The Wish Child Page 14

  ‘Siggi, we have no room for all this,’ she said.

  But they did. In the quiet between the air raids, while her family snatched what sleep they could, Brigitte went to the living room and watched the wall behind the sofa. She stood before its whitewashed expanse, face to face with the Führer’s portrait, her unslippered feet cold against the parquet. She waited, then brushed a hand across the wall, barely making contact – and no, she was not dreaming: it moved. Just two or three centimetres, but the wall moved, backing away as if recoiling from her touch. She saw it and she heard it, that same dragging noise she’d been hearing for so long, someone shifting heavy and forgotten things about in the attic. Had she done it herself? The Heilmann sideboard and the radio and the armchairs all cast their shadows at her, and the room was so much bigger now – there, she had admitted it. She held her breath, unsure of what to do. Should she wake Gottlieb? Report the matter to Herr Schneck the caretaker in the morning? Still she did not breathe. And then, from the neighbouring apartment, the Loewenthals’ apartment, she heard a hand brushing the wall’s surface, checking it was solid and stable and real. The hand was just where her own had been moments earlier, she felt sure, and she pictured herself there on the other side of the wall, a silent twin, the hole left in the paper once the silhouette was cut. Should she say something? Should she speak? Ask who was there, ask for a name, give her own? The Führer’s portrait had slipped a little, she noticed, and she put it to rights. Ear to the wall now she waited, wordless, but heard nothing more.

  The following evening she asked Gottlieb if he noticed anything different about the living room.

  He looked around. ‘It seems the same as ever,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong with it?’

  ‘Wrong with it?’

  ‘Can’t you see? It’s bigger. Far bigger than it used to be.’

  ‘Brigitte,’ he said, ‘the living room is the same size it’s always been. Are your nerves bad today? Is it the broken nights? How could it be bigger?’

  So, she thought. She had denied it to Sieglinde, and then she had denied it to Frau Loewenthal, and now Gottlieb was denying it to her, and if Frau Loewenthal asked her again she would deny it again, because it would be too late to say anything different. And yes: she knew that if she had more room somebody else had to have less; and yes: she knew that if she bought a samovar that belonged to someone else then that person no longer possessed the samovar; and she knew that these were the laws that spun the world. And yet, she had not moved the wall herself, and she would not have bought the samovar had it not been for sale. And these were also the laws that spun the world. And perhaps somebody else would speak up about the shifting wall. Perhaps, she thought, it had happened in other apartments, even in other buildings. It could be a consequence of the soil in Berlin – poor quality, too sandy, once a swamp. Yes, surely somebody would say something, because although the extra space was all well and good, although it lent a grandeur to the apartment, suggested a certain standing and importance, what of the stability of the building? So yes, someone else would raise the matter, but until then there was nothing to be done. She had tried, hadn’t she?

  The next time Herr Schneck came to check the buckets of sand and water on their landing she decided to ask him about the apartment opposite – well, was it an apartment? She heard no sound coming from it, had heard nothing in a long while, she was sure, fairly sure.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘That door – where does it lead?’ The caretaker followed the line of her pointing finger. ‘That one? It’s just a cupboard, Frau Heilmann. For the mops and brooms and so on, to keep them tidied away. It leads nowhere.’

  A Puppet Show

  You who are from      above,

         all our      and     ,

      him who’s doubly

  Doubly with your           ;

  Ah, I am       of       !

  Why all this    and     ?

              ,

  Come, ah come into my     !

  July 1944

  Berlin

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t feel clean. No soap until next week, and I need to wash my hair. You know how thick it is, you can see how much hair I possess, I am fortunate to have my mother’s hair, many people admire it.

  FRAU MÜLLER: You know, Frau Miller, I have heard that when a woman makes herself look nice, it is often because she takes a secret pleasure in annoying another of her sex.

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t know what you mean.

  FRAU MÜLLER: It’s just something I heard. In any case, I have enough soap to see out the month, perhaps a little more. I am careful with my soap. Others may be tempted to use theirs up too quickly, washing their hair more than is necessary at the start of the month and then having to walk around dirty for a week or so at the end, but I am thrifty with my soap and therefore never find myself in this unpleasant state. I rub my face with chestnuts. I boil pine needles for the bath.

  FRAU MILLER: I do all that, and I stew ivy leaves for the laundry. The fact remains, my hair is so plentiful that my soap does not last the full month. I have Gabi’s fur to wash too, remember. It’s not right.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Well, we all have to make do with what’s available, Frau Miller.

  FRAU MILLER: Quite, but it’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality. Imitation this, replacement that. Clothes made from wood pulp. Tin in our teeth.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Did you hear the one about the would-be suicide? He tried to hang himself, but the imitation rope snapped.

  FRAU MILLER: I thought you didn’t repeat jokes.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Did I say it was a joke? Anyway – you’ve heard the rumours about the soap, of course.

  FRAU MILLER: I don’t listen to rumours.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Perhaps you could wear a headscarf during that last difficult week.

  FRAU MILLER: Like a Russian?

  FRAU MÜLLER: I’m sure you could arrange it in a fashionable manner that would distinguish you from a Russian.

  FRAU MILLER: Like a cleaning woman, then.

  FRAU MÜLLER: If you will be frivolous with your soap, Frau Miller …

  FRAU MILLER: As outlined above, my hair is so splendidly abundant that the standard soap allowance is insufficient. I am sure there are some people who do not use all their soap within a month – people with thin and unattractive hair, for example – but I feel we should be assessed as to the quantity of our hair, and the soap allocated accordingly. It would be a sliding scale, Frau Müller.

  FRAU MÜLLER: A slippery slope.

  FRAU MILLER: I do not care for your tone.

  FRAU MÜLLER: You are saying that you find the system of soap allocation to be inefficient. You are saying that the very organisation governing the distribution of soap is faulty.

  FRAU MILLER: No, I am not.

  FRAU MÜLLER: It sounds as if you are.

  FRAU MILLER: I am not.

  FRAU MÜLLER: This is how it sounds to me. One must be careful with one’s comments and opinions, Frau Miller.

  FRAU MILLER: Naturally.

  FRAU MÜLLER: As careful as one is with one’s soap.

  FRAU MILLER: Yes. Yes, I am of the same mind.

  *

  Sieglinde woke to Mutti pulling back the covers and telling her to hurry, and the fox fur that hung from Mutti’s neck was brushing her face, as light as air, not quite real, and a paw scrabbled at her throat, and she said, ‘I was having a dream,’ and Mutti said, ‘Leave it, leave it, get out,’ as if the dream were a burning room. It was important to do everything Mutti asked, because her nerves were suffering. Sieglinde sat up. How could she have slept through the siren? It was so loud now that it filled Mutti’s mouth, and the mouth of the fox fur that swung from Mutti’s neck, and Sieglinde could not understand a word, and she was so tired. Most parents, she knew, had sent their children away, as the Gauleiter
had commanded. They had put them on trains full of other children, whole classrooms of children who leaned laughing from the windows and waved bright paper flags, and the trains took them to distant farms where they could milk cows and feed chickens and ride horses, or to camps where there were no parents with suffering nerves, and they learned how to jump across fire and make bridges of their bodies and tell which plants were poisonous, and there was plenty of food, and they did not have to chew every mouthful thirty times just to make it last, or press their hands to their stomachs just to feel full. Almost her whole class from her old school had gone, and so had the Schuttmann boys, and the younger Glöckners, and more than half of the girls from her Jungmädel group – and the children who used to live opposite the Heilmanns went years ago, well before the bombings started, even before there were any camps to go to. What were their names? And Edda Knopf’s cousin, who wasn’t right in the head – he was evacuated too, but he died of heart failure and they sent his ashes back in a box.

  ‘Mask,’ said Mutti. ‘Shoes.’ Yes, there might be gas, there might be broken glass, every night the same threats, distilled into single words by now but just as lethal, just as sharp.

  Sieglinde did not want to go away to the country, despite the horses and the campfires and the food. Who would remind her how to keep safe? She would cut her feet; she would choke. And she did not want to go and stay with Mutti’s parents either, as she had heard Mutti suggest; they lived in Celle, and never came to visit, and Vati said they were as good as strangers. Out on the landing Vati was buttoning up Kurt’s coat, and Kurt was saying, ‘The blacksmith has a horse to shoe. How many nails do you think will do?’ Mutti took his hand and Jürgen’s and rushed down the stairs, fox paws jumping, pattering against her chest.

  In the cellar Herr Schneck was reprimanding the Hauers for letting their dog drink from the bucket of water on the third-floor landing. ‘If there is a fire,’ he was saying, ‘if you are trapped in your beds and the flames are reaching for you from the blown-out windows, will Fritzi save you?’

  ‘Please, Herr Schneck,’ said Vati. ‘The children.’

  But the time for shielding children was past, said Schneck. He nominated Herr Hauer to go up to the roof and check for incendiaries, which could start a fire that jumped from house to house so fast you hardly saw it happening, until entire streets blazed. In his notebook he wrote down the names of absentees – those grown lazy with their lives, those who stayed under the covers and waited for the windows to shatter, the shock waves to bring down the walls. This was illegal, he reminded everyone. This was selfish and un-German, and furthermore – he held up his pencil – you had to be killed in the cellar to qualify for compensation. The English, who did not have the foresight to build their houses with cellars, shut themselves in cages in their living rooms during air raids. He had seen pictures in the Berliner Illustrierte: the cheerful enemy, jammed into wire enclosures like the animals they were. By day they used them as ping-pong tables. See how much use a ping-pong table was when Germany unleashed her wonder weapons!

  Sieglinde said, ‘Vati, are you going to evacuate us now?’ and Vati said no, of course not, and what a thing to ask, and anyway there were no evacuations, there were transfers and relocations and holidays, but no, they would not be sent away, and besides, the war was almost won. (Which was true.) Sieglinde felt her hair lifting from her head; the suck of a nearby bomb.

  After the all-clear she tucked the boys back into bed, which was her job now, because of Mutti’s nerves. The night was quiet again and the sheets had turned cold and outside the rain had started. It spattered down on Jürgen’s sandcastle, dissolving the ramparts grain by grain, exposing the chipped and dented men buried in its walls. From the hallway the grandfather clock chimed no, no, no, the sound deep and distant. Inside its case the iron weights were making time behave, lowering themselves slowly, slowly, taking a full week to fall.

  In the morning, because of Mutti’s nerves, Sieglinde gets up and prepares breakfast for everyone, then helps Jürgen to find his schoolbooks and Kurt to brush his teeth and get dressed, and then she starts on the laundry. She separates the washing into dark and light, checking pockets and turning socks back through the right way. There’s nowhere Vati can have his two suits dry-cleaned any more – all the dry-cleaners have gone to be soldiers – so Sieglinde brushes and presses them for him, running a little soap along the creases in order to keep them sharp. When she shakes out a pair of his trousers a scrap of paper flutters from the cuff, and she bends to pick it up and sees that it is printed with a word, and that word is pity. She turns it over but there is nothing on the back. It is very thin, this piece of paper, as fine as a feather, and so she cups it inside her hands so that it cannot tear or crumble or drift away from her, and then she transfers it to the cake tin with the picture of Frederick the Great on the lid, and it will be safe here, because there is no cake.

  Over the following weeks she finds more words caught in Vati’s trouser-cuffs – not every time she does the laundry, but now and then – and each one she places in the tin. Promise, evacuate, exterminate, Versailles, God. Little scraps, little crumbs. Are these the dangerous things that Vati takes away? Frederick the Great watches her from his rearing horse, its flanks pocked with spots of rust. The tin is so light that when Mutti shakes it to see if it contains anything she should be counting, it feels as empty as air.

  *

  Mutti would prefer it if Sieglinde stopped attending her Jungmädel meetings. ‘I need you at home, to help me,’ she says, but she means I am afraid.

  ‘It’s the law,’ says Sieglinde, ‘and when Jürgen is ten he will go, and when Kurt is ten he will go too.’ (But why is it the law, to teach children songs and customs? To lead them on walks through the forest? To measure how far they can leap, how fast they can run?) I see Mutti start to cry, and Kurt comes and sits on her lap and offers her a piece of his half-eaten Zwieback, and nuzzles his soft little head into her neck.

  ‘You could miss a week here and there,’ says Mutti. ‘You could just not go.’ And again she means I am afraid.

  ‘You mustn’t say that,’ says Sieglinde. ‘You mustn’t let anyone hear you say that.’ She buttons up her jacket, gives her mother and her brother a kiss goodbye and sets out for the tram stop. She knows where all the shelters are along the way, in case of an attack, so she is quite safe. There are more holes in the houses, more craters in the streets, and the air smells of gas. She sees a pair of shoes poking out from beneath a striped bedsheet, and a Hitler Youth girl only a few years older than herself reaching beneath the sheet and attaching a label to a hand. Hitler Youth boys are clearing the rubble, pulling people from it, people so caked with mortar dust they have turned to stone. On the corner another girl in uniform collects money for the Winter Relief, and at the tram stop another clips Sieglinde’s ticket. Yes, we are the storm of youth; we are victory.

  That afternoon she and her friends tear newspapers into strips while Julia, their leader, mixes the paste in a bowl. They are wearing aprons to protect their uniforms, which their parents have worked hard to buy; the aprons they have sewn themselves, for they will be mothers one day, and mothers must know how to sew, and they are neat and tidy girls who will make good mothers, nice girls with clean hair and correct thoughts, and they shred the daylight terror attacks, the strategic retreats, the losses, and they shred the notices that say I am a soldier 22 years old, blond and of good health. Before I give my life to the Führer I should like to meet a German woman through whom I can leave a child for the German Reich.

  ‘This one has a picture of the Führer,’ says Edda Knopf. ‘We can’t tear him up, can we?’

  ‘Quite right. Put him aside,’ says Julia, and Sieglinde and all the other girls begin to search for pictures of the Führer they can put aside, but Edda is Julia’s favourite for today, Sieglinde can tell. And anyway, co-operation as a group is what matters, and not the work Sieglinde might do on her own or the helpful suggestions she might make; th
e group is everything and she is nothing, nothing, even though it is also and at the same time true that a single girl or boy can make a difference, like Herbert Norkus, who was stabbed six times and died for their freedom. Julia shows them how to scrunch a page of newspaper into a ball and wrap it with paste-soaked strips, smoothing them flat, building up layer after layer until the torn words and pictures are so dark and wet that you cannot recognise them any more, which is a relief for Jutta Schönbrunn, who had already ripped up the Führer before Edda Knopf asked what to do in such a situation. Slowly the lumps of wet paper turn into heads – witch, policeman, robber, crocodile, grandmother, Devil – and here is Kasperle himself, with his hooked nose and his long chin. Everybody wants to play Kasperle because he is allowed to misbehave, to think up pranks and to say rude things even though at heart he is good, but Julia chooses Margarete Braun because she has the best voice and sounds the funniest, and Kasperle must make the audience laugh.

  Before they leave for home that evening the girls set the paper heads to dry on the windowsill. All week Sieglinde worries about them, wondering if they will be hit in a raid – they are so soft, so flimsy – but there they wait the following week, lined up like the shrunken trophies of some savage tribe, and the girls paint faces on them and give them wool for hair and rags for bodies, and make up words for them to say. And when they perform the puppet show their families know what to say too, cheering Kasperle and shouting warnings to him when he is in danger and does not realise it. Look out! Look out! All Kasperle wants is to sleep, but visitors keep arriving to interrupt him. The policeman comes to tell him there is a robber in the area who has been stealing coal, and Kasperle should keep his cellar locked and watch out for anybody who has black hands and dirty clothes. His grandmother brings him a hat she has knitted for him, but it is too big and covers his eyes and he cannot see properly, and he stubs his toe when he is making her a cup of tea, and spills boiling water on himself, and everybody laughs. He goes back to bed, falling asleep straight away he is so tired, but the crocodile and the witch knock on his door and embrace him and say they are his parents, and they weep with joy to have found their little boy at last.