The Wish Child Page 12

  *

  When the shadowman posters appeared in Berlin, nobody knew what to think. He loomed from the advertising columns and the bridges and the blank walls of the apartment blocks, inking them with his strange silhouette. To begin with there were no words, no explanations, just a white question mark floating against his dark form. Was he a secret signal to partisans? A warning to black-frocked clerics who stood in their broken pulpits and spoke of forgiveness and surrender? In the early morning, before the day was certain, he seemed a remnant of the blacked-out night. In other lights he appeared to spring from the walls themselves; a stain leaching from the homes of ordinary people going about their business. Later the word came, pasted over the figure like a correction: Pst! People said it to one another although they were not quite sure why: Pst! Pst! You could hear it on the trams and at the markets, in the cafés and the stairwells, in the parks and in the cinemas. Pst! wherever you went, as if the city were deflating. And still there was no telling who the shadowman was supposed to be. That was the problem with shadows: they could be anybody.

  One Sunday morning Brigitte saw two boys putting up posters on the façade of a bombed-out building. She watched them working, Blood and Honour glinting at their waists. The posters showed ordinary people: men drinking at a bar or talking in the corridor of a crowded train; builders working on a house, the mortar drying as they chatted; a woman seated at a switchboard and speaking to someone beyond the poster’s edge, the criss-crossing cables flexing like tendons as she spoke; a barber pausing to listen to a customer, the razor suspended above the man’s soaped throat. Across them all fell the shadowman. Pst! the posters read. The enemy is listening.

  ‘Mutti,’ said Sieglinde, peering at one of the posters, ‘who is that?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Brigitte. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the boys. ‘Excuse me …? Who is that?’

  The boys did not reply. The sky was darkening overhead; it looked like rain. It was all the anti-aircraft guns, Brigitte had heard, messing up the weather, tearing open the clouds.

  ‘It could be anybody, I suppose,’ she went on, and still the boys said nothing. One unrolled another poster while the other dipped his brush into the pail of paste. She thought she recognised their faces; they had come to the apartment, hadn’t they, collecting bones? ‘What does it mean?’ she asked, but the boys were already walking away, finding another façade.

  Such unanswered questions were usual now. People began to take note of every remark made by friends, neighbours and family, storing them away for leaner times. Children paid attention to their teachers as never before, eager to report problematic points of view, regrettable lapses from the syllabus. Trust no fox on the green heath, they reminded one another. Words were analysed for hidden meanings, conversations taken apart and examined piece by piece like faulty radios.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Have you heard from Hans-Georg?

  FRAU MILLER: Why do you ask?

  FRAU MÜLLER: I haven’t heard from Dieter for weeks. I was wondering if you had any news.

  FRAU MILLER: That’s not for me to say. But if I were to receive some news from Hans-Georg, it would not be real news.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Yes. They cut things out. Dieter’s last letter was almost all holes. An emptiness.

  FRAU MILLER: Where is he?

  FRAU MÜLLER: Why do you ask?

  FRAU MILLER: I cannot say.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Quite correct. I had a tooth pulled without sedation last month in case I let anything slip.

  FRAU MILLER: I often think: they have just gone out, and soon they’ll be coming back home.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Yes indeed, they have just gone out, and now they’ll return home.

  FRAU MILLER: Frau Ehrlich’s neighbour stopped her in the stairwell and whispered that Johann – Frau Ehrlich’s youngest – was safe. She heard it on enemy radio.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Frau Ehrlich reported her, I trust?

  FRAU MILLER: She did.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Quite right.

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t mind the holes in the letters. It’s the official notice I fear, that comes in the black-bordered envelope: when and where and how. Missing or dead. Location of grave.

  FRAU MÜLLER: (whispering) I think we don’t know just how many have died. Why don’t they publish the casualty lists?

  FRAU MILLER: That is a bold remark. I read something similar on a leaflet that fell from the sky. I must remember what you have said.

  FRAU MÜLLER: There’s no need. I meant nothing. It means nothing.

  FRAU MILLER: Everything means something.

  FRAU MÜLLER: The lies that fall from the sky – they are not suitable reading. You should not be reading them. They should be burned.

  FRAU MILLER: Quite right. Quite right. And I do. But sometimes one notices a sentence here and there as one is gathering them to burn.

  FRAU MÜLLER: One should stop noticing.

  FRAU MILLER: (whispering) What of the other scraps that fall from the sky? The strips of silver that disguise the enemy’s planes?

  FRAU MÜLLER: I hear they’re radioactive.

  FRAU MILLER: I hear they’re smeared with disease.

  FRAU MÜLLER: I hear botulism.

  FRAU MILLER: I hear anthrax.

  I hear these words too, but there is no weight to them; they are mirages, false echoes, artificial clouds designed to blind the radar.

  February 1944

  Near Leipzig

  Oma Kröning always had a lot to say. When she visited, Emilie took care not to bring up any matters she wanted kept private – and there were many such matters – but somehow her mother-in-law always knew about these things, or made a point of finding them out. On this particular day she had been following Emilie around the kitchen, too close, far too close, telling her how to cook potatoes and exactly when to take the Apfelkuchen from the oven. Several times Emilie had burnt herself.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to Erich,’ she said. ‘He always looks forward to your visits.’

  And so Oma Kröning sat on the edge of the sofa, watching while Erich played on the floor, and after a few moments she leaned down to him, and her face puckered out of shape so that she looked a little unlike herself, and she said, ‘Shall I tell you a story?’

  This is what I heard, so this is what I can relay:

  A long time ago, in the region of Saxony, on a hill above a lake, stood a castle. Its walls were as thick as three men and had never been breached. Should an enemy approach this fortress, arrows flew to his heart from the notch-wide windows, and should he reach the gate, then oil rained down on him from the murder hole, so hot it peeled the skin from his flesh and the flesh from his bones, and should he reach the spiralling steps that led to the place where the children hid with their mother, then he would trip and split his head on the uneven treads known only to those who lived there. And these sly defences afforded the castle’s inhabitants a peaceful sleep, and no enemy ever so much as cast his shadow on the broad stone walls. Still, all these safeguards – the arrow notches, the murder hole, the stumbling steps – all these were not the secret to the castle’s strength. No, that sprang from altogether a different source. Before the building of the great structure had started, when the castle existed only on vellum skinned from unborn calves, a search began for the thing that would make it impregnable: a living child to be set into its foundations. A local woman agreed to sell her son for the purpose, and as the wall went up the boy was heard to cry Mama, I can still see you, Mama. And then, as the wall grew higher, Mama, I cannot see you.

  And Emilie comes into the room and says, ‘What are you telling him? You’ll give the child nightmares!’

  And Oma Kröning says, ‘Nonsense – not a word of it’s true. And I’m sure you loved hearing it when you were little. Didn’t your mama tell it to you?’

  And Emilie does not deny this, and clouds pass over me and through me, and I do not know if it is now or then or some time still to come.

  In March a man
came to stay with the Krönings, and that man was Papa – so Mama said, but Erich couldn’t be sure. This man was quieter than Papa, and he wore a beard, and his clothes did not seem to fit him any more – they were neither too small nor too big; they were simply the clothes of a different man. Mama set him to work churning the butter, but he didn’t know when to stop and ruined the whole batch. It was the same when she asked him to beat the carpets; he kept on hitting them long after they were clean. Erich studied his face, watching him first from one side and then from the other. At certain angles, at certain in-between times of day, when the light was low, when the sky glimmered like the belly of a fish, he thought he could make out a shadow at his throat. The man who said he was Papa brought presents with him: a brooch for Mama, carved from amber into the shape of a flower, with a stone at the centre that looked just like a diamond, and for Erich a wristwatch with a thick leather strap and initials on the back that were not proper letters – a backwards N, a backwards R, as if seen in a mirror. When Erich brought him Pictures from the Life of the Führer to look at he stared at the cover for a moment as if he did not recognise it, and as they leafed through the album together he kept running his fingernail under the edges of the pasted-in photographs as if he might tear them out, undo all his careful work.

  One day Erich saw the man crouching before the bronze head – let us call him Papa, this man, because Mama says we must – and bite by bite he ate the piece of bread and honey Mama had placed there, licking his finger to pick up every last crumb. Erich thought Mama would be angry, but when she found the empty plate all she did was take it away and wash it and set it back down with a fresh slice of bread and honey, which Erich knew was the last slice, and which he had been wanting for himself. Then Mama wrote something on a slip of paper and pushed it up inside the head, and then she returned to her sewing, because torn shirts don’t mend themselves.

  At lunchtime Mama said, ‘Is it terribly cold there?’

  And Papa said, ‘No, it’s quite comfortable.’

  And Mama said, ‘Is there enough to eat?’

  And Papa said, ‘Yes, there is plenty to eat.’

  And Mama said, ‘Do you go to church?’

  And Papa said, ‘Yes, every Sunday.’

  You-you, you, called the turtle dove, and the bees sang a long and rising note, a question that had no end.

  *

  Mama has been saving eggshells; whenever she needs an egg she pierces it at the top and the bottom with a needle and blows out the contents, then rinses it and puts it aside. Now, a week before Easter, Erich and Papa sit at the kitchen table with paints and brushes and decorate the empty shells. Erich is so careful with them, so aware of the weight of his fingers, the pressure of the brush. He paints violets and bluebells and bees, and Papa paints snowflakes, little black sprays that look like spiders, but he presses too hard and the shell shatters in his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he says, and Erich says it doesn’t matter, there are other shells to paint, but Papa says he does not trust himself.

  Outside the bees return heavy to their hives, drawn in through the whittled mouths as if by a hungry breath. We took the clotting blood, my father and I, my son and I. Whom think ye that I am?

  Two weeks later Papa returns to Russia, and that is all Mama will say, that he is in Russia, which is big enough to hold Germany many times over. Erich thinks she must mean the Soviet Union, but he does not correct her, and Papa’s letters are sent from nowhere and give nothing away: they do not mention strategy and they do not mention wonder weapons, and he might be in Moscow after all, sipping tea from a little glass cup with a silver handle, and he might be at the Winter Palace, where the statues and the chandeliers and even the throne are made of ice, and he might be riding the steppe in a sleigh pulled by wolves, whipping through frozen air, the snow turning to stars around him. Mama still writes every week, and Erich writes too, telling Papa that the hens are working hard to lay the required number of eggs and that the inspector from the Reich Food Estate wants Mama to plant beets and sunflowers in place of wheat. When he can’t think of anything to say he draws pictures: borders of bees marching in single file around the edges of the page, and Mama in the bee-keeping hat and veil, smoke fanning its wings at her back, and the hives in the apple orchard: Saint John and the pastor, Luise and Gustav, the moneylender and the butcher, bearded with bees. They have things to say, sad things that belong to the Krönings’ past. I wanted my sorrow to sink me beneath the lake, it was said the French had poisoned the water, I will bake my bread from the blood the stolen coins the whipped dogs the clotting ropes of vipers. But Mama still checks his letters for traces of sadness, and so Erich keeps these sad things to himself.

  And where is Papa when Ronja falls lame and cannot pull the harvester for a time? Where is he to explain why the milk is turning? And why the hens are laying soft-shelled eggs, and why the lake is sinking? Where is he when the foreign workers talk to one another in their own seditious tongues? Everything starts to go wrong without him. Cankers pit the apple trees and the bees pour from the hives, erupting from their wooden mouths like curses. When the wagon needs mending, where is Papa? And when the slates fall from the roof, and when the weathervane works its way loose in high winds? The steel bird hurtles across the fields, and it could kill someone, it could pierce a throat, a heart, and Papa is not there to stop it. And where is he when the last of the wheat needs cutting? No Ronja and no Papa, and the Hitler Youth boys have all gone, and the foreign workers are not to be trusted, and Erich is still too small for the job and can only watch his mother swinging the scythe back and forth, the sighs filling the absent air.

  ‘Will Papa be back to dig the potatoes?’ he says.

  But no, Papa is gathering a different harvest, says Mama – ah, ah says the scythe – and Erich knows that this harvest is men, that Papa is cutting down men. And the milk sours in the sun, and the lake sinks into its bed, and the hemlock heads wither, black hooks in the dirt, and there is no telling which way the wind blows.

  April 1944

  Berlin

  Julia held up the book and the girls peered at it, tilting their heads first to one side and then the other, trying to make sense of the photographs and drawings. Was it a boy? Was it even a person? They saw a trampled, empty thing, the feet and hands torn away, the head pushed into the deflated chest.

  ‘I agree,’ said Julia, though nobody had spoken, ‘he doesn’t look very important. Just an ordinary boy. He doesn’t look like the other Notable Germans we’ve met.’ And certainly, this empty skin was no Horst Wessel, no Karl May, no Hitlerjunge Quex, who still counted as a Notable German even though he was in a film and therefore not quite real. And besides, weren’t there plenty of bodies to be found? Hadn’t Sieglinde seen three on the way to the meeting? But the special thing about Kayhausen Boy, said Julia, was his age: two thousand years old. Imagine if he could speak – imagine what he could tell us about the past. Some of the girls looked a little queasy; they did not want to imagine him speaking, not at all; the suck of the leather lungs, the distorted jaw working to form the words. Not one of them took her eyes off the pictures, though, because somebody might notice this and mention it, and questions might be asked, and what sort of girl felt sick over pictures of a Notable German?

  It was our own rich earth that kept him intact, Julia said. He lay buried for centuries, his body preserved by the juices of the bog, until one day a man was cutting peat at the very spot that was the boy’s grave. Look at his skin, as soft as our mothers’ best winter gloves. How miraculous that he did not decay, because as human beings we all decay and vanish, and that is just the way of things, and we must accept it is so. The man who found him realised he had stumbled across something extraordinary, and he could not keep the news to himself. We know how important it is not to spread stories, how dangerous it is to speak freely; we know that the enemy is always listening and we must hold our tongues no matter how much we want to talk. The man told a man from th
e museum, which was the right thing to do – to report his find to the correct authorities – but he also told other people, ordinary people, and before the boy could be taken away and the proper experiments conducted on him, these ordinary people had stolen fingernails, bones, and carried them off as souvenirs. Of course we can understand the wish for a keepsake, we can appreciate the temptation, let me show you something you have never seen before, here in my possession is the thumb of an Iron Age boy, you may touch it, you may hold it, he is ten years old, he is two thousand years old – but it is a shame, a tragedy that the doctors could not examine the unassaulted remains. Nowadays we cut the heads off pickpockets.

  Julia tapped the pictures with her finger: look at the knife wounds in his neck. Look at the cords around his wrists, the woollen noose, the bound feet. What do these things tell us, these cuts and knots and bindings? That he was a criminal; that he did something wrong. (Or: that if we tether the dead, perhaps they will not return.) And what was his crime? He was crippled by a limp – the doctors found a defect in his hip – and therefore he would have been costly to keep and feed, and therefore he was eliminated, and so you see, even two thousand years ago we knew that it was better not to let such beings grow up and marry and have their own deformed children. Even then, when in most parts of the world people were eating one another, we put in place civilised laws for the good of all, and we observed them, and Kayhausen Boy is our proof of this.

  Julia passed the book around the table and each girl studied the illustrations for an acceptable period in order to demonstrate interest. When it reached Sieglinde, she bent in close to the pages. They smelled of dust and damp and mildew, of rotting leaves and of dark crumbling wood, of shut rooms. She took in the way the boy lay on his back, and she thought: that is the way I lie in my bed when I am going to sleep.