— Mummy says, because of the bombs.
— I don’t believe that.
— If mummy says so, then it’s true.
— Where is your father?
— I don’t know that.
— In the war?
— No. Dead.
— In the war? Killed?
— I don’t know.
— How do you know that he’s dead.
— Mummy said so.
— What if she’s lying?
— She doesn’t tell lies.
Again Detlev hears only breathing. A black figure with white cloths on its head pattered in.
— Quiet now. Go to sleep, all of you. You go to sleep now too, Detlev.
The white cloths turned away. Sister Silissa didn’t shut the dormitory door. The corridor grew as dark as the nun’s habit. Whispering again :
— Mrs Weindeln found a half-rotted leaf in Aichach. There were holes in the leaf. All the holes together looked like the face of Lord Jesus and like Lord Jesus’s hand raised in blessing. It’s a miracle.
Alfred asked :
— Why have you been put in the orphanage?
— My mother can’t get a room for both of us.
— Even though she’s in the Party?
— Perhaps she isn’t in the Party.
— Does your mother work in Scheyern?
— For the town council.
— In the town hall?
— Yes.
— If she does her work properly, she would have found a room for both of you. Perhaps there’s something else wrong with her? Why do you have such big ears?
— I don’t have big ears. You’ve got big ears yourself. Detlev heard the breathing again. Then there was talk about Kriegel, who beat the Poles in the town hall cellar so badly with a whip full of metal stars, that their screams could be heard during Holy Mass.
— The Poles should give Kriegel himself a beating instead.
— They can’t do that, because he’s a policeman. They’re prisoners of war.
— What if they do it anyway?
— We should leave out some coins that have been in a fire : There, Mr Kriegel, we’ve put some money on the windowsill for you. When he picks them up, he burns his fingers, so that he can’t beat any more Poles.
— And after that the nuns would be arrested, because they’re responsible for everything we do. The Holy Catholic Church is exposed to great persecution in these years.
— In Poland the Poles cut German prisoners of war in half with band saws.
— We have to choose between final victory or Bolshevik chaos.
The visit to Hamburg. Detlev, his mother arrived in Hamburg before sunrise. The central railway station was painted in camouflage colours. A placard with a picture of a slant-eyed man hung on every lamp post.
— Wheels roll for victory.
— In Lauterbach a farmhand cut the throats of the farmer and his wife and their seven children. They were all asleep.
— If someone from the Party arrests a sister and executes her, he has no more peace by day or by night. By day she would appear to him and sit beside him at table and snatch the vegetables and meat and eggs from his fork and at night she would lie in his bed with a bright glow around her head; blood would burst from her wounds, and she would constantly weep when he wants to sleep.
— He won’t be put out by a few tears from a dead sister.
— They were going to take away a sister from San Salvator. She made the sign of the cross and the people from the secret police ran away, foaming at the mouth.
— Alfred, you go and lay down the money for Kriegel. It was your idea.
— Then the Holy Catholic Church will suffer new persecutions. Perhaps they’ll take away the whole orphanage and shoot us all.
— But if it’s enough to make the sign of the cross in defence.
— Come on, Alfred.
— I want to go to sleep now.
There was a rustling at the door.
A nun came closer. She stood in the moonlight. She didn’t switch on the light. She moved her lips without speaking. She turned the pages of her prayer book. She stepped back. She dissolved in the blackness of the corridor.
The breathing around Detlev grew louder and more regular.
— No one’s looking at me in the dark any more.
Detlev saw his mother in front of him in the new room he didn’t know. He saw the Nivea oil bottle and the black box with the perfumed eye pencils. He saw the spectacles lying on the night table, beside them the red-bound prayer book.
— They’re Protestant prayers.
The book of fairy tales, the comb, the hairpins.
It grew dark above Detlev’s bed. He didn’t dare move. He didn’t know whether it was the shadow of a dead or a living nun or the shadow of a telegraph pole in the garden of the orphanage.
— Now I shall eat only once more in the orphanage.
In the morning after breakfast the orphanage children walked to early mass in pairs. They walked quickly across the church square shepherded by the nuns. They entered the church through the side door, bumping against the door posts. The pillars were close together. Detlev began to feel dizzy when he leant his head back and looked up at the vaulting. Above, the pillars spread out like the rhubarb stalks on the rhubarb leaves in grandfather’s garden, which Detlev, lying on his back on the cinder path, had looked at from below before the war began. Detlev knelt down like the others. Sister Silissa, kneeling in the gallery, nodded down to him. Above, behind Detlev, the organ shook and rattled like a watering can being dipped into a barrel. Scales and pebbles rub against the sides.
Two boys in white shirts which reached down to the ground swung silver censers. In Hamburg boys swung smoking containers made of tin cans on stiff wires.
— I’ll never be an altar boy.
The parish priest wore a green embroidered chasuble.
— Now you’ll never be a priest, Sister Silissa had said.
The altar boys picked up the golden bells from the carpet on the altar steps and shook them. The parish priest sang in the foreign language. As he sang Detlev thought of a hen that had got lost in the raspberry bushes. He thought of the noise of cars in the night, far away, when his grandfather had stepped out of the air-raid shelter with Detlev during a pause in the raid. The people in the church stood up. Detlev stood up. They knelt down. Detlev knelt down. When they sang, he tried to guess the notes in advance and to merge with the voices of the orphanage children. When Alfred made the sign of the cross beside him, Detlev raised the thumb of his right hand to his forehead, brought it down to his stomach, touched his left shoulder, his right shoulder. The smoke from the silver censers smelt like the bitter almond tasted, which his grandmother mixed into the semolina cake.
— We need seven eggs.
— Seven eggs.
He had sucked at the little bottles of flavouring, when his grandmother turned her back, before he and his mother had been evacuated to Scheyern. The altar boys carried a heavy book from one side of the altar to the other. The parish priest climbed round a pillar. He stopped in a barrel, which was stuck to the pillar. He spoke in German of Our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ and of our great Father, the Almighty. The parish priest grew tired while he spoke. His words tapered off, so that Detlev could no longer understand them. Detlev remembers that he began to fall asleep under the barrel, between the giant, grey rhubarb stalks. The orphanage children’s hands fell from their knees. Their chins fell onto their collars. The black folds in the nuns’ veils were still, as though they were covering coffins or tailors’ dummies or bean stalks.
Detlev discovered a picture in one of the arches behind the altar. A man bent down beside Christ and looked for something on the ground. Detlev thought of the fairy tale with the cook who wants to box the ears of the kitchen boy. Both fall asleep because the princess has pricked herself on the spindle.
The priest began to shout :
— Our Father… The kingdom of God and the ki
ngdom… the Reich…
The boys thrust their noses forward. The nuns smoothed down their veils. The priest climbed down from the barrel. The altar boys opened small doors in one of the pillars. The priest opened a small door in the altar. He pulled out golden objects. The altar boys brought him a silver dish. The parish priest washed his hands. They held out a towel for him, and he dried himself with it. The altar boys shook the golden bells again. The priest knelt before the altar. He raised pointed golden utensils high in the air. People from the nave moved closer to the altar, knelt down on a long, narrow shelf. Detlev watched them from the side. They stretched out their tongues. The parish priest laid little round leaves on their tongues. The people closed their eyes. They leant backwards.
They stood up with their hands pressed together — palm against palm, outstretched finger against outstretched finger. They pushed back between the benches. The teacher swayed as she walked. She didn’t open her eyes. She smiled. — She likes the taste of the little leaf on her tongue so much.
The organ creaked and groaned. Detlev was afraid it would fall down out of the rhubarb arches. The nuns stood up. The orphanage children ran to school. Detlev together with Odel. They went into a classroom.
Detlev is beginning to get the order of the mass muddled. He mixes up the movements of the altar boys and the parish priest. He has forgotten when the congregation made the sign of the cross. He can no longer repeat the syllables of the foreign words he learned off by heart.
He thinks of the second box of building blocks in Hamburg, of the blocks without turrets and arches, from which a building like the orphanage can’t be constructed.
The box contains sixteen uniform cubes. A sixteenth of a landscape or a swimming pool or a royal procession is stuck to each side. Detlev was four years old when he got the box of square blocks for his birthday. He quickly understood how to play with it : He only had to put together the landscape or the swimming pool, then he could make one picture after another appear, by turning over one row after another four blocks at a time. Detlev can smell the shiny paper on the blocks, as he thinks that there would be no picture of a landscape, or a swimming pool or a royal procession, if he had never come to the orphanage.
The views of the towns of Scheyern and Aichach and Steingriff are turned over like the picture sections on the big blocks.
Detlev in front of the town hall steps.
— I want to see mummy.
Detlev inside the town hall.
— I want to see my mummy.
— Are you Detlev?
— Yes.
Detlev on the first floor.
Two men in uniform, with leather straps, stood motionless in front of the banqueting hall.
Detlev watched to see if they rolled their eyes or their eyelashes blinked or if they swallowed saliva. They both looked at him. A fly settled on the nose of one of the soldiers. He didn’t hit out at it with his hand or the rifle or the leather strap. He pushed out his lower lip and blew the fly away. The hall was decorated with flags and red and brown drapes. A man lay in the middle of the hall. Tubs with azaleas and laurel trees framed the figure. Detlev came closer to the man. He smelt of orphanage bread. The man’s face was yellow. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t swallowing any saliva. His eyelashes didn’t move. Flies settled on his forehead and on his eyelids. They ran across his mouth. Detlev forgot that he wanted to see his mother.
Detlev on the stairs.
Three steps at a time.
Detlev at the bottom.
Sunday afternoon.
Detlev waited for his mother — as he waits for her now. Washed. Combed. He was wearing the Bavarian jacket, It was vespers. The enamel mugs were clattering against one another in the kitchen. Wasps were crawling over the thick slices of bread with their thin coating of jam. The hunger which Detlev usually felt at this time of day was being pushed away by a cushion of air.
He was frightened of not recognizing his mother again. When she came, she was completely his mother. He recognized every hair, every wrinkle, every movement of the throat again.
His mother talked about her new room, which he was going to see right away — as they walked past Saint Joseph’s Fountain. There were short flurries of rain. The wind blew the rain against the tree trunks.
— I have a large wardrobe in the hallway. To cover me at night there’s a huge feather bed, which half suffocates me. I have to fetch the water downstairs. The people are very pleasant and friendly. They asked about you. I’m sure it’ll be all right for quite a long time. The veterinary surgeon lives downstairs. The street in front of the house is often blocked by sheep. The veterinary surgeon has to inspect the flock. From the window I have a view of the meadows by the river.
Detlev’s mother told him that his grandmother and grandfather had written to her of heavy air raids on Hamburg. Detlev and his mother walked across the market place. Lamp posts and platforms had been set up for the gauleiter’s funeral ceremony. The wet flags stuck to the poles.
— I know what orphans are now. They all wear grey-striped clothes. And they don’t get any sweets. They say sweetie instead of sweet like other people. They are very envious, and most are stronger than I am, and they want to protect me.
— Detlev, that’s stupid. You mustn’t draw conclusions about everyone from a few exceptions. Because you’re in the orphanage in Scheyern now, you mustn’t draw conclusions about all orphans from the Scheyern orphanage and its children. That’s just as silly as if you said : A mother is someone who lives in a small room and only visits her son once a week. It’s only circumstances that force us to be like that.
Detlev and his mother sat down in the café next to the market arcade. They sat opposite one another.
— I didn’t mean to say that at all.
— Perhaps what I’ve been telling you about my new room is a little exaggerated.
They were silent. The silence prevented Detlev from saying what he wanted to tell his mother. She took off her glasses. Without the lenses her eyes looked like brown ashes. Rough, brown, sticky pieces of coke, which his grandfather put down between the larkspur and the peonies, to make the path firmer.
The eyes were different from how he had imagined them for a whole week.
What he had been afraid of, what he had overlooked at first, had happened. His mother had changed. She had become different and he didn’t know why.
He looked away from her to the pink ice cream.
— I am with mummy. That’s mummy. That’s mummy.
— The gauleiter has died.
— The day before yesterday I was in the town hall after school. He was laid out. The two soldiers in front of the body had little swords stuck on the end of their rifles. Detlev’s mother put on her glasses again. Detlev tried to remember what her eyes had looked like just a few seconds before — before they had been covered by the lenses again. He was unable to.
— Alfred said that Kriegel beats the Poles.
— You mustn’t say that out loud.
His mother looked over her shoulder. The waitress clicked the ice cream tongs. She wasn’t listening. A couple was sitting at the window. They couldn’t have heard anything, because Detlev and his mother couldn’t understand what they were saying. The puffy cheeked man was talking insistently to the woman.
— The orphans also told a joke.
— I don’t want to hear it. You shouldn’t pay any attention to such jokes.
— I didn’t understand why they laughed.
— Forget it completely. Don’t listen. Just don’t say anything. If they ask you, say : I didn’t see or hear anything. Say : It’s the Poles’ own fault. Why don’t they work? Say: Anyone who wants to work, has enough to eat and isn’t beaten with a whip.
— That’s true.
— If we behave carelessly, we can even be caught out here too. I was so afraid in Steingriff that day when you turned up with the medals. Where on earth did you get those medals?
— I don’t know. Our captain d
iscovered them. Sepp hid them in a little wooden house. Anton handed them out if we had been brave. Later I became a captain too.
— If someone had been watching you! We could still all end up goodness knows where. Where on earth did the medals come from? A whole pile of them! — There were enough to decorate a whole regiment.
— It was nice in Steingriff. We rode in a gig. I got a medal for my bravery.
— Thank God I forced you to throw it away in the wood in time. I should have reported it to the police or the local Party branch. I still don’t understand how you could have come upon such a huge pile of medals.
— Perhaps they had already been used?
— Already used! Don’t get mixed up in anything. There are some people who only want to draw you out. They’ll say any old thing just to hear how you respond. Perhaps the medals were nothing but a trap, and the joke and the story about Kriegel. Don’t laugh at any joke. And Kriegel is a friendly man really. He’s a little bad-tempered on the surface. He has a wife and children, he’s even got grandchildren already. A country policeman doesn’t have an easy life. Don’t believe anything. Don’t let anyone try to draw things out of you.
— Now Alfred won’t ask me any more questions ever again. When mummy fetches me this time, she’ll never bring me back again.
— They’re nice to you in the orphanage, aren’t they?
— Sister Silissa gives me a sweet before I go to bed. On Wednesday I had stomach ache, so I was given an egg cup full of red wine. It tasted bitter.
— You’re seeing lots of new things and you’re together with children of the same age. People get on well in such a community.
— A few are allowed to confess and go to Holy Communion. If I pray a lot and don’t sin much, perhaps I’ll be allowed to go to Holy Communion later too.
His mother took off her glasses again. Detlev looked carefully at the lines in his mother’s face. He wanted to remember everything exactly. He wanted to know what had changed in her face. The following Saturday he wanted to check what new changes there had been.
— Mummy’s afraid. She’s afraid of the bombs. But then she’s afraid of something else. Of what?
— I love you as much as the Virgin Mary in heaven above.
The Orphanage Page 3