The Wish Child Read online

  ‘Would you like to borrow the book?’ said Julia, who noticed how Sieglinde lingered over it; she noticed everything.

  All the way home along Kantstrasse Sieglinde could feel the weight of it in her satchel, pulling at her shoulders as she crunched across drifts of broken glass and leapt over puddles from broken pipes. Back in her bedroom she sat on the edge of her bed and propped the book open on her chest of drawers, and every night the boy’s wilted skin was the last thing she saw, and every morning it was the first. She knew how to look at him now, how to see the shape of the body within the tangle. ‘It’s gruesome,’ she heard Mutti saying to Vati, but Mutti was wrong. The bodies lined up in the streets were gruesome, the corpses cloaked and labelled by the Hitler Youth girls who reached beneath the blankets and tied names to wrists, if there still were wrists to be named; Kayhausen Boy was a worn slipper, a hot-water bottle. And when Sieglinde descended to the cellar and the planes and the guns shook the house, the boy slipped from the book as supple as kelp and walked through the Heilmanns’ rooms on his ragged legs, looking at their belongings, wondering at their mirrors, taking a sip from an unfinished cup of tea, a bite from an abandoned slice of bread. He washed his face in the bucket of water that had to last the rest of the day. He touched the pieces of shrapnel that hung from Sieglinde’s ceiling; he lay on her bed and watched them spin and flicker, threads of rain blown by the wind. We weight the dead, we bury them deep, bind them and pin them in place so they will not return. This is never enough.

  June 1944

  Berlin

  ‘How many shirts do you possess?’ asked the woman, placing a piece of carbon paper beneath a form.

  ‘Four,’ said Gottlieb, ‘but two are very worn around the neck.’

  ‘Your wife has already turned the collars, of course?’

  ‘Some months ago,’ said Gottlieb.

  ‘You would be surprised to know how many shirt applications we see where this is not the case.’

  ‘I can assure you that these collars were turned in February, Frau …’

  She tapped her nameplate with her pen.

  ‘Frau Miller.’

  ‘Well, we will return to the matter of the shirts presently,’ she said. ‘Winter coats.’

  ‘One.’

  The woman made a note on her form. ‘Suits.’

  ‘Two,’ said Gottlieb.

  ‘Casual jackets.’

  ‘Also two.’

  The woman continued filling in the form without looking up. ‘Pairs of shoes.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Any trousers that cannot be classified as belonging to a suit.’

  ‘One,’ said Gottlieb.

  ‘Cloth?’

  ‘Yes, they are cloth trousers.’

  ‘No, Herr Heilmann – of which type of cloth do the above trousers consist? Twill, herringbone, gabardine …’

  ‘They’re gabardine trousers. I find –’

  ‘Socks?’

  ‘Pairs?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Heilmann, pairs.’

  ‘I believe the figure is six, and I believe my wife is currently engaged in knitting me a further pair.’

  For the first time, the woman looked up. ‘She has not told you she is currently engaged in knitting a pair of socks for your personal usage?’

  ‘No, Frau Miller. It’s my birthday in two weeks.’

  ‘And it’s your belief the socks are to be presented to you on this future date?’

  ‘It is. I do believe so. Yes.’

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘If it clarifies matters, I’m happy to bring the items in for checking once they’ve been presented to me.’

  ‘I think that would be wise, Herr Heilmann. I shall make an appointment for you at the end of your current appointment.’

  ‘Thank you, Frau Miller.’

  ‘You are welcome.’ She returned to the form. ‘Now, undershirts. You possess how many?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Any mending, holes or fraying?’

  ‘One has been mended at the shoulder seam.’

  ‘Underpants.’

  ‘Also four.’

  ‘It is prudent to have the same number. Mending, holes, fraying?’

  ‘Two pairs show fraying at the waist.’

  Frau Miller looked up again, chewed a fingernail for a moment. ‘And yet you are making a shirt application only?’

  ‘I’m very aware of the Reich’s need for textiles. For the production of uniforms. And bandages.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Gottlieb waited.

  ‘Well, your patriotism is to be applauded. But we will expect you in three months for an underwear application.’

  ‘Thank you, Frau Miller.’

  ‘You are welcome. I shall make an appointment for you when the current appointment is concluded, after I have made the appointment for your following appointment.’

  ‘Thank you, Frau Miller.’

  ‘Now, the shirt application. You have requested two new shirts, correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And you have on your person the buttons from the two expired shirts that the new shirts will replace?’

  ‘I do.’ Gottlieb placed them on the counter.

  ‘You may keep the expired shirts and your wife may use them for cleaning, which is necessary for national morale.’

  ‘I understand, Frau Miller. Thank you.’

  ‘You are welcome.’ She turned the form around to Gottlieb and motioned for him to sign it, then stamped all four copies. ‘You may collect your shirts in Hohenschönhauser Strasse, on the other side of town.’

  If his mother could see him in his mended shirts, his turned collars. His mother, always so mindful of appearance, always so perfectly turned out and made up. Sieglinde often asked about her, wanting to know what her favourite flower was and what stories she liked, what time she made Gottlieb go to bed and whether she drank hot chocolate with sugar, and how exactly she died. Most of all, though, she wanted to know about her clothes. She pored over the few photographs Gottlieb possessed – studio portraits showing her leaning against pillars or the backs of chairs, hair pushed into flawless finger-waves, the little brooch made from his baby teeth pinned just so to her lapel, or strings of pearls wound about her throat.

  ‘What colour was this dress?’ she asked. ‘Was it silk? Is that embroidery?’

  And so Gottlieb described for her the contents of his mother’s cupboards and armoires, the scented chests packed as carefully as a trousseau.

  ‘But where are all her things now?’ asked Sieglinde.

  And yes, where were the stoles of silk and fur, the stab-stitched purses, the filmy gowns? Where were the kidskin shoes with their cut-steel buckles, the velvet dancing slippers, the cloche hats, the hobble skirts?

  ‘Were they sold, Vati? Were they unpicked? And cut down?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gottlieb. (Probably. Yes.)

  He remembered looking for his mother at one of her parties when he was very small. He passed through clusters of women, brushing against dresses that rustled and shook like flowers, misty chiffon rubbing at his cheeks and hair, and everywhere the tiny beads, glass seeds that glittered in the chandelier light, turning cloth to rain. The gowns were drenched with them: thousands of droplets stitched into peacock feathers, lotus blooms, pointillist sun-rays that burst across the body, so heavy the dresses could not be hung without tearing and had to be laid flat and wrapped like the dead in lengths of linen. His mother’s voice glittered when she wore these costumes, and her laugh, too, and sometimes Gottlieb wondered if she might not be little glass beads all the way through. (Is this a mother? Is this, is this? I know nothing of such things.) High above him the women caught the light, perched in their airy and fabulous canopy, and he was not sure which one was his mother, and they all seemed so far away.

  And then her hands came to him, white wings fluttering at his back and propelling him towards the fireplace, positioning him there in front of the mottled marble
and the darkening mirror. And she bent and whispered in his ear, and reminded him what was expected, the diamonds at her neck tapping him on the shoulder, cold and hard and belonging to the night. When the room fell silent he was word-perfect, and he said:

  Over all the hill-tops

  Is peace,

  In all the tree-tops

  You sense

  Hardly a breath;

  In the forest the little birds fall still.

  Wait,

  Soon you too shall rest.

  And all the hands in the room clapped, and touched his hair, and he left that shining place to climb the stairs and go to sleep, having recited his own lullaby.

  This was the mother he recalled for Sieglinde: the one in the jewels and the gowns. He did not tell her what happened when the crisis came – the crash, in which his family lost almost everything. That was how people like the Heilmanns talked about their former lives, when they talked about them at all: in terms of loss. They did not mention ruin – ruin was for people in cold-water tenements, in one-room flats lit by bare bulbs; women of ill repute were ruined, and so were cakes left too long in the oven, and picnics in October, and woollens wrung too tightly. No, people like the Heilmanns simply lost their money; they lost their silverware and their Meissen porcelain, their telephones and their motor cars – lost them, as if they had been swept under a carpet or stored in the cellar and forgotten, and would turn up again quite by chance, caught between two drawers or submerged beneath a dust sheet lifted only in spring, at which point their owners could resume their tea-dances and their cocktail parties, their visits to the dress-maker and their purchasing of supple Italian shoes and pale French soaps, soon forgetting they had ever lost these things in the first place. This was what the Heilmanns hoped, at least for a time, before the truth of their losses settled and hardened about them. They could not keep their chandeliers and their parties. They could not keep their maids. They could not even keep their friends. They could not keep their villa, of course (of course), and they could not keep the furniture that filled it; they chose a few special pieces, family pieces – a cherrywood sideboard, a grandfather clock, an oak settle carved with bears – and lost the rest. They moved to a succession of smaller and smaller houses, in which the pieces did not comfortably fit, and finally to a flat in Kreuzberg, and Frau Heilmann said I cannot breathe, there is no space, the walls are too close, this is not a real house. She did not last; they lost her too. Gottlieb remembered looking at her laid out, her elbows pushing at the coffin’s satin walls. She is in a better place now, he told Sieglinde, but she was just in a smaller box.

  *

  FRAU MÜLLER: Could a son denounce his mother, do you think, for cooking the wrong sort of fish?

  FRAU MILLER: Fish? For cooking fish?

  FRAU MÜLLER: The wrong sort.

  FRAU MILLER: Has something happened? What are you asking me? Your meaning is unclear.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Yesterday I served Dieter herring for his dinner. It’s his favourite. He gets that from his father, rest his soul.

  FRAU MILLER: Everybody likes herring.

  FRAU MÜLLER: He said to me, Are you certain this is a German herring? And I said, Of course, Liebling. Because I was. I am. And he prodded it with his knife and he said, The nose seems larger than you would find on a German herring.

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t think herrings have noses, Frau Müller.

  FRAU MÜLLER: I told him that. I said, I don’t think herrings have noses. And he prodded it again and then he said, I suppose it could be a German-Italian mix. But he was far from happy. Far from happy.

  FRAU MILLER: We want our children to be happy. That’s why we’re at war. Did he eat it?

  FRAU MÜLLER: It was his tone, Frau Miller. And the way he looked at it. And at me.

  FRAU MILLER: He should be pleased to have any herring at all, with the sea so full of mines.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Precisely.

  FRAU MILLER: At any rate, we should not coddle children. We must always bear in mind that Nature shows no such consideration. Did he eat it?

  FRAU MÜLLER: Oh yes, he ate it.

  FRAU MILLER: And did not denounce you.

  FRAU MÜLLER: And did not denounce me.

  FRAU MILLER: There you are, then.

  FRAU MÜLLER: It’s just that Richard Graeber’s daughter denounced her father only last week, for making a joke about the Führer, which I wouldn’t repeat, even if I knew it, which I don’t.

  FRAU MILLER: I heard that too.

  FRAU MÜLLER: The joke? About the Führer?

  FRAU MILLER: No, about Sophie Graeber denouncing her father.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Why would anybody joke about a child denouncing her parent?

  FRAU MILLER: What I heard was that they were giving him twenty-five blows – you know, down there –

  FRAU MÜLLER: Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse?

  FRAU MILLER: – but they had to stop after five because they weren’t using the nationally standardised cane. He noticed, Herr Graeber noticed, and he said, I don’t believe that’s a nationally standardised cane, and so they had to stop the interrogation, and they never did find out who told him the joke in the first place.

  *

  I watch as the bombs continue to fall, as the citizens of Berlin – those strollers and bathers, those bicyclists, those deep-breathers of fair weather, of Führer weather – learn to fear clear skies. Young lovers long no more for the moon, taking comfort instead under low cloud and in soft and starless fog. Few people remember how to sleep. They mourn pre-emptively, fixing black to their windows and keeping a close eye on anyone who flouts the rules of gloom, noting and reporting their neighbours’ infringements: an open door, a crooked blind. Death comes squatting on metal wings, pitching his bony bombs at the backlit, a dogged heckler. Cars squint their way along the snuffed-out streets, headlights masked. Blue bulbs cast an underwater light in buses, trains and trams, and pedestrians lose all sense of the ground beneath their feet. Corrections are necessary: adjustments. Stand still for a moment; let the holes in your eyes widen; try to make out the white-painted kerbs that glimmer like a tideline of shells. (That roar is not the ocean.) There are falls and collisions, twists and strains. Layers of skin are lost. Tell me again, where is the ground? And where is home? Some tie white handkerchiefs to their wrists or their bags; you can make them out, these little phantoms, moving along in mid-air as if of their own accord.

  And always at your shoulder, the shadowman. People are talking less and listening more, everybody is listening, and this is what I see coming: a silent city, dumb with the weight of listening – for planes, for news, for traitorous remarks – and the shadowman moving through the dead streets, slanting across every exchange, mouthless, anybody. Sometimes I find myself listening with them – for the cuckoo’s call, for the siren’s rise and fall, which comes in the daylight now as often as it comes at night. And when it comes I follow them underground to brick cellars with illfitting doors and cast-off carpets, and I watch them settle on their folding chairs and their camp beds, and the smell is mould and the smell is earth, and I admit that I think: let them moulder. Let them go to ground. And the bombs howl down, packs of wolves, but if you hear them hitting they are hitting someone else and not us, thank God thank God oh thank God, and some bombs are so distant we feel just the slightest pressure on the inner ear, and some bombs we hear as rushing water and some as hail, and you will never hear the bomb that hits you. When the blasts are close enough the ground shakes and the brick dust and plaster dust fall and we know that even though the building still stands above us it is coming apart little by little, the whole city is being undone, turning to dust. The light bulbs pitch and sway, blank suns in crazy orbit, and we hold on, reminding ourselves of the banners we strung up for the Führer’s birthday: Our Walls May Break, But Not Our Hearts. Even the littlest children know what to do; they have been prepared for this with card games and board games and bright storybooks about fire, injury, damage, and they know exactly w
hat to do, how to crouch, how to cower.

  Afterwards, when we have returned to our homes and our own private affairs, men from the camps look for unexploded bombs and muffle them with newspaper and rags and thin-wristed fear, and other men, also from the camps – they are plentiful, such men, they are unrationed – dig up the dead and bury them again. And the children go into the streets and collect the shrapnel that grows like branches of coral, that glitters on the cobblestones and in the grass, in the flowerboxes with their ashy geraniums and beneath the linden trees and the lilac bushes, all mixed up with the brittle fallen leaves, crumpled pieces of sky still hot to the touch but cooling, cooling. I watch the children picking through the ruins and pouncing, unearthing these twisted spoils and assigning them shapes that make a kind of sense, the way one searches for the familiar in shifting clouds, and they say to one another that it feels like New Year’s Eve, when you melt lead over a candle and pour it into water to see the shape of the future: a sword, an anchor, a spider, a cross. Sieglinde and Jürgen trade pieces with other children at their new school in Oranienburg, which is a long way from home but has not been evacuated, and these pieces are a sharp and unstable currency, now iridescent, now battleship grey, now as small and light as shells, now as broad as a human heart.

  ‘They are not toys,’ said Brigitte when Sieglinde brought them inside and arranged them on her chest of drawers. ‘What about your stamps? What about your dolls? Gottlieb, is this even permitted?’

  The collection grew, creeping across the windowsills and the dressing table, doubling itself in the mirror. It occupied the doll-house and the little cradle, covered the soft laps of bears and monkeys, swung from the ceiling on lengths of invisible thread, shivering when someone opened the door, caught in a perpetual state of falling. One or two pieces lay like an offering before the propped-open book about the bog boy. Brigitte was uneasy about these jagged and broken things filling her daughter’s room, encroaching on her bed; she feared what they signalled. Sieglinde needed to understand that they were dangerous; that they could pierce the skin, embed themselves in a person. Surely it was unlucky to bring them into the house? They were too random and mismatched, too jumbled, glinting like a strange rain, and if she tried counting them she always lost her place – but all the same she began a new page in her ledger and attempted to itemise the pieces, because what else could she do but record every fragment, its particular colours and contours, its identifying marks, its weight, and every day more shrapnel fell, some of it from the enemy and some of it from shooting down the enemy, and every day Sieglinde added to her collection, and Brigitte could not keep up, it was too much, she could not keep up.