by Julie Mayhew
He had arrived that morning.
No one could hand-on-heart claim to have actually seen him, but we knew he was in our midst because this weird, electric ripple had gone through all the HJ and BDM troops waiting in the hotel for the show to start. We squinted through the quivering cord screens and craned our necks around doorways eager to be the first to see a real-life American, but we only caught glimpses of his entourage – fat men dressed strangely, in pyjamas and farmer’s trousers, with hooded jackets, as if this trip to our great nation was an everyday event and really not worth dressing up for. It didn’t quite occur to us that these fat men counted as a sighting of a real-life American too.
There were also women in the entourage, dressed a little like the women who had clambered over Frau Hart’s fence, and very much like the women in Clementine’s camouflaged magazine – tight painful trousers, snug little jumpers that left a strip of belly skin exposed. These were the wives we guessed, or secretaries. They busied about, carrying flat touch-screen computers – computers that were nowhere near as fast or as super as ours, especially not in the hands of these women who chewed gum like idiots and jabbed at the screens, sighing and squawking out their every thought.
‘How are we supposed to make this work, if we haven’t got the fucking VPN we were promised?’
It didn’t seem to occur to them to ask the pretty, bossy girl with the looping plaits for what they needed. It would have been brought to them straight away. I think they utterly underestimated our efficiency.
Once positioned on our Xs on the stage, we stood with our backs to these American people, as they waited, chatting in the wings. I did wonder if the gunfire might come from behind us, not from the Wehrmacht boys out front. We could be shot right in the exposed parts of our necks and fall neatly in our rows, on top of one another, like dominoes.
After our songs and marches (were we the best? In the end it didn’t really seem to matter) Herr Dean gave his speech. On stage, we weren’t allowed to move or react, but the girls in the front of the crowd, the girls specially selected to stand on the raised stone sections to our left and right, did enough of that for all of us. They clutched one another and jumped up and down, squealing and gasping. We saluted and gave our victory cries in unison, our fingers quivering, while behind us came unmistakable whispers of ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘fucking hell’, in weird elastic accents. When one American voice raised itself to something closer to a mutter, we heard a scuffle break out. Then quiet. But we were good. We stayed still, we faced forward and listened to our Führer’s wonderful words about music and art and youth and the German spirit.
Then all of a sudden, it was happening. HE was being introduced, being called out onto the stage by our dear, great Führer. I thought the whole square might implode from the incomprehensible excitement of it all. Here was one god introducing another! Well, in a way. And then THERE HE WAS – this pure blood boy, this first American on British soil, on any German soil, in over sixty years, one of the most in-demand celebrities of our time and …
He was very small. Like a squirrel.
And in the same way his entourage hadn’t bothered to dress up for this momentous occasion, he hadn’t either. Here we were bestowing a great honour upon him and he had chosen to wear too-big shorts in the colours of a tiger. They were slipping down low over his tight, black underpants. He walked from the side of the stage in a stuttery, lopsided way, which made me think for a moment that he must be damaged ( … the diseased, the damaged, the dissolute … ) before I realised it had something to do with his huge, clumpy running shoes that were clearly the wrong size, these things not being so readily available in his country.
No one in the crowd quite knew what to do. There had been this build-up of pressure, this massive intake of breath, but no one dared let it out. There was an awkward smattering of applause, which stopped as soon as it had started when the few realised the many weren’t really going for it. How were we supposed to worship this boy, when our true hero, our Führer, was already before us? And actually, were we supposed to worship him? The inspirational poster on the wall of the hotel reception that day read: WE JOIN IN THE PRAYER OF A GREAT GERMAN: ‘AND THOUGH THE WORLD WERE FILLED WITH DEVILS, WE MUST STILL SUCCEED.’
Was this the devil the poster was talking about? Someone to succeed despite of? Was this a Trojan Horse? Nothing but a great big challenge? Because we German people like a challenge – it’s a chance to show our mettle.
Some odd little squeaks and gasps came from across the square.
Jay Acker seemed unfazed by this almost silent reception. He unzipped his hooded pyjama jacket as he made his way to Herr Dean’s podium. Without missing a step, he took the jacket off, bunched it up and tossed it at one of the HJ boys standing in the front line of the formation up on stage. It hit his uniformed chest and flumped onto the floor. The HJ boy did not react at all, not for a second – which we were all thinking was pretty impressive, until there was a cross little bark from below front of stage which made the boy quickly drop to his knees and retrieve the discarded item of clothing.
Underneath the pyjama top, Jay Acker was wearing a white vest. Underwear, basically. There was writing and drawings all over his arms – foreign letters, flowers, the face of a dog and … a big, red triangle on his deltoid muscle. We saw it. Herr Dean saw it. We saw Herr Dean see it. We saw him hesitate to offer a handshake, especially as the boy hadn’t saluted. But we also saw Herr Dean glance down at the photographers poised at the front of the stage ready to catch this momentous image. Our Führer took the boy’s hand, manoeuvred him so the shoulder with the triangle was away from the cameras, and clamped an arm across his back to freeze the pose. The cameras flashed, blinding all of us who were stood behind.
Before our eyesight had had a chance to return, the orchestra struck up its chord to play our Führer off the stage. It was time. IT WAS TIME! We blinked away the comets dancing across our vision and … the boy ran away. Off stage. Gone. Where to? Wohin? The desire to turn our necks was just too too much.
But there was no chance to ask ourselves any more questions. There was an almighty sound. ALMIGHTY. The loudest gasp you have ever heard and it burst free of the speakers. ‘AAAHHH!’ Like a pressure cooker firing off its lid. It made all of us on stage leap thirty centimetres in the air. Up started the solid beat, the ting-ting-ting of a cowbell over the top. Then an echoey, disembodied voice was telling us to dance. But to what? Because this wasn’t music. This was the sound of sandpaper going back and forth. This was a women yelling like she was a kid in a playground calling someone else her ‘baby’. A synthesiser kept starting a tune but never really finishing it. It was the weirdest, weirdest thing. ‘Owwww!’ cried the woman on the music, like she’d trapped her finger in a door. And all the time we had to keep our faces forward, looking pretty and formidable.
‘Come on, Great Britain!’ said a man with a microphone who hadn’t bothered to learn the correct name of our country. He bounded on stage. He stuck out his lips like a monkey, jerked his chin to the beat, clapped his hands above his head, making the microphone thud-thud-thud. The suggestion was we should do the same as him. But no one did. Because who was he? This wasn’t Jay Acker. Why should this stranger be telling us what to do? All the kids in the square were staring up, white-faced at the television screens above the stage, screens that, being on stage, we couldn’t see. Or else they were searching for the faces of their troop leaders in the crowd, or Herr Dean himself, looking for clues as to how to behave. But our leaders were only doing what we were doing – staring forward, enduring it. This was awful.
Then the ‘music’ changed. THANK GOD. But – DISASTER – it had been put on at the wrong speed, either that or the tape player was chewing up their cassette. Yet they let it run for the longest time without sorting it out – this weird monster voice saying something about parties that we couldn’t understand. The voice of a girl wobbled over the top – worse than Angelika Baker milking a solo.
‘
Yeah! Yeah!’ bellowed the microphone man at the end of every line. Again, I think we were supposed to join in. We didn’t.
‘Who is he?’ mouthed the lips of just about everyone in the crowd.
They were all getting itchy. This wasn’t what we wanted, what we expected.
But that’s when the song came on.
A single quivering violin snapping everyone’s jaws shut – just like that.
Jay Acker’s voice – strange but clear and delicious, singing low, full of something, luring us in, talking about how in the very beginning there was no light, no colour, and how he sometimes felt like he couldn’t go on, but then, but then … Oh, goodness! There came a piano, a cry, a WONDERFUL EXPLOSION.
OH!
I had never felt anything like this before. Never. No, that’s not true. It felt like being kissed, like being touched, like watching the person you love swing through a shaft of the last summer sun. The stage spots danced to the same frantic beat as the song. Jay Acker leapt across the stage, telling us we were LUMINOUS, we were LOVED, we were BLESSED, we were TOGETHER. WE WERE ONE! And you almost couldn’t notice it to begin with, because it grew so gradually. But we were moving. It was impossible to stay still. We tried, because we were terrified of being punished, but somehow this was stronger. The audience was rolling in waves, like a beautiful sea, the lights painting them pink, then blue, then yellow, then pink again. GG grabbed my hand in the excitement, because no one would notice, because everyone in that square was doing something they shouldn’t. I squeezed it back. In front of us the kids had their hands in the air. They clapped, they bounced, they sang. They worshipped this devil, this truth, this light.
It was awful. So BRILLIANTLY awful that I entirely forgot, about the something beyond this, the something bigger than this.
And then she burst onto the stage.
I didn’t know that it would be this. She’d told me her family were going to escape. That the concert would be their ‘final day’. Their summer holidays in Cornwall were all about meeting their connections and planning their route out. People had done it before, she said.
‘But you don’t know anyone in America,’ I said, scared for her.
‘Oh, I know plenty,’ she replied. ‘I speak to them all the time.’
She communicated via short little messages on a programme on the Hart’s illegal computer. Her dad knew how to stop everyone else in the Reich using the networks, so of course he knew how to do it himself and go undetected. She spouted a bunch of initials at me, systems, communication routes, ways to distribute information – her father’s value.
‘But have you ever actually met these people you’re talking to?’ I asked her.
‘No.’
‘Then how can you say you really know them?’
I didn’t tell my father; I did as she asked. I thought I was helping her to escape. But it was a fantasy. Why didn’t I see that? There was no longer any chance that that could happen. My hope had made it real, because I was willing to let her go. That was how much I loved her. I knew she would be happier somewhere else. Somewhere nicer than here. But nothing nice could come of this. It was just like she’d said, she hadn’t been taunting me – Clementine was going somewhere she couldn’t come back from.
She was wearing her BDM skirt and necktie, but she had removed her blouse – the title of Jay Acker’s song, FEELING FREE, was scrawled across her small, bare breasts; red triangles were drawn on her arms. She had a Party flag around her neck like a cloak, which is what I think fooled everyone, stopped anyone from reacting straight away. The Americans thought this was something to do with us. The Germans thought, obscene as it was, it was something to do with the boy’s song. She was a devil that we all had to endure for the greater good. She had found her own microphone. It seemed rehearsed. And I suppose it probably was. As much as it could have been.
‘I WANT TO BE FREE,’ she screamed over the song. ‘BUT WE ARE NOT FREE.’
Jay Acker turned to look at her across the stage. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then beamed. He was pleased at the intrusion and because he was pleased, the crowd, lost in themselves, were pleased too. They cheered her on. But I couldn’t. Because now I understood what she was going to do. Had I always known, on some subconscious level? I could smell her – the stench of petrol.
We stayed on our Xs. We did as we were told. I alone was pinned there by the awful realisation of what I had done by keeping quiet, by the awful realisation that no matter what I did, I couldn’t truly save her.
‘WE ARE THE DEVIL. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF DEVILS,’ she screamed.
‘Yes,’ the crowd screamed back, not really understanding.
‘GERMANY AWAKE! DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!’ she cried to the heavens, a fist to the sky. The lights danced around her like colourful moths. She was irresistible.
‘DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!’ the crowd echoed. It was a phrase we knew and understood from one of our own songs. Historic. And here she was, changing that history.
She hollered her last words, borrowing them from Jay Acker’s song – ‘I AM LUMINOUS!’ she cried. ‘I WILL SHINE ON!’ – and then she flicked the wheel on the lighter in her hand. ‘Goodbye,’ she gasped. To me, for me. She did just as she promised. She said goodbye. Then the microphone dropped to the ground with a horrible clunk.
The fire ate her up. The flag, her skirt, her hair. The ticker tape dancing in the air became a swarm of fiery butterflies.
Clementine curled into the flames but she refused to fall.
Everyone just watched.
Like this wasn’t a person at all.
Like she was just the burning logs of a Sonnenwendfeuer on summer solstice eve.
Do you ever feel like you are not your body? That you are trapped inside of it? A soul, if you like. Though I’m not sure I believe in magic like that. You want to climb out of your skin, get a proper view of yourself. A proper view of reality. Or unreality. Because in that moment you can see that everything is just a construction. It’s all fake. But even though you want to leave your body behind, your greatest wish is to be reconnected with it. You want to be part of the world again. But you can’t do either of those things – leave or go back – because either way you’re trapped. Do you ever feel like that?
I left my X.
I didn’t make the decision to do it. I didn’t break the rule on purpose. My body moved without any conscious thought. A well-trained reflex.
I ran to the HJ boy holding Jay Acker’s jacket, snatched it from him, slid my arms inside, back to front, the hood over my face. All this happened in slow motion, though it could only have been seconds. Manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard. I ran towards the person on fire, kicked them hard on the backside, made the hungry fire spill onto the stage, then I threw myself on top.
LET THAT WHICH MUST DIE SINK AND ROT. WHAT HAS STRENGTH AND LIGHT WILL RISE AND BLAZE.
I lay there with the taste of petrol in my mouth, the fug of smoke in my lungs, triumph in my heart, until the fire went out.
I left my X.
I didn’t make the decision to do it. I didn’t break any rule on purpose. My body moved without any conscious thought. An instinct that can’t be taught. Love.
I ran to the HJ boy holding Jay Acker’s jacket, snatched it from him, slid my arms inside, back to front, the hood over my face. All this happened in slow motion, though it could only have been seconds. Manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard. I ran to my friend on fire, my best friend, the only person I have every truly loved and kicked her hard on the backside, made her and the hungry fire spill onto the stage, then I threw myself on top.
THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
O CURSÈD SPITE, THAT EVER I WAS BORN TO SET IT RIGHT.
I lay there. We were one, the taste of petrol in our mouths, the fug of smoke choking our lungs, something unquenchable in our hearts, until the fire went out.
I left my X.
zwei
They pulled me off her.
I don’t know who they were, I only felt them. I was blind. Someone slung me over their shoulder – a man definitely, a soldier maybe. I was carried at some speed back to the hotel, my body bouncing with each step.
‘Out of the way! Out of the fucking way!’
Once in the lobby, they prised open my eyelids and poured in drops that stung like hell.
‘It’s just the blast of the heat,’ said a voice. ‘Just the effects of the smoke.’
The world came back, smeary and unreal. Fuzzy, green explosions in the blackness first, which turned out to be the small, circular spotlights set into the lobby floor. Then I could make out pillars, chairs, feet, people, my Mädelschaft, our Kameradschaft. They had all retreated from the square to regroup.
‘Ugh!’ Ruby Heigl was all of a sudden in my face. ‘You know you have absolutely no eyelashes left.’ She spoke as if my swollen eyes were the worst thing she’d seen that day.
‘Do they hurt?’ she asked, a little quieter now, almost kindly I thought.
I couldn’t speak. I knew I would cry. I looked down at the dark putrid stains on my skirt and socks. I stank like burnt bacon. I nodded.
‘Well, you’re all right then,’ she snapped. ‘Because if it was a third-degree burn, you wouldn’t feel a thing.’