The Wish Child Read online

  *

  ‘Look at the piles of clothing, boys and girls! See how ready we are to help those in need? See how carefully the ladies are checking it over, making sure it is all in good order? Frau Miller has asked us not to touch anything, and she is the supervisor and so we must obey her, even though we might long to run our hands over such fine apparel. We Germans take care of our less fortunate; we do not give them rags to wear. Silk dresses, smart shoes, crocodile handbags, lace underwear – one might think one had taken a wrong turn and wandered into KaDeWe! If KaDeWe had not been bombed, that is; if KaDeWe were not a skeleton now. All the items are inspected and cleaned and then they are given to victims of the terror attacks, provided they can prove they have lost equivalent items. What does equivalent mean? Equivalent? Nobody?

  ‘I think you’ll agree with Frau Miller that this is the most interesting room in the factory, children. What are the ladies doing? Why are they feeling their way along hems and seams and stopping when they find a lump? They don’t seem to speak any German so perhaps they cannot explain – but why are they easing open the stitches, the undone threads kinking and buckling like shaky writing, like anxious messages scrawled in haste? Look at the exposed fabric: unfaded, unworn; I cannot remember when the world was so bright. I cannot remember such colour. But see what the ladies untuck from the holes: diamond earrings that drop to their palms like hailstones; pearl chokers and shell cameos; lockets that hold the faces of the dead. And one brooch can buy fifty bullets, and one diamond bracelet five pistols, so you see, children, nothing goes to waste, not even lost property.’

  November 1943

  Near Leipzig

  ‘What was I like when I was little?’ says Erich. He and Mama are walking home from church; he swings his hand in hers.

  ‘You still are little, Schatz,’ says Mama.

  ‘I thought I was eight and a bit.’

  ‘You are eight and a bit.’

  ‘That’s not little. Oma Kröning said I’m old enough to read Papa’s books from when he was a boy. I meant, what was I like when I was a baby?’

  ‘So she did, you’re right,’ says Mama. And before Erich can ask another question, she says, ‘Tell me about Papa’s books. Which one is your favourite?’

  Erich says he likes The Legacy of the Incas and Through the Desert and The Empire of the Silver Lion, but it’s the Winnetou stories he loves best – and the Führer loves those ones too. He tells Mama about Old Shatterhand, the German hero of the Wild West who can kill a grizzly bear with a single punch, and Winnetou, his brave Apache friend.

  ‘They’re blood brothers,’ he says. ‘They only have to look at each other to know what the other is thinking.’

  ‘Well well,’ says Mama. ‘Now that would be a useful trick.’ She laughs, and her breath clouds ahead of them in the cold air.

  ‘But what was I like when I was a baby?’ says Erich. ‘Before I could walk.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Mama, and looks to the icy sky, as if it holds her memory. ‘Well, you were a good boy. You never cried. Sometimes we had to check that you were still in your cradle – that the devils hadn’t snatched you away. Papa carved it himself, the cradle, from one of our own pines. Little acorns at the head and foot.’

  ‘Tell me something that happened to me, though.’

  I see Mama pause, and again she looks to the sky. This is what she tells him, and the more she tells him the better they both remember it:

  When Erich was a baby Mama placed his cradle outside on fine days, under the shade of the silver linden. Its branches curved down around him, muffling the sound of everything beyond the three-note call of the dove and the shifting of the linden leaves, which was also the sound Mama’s hand made when she stroked his ear. Erich remembers that, doesn’t he? He does. And the acorns carved into the pine cradle? Yes, he remembers them, or thinks he does, because Mama still has the cradle and so perhaps the acorns in the pine are not a proper memory but simply a familiar sight. And Erich remembers watching the hives, their black mouths crawling with bees, although it is difficult to see them from beneath the linden tree – but that is of no consequence. One day a swarm of bees poured from the mouth of a hive – was it Luise’s hive? We’ll say it was Luise’s hive – and hung above his cradle, looking for a place to settle, and yes, Erich remembers the dark shapes overhead, and he remembers that they alighted on him, on the carved cradle, on his little blankets and on his hands, his cheeks, his wispy hair, his eyelids. He remembers that he did not cry – you did not cry, says Mama. You were not afraid. What is it, then, that clusters about him like bad thoughts? Where is this place? And why does Mama snatch him away?

  I find that she is often incomplete to me. Sometimes I wish that this were not so, and that I could possess more of her – and sometimes I am thankful that I do not. When I can make out her memories, they are dead days surfacing from silt. I see her as a little girl, stroking dark garnets on her grandmother’s wrist and neck; I see her sitting on a hearth, arranging and rearranging the skull-bones of a fish, her father watching her firelight face, watching as the bones charm her and perplex her until she looks up at him, lost, and he tells her the answer to their spiny riddle. There she is out on the ice, walking on knives, spinning and spinning on the water until she thinks she will break and shatter and scatter herself like stars.

  I see her waiting on cold Christmas Eves for the blossom trees to bear fruit, the rivers to become wine, gemstones to spill from the mountains, church bells to ring from beneath the sea and the Christ child to shed a white feather, and I see her sister pinching her arm to punish her childishness. I see her as a new bride, acquainting herself with the rooms of the white-walled house that will hold her now, and the whispering goosedown bed that will hold her now, and the man’s rope-hard arms that will hold her now, and I see her learning the shapes of the shadows dropped by the linden tree behind the house, and the call of the turtle dove settled in its branches, and the windows that jam and the floorboards that bow, and the names of horses, names to replace the names she has left behind, as every bride must, and I see her exploring the farm, standing in the stable and looking up at the high-pitched roof as steep as a chapel’s, and counting the glossy cooing hens, and measuring her height against the hives carved from oak trunks into human form: wooden men and a wooden woman filled with bees. I see new thoughts lapping at her, thoughts absorbed from her husband, from the wives of other farmers, from the air: lake-water climbing, taking her in its cool arms and holding her high: yes, the hungry years are on the wane; yes, Germany will renew herself; yes, that renewal has its source in German soil nourished by German farmers; yes, we must cut out the infection that is spreading; and yes, the solution is this man, this guardian we have hung on the wall, an ancestor we never knew we had, proof we are the bloodspring of the people.

  I see her on delirious streets, red banners caught beneath every window, the ground lush with branches cut from firs and still sticky with sap. At a rally she considers the words of a song: If all become untrue, we remain true, and they seem to make no sense: if all are untrue, surely none remains true, but the more she listens and sings the more sense the words make, and the more possible they become, and now look, the curtain is rising and there are the actors in black coats and black hats, black curls hanging from their temples and gold spilling from their pockets, and they are robbing the farmers of their homes and their crops and their God-given rights, and there are the farmers, suffering, searching, looking to a light on the painted horizon. And now the stage fills with dance, whirling peasant girls and strong peasant boys, all in neat rows, an orderly crop, their hair as fair as cornsilk, and look, they are tilling the stage, they are swinging their scythes, the blades keen against the risen sun, each dark hook swinging in time, and the audience claps, and she cannot hear her own hands amid the wash of applause, but she can feel the sting in her palms.

  *

  Every morning Emilie made an offering to the bronze head, laying bright-skinned apples before i
t, or fresh hazelnuts, or little dishes of honey.

  ‘But he can’t eat them,’ said Erich, and Emilie said when he was older he would understand.

  ‘But isn’t it a waste?’ he said. ‘The Führer doesn’t like people who waste food.’

  ‘This is different,’ said Emilie. ‘It’s not wasted.’

  ‘But –’ he began again.

  ‘That’s enough now, Erich,’ she said, more sharply than she meant to – but really, he had to learn when to stop asking questions.

  She dusted the head with soft cloths, always returning it to its correct position, and if she had a special wish she wrote it on a slip of paper and pushed it up inside the hollow metal form, then knelt before it and closed her eyes, staying perfectly silent, so silent she could hear the heat rising in her, could hear the pelt of blood and the flaring of bones, long white candles. This was something like the restlessness she had felt as a child on Christmas Eve, when from the locked room her parents rang the bell, then made her cover her eyes as they led her to the tree, and she could smell the sap of the newly cut fir and the hot smoke from the candles that dotted the branches like fallen stars. She could feel the lightest of breezes from the carved figures that turned and turned on their little wooden carousel, scattering the walls with twisted shadows in the shape of twisted men, and she knew that something splendid was coming. Look, her father would say, the Christ child has been, and there on the floor, shining like a clean thought, lay the white feather.

  *

  One still day in December, when the bees huddled in their hives and the cows huddled in their stalls and the geese hung by their necks, Mama and Erich went to the market.

  ‘Which one?’ asked the fishmonger, his long black apron as slick as an eel.

  Erich peered into the barrel and tried to choose a fish. It was hard to tell one from another; they twisted in the water, feeling their way along the smooth wet wood over and over, looking for a way out. Their scales caught the light like falling coins, and he thought of the time his mother had given him a pfennig at the lake and told him to make a wish: he did not know what to ask for, what shimmering future to imagine for himself, and yet Mama was watching, waiting for him to open his fist and let the coin go.

  ‘Well, young man?’ said the fishmonger, his net poised.

  ‘That one’s nice and fat,’ said Mama. ‘What about him?’

  Already the fishmonger was dipping his net into the barrel and saying that Erich had made a fine choice, and the carp was shivering in the icy air, watching Erich with its white-rimmed eye, its mouth opening and closing as if it could not remember what it wanted to say.

  At home Mama filled the bathtub, and the carp all but leapt from the bucket and into the cold water. ‘It will be your job to look after him,’ she told Erich.

  ‘What does he eat?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t feed him – we want him to be nice and clean.’

  ‘He’s already clean. He lives in the water.’

  ‘We need him to be clean on the inside,’ said Mama. ‘That’s a very important thing to be, for fish as well as for boys.’

  Erich knelt and watched the carp. It kept its distance to begin with, staying at the far end of the tub, but Erich could understand that. Sometimes he felt uneasy in this bare room himself, with its glinting tiles, each one a milky mirror that warped his faint reflection, changing him into someone he was not. (This is what he does not remember: the bare wooden stool, the women in white, the glittering callipers about his skull.) He dabbled his fingers in the bath, and after a time the fish came to him, passing beneath his outstretched hand like the shadow of a cloud, impossible to catch or keep. It did not touch him but he could feel the water shifting against his palm, rearranging itself. Erich knew what the world looked like from beneath the water; how everything wavered and blurred. He could hold his breath for over a minute, lying quite motionless, eyes open, tiny bubbles catching on his arms and legs, his ears, his lashes. One day his mother had come in when he was submerged, but she did not look like his mother, and although he could see her mouth moving, all he could hear were distant notes; a bird trapped in the eaves.

  Mama had been saving sugar and flour for weeks, putting it aside into special tins that Erich was not allowed to touch. It was their duty, she said, to have a normal Christmas, even without Papa, even though when the wind blew in the right direction they could smell the smoke from the bombs that had fallen on Leipzig. The house filled with the aroma of hazelnuts and cinnamon, cloves and almonds, and Mama tucked her hair under her headscarf and hurried about the kitchen as if there were an emergency, kneading sweet brown dough and cutting it into fir trees and stars, pinching pieces of sugary white mixture into crescent moons. The shapes were the shapes of a still night in the forest, and Erich wished he could slip through his bedroom window when Mama was asleep and go to the forest beyond the farm and stand in the fragrant dark, looking up through the black branches – but it was not safe there any more. It hid runaways and traitors, all manner of enemies, bad shadows waiting in every hollow.

  In the tub the carp was growing. When they needed to bathe Erich caught it in a bucket and set it aside and it waited, curled like a question mark, until he poured it back. At night he could hear it splashing, leaping from the water, and each morning he had to dry the bathroom floor so that nobody would slip and break their neck. The fish was calm then, barely moving, but it came to him when he beckoned it, nudging at his fingers as they fluttered beneath the water. And in the mornings, too, Erich saw Mama saying her prayers to the bronze head with the blank eyes. It glinted just as the carp glinted, although it was not a living thing; no, it was not alive, not alive, but its eyes watched without iris or pupil, and you could not tell where they were looking.

  On Christmas Eve Mama killed the carp. She took a hammer, the hammer Papa used for fixing things, and she killed it, and then she cut it open, and it was not clean on the inside, even though it had been in the bath for days, and Mama was wrong. Erich wept for the fish, lying on the sofa and burying his face in the tasselled green cushions where everything was soft and cool and dark, and he could not hear Mama saying that German boys should be brave; that German boys should know some things had to die. He could feel his grandmother stroking his back, and where she stroked, fins appeared, and he swam into the soft darkness, the tasselled weeds parting for a moment to let him through, then closing behind him.

  That night at dinner Mama lit the candles and sat in Papa’s chair. She placed the fish at the centre of the table, its fins and tail as brittle as sycamore wings. Erich could see the slit along its belly, and the filling of onions and parsley leaking onto the dish that had belonged to Mama’s mama, who was dead. The little wooden angels hung on the tree; angels in sleighs, angels playing trumpets, angels doing things that people do, and this was not at all strange, because angels were dead people, after all, and why should they not remember how to play trumpets and ride in sleighs? Erich wanted to ask Oma if angels had memories, but Mama was peeling back the skin and cutting up the fish, cutting a slice for Oma and for Tante Uschi and for Erich and for herself, and telling him to say grace. He did not want to thank God or anybody else for the thing that lay before him, and so he said the words with his eyes open and his head unbowed, and when he had finished Mama said amen, just as she did when she finished her prayers to the head, and then she began to eat, plucking the fine bones from the flesh so that she would not choke. Erich pushed his fork into a piece of the carp and raised it to his mouth, and his mother smiled and the candle-flames shook and the shadows climbed the walls and the snow fell, and the hollow head watched like a father, and Erich knew then that the hand holding the fork was not his own, and nor was the mouth receiving the food; it was a different boy who placed the warm morsel on his tongue, a different boy who chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, and asked for more.

  *

  In the kitchen I watch Emilie take the carp’s head from the dirty plate, its
cooked eyes as white as church-glove buttons. She scrapes the flesh from the skull-bones and examines them, turning them this way and that. She remembers her father showing her how to make them into a dove – a charm against witches, a charm to protect the house. When he held it to the light, the bone bird glowed as if lit from within, and Emilie believed she would be safe – but that was a long time ago now, and she can no longer recall how to fit the pieces together. A fish is a fish; it can never be a bird.

  I lie on her heart that night, as heavy as I can make myself. And look, the dead soldiers are leaving their watch; they are coming home, silently they enter, you hardly hear the tread of their hobnail boots. They sense they are expected. On the young skin of each child they place their earth-encrusted hands.

  December 1943

  Berlin

  ‘I don’t know if we will be able to visit any more factories after today, because most of us are moving to the countryside, aren’t we, where there are no factories in danger of being bombed, so let us enjoy our last special outing today, let us think of it as a special Christmas treat. This is where they make the hair, children, although we cannot see where the hair comes from, but we might like to imagine it is similar to the angel hair we will be hanging on our Christmas trees very soon, and although we cannot see where it comes from, we can see where Frau Müller’s ladies make it into other things: stuffing for mattresses so that we will sleep well, and warm socks for the soldiers so that they will not be cold and their feet will not hurt, and thick cloth for uniforms because it is cold on the eastern front, much colder than here in Berlin, and even roofing material and carpet for our houses. How clever these ladies are, to make such useful things from hair, which is not a useful thing when you think about it, not a tool that will help us to victory unless it is changed into something else. It is like magic, children! Just like magic, the way the hair is transformed, until it is not hair at all.’