by John Boyne
‘I want to be an explorer,’ said Bruno quickly.
‘I wish you luck,’ said Pavel.
‘Thank you.’
‘Have you discovered anything yet?’
‘Back in our house in Berlin there was a lot of exploring to be done,’ recalled Bruno. ‘But then, it was a very big house, bigger than you could possibly imagine, so there were a lot of places to explore. It’s not the same here.’
‘Nothing is the same here,’ agreed Pavel.
‘When did you arrive at Out-With?’ asked Bruno.
Pavel put the carrot and the peeler down for a few moments and thought about it. ‘I think I’ve always been here,’ he said finally in a quiet voice.
‘You grew up here?’
‘No,’ said Pavel, shaking his head. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘But you just said—’
Before he could go on, Mother’s voice could be heard outside. As soon as he heard her, Pavel jumped up quickly from his seat and returned to the sink with the carrots and the peeler and the newspaper full of peelings, and turned his back on Bruno, hanging his head low and not speaking again.
‘What on earth happened to you?’ asked Mother when she appeared in the kitchen, leaning down to examine the plaster which covered Bruno’s cut.
‘I made a swing and then I fell off it,’ explained Bruno. ‘And then the swing hit me on the head and I nearly fainted, but Pavel came out and brought me in and cleaned it all up and put a bandage on me and it stung very badly but I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry once, did I, Pavel?’
Pavel turned his body slightly in their direction but didn’t lift his head. ‘The wound has been cleaned,’ he said quietly, not answering Bruno’s question. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Go to your room, Bruno,’ said Mother, who looked distinctly uncomfortable now.
‘But I—’
‘Don’t argue with me – go to your room!’ she insisted, and Bruno stepped off the chair, putting his weight on what he had decided to call his bad leg, and it hurt a little. He turned and left the room but was still able to hear Mother saying thank you to Pavel as he walked towards the stairs, and this made Bruno happy because surely it was obvious to everyone that if it hadn’t been for him, he would have bled to death.
He heard one last thing before going upstairs and that was Mother’s last line to the waiter who claimed to be a doctor.
‘If the Commandant asks, we’ll say that I cleaned Bruno up.’
Which seemed terribly selfish to Bruno and a way for Mother to take credit for something that she hadn’t done.
The two people Bruno missed most of all from home were Grandfather and Grandmother. They lived together in a small flat near the fruit and vegetable stalls, and around the time that Bruno moved to Out-With, Grandfather was almost seventy-three years old which, as far as Bruno was concerned, made him just about the oldest man in the world. One afternoon Bruno had calculated that if he lived his entire life over and over again eight times, he would still be a year younger than Grandfather.
Grandfather had spent his entire life running a restaurant in the centre of town, and one of his employees was the father of Bruno’s friend Martin who worked there as a chef. Although Grandfather no longer cooked or waited on tables in the restaurant himself, he spent most of his days there, sitting at the bar in the afternoon talking to the customers, eating his meals there in the evening and staying until closing time, laughing with his friends.
Grandmother never seemed old in comparison to the other boys’ grandmothers. In fact when Bruno learned just how old she was – sixty-two – he was amazed. She had met Grandfather as a young woman after one of her concerts and somehow he had persuaded her to marry him, despite all his flaws. She had long red hair, surprisingly similar to her daughter-in-law’s, and green eyes, and she claimed that was because somewhere in her family there was Irish blood. Bruno always knew when a family party was getting into full swing because Grandmother would hover by the piano until someone sat down at it and asked her to sing.
‘What’s that?’ she always cried, holding a hand to her chest as if the very idea took her breath away. ‘Is it a song you’re wanting? Why, I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid, young man, my singing days are far behind me.’
‘Sing! Sing!’ everyone at the party would cry, and after a suitable pause – sometimes as long as ten or twelve seconds – she would finally give in and turn to the young man at the piano and say in a quick and humorous voice:
‘La Vie en Rose, E-flat minor. And try to keep up with the changes.’
Parties at Bruno’s house were always dominated by Grandmother’s singing, which for some reason always seemed to coincide with the moment when Mother moved from the main party area to the kitchen, followed by some of her own friends. Father always stayed to listen and Bruno did too because there was nothing he liked more than hearing Grandmother break into her full voice and soak up the applause of the guests at the end. Plus, La Vie en Rose gave him chills and made the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
Grandmother liked to think that Bruno or Gretel would follow her onto the stage, and every Christmas and at every birthday party she would devise a small play for the three of them to perform for Mother, Father and Grandfather. She wrote the plays herself and, to Bruno’s way of thinking, always gave herself the best lines, though he didn’t mind that too much. There was usually a song in there somewhere too – Is it a song you’re wanting? she’d ask first – and an opportunity for Bruno to do a magic trick and for Gretel to dance. The play always ended with Bruno reciting a long poem by one of the Great Poets, words which he found very hard to understand but which somehow started to sound more and more beautiful the more he read them.
But that wasn’t the best part of these little productions. The best part was the fact that Grandmother made costumes for Bruno and Gretel. No matter what the role, no matter how few lines he might have in comparison to his sister or grandmother, Bruno always got to dress up as a prince, or an Arab sheik, or even on one occasion a Roman gladiator. There were crowns, and when there weren’t crowns there were spears. And when there weren’t spears there were whips or turbans. No one ever knew what Grandmother would come up with next, but a week before Christmas Bruno and Gretel would be summoned to her home on a daily basis for rehearsals.
Of course the last play they performed had ended in disaster and Bruno still remembered it with sadness, although he wasn’t quite sure what had happened to cause the argument.
A week or so before, there had been great excitement in the house and it had something to do with the fact that Father was now to be addressed as ‘Commandant’ by Maria, Cook and Lars the butler, as well as by all the soldiers who came in and out of there and used the place – as far as Bruno could see – as if it were their own and not his. There had been nothing but excitement for weeks. First the Fury and the beautiful blonde woman had come to dinner, which had brought the whole house to a standstill, and then it was this new business of calling Father ‘Commandant’. Mother had told Bruno to congratulate Father and he had done so, although if he was honest with himself (which he always tried to be) he wasn’t entirely sure what he was congratulating him for.
On Christmas Day Father wore his brand-new uniform, the starched and pressed one that he wore every day now, and the whole family applauded when he first appeared in it. It really was something special. Compared to the other soldiers who came in and out of the house, he stood out, and they seemed to respect him all the more now that he had it. Mother went up to him and kissed him on the cheek and ran a hand across the front of it, commenting on how fine she thought the fabric was. Bruno was particularly impressed by all the decorations on the uniform and he had been allowed to wear the cap for a short period, provided his hands were clean when he put it on.
Grandfather was very proud of his son when he saw him in his new uniform but Grandmother was the only one who seemed unimpressed. After dinner had been served, and a
fter she and Gretel and Bruno had performed their latest production, she sat down sadly in one of the armchairs and looked at Father, shaking her head as if he were a huge disappointment to her.
‘I wonder – is this where I went wrong with you, Ralf?’ she said. ‘I wonder if all the performances I made you give as a boy led you to this. Dressing up like a puppet on a string.’
‘Now, Mother,’ said Father in a tolerant voice. ‘You know this isn’t the time.’
‘Standing there in your uniform,’ she continued, ‘as if it makes you something special. Not even caring what it means really. What it stands for.’
‘Nathalie, we discussed this in advance,’ said Grandfather, although everyone knew that when Grandmother had something to say she always found a way to say it, no matter how unpopular it might prove to be.
‘You discussed it, Matthias,’ said Grandmother. ‘I was merely the blank wall to whom you addressed your words. As usual.’
‘This is a party, Mother,’ said Father with a sigh. ‘And it’s Christmas. Let’s not spoil things.’
‘I remember when the Great War began,’ said Grandfather proudly, staring into the fire and shaking his head. ‘I remember you coming home to tell us how you had joined up and I was sure that you would come to harm.’
‘He did come to harm, Matthias,’ insisted Grandmother. ‘Take a look at him for your evidence.’
‘And now look at you,’ continued Grandfather, ignoring her. ‘It makes me so proud to see you elevated to such a responsible position. Helping your country reclaim her pride after all the great wrongs that were done to her. The punishments above and beyond—’
‘Oh, will you listen to yourself!’ cried Grandmother. ‘Which one of you is the most foolish, I wonder?’
‘But, Nathalie,’ said Mother, trying to calm the situation down a little, ‘don’t you think Ralf looks very handsome in his new uniform?’
‘Handsome?’ asked Grandmother, leaning forward and staring at her daughter-in-law as if she had lost her reason. ‘Handsome, did you say? You foolish girl! Is that what you consider to be of importance in the world? Looking handsome?’
‘Do I look handsome in my ringmaster’s costume?’ asked Bruno, for that was what he had been wearing for the party that night – the red and black outfit of a circus ringmaster – and he had been very proud of himself in it. The moment he spoke he regretted it, however, for all the adults looked in his and Gretel’s direction, as if they had forgotten that they were there at all.
‘Children, upstairs,’ said Mother quickly. ‘Go to your rooms.’
‘But we don’t want to,’ protested Gretel. ‘Can’t we play down here?’
‘No, children,’ she insisted. ‘Go upstairs and close the door behind you.’
‘That’s all you soldiers are interested in anyway,’ Grandmother said, ignoring the children altogether. ‘Looking handsome in your fine uniforms. Dressing up and doing the terrible, terrible things you do. It makes me ashamed. But I blame myself, Ralf, not you.’
‘Children, upstairs now!’ said Mother, clapping her hands together, and this time they had no choice but to stand up and obey her.
But rather than going straight to their rooms, they closed the door and sat at the top of the stairs, trying to hear what was being said by the grown-ups down below. However, Mother and Father’s voices were muffled and hard to make out, Grandfather’s was not to be heard at all, while Grandmother’s was surprisingly slurred. Finally, after a few minutes, the door slammed open and Gretel and Bruno darted back up the stairs while Grandmother retrieved her coat from the rack in the hallway.
‘Ashamed!’ she called out before she left. ‘That a son of mine should be—’
‘A patriot,’ cried Father, who perhaps had never learned the rule about not interrupting your mother.
‘A patriot indeed!’ she cried out. ‘The people you have to dinner in this house. Why, it makes me sick. And to see you in that uniform makes me want to tear the eyes from my head!’ she added before storming out of the house and slamming the door behind her.
Bruno hadn’t seen much of Grandmother after that and hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to her before they moved to Out-With, but he missed her very much and decided to write her a letter.
That day he sat down with a pen and paper and told her how unhappy he was there and how much he wished he was back home in Berlin. He told her about the house and the garden and the bench with the plaque on it and the tall fence and the wooden telegraph poles and the barbed-wire bales and the hard ground beyond them and the huts and the small buildings and the smoke stacks and the soldiers, but mostly he told her about the people living there and their striped pajamas and cloth caps, and then he told her how much he missed her and he signed off his letter ‘your loving grandson, Bruno’.
Nothing changed for quite a while at Out-With.
Bruno still had to put up with Gretel being less than friendly to him whenever she was in a bad mood, which was more often than not because she was a Hopeless Case.
And he still wished that he could go back home to Berlin, although the memories of that place were beginning to fade and, while he did mean to, it had been several weeks since he had even thought about sending another letter to Grandfather or Grandmother, let alone actually sitting down and writing one.
The soldiers still came and went every day of the week, holding meetings in Father’s office, which was still Out Of Bounds At All Times And No Exceptions. Lieutenant Kotler still strode around in his black boots as if there was no one in the whole world of any more importance than him, and when he wasn’t with Father he was standing in the driveway talking to Gretel while she laughed hysterically and twirled her hair around her fingers, or whispering alone in rooms with Mother.
The servants still came and washed things and swept things and cooked things and cleaned things and served things and took things away and kept their mouths shut unless they were spoken to. Maria still spent most of her time tidying things away and making sure that any item of clothing not currently being worn by Bruno was neatly folded in his wardrobe. And Pavel still arrived at the house every afternoon to peel the potatoes and the carrots and then put his white jacket on and serve at the dinner table. (From time to time Bruno saw him throw a glance in the direction of his knee, where a tiny scar from his swing-related accident was in evidence, but other than that they never spoke to each other.)
But then things changed. Father decided it was time for the children to return to their studies, and although it seemed ridiculous to Bruno that school should take place when there were only two students to teach, both Mother and Father agreed that a tutor should come to the house every day and fill their mornings and afternoons with lessons. A few mornings later a man called Herr Liszt rattled up the driveway on his boneshaker and it was time for school again. Herr Liszt was a mystery to Bruno. Although he was friendly enough most of the time, never raising his hand to him like his old teacher in Berlin had done, something in his eyes made Bruno feel there was an anger inside him just waiting to get out.
Herr Liszt was particularly fond of history and geography, while Bruno preferred reading and art.
‘Those things are useless to you,’ insisted the teacher. ‘A sound understanding of the social sciences is far more important in this day and age.’
‘Grandmother always let us perform in plays back in Berlin,’ Bruno pointed out.
‘Your grandmother was not your teacher though, was she?’ asked Herr Liszt. ‘She was your grandmother. And here I am your teacher, so you will study the things that I say are important and not just the things you like yourself.’
‘But aren’t books important?’ asked Bruno.
‘Books about things that matter in the world, of course,’ explained Herr Liszt. ‘But not storybooks. Not books about things that never happened. How much do you know of your history anyway, young man?’ (To his credit, Herr Liszt referred to Bruno as ‘young man’, like Pavel and unlike Lieutenant K
otler.)
‘Well, I know I was born on April the fifteenth nineteen thirty-four—’ said Bruno.
‘Not your history,’ interrupted Herr Liszt. ‘Not your own personal history. I mean the history of who you are, where you come from. Your family’s heritage. The Fatherland.’
Bruno frowned and considered it. He wasn’t entirely sure that Father had any land, because although the house in Berlin was a large and comfortable house, there wasn’t very much garden space around it. And he was old enough to know that Out-With did not belong to them, despite all the land there. ‘Not very much,’ he admitted finally. ‘Although I know quite a bit about the Middle Ages. I like stories about knights and adventures and exploring.’
Herr Liszt made a hissing sound through his teeth and shook his head angrily. ‘Then this is what I am here to change,’ he said in a sinister voice. ‘To get your head out of your storybooks and teach you more about where you come from. About the great wrongs that have been done to you.’
Bruno nodded and felt quite pleased by this as he assumed that he would finally be given an explanation for why they had all been forced to leave their comfortable home and come to this terrible place, which must have been the greatest wrong ever committed to him in his short life.
Sitting alone in his room a few days later, Bruno started thinking about all the things he liked to do at home that he hadn’t been able to do since he had come to Out-With. Most of them came about because he no longer had any friends to play with, and it wasn’t as if Gretel would ever play with him. But there was one thing that he was able to do on his own and that he had done all the time back in Berlin, and that was exploring.
‘When I was a child,’ Bruno said to himself, ‘I used to enjoy exploring. And that was in Berlin, where I knew everywhere and could find anything I wanted with a blindfold on. I’ve never really done any exploring here. Perhaps it’s time to start.’