The Wish Child Read online

  Kasperle says, ‘Parents? I have no parents. I am made of paste and paper through and through.’

  ‘But so are we,’ says the witch. ‘And look, my hair is wool just like yours. You are clearly our son.’

  ‘No, no!’ calls the audience. ‘Be careful!’

  ‘Can’t you see how handsome I am?’ says Kasperle. ‘You’re too ugly to be my parents. If I had a mother she’d be prettier than Kristina Söderbaum, and if I had a father he’d look like Carl Raddatz.’

  ‘What a rude boy you are,’ says the crocodile. ‘I’ve a mind to eat you whole just to teach you some manners.’

  But as the crocodile is opening his jaws the policeman returns and asks Kasperle if he has seen the robber, and Kasperle points to the false parents and says, ‘I caught these two breaking into my cellar, Herr Offizier.’

  ‘How could you?’ the witch and the crocodile shout as the policeman leads them away. ‘Your own parents!’

  The audience laughs and laughs.

  Kasperle returns to bed and begins to snore. The robber peers in through the window, then goes to the cellar and helps himself to Kasperle’s coal, and no matter how loudly the audience shouts, Kasperle does not stir. And as he sleeps on and on another visitor appears at his door, and this visitor does not knock; he lets himself in and makes his way to Kasperle’s bed and sits down beside him. And when Kasperle feels his hot breath on his face he wakes, and it is the Devil come to claim his soul, but Kasperle tells him to go back to hell, and that he has no soul, that the little girl who made him forgot to give him one, and he is made of paper and paste and nothing more.

  ‘A boy made of paper?’ says the Devil. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘It’s perfectly true,’ says Kasperle. ‘And not just any paper, but the Völkischer Beobachter.’

  ‘That is a very fine paper,’ says the Devil. ‘I read it myself. May I?’

  He is reaching out a hand to touch Kasperle’s face, but quick as a flash Kasperle jumps out of bed and pulls his grandmother’s hat down over the Devil’s head, and the Devil cannot see a thing, and Kasperle pushes him out of his house, locks the door, climbs back into bed and sleeps and sleeps, and he remains sleeping as the little curtain falls, and for all we know he is sleeping still.

  Mutti and Vati and Sieglinde and the boys walk down Charlottenburger Chaussee on their way home, beneath the camouflage netting that turns the street into a dappled forest floor. Mutti asks, ‘Which one were you? We couldn’t tell. It was the strangest thing.’

  And yes, it is a very strange thing, not to know one’s own child.

  ‘She was the robber,’ says Jürgen.

  ‘The policeman!’ says Kurt.

  ‘I was the crocodile,’ says Sieglinde, and Vati says, ‘You see?’ and Sieglinde puts her hand in his and wishes that he did not have to work so hard.

  *

  FRAU MÜLLER: I thought we’d lost him. When the radio said there’d been an attempt on his life –

  FRAU MILLER: Let’s not panic, Frau Müller. Let’s remain calm. It was only cuts and grazes. And his trousers torn to shreds. And his underpants.

  FRAU MÜLLER: His trousers? And underpants? In shreds?

  FRAU MILLER: So I hear.

  FRAU MÜLLER: My goodness.

  FRAU MILLER: Naked, I imagine. From the waist down.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Do you know, Frau Miller, that some women write to the Führer and offer themselves to him?

  FRAU MILLER: What do you mean?

  FRAU MÜLLER: They offer him their bodies to enjoy as he wishes. They ask him to give them a child.

  FRAU MILLER: Which child?

  FRAU MÜLLER: His child.

  FRAU MILLER: The Führer does love little ones. He shares a special bond with them.

  FRAU MÜLLER: But can you imagine writing such a letter? What would you say?

  FRAU MILLER: I cannot. I would not. Why? Can you?

  FRAU MÜLLER: (silent)

  FRAU MILLER: Frau Müller?

  Oh, the women. They were all in love with him, their blue-eyed god, and sent him pieces of their hair and the imprints of their mouths, and when they opened their legs they opened them for him.

  August 1944

  Near Leipzig

  Mama spent weeks thinking about the blanket, sketching different designs like a girl trying out a married name, spreading the square of cloth on the floor and considering it from every position. She counted the rows in its weave with the tip of a needle, murmuring figures under her breath and marking off sections with blue chalk, her mouth full of pins. Each evening she practised her stitches until they were as tiny as possible; little red seeds, little black seeds.

  ‘What’s it going to be?’ said Erich.

  ‘A present,’ said Mama.

  ‘What sort of present?’

  ‘A special one.’

  Slowly her design took shape. She unpicked her work if it was not perfect; some mornings I saw her uprooting every stitch from the previous day and starting again. She passed the crinkled lengths of thread to Erich and he dipped them in water and wound them around his hand. Up close it was difficult to make out the pattern; the red and black dashes were stalks of grass, rain on a lake, endless and repeating so that the eye became quite lost, but if you stood back and looked, truly looked, they resolved into Mama’s angular intention: a swastika that stretched the length and width of the piece. And then, after a time, you noticed that this held smaller swastikas, and that they held smaller ones still, all locked together as tightly as honeycomb. Even Mama did not know how many it contained.

  ‘Is it for Papa?’ said Erich, and she said, ‘Papa? For Papa?’ and he knew that he had asked a foolish question. Where would they send the blanket? To the snow? To the mud? They had not heard from Papa for months.

  ‘It’s for the Führer,’ she said, ‘to show him we love him.’ Erich thought then that he might start to cry, because how many boys could say they had helped their mama make a special blanket for the Führer? The traitors’ bomb did not kill him; the Führer could not die. A matter of hours after the explosion he had spoken on the radio, and Erich had closed his eyes and pictured him right there in the room: It is the duty of every German without exception to ruthlessly oppose these elements, and either to arrest them immediately or, if they should resist arrest, to shoot them without further ado. Erich imagined presenting the blanket to him in person, the Führer smiling and shaking his hand as the cameras flashed. Boy in Saxony Presents Adolf Hitler with Magnificent Blanket. He swallowed the lump in his throat. As Mama kept reminding him, he was the man of the house now.

  Word came the following week: Papa was missing.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Erich asked, and Mama said, ‘They don’t know where he is. They have lost him.’

  Like a single mitten? Like a favourite book? Erich had lost his favourite Winnetou book for quite some time, and only found it when Lina moved his shelves away from the wall to clean behind them. Had Papa slipped away somewhere too?

  ‘We must tell the bees,’ said Mama, and she led him through the withered garden.

  ‘Herr Kröning is dead,’ she said, moving from hive to hive and repeating the news, and that was when Erich understood what missing meant. ‘Herr Kröning is dead. Herr Kröning is dead. Herr Kröning is dead,’ over and over until it stopped making sense and became just a sound, a hum that merged with the humming of the hives. ‘Dead, dead, dead,’ he whispered in her wake.

  A letter arrived from Papa two weeks later, dotted with holes:

  We came to a field of watermelon in    and could not believe they were real. We split them open with our bayonets and ate every last one, and we spat out the seeds like black teeth. Home seems unreal to me too. I am forgetting the shape of your mouth. I have no   left.    is lost.

  Mama said she did not want to keep the letter and asked Erich to burn it, but he took it to his bedroom to store in his honey jar with his other precious things. He upended them onto
his pillow and arranged them in a line: an empty snail shell, an acorn, a dead and perfect bee, the ten-thousand-mark note, the paper flags from the parade. The snail shell was still empty, the acorn unsprouted; the bee was still dead and the money still worthless and the flags were so faded they were almost blank. Erich unrolled the banknote, turned it sideways and studied the little picture of the farmer. He had not taken it from the jar in a very long time, and it kept rolling shut, and he sighed. The bee fluttered its wings in the draught. He held the note down with both hands and lay very still … and then he saw it: a pale figure, a monstrous face, there at the farmer’s throat, hidden in the light and shadow of his skin, feeding on him. Suddenly Erich could see only the ghoul, the vampire, and he could not fathom how he had failed to see it before; it was so plain to him now. It was there all along.

  *

  I watch Erich at night, after Mama has switched on his bedside lamp and kissed his forehead – a guardian of sorts, I tell myself, though at times I wish that I could replace him: that I could creep between his lips as he sleeps and take up residence within his skin, seeing what he sees, touching what he touches. Does this sound like love? I envy him his little room with the window that faces the apple orchard, his bag of glass marbles with their trapped and twisting flames, his books about Apache chiefs and silver lions. Sometimes I fear what I might do to him. I watch the bird lamp as it spins in his sleep. I breathe on it and it quickens, the birds swooping across his bed, flickering on his cheeks like moths.

  *

  It is autumn when the airman falls, the season of falling, and I see him thrown from his droning machine and out into the night, and then, when the great silk canopy blooms above us, I see him drifting, a spore cast from its burning pod. I drift with him; I take his hand and speak to him of the sky, the birds, the way a turning wing can catch the light. In the darkness – and in his condition – he cannot make out the copse of larches beneath us, soft and gold, planted in the form of a swastika, but I tell him of their bright presence among the evergreens, how they show themselves year after year. He dies on the way down, somewhere between heaven and earth, and I know where he will land.

  Erich and Mama leap from their beds and run through the garden and on through the orchard, the bees roaring in their ears, the carved hives staring after them, mouths wide open. I turned first to water and then to ice the dead lay so thick to their backs I could untangle their every sin a rearrangement of flesh. By the light of the moon they see the airman lying in the burnt-off barley field, a charred body come to rest on charred ground, and even though they know he must have perished still they run to him, the black earth thudding, marking their feet with ashes. He is a mess of a man, hardly a man at all, already turning to dust, white silk spilling from him, and they peer at him as if to identify the meaning held in his jumbled shape, as if to tell their own future. No eagle on the breast: not one of theirs. They begin to wrap him in his parachute, spinning a white chrysalis about him, but as Mama pleats and tucks the skin-soft cloth she thinks of Uschi, her sister, soon to be married in crêpe, and Gerhard away fighting in France. He cannot attend his own wedding, but that is no barrier: all over Germany young brides are marrying men who are not there.

  ‘Bring shovels and a knife,’ she says to Erich, unrolling the silk once more, and I run with him back through the orchard, and the hives call after us, full of caution, and they say:

  Blood pattered into the pails at our feet, dark honey in the dusk, and I felt the blood between us, my blood in him, and I knew that someday the blood would fill his own son, there was no end to it, this great rope.

  Do not walk in the forest with another. Do not eat wild berries.

  God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

  Do not drink from the wells. Hide behind the dead.

  We do not listen to the hives. We bring the knife to Mama and she cuts the parachute lines, and then we help her dig a hole for the airman, right there in the burnt field, and before we roll him into it she holds her hand to his chest for just a moment, and touches his blackened head. She does not check him for a name, because even though he wears no eagle she has already decided who he was and who he will be: our own missing man, returned home. We bury him where he landed; there are no men left to carry him anywhere else, and he is another man dead, there are so many dead men that they fall from the sky as common as rain. Mama rolls the parachute up into a bundle and carries it home like clean washing, and says it was meant to be. And by still fires would I lie in fields in darkest night.

  When Erich woke the next day he thought he had dreamt it all, the moonlit silk, Mama’s knife slashing the lines, but when he looked at his hands he saw dirt under his nails, and his arms ached from digging, and there at the back door stood the shovels still clotted with fresh earth. He and Mama found the aeroplane in the forest, its black wings bitten from its body, a drone pushed from the hive at the end of autumn. It was cold to the touch and they nudged at its jagged flanks, its many riveted parts: this was the machine that held men in the air, the miracle that kept them from falling. If this could break, so could anything.

  ‘But where are the guns?’ said Mama. ‘Where are the bombs?’

  ‘It’s a Spitfire,’ said Erich. ‘He was just taking photos.’

  ‘Photos? Of us? At night-time?’

  ‘Perhaps he was lost,’ said Erich.

  They both stared at the wreckage.

  ‘At any rate,’ said Mama, ‘let’s be thankful that it didn’t burn Papa’s larches.’

  And yes, there they were, four right angles, butter-yellow and unharmed, yet to lose their needles though it could not be long now. Inside the hollow of the cockpit Erich found another piece of silk; it looked like a dropped handkerchief, and he wondered if this was how death came: a poorly timed sneeze. (Not for most. Luminal in tea; a needle to the heart: this is how death comes.) When he picked it up he saw that it was not a handkerchief but a map of Germany, hardly singed, with all her rivers and railways, canals and roads printed in black. They radiated out from Berlin, Posen, Vienna, Danzig like cracks in glass, each city a point of impact. He crushed the map into his fist – it reduced to almost nothing, the entire country, and made no sound. And the turtle dove sang You-you, you, and from the orchard a black line of bees was flying to the house and in through the open door, a river of bees, a black canal, and they were taking up residence in the bronze head, building their combs around Mama’s paper wishes. They hummed inside the hollow skull, their newest hive, and it seemed that at any moment the head might begin to speak too, asking for Papa’s safety, for Papa’s return, for Papa’s whereabouts, for another child. And where would Mama find this child? Next to the brook, beneath the Adder Queen’s red stone? Waiting on the hillside, whistling the songs of the birds? Combing the snails and the eel-grass from the water sprite’s hair? Or dropped by the cuckoo into the wren’s strange nest?

  *

  Tante Uschi stood on a stool in her tacked wedding dress, the silk falling well past her feet. I know one day there will be a miracle, she sang as Mama pinned up the hem. Erich had never seen her so happy.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she kept saying, running her hands over the luminous cloth. ‘Just like Emmy Göring’s.’ She felt the side seam for the little hidden pocket that would hold the bread and the salt. She would never go hungry.

  ‘Stop moving,’ said Mama.

  ‘I haven’t told Gerhard about it. I want it to be a surprise when he gets the photograph.’

  Mama looked up at her sister. ‘You can’t tell Gerhard. Not in a letter.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t told him, have I?’ said Tante Uschi.

  ‘If word got out …’

  ‘How do we explain it, then?’

  ‘It’s a family dress,’ said Mama. ‘We’ve simply altered it for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tante Uschi. ‘A family dress.’

  When the news came three weeks later that Gerhard, having survived years in the desert, had f
allen in eastern France, Uschi said, ‘But what about the wedding? What about my dress?’ Nobody scolded her, because the freshly bereaved are entitled to say such things without thinking how they will sound, and even though Uschi had never met Gerhard, anybody could see they were in love, and why shouldn’t she have her wedding day? And just as Gerhard’s absence had not prevented the marriage plans, neither would his death: thanks to the Führer, German women could marry dead men, provided those dead men were also German and of clean blood.

  Erich was sorry he would never meet Onkel Gerhard, but Mama said he should not be sad, because Onkel Gerhard was a hero, and not every boy had an uncle who had fallen for Germany. Erich considered the manner of his death, his falling: Onkel Gerhard standing his ground until the last, and when he fell he came to rest quite intact, his rifle still raised, aimed at nothing.

  Mama and Tante Uschi went to the town hall the day before the ceremony, sweeping the stone steps at the entrance and polishing the windows in the registrar’s office, dusting the long dark table and hanging fragrant fir branches from the walls. The next morning Mama braided her sister’s hair and pinned it into place beneath a veil so fine you could hardly see it. She gave her their grandmother’s garnets to wear, the earrings and bracelet and choker so dark they were almost black, and then she buttoned her into the wedding dress, which drifted and billowed with Uschi’s every step, filled with the memory of sky.