by Anika Scott
Chilled, Clara thought of Fenshaw, who had intercepted the letter she had written to Elisa. The letters that had reached Elisa didn’t help at all: an appeal for money from a distant cousin in Hessen, an appeal for money from a charity. Clara tossed them aside and roamed the cellar again, trying to understand. The Gestapo had taken Elisa and she had never come home, and Clara had not been here to help. She had fled when Elisa needed her most. If the Gestapo had arrested her because of what they had done together for the workers, the punishment would have been swift and severe. Prison at the very least. In the war, there had been posters around the city warning people not to give food to the eastern crews, some of the hungriest and most miserable of the lot. Clara and Elisa had done so much more than feed them. They had known the risk, had discussed it, and Clara had always assured her that if they were caught, she would take responsibility. As head of the Works, she would shield Elisa as much as she could. But she had fled, and Elisa had vanished. A barren land unfolded inside her—the thought that maybe Elisa hadn’t survived. She stopped herself, pushed the thought away. It did her no good to think the worst before she had all the facts.
“I’ll find her,” she announced to the Bergers, who were exchanging worried looks. “I’ll be careful. And I’ll make sure you have somewhere else to go once she’s back.” Clara couldn’t promise them anything more. She had nowhere to go herself, except perhaps home to her mother. Anne might know more about what had happened to Elisa. Once Clara found her, she would leave the city. She couldn’t risk staying with Fenshaw on her trail. She wasn’t even sure if she should stay with the Bergers, but she didn’t see what choice she had. For now.
The Bergers looked doubtful. “If Frau Sieland survived, why hasn’t she come back already? It’s been over a year and a half.”
“She must have thought the house a complete loss and moved in somewhere else. Or maybe she didn’t see the point of evicting you.”
“She’s got something better, then? Not many options, fräulein, unless she found herself an Allied soldier as soon as they took over.”
Clara shook her head—absolutely not, not Elisa—but then she remembered how her friend had been late in the war, a kind of glow in her as the Allies swept closer. Sometimes Elisa would sing at the top of her lungs as she ran errands at the iron works. At the time, Clara hadn’t thought much of it. They were all going a little mad. Everyone felt the end coming. Max used to blare swing music on the old windup record player in his office. Clara took great care to tidy her desk even when the ceiling shed plaster after the bombardments. She roared at whatever staff she had left to clear the hallways, her father’s voice ringing in her ears, reminding her to save the Works, preserve it, cherish it. She would have no chairs blocking the way, no rubbish, and no rubble. She would have a clean, orderly environment as the world turned to dust around her. Elisa’s singing was no odder than that, a strange expression of joy as the Americans pressed toward them.
“Did she leave anything behind that might tell me where she went?”
“We salvaged some of her things,” Frau Berger said, opening a battered suitcase in front of Clara. “It isn’t much. Suppose it’s no surprise she didn’t bother to come for them.”
It was a rummage sale of personal items. A tarnished compact mirror, broken. An address book once soaked by water, words illegible. Sunglasses, one lens missing. A pair of black shoes with holes where the big toe had chewed through.
Clara didn’t touch these things. She felt around inside the suitcase and pulled out a notebook, also water-stained but still readable. It was Willy’s from a time when he still wrote in all capitals. BIRDS, he’d printed on the first page. From there, he had noted the numbers of pigeons, sparrows, and other birds he’d seen in the city. He used to carry the book pinned under his arm, a serious-faced seven-year-old with his gaze on the treetops and the lampposts and the windowsills high over his head. Seeing his boyish handwriting made her remember his hand, her thumb stroking the soft pillow of his palm the many times she’d held it.
“What did Willy do when he came home after the fire and found his mother gone?”
“He never came back either, fräulein,” the old man said softly. “We thought he’d been sent off to fight.”
“He was just a boy,” Clara snapped. “He didn’t fight.” She held his notebook tightly in her lap, thinking. At the end of the war, he was thirteen. She remembered how one day he had appeared in his Jungvolk uniform in Clara’s office, asking for a job. He wanted to do something for the war effort. Her heart wasn’t easily broken, but a little piece of her shattered deep inside, seeing a boy so desperate to work for a lost cause. Instead of sending him home, she gave him a crucial role. He was to mind the blackout at the iron works. From then on, when she could stomach looking out of her office window, she would often see him on his bicycle racing around the groups of foreign workers trudging through the ruined factories. Now and then he would stop and watch them go by. She had been too far away to see his face, if he felt horror or pity or fear at the sight of them.
She turned the pages of Willy’s notebook again. BIRDS. And then she remembered what was missing from the cellar. “Where’s Gertrud?”
The Bergers looked at one another. “Who?”
“Willy’s canary.”
“We didn’t see any bird here.” Frau Berger shrugged. “Maybe it died. Not like there wasn’t enough of that going around.”
In the corner of the cellar, she found the hook in the ceiling. “He kept her in a cage right here.” Clara had given Gertrud to Willy for his twelfth birthday. She’d been nervous about it because the canary was damaged, a wing not quite right so that the little thing fluttered around instead of flying. But that was the very thing that won Willy’s heart. He had taken one look at the clipped wing and the way Gertrud struggled in her fear of him, and this boy, Elisa’s quiet boy, who rarely spoke to other children, had begun to whisper gentle words to the little yellow bird.
8
The boy soldier was a creature of habit. After Jakob slept off his exhaustion on an army bed, he awakened groaning and muttering about his pains while the kid paced back and forth in what Jakob began to think of as a camp. It was a wide tunnel reinforced with timber and steel beams. The dead end looked as though somebody had wanted to blast it and then changed his mind. Holes dotted the rock where the blaster had set the dynamite, then failed for whatever reason to push the plunger. There was no dynamite now. Jakob felt the weight of the earth over his head. He had been born to be a miner—the son following in the father’s footsteps and all of that—and he’d thought himself a clever fellow to avoid these tunnels by going to war.
A war that was over a year and a half ago. The boy in the uniform was playing a peculiar—if disturbing—sort of game, acting as though it was still in full flow. He paced from the crate he used as a table to the map on the wall to the curtain that blocked the camp from the main tunnel. His steel helmet cast a shadow on his face, but Jakob saw his jaw well enough. So smooth, it had never seen a razor. A rash of spots dotted the left side of his mouth. And if Jakob squinted, he thought he saw freckles on the tip of the boy’s nose.
“How old are you, kid?”
“I’m not a kid. I’m thirteen.” The boy frowned down at Jakob as if he disapproved of him being half naked—as if it was Jakob’s fault. “Stay here,” he said, and vanished into the next tunnel.
Jakob heard a rustling and a series of irate peeps. For the first time, he noticed a kind of shelf in the rock wall at the foot of the bed. On it was a nest of twigs and paper occupied by a yellow canary. She shivered her wings and cocked her head and chirped at him for so long, he got the impression she was trying to tell him something important.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Call me Jakob.” She shrank back, still chirping, her tiny legs stomping her nest. He understood her hesitation; he was a stranger after all, so he left her alone. He was glad she was there. A mine is a living thing,
Papa used to say. It breathes. Noxious gases could come at any time, carbon dioxide hovering along the floor, methane floating odorless and invisible near the ceiling. As long as the canary lived and nobody lit a fire, the air was probably safe.
Soon the boy returned with gifts Jakob was only too glad to receive. Fresh army trousers, a sock, an army shoe that looked a size too small. It didn’t matter. To get out of the mine, he needed clothes, his strength, and his prosthesis. The kid was also thoughtful enough to bring an aspirin. As it dissolved in a tin cup, Jakob said, “If you find my wooden leg, I’ll owe you, kid. I’ll light candles for you in church. I’ll introduce you to my sisters. We’ll go into business together. What do you say? Go out and search for me?”
The boy rotated on his heel, swept aside the curtain, and kept watch, one boot in the tunnel room, one outside it. His silence was unsettling, a kind of absence, as if he wasn’t wholly there. Jakob tried a different tack.
“Met your canary, kid. What’s her name?”
The boy let the curtain, a wool blanket spanning a rope, fall back into place. He scratched the eagle on his tunic. “Gertrud.”
“She’s sweet. What’s your name, then?”
The boy paused as if thinking long and hard about this. Then he shook his head and again set about pacing—nest, table, map, curtain. This continued for what felt like hours. The kid rarely spoke or changed his route except to piss into a bucket or replace the spent lamps with full ones. Jakob began to think time moved in circles inside the mine. He had slept for at least a few hours, maybe the whole night, into the next day. He ate the meals the kid gave him, but Jakob couldn’t guess the interval in between. He had no watch and the kid offered no information. Even the grumbling of his stomach didn’t help Jakob measure time. He was permanently hungry like everyone else in the world. At every meal, the boy opened a can and handed it with a spoon to Jakob. Then he noted something in a leather-bound book he kept in the footlocker by the bed. Jakob longed to see what the boy was writing.
But mostly, he watched that uniform, the gray tunic coat and the helmet. At the end of the war, the Nazis tossed boys at the losing front. Cripples too, and old men. The Volkssturm, they called it, as if children and the dregs of the army would attack the Allies like a storm. The people called it the Cripple Guard. When Jakob first saw the big-eyed boys and trembling old geezers he was called up to train after his recovery, he’d nearly busted his teeth to keep from weeping.
“You a Werewolf?” he asked, trying for the tenth time to start a conversation.
Finally tired of pacing, the boy now sat at the crate table, sorting junk. Screws, wires, coils, nails dropped into tin cups. He had sorted them once already, then emptied the cups into a heap and started again for no clear purpose that Jakob could see. He repeated his question three times before the kid said, “A what?”
“A Werewolf. Partisan fighters. Fanatics. They murdered the mayor of Aachen a while back.”
The kid dropped the last screw into its cup. Then he turned to the map of Europe on the wall.
Jakob snapped his fingers.
The boy didn’t blink. Whatever he saw in that map, it absorbed him. Jakob took the opportunity to shimmy down the bed to Gertrud’s nest, and this time, she let him stroke her head with his thumb.
“Stop that.” The boy swept his bird out of her nest and set her on his shoulder. She tilted as she flapped her wings, the feathers clipped on one side.
“I got one leg, you got a bird on your shoulder,” Jakob said. “Between the two of us, we’d make a nice pirate.”
Nothing. Not even the hint of a smile from the boy. He pulled the curtain aside and stared into the tunnel in that expectant way he had. Jakob got the feeling he didn’t exist for the boy just then.
Jakob braced himself on Gertrud’s shelf and pulled up onto his good foot. No dizziness: a good sign. His leg wobbled, that stork feeling he always got when he stood without his prosthesis. Once steady, he did an experimental hop. It made his jaw rattle, and he let out a groan of pain. He glanced toward the curtain.
Boy and bird were gone. An opportunity Jakob couldn’t pass up.
He hopped along the wall and leaned, panting, against the map. The German Reich and its conquests sprawled across Europe as if time had stopped in 1942. Writing covered the map, tiny notes that Jakob could make out only when he got close. Dates, units, troop movements, none of them within the borders of the old Reich, as if the two-front war that crushed Germany had never happened.
He eased himself back onto the bed and raided the kid’s locker. He found a military identity card without a photograph made out to Wilhelm Sieland, born September 27, 1931. His father, Reinhard, was deceased, and his mother was named Elisabeth. Under the addendum, someone had penciled in what Jakob assumed was the boy’s address in Sophienhof, a Falkenberg housing estate Jakob knew of but had never had cause to visit.
He set the card aside and picked up the notebook the kid had been writing in. A picture slid out, a family snap by a big house. The father was in uniform, puffed up like an ape in spectacles. The mother was a knockout in a white blouse and loose curls. Reinhard and Elisabeth, Jakob assumed. Between them, the boy soldier, midget version, held a toy train. On the back of the photograph: Willy’s 10th birthday, September 27, 1941.
Jakob looked at the identity card again. He rubbed his forehead, slow at the math. If the kid was born in 1931, he’d be fifteen now. Didn’t he say he was thirteen?
Back to the ledger. The first page was a list, an inventory of the supplies in the mine. Jakob couldn’t believe this stuff existed all in one place. Fruit and soup, beans and sugar, fish and dried meat and on and on until he got the feeling he’d woken up in Schlaraffenland where wine flowed in the rivers and houses were made of cake.
After the inventory, a new list began.
1. 200g bread, 1 tsp each margarine and artificial honey, 150g canned ham.
It reminded Jakob of his mother’s recipe book, but it was no recipe. It was breakfast. The numbered columns stretched down the page. And the next one. And the next. Jakob read at random.
298. 3 zwieback, 1 pellet Knorr pea soup (with bacon).
901. 3 slices bread, 1 sardines, 1 carrots.
Jakob flipped to the last written page.
1,932. 1 ham, 1 peas and carrots, 300g powdered potatoes. 1 tsp margarine. 150g powdered milk. 1 packet Dr. Oetker pudding (vanilla).
Willy was keeping track of the food he took out of the stores. Jakob assumed the food was for the kid’s family, but—if so—why such small amounts? Why keep the ledger at all? He couldn’t imagine the men who owned the supplies would care. When Jakob’s old employer gave him a chicken leg, he sure as hell didn’t write it down. On the other hand, two thousand meals was more than an occasional gift.
“Put that down.” Willy snatched back the ledger. Gertrud tipped off his shoulder and fluttered back to her nest.
“What is this place?” Jakob asked. “You’re sitting on a fortune in food and cigarettes. You’re dressed like you want the Tommies to lock you up for good. What are you doing down here?”
“My duty.”
“What duty?”
“Guarding the depot.”
“Figured that out. But what for?”
“Ever heard of the End Push?”
“When we rise up against the Allies with our secret weapons and kick them out of the Reich forever? That End Push?” Jakob watched the kid tuck the ledger back into the locker, saw the gas mask, the ammunition pouch. He felt the first cold prick of a terrible, impossible thought. “The war is over. You do know that, right?”
Willy took off his helmet. He was the standard blond-blue combination, the face printed on the five Reichsmark note, the Nordic boy, gaze fixed on his future of death and glory. That face got lost in a uniform. There were tens of thousands like it. Jakob had the same face. As a kid, he’d rubbed coal dust in his hair to be different for a day.
Willy did have something special. His eyes. Frosty b
lues that bulged enough to be striking. Without the helmet, he looked even younger than Jakob had thought. Thirteen? Fifteen?
“Victory,” Willy said with awe. He splayed his hand on the map, Atlantic theater. “When the Tommies bowed to the superiority of our V-2 rockets, we swept the Western Front, didn’t we? Our submarines shot missiles at the American coastline. The Americans withdrew from Europe to defend their country. That left us to turn against the Russians. The Bolshies are finished, right? Nobody would leave them standing. The führer never would. When did they surrender?”
“You think the Russians surrendered? They had thirty million men.”
“One German soldier is worth five of them.”
“You mean there were five of them for every German soldier. We lost, kid.”
Willy turned abruptly from the map. “That’s impossible. We can’t lose. We . . . We’ll fight until the last man.” He was scratching his tunic again. “Until victory.”
Jakob’s head throbbed. One thousand nine hundred and thirty-two meals. If he calculated three meals a day for one person, how many days had the kid been down here? How many months? That is, if Willy didn’t take food for his family and had been consuming it alone since . . . when?
After the war, the Americans had kicked over every rock and poked around in every cellar. They’d searched for weapons, Nazis, partisans, soldiers who refused to surrender. So many coal mines snaked under Essen, the city should have sunk by now. But still, wouldn’t the Americans, or the British who came after them, have found this place? Could this kid really have been here alone all this time?
He looked around the room. The camp bed, the map, the table, the locker. They had the settled feel of a bunker for one on a front that hadn’t moved in a long while.
“When did you come down here, kid?”
At the curtain, Willy watched the tunnel. Jakob repeated the question twice before the boy said, “March.” His eyes bulged in the darkness. “The eleventh of March.”