The Wish Child Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Catherine Chidgey

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Puzzles

  Strength Through Joy

  Führer Weather

  The Wax Woman

  The German Face

  You Too Belong to the Führer

  The Shadowman

  A Puppet Show

  Alchemy

  Kindertotenlieder

  Persilscheine

  The Wish Child

  Er Ich

  The Secret That Is Not a Secret

  Historical Note

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Siggi lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words (‘promise’, ‘love’, ‘mercy’). Erich is an only child living a lush rural life, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions.

  Drawn together as Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theatre amidst the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days Siggi and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.

  Watching over Siggi and Erich is the wish child, the mysterious narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the wreckage of a nation’s dream.

  About the Author

  Catherine Chidgey was born in 1970. She has degrees in creative writing, psychology and German literature and lived in Berlin for three years. Her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church (‘Warm, subtle and evocative’ Louis de Bernières), won the South East Asia and Pacific Region Prize in the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Betty Trask Prize and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Golden Deeds, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, followed by The Transformation (‘As beautiful as it is terrifying’ Sunday Express) in 2006. Chidgey lives in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand.

  Also by Catherine Chidgey

  In a Fishbone Church

  Golden Deeds

  The Transformation

  To Tracey Slaughter

  … everything created

  Deserves to be annihilated;

  Better, then, if nothing began.

  Mephistopheles, Part I Scene III, Faust, Goethe

  Puzzles

  Let me say that I was not in the world long enough to understand it well, so can give you only impressions, like the shapes left in rock by long-decayed leaves, or the pencil rubbings of doves and skulls that are but flimsy memories of stone. Just these little smudges, these traces of light and shadow, these breaths in and out. They feel like mine.

  1995

  Near Nuremberg

  Sieglinde is shuffling and turning the pieces of paper, releasing the scent of old typewriter ribbons and pencil sharpenings, rubber stamps and vinyl chairs, ink pads, carbon paper. There are shelves of destroyed documents, rooms of them, ripped apart in the last frantic days of the GDR and crammed into sacks. Some are simple to reconstruct, torn only in two or four, and you can read whole sentences, even paragraphs – but others are in pieces no bigger than postage stamps and bear mere fragments of words. There is no telling what will emerge from the sacks; no way of predicting whose life she will pull out in tatters. One day it’s a university student who told a joke about Honecker; the next it’s a housewife whose parcels sent from friends in the West betrayed clear capitalist leanings: aluminium foil, instant pudding. There’s a train driver who refused to let a camera be pointed from his apartment towards his neighbour’s, and so was monitored for years himself. A mother who let her son grow his hair long and wear jeans to school. A teenager who covered her bedroom walls with pictures of Michael Jackson. The intercepted letters are the easiest to put back together, the phrases well-worn, expected: I miss you. I love you. I wish I could see you. Sieglinde spends a week reconstructing a drawing of someone’s apartment – it’s a detailed floor plan, viewed as if from above, as if the roof has been cut away to let you see into every room at once. It shows all the furniture down to the last footstool, and all the electrical fittings, and the measurements of every wall. There is even a newspaper on a coffee table and a cat asleep on an armchair; everything is there but the people. She finds photographs in the sacks, too: Polaroids of rumpled sheets, books in a bookcase, dishes left to soak in a kitchen sink – a record of the ordinary, so that after a search it could all be put back in the right place and nobody would notice a thing. Sometimes she pauses over these small domestic scenes, tracing with a finger the crinkles in lace curtains tied into bunches, the eddy of an unmade bed.

  She has developed her own system, as all the puzzlers have. She lifts the scraps from the bags as gently as possible to preserve the original strata, sorting them according to size, paper colour, texture, weight, as well as typeface or handwriting, before fitting ragged edge to ragged edge to restore the destroyed file. It can take days to complete a single page, and always there are pieces she cannot home, holes she cannot fill. Sixteen thousand sacks, six hundred million scraps of paper – it will take centuries to finish – but she trains herself to focus only on the snippets in front of her, to find the patterns, the matches. She knows she is running out of time; soon she will retire, and she will return to her old life in Berlin, give notice to the student who is subletting her apartment. She pushes herself to work as quickly as possible, restoring the stories of ordinary people, watching the puzzles decipher themselves beneath her hands. And always, in the back of her mind, the puzzle that has never left her: Erich Kröning. She searches for him in every file, her heart turning over when she thinks she sees his name – though it is never the right Erich, never her Erich; of course not. I’m not telling that sort of story; I can’t put everything back together.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  Strength Through Joy

  I don’t know whether the little bones,

  Rinsed by the sea, will tangle together,

  Or whether, wrapped in clouds,

  They will reach for music and   .

  I know that    without fragrance,

  Like    fingers stiff in the joints,

  Offer no    magic

  For which the living call in sleep.

  July 1939

  Near Leipzig

  The Krönings rose earlier than usual, though everything was already in order: the pathways were swept, flowers cut and arranged, windows polished until the glass all but disappeared. In the fields the wheat grew straight and golden and in the orchard the bees were waking in their hives. The living-room curtains shifted a little of their own accord – was a window loose? Was there a draught? Emilie and her husband Christoph sat in each chair in turn and pretended to be guests, looking at their home through outside eyes. The sun was not yet up, the rooster only just beginning to crow, but they suspected it would be a stifling day. It was sensible to be prepared for the visit, to allow themselves time to check that nothing was out of place. Perhaps they had not noticed that the fringe of a carpet was tangled, or that the blessing hung askew; perhaps a clock needed winding or a cushion punching back into shape – but no, all was correct: flowers in the vases, wheat in the fields, bees in the hives and Mein Kampf on the shelf.

  When they were satisfied with the house, the Krönings began to prepare themselves. Emilie sat at her mirror and parted and braided her pale blond hair, pinning it into
place so it would not move. She could feel her scalp and the fine skin at her temples pulling, but the sensation was quite bearable. She was proud of her hair; it hung to the small of her back when she brushed it out, and the strands of her braids were as thick as thumbs.

  ‘I’ll give you my skin if you give me your hair,’ her sister Uschi used to say when they shared a bedroom.

  ‘I’ll give you my eyes if you give me your ankles,’ Emilie would reply.

  She pinched a little blood into her cheeks now and smoothed her church dress over her slim hips. You really could not tell she was a mother. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said to her reflection. ‘Thank you for considering our case.’ You-you, you, the turtle dove called from the forest. You-you, you. The sound drifted to Emilie’s window and seemed to float there in the indistinct early morning. The day had not yet decided what it would become.

  She watched Christoph splash his razor in the water. He paused to wipe steam from the mirror – he kept disappearing – and then he held taut the skin of his throat. He was a tall, sinewy man; he had to crouch to see himself. He frowned away a lock of sandy hair that fell forward into his eyes, giving Emilie a small smile when he noticed her looking at him. The sound of the blade against his flesh called to Emilie’s mind the first rasp of fire burning off a spent crop. In a way she regretted those blazes – a certain melancholy rose in her as she watched the remains of a harvest begin to crumple and vanish – but unless you cleared away waste matter there could be no new growth, and any small sentiment always passed once the flames had burst and spread. Christoph smoothed his hair down with water, flattening the curls at his brow. The little scar above his eye was pale in the early light, almost invisible, though as summer wore on and his skin turned browner it would show itself more. His father had been teaching him how to use the scythe and Christoph had stepped too close. His mother still fussed over it: if it had been half a centimetre lower … Sometimes Emilie touched it with her long, cool fingers and said the same thing.

  At breakfast the Krönings sliced open their rolls and spread them with butter and jam while their wedding clock tutted at them from the far wall. Today the little woman had swung out from the clock’s insides to tell them that rain was on the way, but it didn’t feel like it. The oilcloth table-cover caught the pale light from the window to the north and lay cool beneath their wrists. They took measured bites, neither hurrying nor dawdling. The guest was not getting into Leipzig until after ten. There was plenty of time.

  ‘Is this the last of Uschi’s jam?’ said Christoph.

  ‘Of the cherry, yes,’ said Emilie. ‘There’s one more apricot.’

  ‘The apricot is very good too,’ said Christoph. ‘Though I prefer the cherry.’

  The guest arrives just as the wedding clock strikes eleven: a tall, well-groomed man with dark hair and a calm voice. He looks like the kind of man who always knows what to say. He looks like the kind of man who would take your hand if you were lost and make sure you got home safely. He wears an expensive black suit instead of a uniform, but his Party badge glitters on his lapel. Christoph conducts him to the chair they have deemed the most suitable and Emilie lifts the cover from the bee-sting cake.

  ‘I’m afraid I have very little time,’ the guest begins, but Emilie is already reaching for the knife.

  ‘It’s made with our own honey,’ she says. ‘My husband will show you the hives later. His father carved them himself – they’re the traditional kind, in the shape of people.’ She hands him a plate and an embroidered serviette. ‘And you must see our copse of larches – Christoph planted them in 1933, to celebrate the election. In autumn they’re quite something.’

  They pause to eat their slices of cake, and for a moment it seems the guest might choke on a sliver of almond – but he gives a little cough and everything is fine.

  ‘We can, of course, show you the nursery,’ says Emilie. ‘If you think it would help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says the guest. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ says Emilie.

  ‘We’d like the matter dealt with swiftly,’ says Christoph. ‘To prevent further suffering.’

  The guest nods – he is a kind man, a fair man.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ says Emilie as they see him off. ‘Thank you for considering our case.’

  Yes, he is kind and fair; after he has gone, the Krönings agree that this is so. And then they return to their work.

  September

  1939 Berlin

  But this is where I’ll start: some weeks later, when the absurd man with the absurd moustache calls off the Peace Rally so he can send his troops into Poland.

  The war begins punctually and according to plan. Sieglinde Heilmann, six years of age, sits with her parents and brothers and listens as the voice from the radio crackles through their Berlin apartment, a fire taking hold of its fuel.

  I see her father Gottlieb pinching the antenna between his thumb and forefinger and hunting the signal: reception can be poor in their living room, which seems unjust, he says, given that they are in Charlottenburg, which is a respectable part of town, and on the uppermost storey, what’s more – but no matter, no matter, one mustn’t make a fuss. When he thinks he catches the broadcast he freezes, though he looks so uncomfortable, his narrow frame all angles and corners, even his long face motionless. Sieglinde’s mother Brigitte points to the right, but he moves too far over and loses the signal again.

  ‘Back a bit, Vati!’ Sieglinde tells him, and with a little perseverance he manages to tune in, moving the wire through the air until the Führer reaches them undistorted.

  Jürgen, who is almost five, is building houses with his wooden blocks. Before they can fall he knocks them down and they clatter against the parquet – ‘On the carpet, Jürgen! The neighbours!’ – and Kurt, who is just a baby, murmurs in his cradle.

  Sieglinde looks out the window and says, ‘But where is the enemy?’

  Above the sofa the Führer stares out from his portrait, frowning a little, straining to make sense of himself. Vati repositions a leg.

  ‘Mutti, where are they?’ says Sieglinde.

  My whole life has been nothing but one long struggle for my people, says the radio. Just as I myself stand ever ready to lay down my liver for my people and for Germany – anyone can take it from me – so I demand the same of everyone else …

  ‘His liver?’ says Mutti. ‘Our livers?’

  ‘His life,’ hisses Vati, who has heard the speech earlier that day, on the loudspeakers at work.

  ‘That must be it. Life. It did sound like liver, though. But why would the Führer want us to lay down our livers?’

  Jürgen builds and destroys another house, and another, and Sieglinde comes away from the window and settles back on the sofa with Mutti, and the baby sighs and sleeps, and Vati stands motionless, thin hands raised like a holy man, fingers alive with blessings, and I watch them, these ordinary people, the Führer’s face above them and his voice off to one side, quite the ventriloquist, and if I could have spoken I suspect they would have heard only static, rain, tumbling blocks, the sound of blank air. And when there is an air-raid alarm that same evening they file down to their cellar, though nobody really knows why: there are no planes to be seen or heard. When they emerge, everything is just as it was.

  She is right, though, the little girl: if Germany is at war with Poland, where are the Polish? And then, where are the French and the English? Not on the trams or buses, not reclining in wicker beach chairs at the Müggelsee, not in the cinemas or the vaudeville halls. Day after day Berliners watch the sky and wait for the war to show itself, and night after night they observe the blackout rules. Even the famous neon signs are snuffed out: the fizzing glass of Deinhard Sekt; the Sarotti chocolate Moor in his little turban. And yet – people go sailing on the Wannsee, and picnic in the Tiergarten, and sunbathe on the lawns at Friedrichshain. Trains run, and clocks strike, and dogs cock their legs. Men drink beer and women try o
n gloves and children visit the zoo and hear the monkeys screeching, and watch the elephants plucking up hay with their trunks, and pet the lion cubs and feed the bear cubs, who drink milk from bottles, just like proper babies, and the orangutan reaches his arms through his cage, wanting something, and looks for all the world like the drawings of greedy men in the children’s schoolbooks. And yes, the schools open again, and the children learn to sit, be silent, obey; they learn to copy and repeat, to divide and subtract, to calculate solutions. There is nothing to fear. The sandbags stacked against the cellar windows are just a precaution. The sky is quite empty.

  ‘All is well,’ Vati tells Sieglinde, pointing to the newspaper headlines that turn the fingertips black, every day a plague of good news. ‘You see? We are happy and secure. There is plenty of food. We cannot be bombed.’

  A crow watches from the window ledge as Sieglinde helps Mutti put the kitchen to rights. She does not like its black stare, the way it runs its eye up and down the glass as if searching for a way in. She opens the window and the bird vanishes into the courtyard; the dark, empty space at the heart of their building and every building like it in Berlin. She does not linger at the ledge. There is a house rule – Sieglinde knows it is recorded in the caretaker’s register, along with the rules about swearing and spitting, and the conducting of loud conversations in the stairwell – that forbids anybody from staring into anybody else’s apartment. Everyone pretends that everyone else’s business – and therefore their own – is private.

  Sometimes, as a treat, Vati takes Sieglinde out on her own for cake. (Is this a father? Is this, is this? I know nothing of such things.) They go to Café Kranzler on the Ku’damm, where they sit beneath the striped awning and watch the ladies pass by in their smart hats, or to Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz, with its silver palm fronds in the ballroom and its thunderstorms that strike on the hour. Vati lets her try his coffee and she takes a sip as if she were a grown-up, even though she does not like the taste and has to make it go away with a big bite of Sachertorte. Vati smiles at her then from behind his little round spectacles, and his grey eyes make her feel quiet inside. He is kinder than any of her friends’ fathers, and has fine brown hair that is never untidy, unlike her own, and clever hands that can cut from paper any shape you can imagine. As they make their way home he points out interesting things to her: the Prometheus fountain on Hardenbergstrasse; the Palace balcony – which is looking rather shabby – where the Kaiser said Today we are all German brothers, and only German brothers. When they come to their building in Kantstrasse he holds the street door open for her like a gentleman, and then he takes her arm and leads her back into their courtyard, and no matter how fine the day it is always a cave, a well, a place of shadows too deep for the sun, where in winter the snow does not melt. Her good shoes click against the chill flagstones, and banks of unlit windows rise up around her. They pass the screens that hide the dustbins, and the rails where carpets are hung and beaten, and the sandpit with its falling castles. Last spring Sieglinde planted marigolds in the marshy soil by the entrance to their wing, but they never took.