“So we’ll advance when we get those, will we?”
“Oh yes. We’re unstoppable,” he said. “Conquering heroes.”
Klaus said that the entire army knew how very badly the Eastern front was going; they talked of the Napoleonic jinx, the impossibility of ever reaching Moscow. Franzl helped himself to another slug, swirling it round the glass and sniffing appreciatively.
Unobtrusively, Nicolai poured himself one; Franzl did not seem to notice or care. The Café König watered its beer, when it had any; when there was none, it served a cocktail named the Hollywood. This potent mixture of raw spirit and red-currant syrup delivered a mighty punch. It was disgusting but people fought to get drunk on it, on anything. As the doorbell rang, he finished his whisky quickly. Guests were being shown into the study, where his mother liked to receive people; he could hear muffled sounds of laughter and chatter. The door opened.
“Franzl! There you are!”
A group of people he did not know surged into the room carrying champagne glasses, his mother the rear guard. Unexpectedly, Wolfgang had brought his Lübeck girlfriend. Clara Kröger was a BdM leader whom he had met at a rally. “A pretty toy,” his mother had said of her. “No brains, of course. No money in the family at all.”
The ripped snapshot Nicolai had studied of a bare-legged girl in a dirndl holding a wreath of flowers and shielding her eyes from the sun had not done her justice. Clara, golden hair hanging down her back, huge eyes turned worshipfully upon Wolfgang, was seventeen. Perhaps she was a toy. With her rosebud mouth and tilted-up nose, she reminded him of Sabine’s porcelain doll. Urged to the piano, she played Schubert and Brahms with rich rippling extravagance. Her mother was a musician and Clara practised for hours every day. A girl with hands that could move with such sureness must have a brain. She played, her eyes half closed, and the whole of her body was involved in the music she made, filling the room, the house, his head with her sound. Wolfgang leant against the piano watching her. He wore his black SS uniform with the death’s head insignia; the silver oak leaves sparkled and one long fair hair lay vivid across the dark cloth of his shoulders.
“Darling, you need help with your snapshot,” his mother said to Nicolai, shepherding the remaining guests into the drawing room for the picture: it would be a souvenir of happy days. “Tell him what to do, Benno,” she said.
“The boy doesn’t need my help,” his father said proudly. So Nicolai told them all where to stand or sit, though he scarcely knew himself which order was correct or how the picture should look. Everything seemed fluid. Was any arrangement of these bodies more real than any other? The camera clicked silkily. Still, he made them change places twice, for the pleasure of moving them.
“Dinner is served, my ladies and gentlemen,” said Magda in a voice cracked with nerves. At the table, Wolfgang proposed a toast to “my beloved godfather,” Colonel Oster, generous provider of the goose, wines, butter and eggs, whose duties had not permitted him to join them.
“One fewer to feed,” said Franzl, sotto voce, nudging Nicolai, to whom the name brought the usual prickling unease.
“The Colonel!”
Raising his glass, Nicolai saluted the picture he held in his mind’s eye very clearly though it was eighteen months ago: the Colonel hot and annoyed, the bonnet of his car up, pacing out the long sweltering wait until a mechanic could be found on a Sunday in a place as remote as Timmendorfer Strand. It hurt him that his father, smiling at his guests, knew nothing of his wife’s adultery and must never be told.
Fear of accidental disclosure hung above the table; the simplest glance of father to mother made him uneasy. Wolfgang’s conversation was full of potential dangers. What was his half-brother saying so confidentially to Gertie, his mother’s closest friend? Nicolai leant forward to make it out. It was only a boast, that Wolf would be swearing his oath of allegiance “in the presence of Himmler himself, though I’m still waiting for my full membership to come through from the SS Race and Settlement Office.” He smiled at Nicolai, nodding. “Your turn next, Nico.”
Lore slipped into the room.
“We would have been thirteen at table—such bad luck,” his mother said. “So I’ve asked our Fräulein nursemaid to join us.”
His father rose to his feet as Nicolai did; none of the other men got up because she was a servant. He hated their rudeness. He noticed, as his father evidently did, how well the borrowed evening dress of his mother’s in vivid emerald green suited her creamy skin. The dinner wore on, with exclamations of pleasure at the extravagance: globules of real butter, not ersatz oil, floating in soup made with real chicken, not powder. Soup plates were removed. Flushed with excitement and anxiety, Magda served her goose and red cabbage, her mashed potatoes running with butter. They quietened down for serious eating and Nicolai, who had no appetite for the Colonel’s goose, circled the table, pouring the good wines. Franzl, the decanter beside him, continuously replenished his whisky glass. His mother was talking to Gertie about food; Wolfgang discoursed on the purity of his family tree to one of his father’s university friends. He passed Lore and his father talking, very intently. She hardly ate; rich food made her ill. The wires of their different conversations crossing and crisscrossing wove an invisible mesh, the framework which kept them all in their places. And he, the puppeteer, mentally shifted them all from foreground to background according to their rightful position and the volume of their talk, and lit them, so the hollows of Lore’s face were smoothed away. There could be no danger while his father talked only to her. When he laughed, as he did now, it was so infectious that those sitting near him could not but smile.
“Here’s a thing, Benno,” said Wolf. “Clara wore her mother’s old fur coat today.” (How the girl kept her gaze on the table, never meeting anyone’s eye.) “And a woman actually spat at her upon the street, called her a whore. Because of the appeal for clothing for our troops in Russia. What effrontery!”
“We have created a culture of blame and denunciation—what do you expect?” said his father. Nicolai craned forward, hoping for a real discussion. But Wolfgang, reaching over to touch Clara’s hand, did not reply. He had no doubts. He had just wanted that touch, to bring her into the conversation, to pronounce her name in secret delight. Holding up his wine against the candlelight that intensified Clara’s perfection, Nicolai watched the tiny faces of the golden-haired young couple sliding across the ruby surface. They were hollow. They were doomed, because the mystery of absolute belief, like religious fervour, was incomprehensible. If only they could be warned. Everybody should be warned. He drained the glass. He felt certainties expanding warmly inside him, rising to his head, just as the wine did.
“Young man! Tell us the news from the East, young man!” Gertie’s voice trilling from the far end of the table was a wire snaking across aimed at Franzl, who looked blankly back. “Franzl!” But still he said nothing. Drink had silenced him; with Nicolai, it had the opposite effect.
“Do you want the real news or the usual lies?” Nicolai heard himself saying.
“The real news, of course.”
“Ssh, Nicolai, it’s not for you to speak here, but Franzl,” said his mother.
“Hilde—” said his father in a warning tone.
“The boy knows nothing.”
“If he’s old enough to sit with us, then he’s old enough to have an opinion.”
His mother’s face grew pink with a flush of indignation, like a child being admonished unfairly.
“Well, my boy?” His father nodded encouragement. They were all looking at him.
“Go on, Nicolai. Go on. Let the boy speak,” said Franzl, slurring his words.
Nicolai took a deep breath. His moment had come, but he was not quite sure what to do with it. “Our troops are exhausted. They’re stuck in that godforsaken land and there’s no more food because they can’t supply them,” he said in a low voice. “And they’re all freezing to death. They bring them in at night, so nobody knows. You see, it’s a great
tragedy—”
“Benno—” his mother said.
“Train after train,” continued Nicolai a little louder. “Stacked with wounded. The Russians hit back, they mine every metre of land, they leave nothing for our men to eat. They strip every factory to the last nut and bolt. So the further the advance goes, the less there is for our men. The state of them is terrible. You should try going to Dammtor at night. Or Hauptbahnhof—” And then he saw that his father’s face wore a stricken look and that he was lifting a hand to cover his eyes.
“Benno, just tell him it’s nonsense,” called out his mother in a tone which snapped the slender threads that kept him in his seat.
Nicolai sprang up. “It’s the truth. Can’t you ever listen?”
Wolfgang also rose.
“Leave him, Wolfgang—” His father laid a hand on his halfbrother’s arm. Blundering out of the room, Nicolai cannoned into the doorway.
“Drunk,” he heard his mother pronouncing. “Disgraceful. Completely drunk.”
Up the stairs and round he went, two at a time; his head was reeling and he sat on his bed, filled with despair.
A moment later, his father rapped gently on the door frame. “May I come in?”
His father sat on the bed, put an arm round him. Nicolai, who was going to be sixteen in two months’ time, fell into his father’s arms. “What have they done to you?” his father asked.
It took a moment for Nicolai to recover enough to speak. “Nothing, I don’t know what it can mean—that I am so very sad. I suppose it’s just the war.” He let out a terrible dry noise that wanted to be a sob. “And the wine.”
“And the wine.” His father patted his back. He was looking at him with such a gentle expression, full of concern. The shadows under his eyes were very dark.
“Doesn’t the truth matter, Vati?”
“Always. But even when they are true, certain things don’t need to be said,” and he squeezed Nicolai’s hand. “Sometimes we know things just for ourselves. Bad thoughts and ideas expand into the air and then they choke us.”
Released, he lay down; his father covered him up. The blood beat through his head and he felt so giddy.
“I’ll stay with you until you feel better.”
His father’s presence was a pool of calm that was spreading and soothing, that was lapping over his head.
Waking with a thundering headache in the middle of the night, Nicolai got up to have a drink of water and to relieve himself and then, when he felt steadier, crept downstairs. Pushing open the door to the cellar and the last flight of steps, he heard a voice coming from Lore’s room, a man’s voice. He took another two steps. Silence. He waited. If she heard his footfall on the stone steps she would come out, as she always did. Then he would sit with her and hold her hand. That was the only thing that could make him feel better. He waited. He took two steps up and two down. Nothing happened. She was asleep; perhaps it was the radio he had heard; perhaps he had imagined the voice. Holding tight to the banister, he went back up to bed. In the morning, he had a thick head.
There was no other man in the house. The voice could only be his father’s, he thought, and all the way to school he could not stop imagining, with a kind of shameful excitement, that his father, who was the master in their house, might do what he himself so badly wanted to do, might slip into Lore’s room and quietly lay his naked self against her white body in that small bed. Would she refuse him? The thought, exciting and worrying in equal measure, would not go away. It was one of those bad thoughts that just grew and grew.
That day as usual they shared a meagre lunch, rations of meat, fat and bread having again been cut. All the food went to the army. Magda was frugal with their provisions; everyone feared a long war. While Sabine and his mother had an afternoon nap, the two men went tramping in the snow along the Elbe, his father slipping in the thin civilian shoes he loved to wear despite the cold; he hated his army boots and had no others. Spare shoes used to be collected by the Winter Relief, latterly the Russian appeal had taken a heavy toll on boots, woollen clothing and furs. The river slid by, a sullen slate colour, and his father often seemed far away and tired, so that Nicolai felt abashed. He wanted to tell him thousands of thoughts but the cold air froze them in his mouth. His thoughts were impure. That sorrow in his father made his own concerns seem unworthy. It had to suffice that their footprints, side by side, left syncopated tracks, that he hummed jazz melodies and his father joined in, that they knew so many things just for themselves without needing to speak them out loud.
Afterwards, sitting in his study, the grey afternoon light made his father look even paler than usual. When he lit a cigarette, he half vanished behind the smoke and his eyelids, downcast, looked like sockets. They were white marble, the irisless eyes of a statue, until he suddenly looked up and straight at him.
“Nico, do you remember us skating together, when you were little?”
“I was jealous, because you could skate backwards and I couldn’t.”
Slipping in his socks on the polished floor, Nicolai tried to do the movements. Like a bird, his father cocked his head to one side; he was listening to the noises of the house. High above a tiny squeaky voice was Sabine, making Susu talk, then replying in a very bossy manner; the lower tone was Lore. They listened to the little girl’s chattering descent for tea.
“If you are as good as gold, Susu, then you can have some of the cake the guests had. A very small piece, but you will have to be very good. Fräulein Lore will decide.”
“Nicolai, I’m still skating backwards. And you still can’t. Not if last night is anything to go by.”
Nicolai felt himself flush. “So I shouldn’t have spoken. But you encouraged me.”
“I think we were both a bit light-headed.” His father sighed. “Nico, be careful. I don’t know any way to get through this, you see, other than not being noticed and hoping for some luck. People hear and notice things. The most stupid are the most dangerous.”
“So I should shut up and say nothing?”
“When you skate backwards, you can’t look down at your feet, or you fall over. You just keep your eyes fixed on a point far away. That’s what I do. I used to write about honour and duty in the songs of the troubadours. Well, honour’s a luxury we don’t have. There’ll be a time for it, but not now. We’re living the time of dishonour.” All the time, his father’s mild voice got quieter and quieter. The larder door opened and shut, there was a clatter of plates in the kitchen and a tiny voice was Sabine, pretending to be her doll. His father ground out the cigarette and stood up, smiling. “Come on. We can’t let Susu get all the cake.”
News came that his father’s division was being sent south to rest and refit. In all likelihood they would go back to Greece. His father said that it took a certain army wit to send a scholar of romance languages there.
“Beware the literally minded,” he said. “It’s the German disease. It’s everywhere. And we are above all the masters of detail. Denker und Dichter werden Henker und Richter.”85 He smiled, but his eyes were sad. “I’m in intelligence. I’m very fortunate. I can spend all my time and energy making sure I don’t have to kill anyone.” Soon he was gone.
It snowed again and heavily, the world from his window white, the branches of his tree thick-rimmed with it. Roads were impassable, schools closed. Unable to leave the house, he set to work to develop his photographs. So many tasks had to be done by touch. Feeling his way carefully through his small blind world, thoughts hummed into his head and placed themselves into position as gently as the paper he manoeuvred in the frame. He played with his variants, seeing that though he might shift people, they also moved to present the best version of themselves, looking right, then left, adjusting their smiles, inventing themselves anew. A face was supposed to be a reflection of character; everyone believed in the power of faces, even their own.
His mother, dressed in her party smile, stood tight with her certainties, giving nothing away. His father, turning a pl
easant face to his son in each shot, was endlessly cheerful. Clara, who usually hid her face, had once looked at the camera and smiled. Nobody could ever know why. Placing Wolfgang to the very right of the group made it easy to crop him, yet without him the picture looked lopsided. Even the camera, the magic box of light, was selective, hiding more than it showed. Nicolai printed up the best group picture, a memento for his mother. But the story lay outside the frame. Lore was not in it; Magda was not there, nor was his father’s sorrow. Invisibly permeating each tiny dot was the absence of Colonel Oster against the presence of his father.
There were other absences. At night, the wind howled and the branch tapped against the windowpane. He heard the stick of the old man going along the road; he heard dead Ilse, rapping on the windowpane so he would look up, so he could see her waving from her bedroom window. He dared not; he covered his eyes. Faces crowded up against the window. Their mouths opened and closed and made no noise, because they could not be seen or heard except at certain times (between four and five p.m.) and certain places (hardly anywhere now). Lore called them “ghosts.” “Did you see any ghosts today?” The yellow stars had appeared in September, marking them out from the rest. Of course he saw them. He had seen a little boy hanging on to the pole at the back of the tram with a big satchel on his back half covering the star, not daring to venture beyond the platform to the safety of inside. When he realised Nicolai was observing him he had simply let go and fallen onto the street, tumbling backwards, a little figure sprawled across the tracks. An old woman shuffling along the pavement shrank back into a stairwell when she saw him turn. Jews were scared shadows of themselves, as sensitive to being seen as a vampire was to daylight, clinging to a fading existence in a parallel world. There were so few now. People never noticed that the Jews were disappearing; if they did, they never mentioned it. They were too busy queuing for a strip of meat, for potatoes and carrots and cigarettes. Any decent person would bow their head when they saw a Jew: for shame, and to spare them the humiliation of being stared at. But a face that was not looked at ceased to exist, not just for others, but for itself.
The Children's War Page 31