The Wish Child Page 2
The Heilmanns are lucky, says Vati, to live up on the fourth floor, where there is plenty of air and light, and nobody above to disturb their quiet household. It is true that the marble stairs stop at the first floor, giving way to wood, and it is true that the building has no elevator, but the Heilmanns value their distance from the pushy street, from the stubbed-out cigarettes and the jangling bicycles and the news vendors who yell as you walk by, the spiky umbrellas and the little dogs underfoot, the boys selling badges you must be seen to wear, the amputees from the last war with their pinned-up trouser legs and their empty sleeves. And the marching! says Mutti. One group or another is always trooping past, which rattles her nerves: the National Socialist League of German Switchboard Operators; the Reich Association of German Rabbit Breeders. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your job, says Vati, but he does agree they are fortunate to be living well above eye level. They must refrain from remarking on their good fortune to their neighbours, however – it would be a sign of very poor breeding – and they must be mindful of the family one storey beneath them, taking care to wear their house-shoes and to tread softly, to lift their dining chairs rather than dragging them, which is better for the parquet and the carpets, after all, and never to be so thoughtless as to drop a knife, a jar of peas, a weighty book – the Bible; Mein Kampf. A cautious life, says Vati: that is the thing.
I see them visiting the Schuttmanns (second floor, front building) one Sunday afternoon. The Heilmanns have become friendly with them over recent months; Herr Schuttmann is also a Party member and wields some local influence, it is believed.
‘But more than that,’ says Vati, ‘they’re just our sort of people.’
And so they are. They have three young children and are expecting a fourth; they make a point of using the proper German greeting rather than a lazy good day; and they even took the same cruise to Madeira and Italy the previous year. Sieglinde wishes she could have gone – she and Jürgen stayed behind with their aunt – but Mutti sent her postcards, and Vati brought her back a bracelet with the name of the ship spelled out in naval flags, and a little swastika one at the end.
‘How pleasant it would have been had we known you better then,’ says Frau Schuttmann. ‘We could have shared a table, and played quoits.’
‘We did see you on board, of course,’ says Vati, ‘but one doesn’t like to intrude.’
‘No, quite right,’ says Herr Schuttmann. ‘We saw you too, but as you point out …’
There is a pause in the conversation, and above them the ceiling lamp trembles. The Schuttmanns do not seem to register the movement, nor the sound of footsteps overhead, but Mutti stares up at the swaying globe for a good long minute – thinking of their cruise, perhaps; of the motion of the ship as they sailed through the English Channel. She told Sieglinde that it flickered by night with luminous dust, as if all the stars had fallen.
‘Anyway, all that is over – the cruise liners are to be hospital ships,’ says Herr Schuttmann. ‘Which is just as it should be, given that we are at war,’ he adds, in case anyone should take his comment and make it into something else.
‘Yes of course,’ says Mutti, but when they return home and Sieglinde asks her if it’s true, that the cruise liners are to be used for sick people, she says that Herr Schuttmann must be mistaken. Their ship, she says, their beautiful ship, surrendered to the wounded and the diseased? She remembers stepping on board in Hamburg beneath all the banners strung up as if for a party, and there was a band playing marching songs, the trumpets and trombones flashing in the sun, and the passengers were calling and waving to their friends and family on the dock. When they were about to set sail they threw streamers that spiralled through the air, reaching all the way to the people left behind, and for a moment that was all that held the ship to the land, these flimsy strips of paper. A hospital ship? She had danced on its decks in her green silk as the lifeboats hung high above, and Vati had held a handkerchief in his right hand so as not to spoil her dress; she had bathed in the swimming pool beneath the mural of Neptune in his chariot, and on the dining tables the starched serviettes sailed across the dinner plates, ships of cloth on a clean white sea, and she had eaten black swordfish with fried bananas when they stopped in Madeira, and it did not matter that after a bite or two she decided to wait for the evening meal back on board, which was rissoles with mashed potatoes; the fact remained that she had tried black swordfish in Madeira.
Mutti had never been on an ocean liner before, and it took her some time to adjust to the motion. It was a strange feeling – the sense that the ground was not stable beneath her, that she needed to correct her gait in order to retain her footing when the waves were high. To begin with she wondered whether she had made a mistake, whether she would ever adapt to this new way of moving, in which she had to take so much care not to harm herself. She did not mention it to Vati – the cruise had been his idea, his surprise – but there were moments out on the deck, she tells Sieglinde, when she could see no land in any direction and knew that they were nowhere, that she feared where they were going and where they would end up. She remembers the gulls crying and crying, circling the ship. Some of the passengers fed them, throwing crusts of bread and morsels of cake, even scraps of meat, but Vati said such creatures should not be encouraged, and feeding them upset the natural order of things – before you knew it they would take over, clawing food from the plates, from the very mouths of the passengers – and this was sensible advice, and he was a sensible man, and she trusted that soon they would see land. And she looked about her at the other couples laughing and enjoying themselves, taking photographs of each other smiling so they could remember that they were happy, and she watched them drinking coffee and eating cake in the sun, and filling their mouths with great fresh gusts of air, and bathing in the pool beneath the Neptune mural, and applauding the fireworks that spun and burst and fell into the sea, and she thought: I can do that. I can be like that.
Each morning began with the trumpet call and the flag ceremony, and then there were so many programmed activities that there was no time for idleness or uncertainty. She and Vati rose early for calisthenics on the sports deck, and attended concerts and talks, and listened to a German author reading from her novel – He had never been able to stand the chosen sons of Israel. He hardly knew why; it must have lain in his blood – and at German folk music evenings they sang Praise the Rhine, the proud river resting in the lap of vines, and they sang There stands a man, a man as steadfast as an oak, and they sang Be always true and honest till you’re in your cold grave.
And when they disembarked at Naples and the beggars thrust out their hands, they said to each other how lucky they were to live in Germany, where everyone was equal, and where everyone had a job, and a home, and the right to a subsidised cruise to places where you could try black swordfish with fried bananas, even if you preferred proper German food. Mutti says she would have liked to dock in England, to see Buckingham Palace and to hear Big Ben telling a different time, to drink tea with a slice of lemon and to marvel at the wax people who looked so real they might begin to speak, but England would not permit their ship entry because then the English would see how well Germany treated her workers. They would hear the enthusiastic German songs, and smell the rissoles, and see the Germans busy with their leisure on the large and sunny decks, and they would realise how poorly off they were to live in a country where people queued without question and you could not buy proper bread.
And if she is not mistaken, she says – no, she is not mistaken – Kurt was made at sea, their little sailor, their stowaway; conjured up in their narrow cabin with its fitted cupboards and its tiny wash-basin, its built-in sofa and its tethered beds, everything just so, everything in its proper place, not a centimetre squandered, and the porthole a blue sun above them.
*
Every few weeks Sieglinde’s class visited a factory to learn about all the clever and marvellous things Germany made. The children looked forward to thes
e outings; no sooner had they returned from one than they were asking Fräulein Althaus about the next, but she never told them where it would be.
‘It’s a surprise, children,’ she would say, smiling as she stood in front of the blackboard, the perfect alphabet suspended above her, too high to smudge.
Perhaps they would visit a toy factory, the children said to one another, and they would see boxes of eyes and hands and hair, and stacks of unstuffed skins, and stringless yoyos yet to whirl until they knotted and choked, and puzzles before they were cut apart, and unpainted soldiers missing their medals and their faces. Or maybe they would visit the factory where the special badges and buckles and daggers were made, all the glinting rewards they could earn one day when they were big enough, and they would be allowed to touch them and hold them and maybe even try them on, and pretend they were older children, so long as they gave them back before they returned to school, because things went very badly indeed for liars and thieves. Or perhaps they would visit a stamp factory, where giant sheets of gum-backed paper waited to receive the image of the Führer repeated countless times over, and then a machine full of needles would punch all the holes in between the countless Führers so they could be torn off and stuck to letters. Some of the children thought this would not be a very interesting outing, to see all the Führers printed and punctured, but they did not say so, because everybody knew you did not say such things, not even when you were quite alone.
Their own school was a factory of sorts, too: every day they picked mulberry leaves for the silkworms that filled the classrooms, stripping the bushes bare to feed the white larvae stacked in their shallow trays beneath the windows. The creatures were ravenous, never satisfied, fattening overnight, it seemed, their chewing a rainstorm that accompanied each lesson. When the caterpillars began spinning their white cocoons, the children knew it would not be long before they were taken away and made into parachutes. The teachers told them how important it was to care for the silkworms, making sure that their trays were clean and that they had plenty to eat. This might save a pilot’s life, the teachers said.
‘Can we visit a parachute factory?’ Sieglinde asked Fräulein Althaus, but Fräulein Althaus said such places were not for children, and that they were going to visit a biscuit factory instead, which was a lovely surprise indeed, because biscuits were in short supply these days, and how wonderful to think of a whole factory full of them.
It was just a short ride on the U-Bahn, and they didn’t even have to change trains, but when they emerged into daylight again none of the children recognised where they were. It was a different neighbourhood, not their own; a new and different part of town where people made biscuits and toys and daggers. They walked from the station two by two, listening to Fräulein Althaus as they marched along.
‘Our biscuits contain only the purest ingredients, children,’ she said. ‘They are free from any trace of inferior cinnamon or low-grade sugar. Who can tell me what inferior means? Yes, Gisela, that’s quite correct, thank you. Now everybody remember the word inferior, because it is a useful word. The butter for our biscuits comes from healthy German cows, tended by healthy German farmers. The English eat biscuits made from flour and water, children. Flour and water!
‘Here we are. Do you see the factory behind the tall gates, with its tall chimneys? This is where the biscuits are made. Here is Frau Miller to let us in, we cannot glimpse more than her face because the people who make the biscuits must cover themselves up, all except their faces. They cannot allow so much as a single hair to fall into the mixture, a single hair is not very big but imagine if you found one in a biscuit, that would be very disgusting and unacceptable. Perhaps such a thing would be acceptable to the English. Frau Miller is shutting the gates behind us, because not everybody is allowed to come and look at the biscuit factory, that would not be sanitary, so let us say thank you. Thank you, madam, Heil Hitler and good morning, and yes, please do count us as we file past. Now wait here, children, because we must listen to the rules before we can go into the main part of the factory, where the biscuits come from. Do we all hear and understand what is being said? We must put on our special white hats, and the special covers for our shoes that make us look as if we are walking on little clouds. Now we are all alike. We must not touch anything. We must not eat anything. If we need to use the lavatory we must do so now, although we must remove our special hats and our special shoe-covers to do so. Under no circumstances are we to leave the group to explore on our own. I heard someone cough. There is to be no coughing. And I heard someone sneeze. There is to be no sneezing. No touching, no eating, no leaving, no coughing and no sneezing. Heil Hitler!
‘Come through, come through. Now I will have to shout, children, because we are in the main part of the factory, where the biscuits come from, and it is very noisy. Normally a woman would not shout. A man who shouts is not a handsome sight, but a shouting woman is even worse. Her voice grows shrill, and she starts to claw at people, or stab at them with hairpins – but this is different. This is an exception. Can you all hear me? It may be wise to hold the hand of a friend, for safety reasons. There are many pieces of machinery and equipment, as you can see – vats of flour and sugar, mixing bowls as big as bathtubs, blades that cut the butter, iron arms that hook and scrape – and I imagine it would be quite easy for a child to become caught up in this machinery and turned into biscuits. Therefore we must remember the rules. A stray braid, a flapping cardigan, a finger snatching a taste – you can appreciate where all this leads. Look at the workers in their clean white uniforms. They make thousands of biscuits per day here, children, isn’t that wonderful? We are standing in one of the world’s foremost biscuit factories. What does foremost mean? Foremost? Well done, Hannes, thank you, yes. We must learn the word foremost because it is an important word. We can be very proud of our biscuits, children, all our biscuit makers are the same and so are all the biscuits, each one just as it should be, except for the broken ones that cannot be sold, because even if they taste like the others, they are defective. It is said that the Führer enjoys a Butterkeks with his evening cup of tea – the Führer does not take any alcohol – and so every year, on his birthday, the factory sends him a one-kilo assortment, which he enjoys very much, and finds most fortifying, and in this way our biscuits are helping us to defeat the English, who have never produced a biscuit of note.’
October 1940
Near Leipzig
Erich Kröning was a quiet child, hiding behind his mother if strangers came to the farm trying to buy fruit or eggs or honey, and hiding from her sometimes, too: she would find him under his bed, drawing shapes in the dust and talking to himself in his own language, or out in the stable, murmuring to their horse Ronja. If she asked whether he was hungry, he would nod or shake his head; if she asked whether he was tired, he would simply continue playing, or lie down on the sofa and close his eyes. He was as pretty as a doll, with a cloud of downy yellow hair, and when Emilie took him into the village in the wagon he watched the sky passing above him, his blue eyes moving over its blueness as if searching for something.
At the market other mothers stopped to admire him. ‘Is he your first?’ they asked. ‘The first is always special.’ They gave him plump cherries and slices of cheese to eat, stroked his cheeks and his hair as he shied from their touch.
When his grandmother visited on Sundays after church, though, he was a different boy. My heart is clear and pure, she told him. I sing and cannot cry. Oma Kröning was a small, soft woman who dressed in black and wore her dove-grey hair in a knot at the nape of her neck. She gathered him onto her lap and taught him old songs about mermen who took human brides, and roses that fell from the sky like snow and wine that fell like rain, and nightingales and crows that spoke as clearly as you or I, and wanderers far from home. At first he tried to sing along with his wrong words, but soon he learned the proper ones, and if Oma Kröning stopped in the middle of a line and looked at him, her eyebrows raised, he would complete it, put
ting birds in their trees and fish in their streams, roses in their valleys and wanderers in their forests.
‘He is a perfect child,’ she said. ‘Just perfect. Will there be, one day, perhaps, a second, or …?’
Nobody completed that line.
On his birthday, Emilie woke Erich at seven o’clock. His face was still dull with sleep as she lifted him from his bed, and he stared at her as if he knew neither her name nor his own. She caught the odour of urine rising from the boy and found herself wishing – as she wished every day – that time would quicken, that soon he would be able to control himself overnight. Still, she reminded herself, it could be worse. It could be far, far worse. You-you, you, called the dove from the forest.