The Wish Child Page 10

  ‘I have been saying children, children, but of course I mean boys. It is important to say what we mean. Our generals call their men children when they speak to them informally, which I have always found very moving. However, man’s universe is vast compared to woman’s, and I should not have implied that a girl can be a sniper, a destroyer of tanks and partisans – but a girl can be mother to a sniper, et cetera, so do not lose heart. Perhaps our guide Frau Müller might show us the Mother’s Cross? It comes in bronze, silver and gold – yes, like the Olympics – and you must bear at least four children to qualify, and none can be born dead. It’s not sufficient, though, simply to produce these children – anyone can do that; look at the gypsies. No, girls, you must be judged worthy of the medal – your conduct as well as your blood – and not only the number but also the quality of the children is considered. And once you possess the Mother’s Cross you will never have to queue, and you will always have a seat on the bus or the tram – even the elderly will give theirs up – and the butcher will reserve for you the choicest cuts of meat.

  ‘We’ll end with the Wound Badges – what a mountain! Hostile action, children. That’s what you need to remember. Hostile action? It means you don’t have to be a soldier. You can be wounded from hostile action in your very own house – if a bomb takes an eye or a hand, for instance. Facial disfigurement, brain damage, blindness – they all count, but not if they are present from birth, for then they are the fault of the blood and not the result of hostile action, do you see?’

  *

  From her bed Sieglinde could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock, and beyond that the voices of her parents mingling with the voices on the Volksempfänger; impossible to tell which was which. Her jumper scratched at her neck, but Vati said they must sleep in their clothes, they must be ready, always ready. She thought of the bombed-out people who were sleeping at her school until new homes could be found for them. Some had nothing more than the clothes they wore, and they all but snatched at the soup the Hitler Youth girls served. They had not been ready. She raised the blinds and opened the windows just a crack, and she watched the searchlights weaving the sky into a bright net. Nothing. Nothing. Down below in the courtyard stood Jürgen’s sandcastle, splitting as it dried. She thought: here is my left hand, here is my right hand, here is my left eye, here is my right eye. Forwards. Forwards. Youth knows no fear.

  The Shadowman

  The house is       ,

  The      is

  In       -  rooms.

  Who is an         man?

  A father, who cannot     ,

  When his chidren         .

  November 1943

  Berlin

  One morning in winter, as Gottlieb was arriving at work, he noticed that the door to the neighbouring office was open. In the four years he had been at the Division he had never seen inside the other booths; he knew the names of the men who occupied them only because they were painted on the frosted glass. He paused and glanced inside and realised that the space mirrored his own. And the man who sat with his back to the door, typing his report – surely he wore the same suit as Gottlieb? And surely his hair was the same shade of brown, with the same slight wave in it? The man opened his filing cabinet, and Gottlieb saw that it was the same clever design as his own, extending from the wall an impossible distance. The Division was an example, he thought, of the shape the new Germany would take: innovative structures that offered solutions to age-old problems; man-made miracles. There was to be a triumphal arch, ten times bigger than the one in Paris, carved with the names of the two million dead from the Great War, and there was to be a great domed hall, built on granite to counter Berlin’s sand, so vast it could swallow Saint Peter’s, so vast it would have its own climate, the breaths of tens of thousands rising into the vault as clouds and falling again as dew and rain, a world unto itself, the word in stone. He stood at the door a moment or two longer, and then, before the man turned and saw him, pulled it to without a word.

  At his desk he typed his report of the previous day’s work, but when he looked it over he found he could hardly read the carbon copy. He was frugal with his materials – yes, wars could be won with paper, with ink – and each month he had to account for all supplies used, typing a summary that he then filed along with his daily reports in the cabinet to which nobody else had access. He scrutinised the used sheet of carbon paper, tilting it towards the window, the pale winter light falling on the piled-up letters, the dark impressions. Here were all his excised words, days and days of them, their meaning lost in the layers. Too changed, too buried.

  That day Gottlieb made unprecedented progress, his magpie blade flying across the pages of his text and picking out all the shining things: loss, mercy, remembrance, hope. As a rule he did not dwell on these removals, putting them out of his mind as soon as he shut them in the furnace, which was the recommended practice. They were just scraps. Today, though, they would not leave him, flickering through his thoughts, following him home. At this time of year it was already dark when he finished work, and he made his way along the pavement to the U-Bahn station as slowly as an old man, trying not to bump into the other pedestrians. No light came from the houses or the restaurants, the cinemas or the theatres – there was only the moon and the hard-edged stars pinned to the sky’s black breast, as useless, in the end, as medals of tin.

  I watch him squinting at the road ahead. Who knows what waits in the dark? When the zoo was bombed, the newspaper said all the escaped animals were shot – but what is that rustling beside the canal? What is that growling in the vegetable plots? This is a time of imitation. Bakers fill the bread with potato starch and women paint seams down their legs. There are paste jewels, substitute eggs, mock oysters; we treat the wounded with dried herbs; we tell them that coconut water is plasma and they offer their veins to the needle. The walls between cellars are not walls; if you find yourself buried, just unstack the bricks. This coffee isn’t coffee and that silk isn’t silk; this courage isn’t courage and this love isn’t love and that honey didn’t come from bees. Where is our usual doctor, our usual tailor? Things change when we turn our backs. Christmas trees bloom in the sky to light the enemy’s way; they fill the clouds with branching ghosts. We eat thistles and nettles, udders and hearts, smear our bread with Hitler-butter. Everyone is pretending. The bombs have blown open the cages and jaguars walk the streets.

  *

  ‘Now children, in a line, please! We are not animals, we are good children, we have nice manners and we do as we are told. Here is the lady to let us in, look, here is Frau Müller, she is a controller at the factory and she will count us to make sure she knows how many we are. Say thank you as you pass her, please, because we are nice polite children and we are not animals. Thank you, thank you, I should not have to tell you this. Other children – non-German children – do not say thank you, they are rude and dirty and have no manners, they are animals, animals and also mushrooms, yes, they are mushrooms, not the kind of mushroom that you might find on a nature ramble through our fine forests, the kind that you can eat, that Mutti might put in a delicious soup, but the deadly kind that poison our soil and are dangerous and must be eradicated. So we are not poisonous mushrooms, no, we are well-bred children who obey and follow and walk in nice straight lines and say thank you.

  ‘Now here we are in this lovely clean factory, and look, it is full of hard-working ladies who are helping us to victory, see, children. These are ladies who probably have children of their own, and plenty of work to do at home to keep their children safe and not hungry, but at the moment these children will be at school, learning about important things the way that you are learning about our factories. Or perhaps the children of these industrious ladies – who can tell me what industrious means? Yes, thank you, Anna, that is correct, now everybody remember that word, it is an important word and it is something we must all be – perhaps the children of these in
dustrious ladies have gone to the countryside and are having a lovely time, as our Gauleiter has commanded them to do. A number of our classmates have already gone, haven’t they, but we are fortunate and are allowed to stay even though the city is under attack – even though our winter coal supplies are burning in our yards, impossible to put out, and the firestorms make sunsets at midday – because our Vatis have important jobs. Of course the children who have gone to the countryside must miss their Muttis, it would not be normal if they did not miss their Muttis, but they have gone to the countryside where it is safe, not that we are unsafe in Berlin, and since we have planted vegetables in all of our parks and morphine poppies in the churchyards it even looks a bit like the countryside, doesn’t it, but in the real countryside it is very safe and these children have gone there, and soon we will go too, probably, as a class, everyone together, everyone safe together. And then the bombed-out people who have moved into our classrooms will have more space, and so will the wounded soldiers who arrive on trains in the night and are carried into our gymnasium, and whose arms and legs the caretaker spirits away to the incinerator. But we won’t talk about that today, today we will enjoy our visit to this wonderful and interesting factory where we will see the very useful items that these good ladies produce. Look at them, children, how hard they work, making these items for us all so that we will be safe and not overrun by poison. Look how they crank the fabric from the shining machines, out it rolls, so well-made and bright, a cheerful yellow, the colour of buttercups, isn’t it, children, the buttercups we will be able to see and to smell and to pick when we go to the countryside without our Muttis. See the pattern the ladies print on the fabric now, see how they roll it through another machine, such a clever machine, and see how it comes out the other side of this ingenious machine – who can tell me what ingenious means? Yes, Jürgen, thank you, that is just what it means. Now everybody remember this word because it is what we all must be. See how the buttercup fabric slides from the ingenious machine, printed with its pattern of stars, each one the same size and shape, and this fabric is a tool that is helping us to victory. It is like a big quilt, isn’t it, with its pattern of stars repeated over and over, so neat, such neat rows, a beautiful warm quilt that will keep us warm and safe. Now there is the door out, children, and there is Frau Müller opening the door for us, showing us the way out and counting us again, and we will say thank you as we pass Frau Müller, we will all thank her for showing us her lovely and interesting factory.’

  *

  Gottlieb had not touched his wife for quite some time; hardly at all in the last year. It was not that motherhood had changed her the way it changed some women – thickening their waists and slackening their breasts, turning clear eyes dull and bright cheeks sallow. On the contrary, as far as appearances went, Brigitte Heilmann was still the same woman: a small-boned, pretty creature with dark-blond hair and green eyes, slender hands that were always manicured, slim arms and legs that turned golden in the summer. She maintained her looks with a determination Gottlieb could only admire. He saw the way other men glanced at her, and the way other women did, too, and felt proud at the choice he had made, and this pride satisfied in him a need that some might call love. For a while now, though – perhaps six months, perhaps a little longer – Brigitte had been turning to him at night, the length of her body close at his back, her feet brushing against his thin-skinned arches, a hand alighting on the corrugations of his chest. And although Sieglinde was almost eleven and the boys were past their most difficult stage, it seemed to Gottlieb that his wife was always stopping on the street to admire infants and to compliment mothers. She had devoted a page of her ledger to the baby clothes she had never given away, washing and airing them every few months, because wool could yellow and cotton could rust if they were not cared for, and it would be wasteful to let them spoil when they still had so much wear in them. She drew Gottlieb’s attention to articles about the latest findings on the inadequacies of children with too few siblings, and she mentioned certain women of their acquaintance who, having produced the required number of babies, were to be presented with the Mother’s Cross. Hannelore, she said, wore hers all the time, pinning it to every outfit, even the more delicate fabrics, with never a thought for the damage.

  Gottlieb had tried to explain to her how draining his job was; how he needed to be as well-rested as possible, despite the worsening night raids, so that he did not make any costly mistakes – but he could speak only in general terms about his work, and could tell she did not understand. When she reached for him at night, he murmured that he was too tired – or he did not respond at all, remaining mute to the body and the feet, sensing the hand no more than he might sense the alighting of a silent bird as he slept. And if he were to be honest, the problem was not just his work: why have more children, only to be told to evacuate them? They were leaving Berlin by the train-load. Eventually Brigitte retreated to her side of the bed, waiting, he suspected, for him to advance, when all the while he too was retreating.

  His parents had slept in adjoining chambers, the door between them papered to look like part of the wall; at first glance one did not notice it. It could be locked from either side, this private entry, and he remembered rushing to his mother’s bed when some monster inhabited his own, and hearing the door-handle turning and rattling as she explained to him that he was mistaken.

  ‘How odd,’ Brigitte said when he told her of this arrangement. ‘Did you not find it odd?’

  ‘I thought nothing of it when I was a child.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now spouses sleep in the same room and in the same bed, and each knows the other’s every habit and private routine.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brigitte. ‘Yes, that’s the way it is now.’

  When Gottlieb was nine years old his parents locked him in his bedroom because he cut the pages from one of his schoolbooks. At the time he hadn’t thought of it as damage; his class had already covered those chapters, which concerned the Franco-Prussian War, and he wanted to make snowflakes from the paper to hang on the Christmas tree.

  ‘You have brought shame on the entire family,’ said his father. ‘And besides, it’s only May.’

  ‘What possessed you?’ said his mother.

  They cancelled his outing to Luna Park with Onkel Heinrich that weekend, and when his uncle visited they would not let him see him. Gottlieb knew he was there, though, because he could hear him playing his accordion, for verdant green my heart does long in bleakest winter time, and then the music changed and grew louder and he knew it was for him, a crazy stumbling tune that had no name and no words but brought the fun fair to his room: the muddle of the crowd, and the shimmy-steps that made you trip and stagger, and the swivel-house that took from you all sense of up and down.

  Outside his window he could see the tops of the plane trees that shaded the driveway, their cool knuckles meeting and locking overhead, and in the ice house buried in the garden there were blocks of winter packed in straw; they would not thaw all summer. Gottlieb heard the telephones ringing in the rooms below; people talking to people they could not see. Mama could ring from the salon to talk to Papa in the living room, or Frau Kruckel could ring from the kitchen to talk to Mama in the salon. Papa sat in his wing chair, which hid both sides of his face, and Mama listened to her music and wrote letters to friends and important people, inviting them to one of her luncheons or soirées. We look forward to your visit on Sunday the 25th. The roses will be blooming by then, and I shall ask Frau Kruckel to make her rose-petal sorbet …

  And in the entrance hall downstairs, which led to all the other rooms, bears danced along the back of the vast oak bench, and they danced up its legs, they were its legs, they held it aloft with broad paws, dancing upright just as people did, and their eyes shone in the gloom, and they were strong, these bears, they had held up the bench forever, but Gottlieb must never sit on it, because it was not for sitting on.

  When the maid brought him his dinner
– bread and cheese, and a quartered apple – she produced a pair of scissors and some sheets of black paper and whispered, ‘From Fräulein Hannelore.’ And he cut silhouettes from the paper, his very first silhouettes, and they were the faces of his family produced from memory, for of course he was alone. But when the maid came with his next meal she said they were a good likeness, and he had a gift, and she brought him more paper from Hannelore and he cut out more faces: his mother from the right, his father from the left, his sister from the left, his father from the right …

  He wanted to explain to his parents that when he sliced the pages from the schoolbook he was not destroying but creating, and as proof of this he gathered all the silhouettes he had cut in his bedroom – and his parents looked at them and looked at each other and had to admit that yes, he had a gift. And even when he was allowed back into the bright downstairs rooms, with their French doors that led to dragonflies and mimosa, he kept his scissors and his pages of black paper close by, and he was always snipping away, seeing the shapes that lay in nothingness, and after a time he finished with people and moved to buildings and landscapes, which were easier to get right.

  A few days after they released him, he smuggled a pair of scissors into his mother’s dressing room and cut a hole in one of her gowns. He could not say what prompted it. The clothes surrounded him on their quilted hangers, absorbing all sound, satins as waxy as leaves, velvets that shimmered like half-hidden pollen hearts, shoes waiting primly on their racks, mouths crammed with tissue, and the floor seemed to move beneath him like the shimmy-steps at Luna Park, like the swivel-house always about to fall, and in the tilting mirrors he could see himself from two different angles: two different Gottliebs cutting a hole so small it would not be noticed, not for several months, and even then his mother would decide she must have done it herself, with one of her sharp-heeled shoes.