by John Boyne
‘I beg your pardon, Herr Commandant?’ asked Lieutenant Kotler, even though Father had spoken in a perfectly clear voice.
‘I asked you where he went,’ he repeated. ‘Your father. The professor of literature. Where did he go when he left Germany?’
Lieutenant Kotler’s face grew a little red and he stuttered somewhat as he spoke. ‘I believe…I believe he is currently in Switzerland,’ he said finally. ‘The last I heard he was teaching at a university in Berne.’
‘Oh, but Switzerland’s a beautiful country,’ said Mother quickly. ‘I haven’t ever been there, I admit, but from what I hear—’
‘He can’t be very old, your father,’ said Father, his deep voice silencing them all. ‘I mean you’re only…what? Seventeen? Eighteen years old?’
‘I’ve just turned nineteen, Herr Commandant.’
‘So your father would be…in his forties, I expect?’
Lieutenant Kotler said nothing but continued to eat although he didn’t appear to be enjoying his food at all.
‘Strange that he chose not to stay in the Fatherland,’ said Father.
‘We’re not close, my father and I,’ said Lieutenant Kotler quickly, looking around the table as if he owed everyone an explanation. ‘Really, we haven’t spoken in years.’
‘And what reason did he give, might I ask,’ continued Father, ‘for leaving Germany at the moment of her greatest glory and her most vital need, when it is incumbent upon all of us to play our part in the national revival? Was he tubercular?’
Lieutenant Kotler stared at Father, confused. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked.
‘Did he go to Switzerland to take the air?’ explained Father. ‘Or did he have a particular reason for leaving Germany? In nineteen thirty-eight,’ he added after a moment.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know, Herr Commandant,’ said Lieutenant Kotler. ‘You would have to ask him.’
‘Well, that would be rather difficult to do, wouldn’t it? With him being so far away, I mean. But perhaps that was it. Perhaps he was ill.’ Father hesitated before picking up his knife and fork again and continuing to eat. ‘Or perhaps he had…disagreements.’
‘Disagreements, Herr Commandant?’
‘With government policy. One hears tales of men like this from time to time. Curious fellows, I imagine. Disturbed, some of them. Traitors, others. Cowards too. Of course you have informed your superiors of your father’s views, Lieutenant Kotler?’
The young lieutenant opened his mouth and then swallowed, despite the fact that he hadn’t been eating anything.
‘Never mind,’ said Father cheerfully. ‘Perhaps it is not an appropriate conversation for the dinner table. We can discuss it in more depth at a later time.’
‘Herr Commandant,’ said Lieutenant Kotler, leaning forward anxiously, ‘I can assure you—’
‘It is not an appropriate conversation for the dinner table,’ repeated Father sharply, silencing him immediately, and Bruno looked from one to the other, both enjoying and being frightened by the atmosphere at the same time.
‘I’d love to go to Switzerland,’ said Gretel after a lengthy silence.
‘Eat your dinner, Gretel,’ said Mother.
‘But I was just saying!’
‘Eat your dinner,’ Mother repeated and was about to say more but she was interrupted by Father calling for Pavel again.
‘What’s the matter with you tonight?’ he asked as Pavel uncorked the new bottle. ‘This is the fourth time I’ve had to ask for more wine.’
Bruno watched him, hoping he was feeling all right, although he managed to release the cork without any accidents. But after he had filled Father’s glass and turned to refill Lieutenant Kotler’s, he lost his grip of the bottle somehow and it fell crashing, glug-glug-glugging its contents out directly onto the young man’s lap.
What happened then was both unexpected and extremely unpleasant. Lieutenant Kotler grew very angry with Pavel and no one – not Bruno, not Gretel, not Mother and not even Father – stepped in to stop him doing what he did next, even though none of them could watch. Even though it made Bruno cry and Gretel grow pale.
Later that night, when Bruno went to bed, he thought about all that had happened over dinner. He remembered how kind Pavel had been to him on the afternoon he had made the swing, and how he had stopped his knee from bleeding and been very gentle in the way he administered the green ointment. And while Bruno realized that Father was generally a very kind and thoughtful man, it hardly seemed fair or right that no one had stopped Lieutenant Kotler getting so angry at Pavel, and if that was the kind of thing that went on at Out-With then he’d better not disagree with anyone any more about anything; in fact he would do well to keep his mouth shut and cause no chaos at all. Some people might not like it.
His old life in Berlin seemed like a very distant memory now and he could hardly even remember what Karl, Daniel or Martin looked like, except for the fact that one of them was a ginger.
For several weeks after this Bruno continued to leave the house when Herr Liszt had gone home for the day and Mother was having one of her afternoon naps, and made the long trek along the fence to meet Shmuel, who almost every afternoon was waiting there for him, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring at the dust beneath him.
One afternoon Shmuel had a black eye, and when Bruno asked him about it he just shook his head and said that he didn’t want to talk about it. Bruno assumed that there were bullies all over the world, not just in schools in Berlin, and that one of them had done this to Shmuel. He felt an urge to help his friend but he couldn’t think of anything he could do to make it better, and he could tell that Shmuel wanted to pretend it had never happened.
Every day Bruno asked Shmuel whether he would be allowed to crawl underneath the wire so that they could play together on the other side of the fence, but every day Shmuel said no, it wasn’t a good idea.
‘I don’t know why you’re so anxious to come across here anyway,’ said Shmuel. ‘It’s not very nice.’
‘You haven’t tried living in my house,’ said Bruno. ‘For one thing it doesn’t have five floors, only three. How can anyone live in so small a space as that?’ He’d forgotten Shmuel’s story about the eleven people all living in the same room together before they had come to Out-With, including the boy Luka who kept hitting him even when he did nothing wrong.
One day Bruno asked why Shmuel and all the other people on that side of the fence wore the same striped pajamas and cloth caps.
‘That’s what they gave us when we got here,’ explained Shmuel. ‘They took away our other clothes.’
‘But don’t you ever wake up in the morning and feel like wearing something different? There must be something else in your wardrobe.’
Shmuel blinked and opened his mouth to say something but then thought better of it.
‘I don’t even like stripes,’ said Bruno, although this wasn’t actually true. In fact he did like stripes and he felt increasingly fed up that he had to wear trousers and shirts and ties and shoes that were too tight for him when Shmuel and his friends got to wear striped pajamas all day long.
A few days later Bruno woke up and for the first time in weeks it was raining heavily. It had started at some point during the night and Bruno even thought that it might have woken him up, but it was hard to tell because once he was awake there was no way of knowing how that had happened. As he ate his breakfast that morning, the rain continued. Through all the morning classes with Herr Liszt, the rain continued. While he ate his lunch, the rain continued. And while they finished another session of history and geography in the afternoon, the rain continued. This was bad news for it meant that he wouldn’t be able to leave the house and meet Shmuel.
That afternoon Bruno lay on his bed with a book but found it hard to concentrate, and just then the Hopeless Case came in to see him. She didn’t often come to Bruno’s room, preferring to arrange and rearrange her collection of dolls constantly during her free time. However, so
mething about the wet weather had put her off her game and she couldn’t face playing it again just yet.
‘What do you want?’ asked Bruno.
‘That’s a nice welcome,’ said Gretel.
‘I’m reading,’ said Bruno.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked him, and rather than answer he simply turned the cover towards her so she could see for herself.
She made a raspberry sound through her lips and some of her spit landed on Bruno’s face. ‘Boring,’ she said in a sing-song voice.
‘It’s not boring at all,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s an adventure. It’s better than dolls, that’s for sure.’
Gretel didn’t rise to the bait on that one. ‘What are you doing?’ she repeated, irritating Bruno even further.
‘I told you, I’m trying to read,’ he said in a grumpy voice. ‘If some people would just let me.’
‘I’ve got nothing to do,’ she replied. ‘I hate the rain.’
Bruno found this hard to understand. It wasn’t as if she ever did anything anyway, unlike him, who had adventures and explored places and had made a friend. She very rarely left the house at all. It was as if she had decided to be bored simply because on this occasion she didn’t have a choice about staying inside. But still, there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.
‘I hate the rain too,’ he said. ‘I should be with Shmuel by now. He’ll think I’ve forgotten him.’
The words were out of his mouth quicker than he could stop them and he felt a pain in his stomach and grew furious with himself for saying that.
‘You should be with who?’ asked Gretel.
‘What’s that?’ asked Bruno, blinking back at her.
‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she asked again.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bruno, trying to think quickly. ‘I didn’t quite hear you. Could you say that again?’
‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she shouted, leaning forward so there could be no mistake this time.
‘I never said I should be with anyone,’ he said.
‘Yes, you did. You said that someone will think you’ve forgotten them.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Bruno!’ she said in a threatening voice.
‘Are you mad?’ he asked, trying to make her think that she had entirely made it up, only he wasn’t very convincing for he wasn’t a natural actor like Grandmother, and Gretel shook her head and pointed a finger at him.
‘What did you say, Bruno?’ she insisted. ‘You said there was someone you should be with. Who was it? Tell me! There’s no one around here to play with, is there?’
Bruno considered the dilemma he was in. On the one hand his sister and he had one crucial thing in common: they weren’t grown-ups. And although he had never bothered to ask her, there was every chance that she was just as lonely as he was at Out-With. After all, back in Berlin she had had Hilda and Isobel and Louise to play with; they may have been annoying girls but at least they were her friends. Here she had no one at all except her collection of lifeless dolls. Who knew how mad Gretel was after all? Perhaps she thought the dolls were talking to her.
But at the same time there was the undeniable fact that Shmuel was his friend and not hers and he didn’t want to share him. There was only one thing for it and that was to lie.
‘I have a new friend,’ he began. ‘A new friend that I go to see every day. And he’ll be waiting for me now. But you can’t tell anyone.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s an imaginary friend,’ said Bruno, trying his best to look embarrassed, just like Lieutenant Kotler had when he had become trapped in his story about his father in Switzerland. ‘We play together every day.’
Gretel opened her mouth and stared at him before breaking into a laugh. ‘An imaginary friend!’ she cried. ‘Aren’t you a little old for an imaginary friend?’
Bruno tried to look ashamed and embarrassed in order to make his story more convincing. He squirmed on the bed and didn’t look her in the eye, which worked a treat and made him think that perhaps he wasn’t such a bad actor after all. He wished that he could make himself go red, but it was difficult to do that so he thought of embarrassing things that had happened to him over the years and wondered whether these would do the trick.
He thought of the time he had forgotten to lock the bathroom door and Grandmother had walked in and seen everything. He thought of the time he had put his hand up in class and called the teacher ‘Mother’ and everyone had laughed at him. He thought of the time he’d fallen off his bicycle in front of a group of girls when he was trying to do a special trick and cut his knee and cried.
One of them worked and his face started to go red.
‘Look at you,’ said Gretel, confirming it. ‘You’ve gone all red.’
‘Because I didn’t want to tell you,’ said Bruno.
‘An imaginary friend. Honestly, Bruno, you’re a hopeless case.’
Bruno smiled because he knew two things. The first was that he had got away with his lie and the second was that if anyone was the Hopeless Case around here, it wasn’t him.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I want to read my book.’
‘Well, why don’t you lie down and close your eyes and let your imaginary friend read it to you?’ said Gretel, delighted with herself now because she had something on him and she wasn’t going to let it drop in a hurry. ‘Save you a job.’
‘Maybe I should send him to throw all your dolls out of your window,’ he said.
‘You do and there’ll be trouble,’ said Gretel, and he knew that she meant it. ‘Well, tell me this, Bruno. What do you and this imaginary friend of yours do together that makes him so special?’
Bruno thought about it. He realized that he actually wanted to talk about Shmuel a little bit and that this might be a way to do it without having to tell her the truth about his existence.
‘We talk about everything,’ he told her. ‘I tell him about our house back in Berlin and all the other houses and the streets and the fruit and vegetable stalls and the cafés, and how you shouldn’t go into town on a Saturday afternoon unless you want to get pushed from pillar to post, and about Karl and Daniel and Martin and how they were my three best friends for life.’
‘How interesting,’ said Gretel sarcastically because she had recently had a birthday and turned thirteen and thought that sarcasm was the very height of sophistication. ‘And what does he tell you?’
‘He tells me about his family and the watch shop that he used to live over and the adventures he had coming here and the friends he used to have and the people he knows here and about the boys who he used to play with but he doesn’t any more because they disappeared without even saying goodbye to him.’
‘He sounds like a barrel of laughs,’ said Gretel. ‘I wish he was my imaginary friend.’
‘And yesterday he told me that his grandfather hasn’t been seen for days and no one knows where he is and whenever he asks his father about him he starts crying and hugs him so hard that he’s worried he’s going to squeeze him to death.’
Bruno got to the end of his sentence and realized that his voice had gone very quiet. These were things that Shmuel had told him, but for some reason he hadn’t really understood at the time how sad that must have made his friend. When Bruno said them out loud himself he felt terrible that he hadn’t tried to say anything to cheer Shmuel up and instead had started talking about something silly, like exploring. I’ll say sorry for that tomorrow, he told himself.
‘If Father knew you were talking to imaginary friends, you’d be in for it,’ said Gretel. ‘I think you should stop.’
‘Why?’ asked Bruno.
‘Because it’s not healthy,’ she said. ‘It’s the first sign of madness.’
Bruno nodded. ‘I don’t think I can stop,’ he said after a very long pause. ‘I don’t t
hink I want to.’
‘Well, all the same,’ said Gretel, who was becoming friendlier and friendlier by the second, ‘I’d keep it to myself if I were you.’
‘Well,’ said Bruno, trying to look sad, ‘you’re probably right. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’
She shook her head. ‘No one. Except my own imaginary friend.’
Bruno gasped. ‘Do you have one?’ he asked, picturing her at another part of the fence, talking to a girl her own age, the two of them being sarcastic together for hours at a time.
‘No,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake! I can’t afford to act like a child even if you can.’
And with that she flounced out of the room, and Bruno could hear her talking to her dolls in the room across the hall and scolding them for getting themselves into such a mess while her back was turned that she had no choice but to rearrange them and did they think she had nothing better to do with her time?
‘Some people!’ she said loudly, before getting down to work.
Bruno tried to return to his book, but he’d lost interest in it for now and stared out at the rain instead and wondered whether Shmuel, wherever he was, was thinking about him too and missing their conversations as much as he was.
For several weeks the rain was on and off and on and off and Bruno and Shmuel did not see as much of each other as they would have liked. When they did meet Bruno found that he was starting to worry about his friend because he seemed to be getting even thinner by the day and his face was growing more and more grey. Sometimes he brought more bread and cheese with him to give to Shmuel, and from time to time he even managed to hide a piece of chocolate cake in his pocket, but the walk from the house to the place in the fence where the two boys met was a long one and sometimes Bruno got hungry on the way and found that one bite of the cake would lead to another, and that in turn led to another, and by the time there was only one mouthful left he knew it would be wrong to give that to Shmuel because it would only tease his appetite and not satisfy it.