The Wish Child Read online

  Erich was turning five – the age when colours and sensations, aromas and tastes and sounds begin to knot into permanent memories: the sour fur of a chewed and eyeless toy, or the patter from a watering can on fusty soil, or the hardness of a little wooden stool in a white and clattering room. And who can tell why certain episodes take hold while others are lost to the sky as smoke? And why some are retained only in part; fragmentary joys, half-formed horrors?

  ‘Slowly, Schatz,’ said Emilie over breakfast – Erich always bolted his food, which was dreadful for the digestion.

  He pushed his new wooden snake across the table, its joints clicking as it curled its way about the milk jug.

  ‘What does the snake say?’ asked Emilie.

  ‘Hisssssssssssss,’ said Erich and Christoph.

  After breakfast Emilie washed Erich’s face and combed his hair flat with water. He was her summer boy, as blond as wheat, sky-eyed. You couldn’t deny that the race was getting better looking; you had only to look at the children. He slipped his little warm hand into hers, and with the other he trailed the wooden snake across the floor. Click. Click.

  He was tired by mid-afternoon, and when Tante Uschi and Oma Kröning arrived he would not stop crying. He kicked his feet, knocked over his milk. They wondered if he ever would settle; he gazed at them as if he saw monsters.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ said Emilie.

  ‘What did the nurse say?’ said Oma Kröning.

  ‘To give it time,’ said Emilie.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ said her sister, who was not married and had no children and could not know. ‘They cry from time to time, and sometimes for no good reason. It’s quite normal.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Emilie agreed, and they pulled faces at him, and shook a bear at him, and spoke made-up words that had no meaning. Look, she said, look at Mama, trying to distract him from his sorrow the way that mothers do, changing her voice so that it was no longer her own, making spiders and wolves of her hands. Bumpety bump, rider, she sang as he struggled on her lap. If he falls, he cries out. She gave him one of her Leipzig larks to eat, which were not birds but little bird-sized cakes filled with jam to suggest plump hearts. Then, after she had mopped up the milk and wiped clean the gift from Tante Uschi – a book of animals – she hugged him close and whispered, ‘You are the gift. You, you.’ But those who whisper tell lies.

  I watch Erich with his new book, each page cut into three. He makes a bear with a lion’s body and the legs of a dog; he joins an elephant’s head to a duck with goat’s hooves. It seems there are endless combinations, a whole menagerie of the fake, all those turned away from the ark and left to face the flood. It is troubling to me, this severing and grafting. I do not blame the boy because he does not understand that the creatures are impossible, and that even if such a specimen were to be produced it could not survive; it would be too deformed, too far from normal. The adults, though, watch him turning the pages with his little fingers, and they watch him smiling because they smile, and laughing because they laugh, and nobody finds the book – nor even the idea of the book – in the least bit troublesome.

  Later Emilie takes Erich to his bedroom and tucks him in, perhaps a little too tightly; he struggles, but she strokes his head and tells him to sleep, and pulls up the green satin quilt that is cool to the touch and swishes like Christoph’s scythe cutting the wheat. She repeats his name to him – Erich, Erich – and his blue eyes watch and watch her, and do not close. She switches on the lamp beside his bed; its transparent shade is patterned with birds, and after a moment, when the bulb is hot, it starts to turn.

  I watch the shadow birds stealing around the walls, wavy when they pass over the curtains, bent in two at the corners of the room.

  ‘Shh,’ says Emilie, ‘shhhhh,’ her voice as soft as the wind in the pines.

  Outside the bees grumble in their hives; something has changed.

  November 1940

  Berlin

  At the theatre there is standing room only for the Führer’s speech. The women hand over their furs to the coat-check girl, who cannot, it seems, trouble herself to smile, and may not even be German. They find their seats, which are ten rows back from the stage and afford an acceptable view of the lectern, until a vast individual with blond braids piled high on her head takes her place in front of them. It is difficult to see past the bulging hair, which the women agree must be false. Such persons need to acquaint themselves with mirrors, they remark, but they refuse to let her ruin their evening. Through their opera glasses they take in the one-man show, the feverish aria tumbling from the stage: swords and blood, blood and earth, betrayal and sacrifice, disguise, salvation: all the traditional and tragic themes. And how the women applaud! How they cheer.

  FRAU MILLER: Look at his words – they’re caught in the lights; they’re falling like rain.

  FRAU MÜLLER: If we were further forward they’d be falling on us.

  FRAU MILLER: I secured the best seats I could, Frau Müller. We’re lucky to be here at all. You didn’t see the queue.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Still, if you’d gone a little earlier …

  FRAU MILLER: As I have explained, Gabi was sitting for her portrait that morning. You cannot dance at two weddings, you know.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Of course not, of course not. How did it come out?

  FRAU MILLER: As a portrait, it’s excellent – you can make out every whisker, and she’s holding her tail just so – but unfortunately he couldn’t capture her saluting.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Oh that is a shame. And after all your training …

  FRAU MILLER: I know. I kept saying Heil Hitler, and he kept clicking, but every time she raised her paw it was either too early or too late.

  Führer Weather

  When I was still a child I took up the lyre –

  For early I forgot my childhood games;

  I    only in the silent land of the   ,

      from the raucous throng of sisters.

  And even if my song clanged shrill and off-key

  As a   that had split in two,

  Thudding dully, sounding its discordant chime:

  Still I knew what    of    meant.

  December 1940

  Berlin

  Time spins blue and gold, blue and green; it is spring and autumn; it is morning and dusk; it is then and it is now and it happens over and again and all at once.

  ‘Can you breathe?’ says Vati, tightening the strap.

  We are elephants, we are aardvarks, we are glass-eyed flies. Our hands we clasp, our heads we sink, and of Adolf Hitler we think.

  ‘Yes,’ nods Sieglinde.

  At night her mask waits at the foot of her bed, and she listens for the siren and thinks of a golden comb slipping through lengths of golden hair. The poem comes to her as she lies listening – but it is not a poem, Fräulein Althaus has told them, it is a folk song, a traditional old German song written by nobody. Still, the children do not sing it, this old siren song, but recite the lines in unison, and at night they come to Sieglinde as she waits for the bombs to flash above her, jewels glimpsed from a little boat at the river’s deadly bend. O, dark water.

  ‘As soon as we hear the siren, we must wake up straight away,’ says Vati. ‘We must jump from our beds and grab our masks and our suitcases and hurry – calmly hurry – to the cellar.’

  I cannot determine the reason that I am so sad at heart. They do jump from their beds. They do grab their masks, and their little cases that stand packed and ready as if for a holiday, and they do hurry down to the cellar. On the second floor the Metzgers are just emerging from their apartment, Herr Metzger in his thick black coat that smells of camphor, and his wife in all her furs, sable, chinchilla, mink, three pelts thick about her shoulders. Jewels adorn her wrists and fingers, earlobes and throat – does she sleep in them? Do they dig into her dreams? Herr Metzger helps her descend the stairs, slowing everybody down, and Herr Schneck, the caretaker and house warden
, shouts, ‘Quickly, please! This is not a drill! Masks on! One two, zackzack!’

  Down they go, down and down, and it is even colder than in their cold apartments. Beneath the earth they feel the bombs: a monster in the distance, stamping its feet.

  ‘Please keep in mind that all talking is forbidden,’ says Schneck.

  ‘How long must we stay here?’ asks Frau Metzger.

  ‘No talking,’ says Schneck.

  ‘Only my arthritis …’

  ‘Silence!’ says Schneck.

  ‘But Mutti, he’s talking,’ says Sieglinde.

  Schneck turns to her. ‘I have to talk in order to tell everyone else not to talk,’ he says.

  ‘Quite right,’ whispers Herr Schuttmann.

  ‘Shh!’ says Schneck.

  ‘I wasn’t talking, I was whispering,’ says Herr Schuttmann.

  ‘And now you’re talking!’

  ‘I am merely trying to explain, Herr Schneck,’ he whispers, ‘that your reprimand was unfounded, as I was not talking but whispering.’

  ‘Whispering still depletes the shelter of oxygen. We all have an allotted amount, and you are taking more than your share.’

  ‘So now the air’s rationed,’ someone says, and laughter glances off the cellar walls.

  ‘Who said that?’ yells Schneck.

  Silence.

  ‘And speaking of not talking,’ says Schneck, ‘I must ask you to refrain from scaring your children with stories about bombs. There is simply no need for such stories.’

  Sieglinde wants to ask him if it’s true that the English coat their planes with invisible paint, and if that’s why the searchlights hardly ever catch one – but she doesn’t dare. After a time Kurt begins to wail, and he wakes another baby, who wakes another baby, who wakes yet another, and the cellar fills with their high cries.

  ‘Ladies, ladies!’ shouts Schneck. ‘Control your infants!’

  ‘They are so small,’ says Vati. ‘Their lungs do not use much oxygen, even when crying.’

  Schneck scrutinises Kurt and the Schuttmann baby. ‘This may be true,’ he says. ‘This is a logical line of thought.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Vati.

  ‘Be quiet,’ says Schneck.

  ‘Shhhh,’ say the mothers to the babies, ‘shh-shhh.’ Little waves on dark water.

  It is only after an official notice from the Reichsmarschall that Schneck relaxes the rules.

  ‘There is no scientific evidence for the oxygen-depletion theory,’ he announces. ‘A shelter would have to be airtight for this to be an issue. Sealed completely shut. Of course such chambers do not exist, and therefore we are quite safe. The person who made this ludicrous recommendation was mistaken – he will have been dealt with accordingly – and it is fortunate that Herr Göring has brought the truth to our attention and assured us that we may speak freely.’

  Silence.

  *

  Brigitte Heilmann has always been a light sleeper, awake long after the rest of the building is dreaming, when even Schneck is off duty. She is familiar with the noises of the night – the S-Bahn pulling into the station at Savignyplatz, wheels scoring the darkness; the ticking of the roof as the pitch cools beneath the tiles; the drumming of Fräulein Glöckner’s dancing shoes on the stairs when, despite the rules, she returns home well after midnight: twelve steps and a landing, twelve steps and a landing. And the smaller, closer sounds: the intermittent murmurings of Jürgen and Sieglinde; the baby’s sighs and whimpers; the grandfather clock from the Heilmann family villa chiming the hour. And closer still: her husband’s breaths as he sleeps; the way the air catches in his throat again and again, as if he keeps taking fright in some looping dream, as if his fear keeps meeting its own beginning. Tonight, though, she hears a new noise – or, at least, she thinks she does. The prising open of a stuck door; a low, off-key note; the dragging of heavy furniture across a wooden floor, leaving a mark that will never come out.

  ‘Gottlieb,’ she whispers, touching her husband’s shoulder. ‘Gottlieb, did you hear something?’

  He growls and turns away from her, and she withdraws her hand. She can hardly make out a thing as she feels her way to the door of their blacked-out bedroom; she looks for herself in the mirror but all she sees is a shadow in a patch of black ice. And is that her own hand reaching out in front of her, or the hand-shaped vase that sits on the dressing table at the centre of a crocheted mat? It was one of the first presents Gottlieb ever gave her, as slender and white as the hands that advertise soap, wristwatches, scented lotion, nourish your skin, steel your nerves, the mirror does not lie, your hands reveal all. You are as old as your arteries, but you look as old as your skin. To begin with she filled it with flowers, but she soon discovered it was not very stable, and had a tendency to fall over if she so much as closed the dressing-table drawers too roughly. Gottlieb has glued the base back on twice, as well as one of the fingers, and even though you can hardly see the joins, it no longer holds water and is only for show. When Sieglinde was little Gottlieb told her that there was a lady trapped inside the dressing table who was waving for help, and that at night you could hear her knocking on the mahogany, calling for someone to come and let her out. Sieglinde refused to go anywhere near the vase after that, until Brigitte picked it up and showed her that it wasn’t attached to anything, and certainly not to a trapped lady.

  In the hallway she hears the noise again – a shifting, a rupturing. Gottlieb sighs in his sleep.

  *

  Most Saturdays, when school was over for the day, Mutti took Sieglinde and her brothers to visit Tante Hannelore in Dahlem. Her building was much grander than theirs; stone boys and girls flanked the windows of the façade, arms raised, holding up the lintels, and the entranceway glittered with chandeliers and mirrors and brass fittings polished to gold. Tante Hannelore was tall and elegant with deep-set green eyes and glossy brown hair and you could tell she came from money; she knew how to select crystal and how to make conversation, and she had a way of speaking to shopkeepers and market vendors that won her the freshest fish, the largest eggs. She lived on the ground floor, her large apartment giving onto a tree-filled courtyard of chestnuts and oaks. In summer they cast their green shade across her rooms, and in winter the bare branches let in the light. Her carpets were genuine Persian and her photograph frames solid silver. Some of the residents in her building even had maids, though Tante Hannelore had let hers go when her husband died and she found herself in a difficult position for a time. Twelve years older than her brother Gottlieb, she had four sons, all in the Wehrmacht, and one of them already a senior lance corporal; she wore her Mother’s Cross every day.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, ushering the Heilmanns through the entranceway, past the oak settle carved with dancing bears that Sieglinde longed to sit on, and into the parlour with its damask chairs and its painted bamboo screen in the Japanese style. The samovar was simmering – don’t touch, children – and on a blue china plate lay Jürgen’s favourite Spekulatius biscuits, thin and crisp and smelling of spices, though where the ingredients had come from Sieglinde did not know. Mutti said it was impossible to find such things nowadays, but Tante Hannelore always made the special biscuits for Jürgen, even when it wasn’t Christmas, and she let him nibble around their edges, right up to the outlines of the windmills and mermaids and castles and ships, rather than taking polite bites. Mutti thought this rather indulgent, though she only ever said so at home. She never said a word, either, when Tante Hannelore dressed Sieglinde up, arranging her hair in styles that were far too old for her, whisking a powder puff over her cheeks and nose and dabbing lipstick on her mouth, draping her in her own expensive clothes; Sieglinde was forever losing her hands beneath trailing sleeves and trying not to step out of shoes, trip over hems.

  ‘Oh, I would have loved a little girl like you,’ Tante Hannelore said now, smoothing down the sailor collar on Sieglinde’s dress. ‘Brigitte, you’re so fortunate to have a daughter. Little boys fall in love with their
mothers, but daughters look after them later on.’

  Most of the jewels belonging to Oma Heilmann had been lost in the Depression, but Tante Hannelore retained the Berlin iron pieces passed down from her great-grandmother – a pair of wide black bracelets as fine as lace, and a ring that read Gold I Gave For Iron. This was not a private message scored inside the band like the one on Mutti’s wedding ring (To my treasure 13.6.33); the words ran around the outside, designed to be seen. Tante Hannelore wore the ring in place of a wedding band, just as her great-grandmother had, and on special occasions such as Heldengedenktag and the Führer’s birthday she put on the black bracelets, and people on the street stopped her to commend her excellent lineage, and to remark on her family’s sacrifice.

  ‘Your great-great-grandmother gave up her jewels for the war,’ she told Sieglinde. ‘Not this war, of course, a different one – she surrendered them all, even her wedding ring, and received these in return.’ She showed her the iron band, turning it on her finger so Sieglinde could read the message; she took the iron bracelets from their box lined with sky-blue silk and fastened them about Sieglinde’s wrists. ‘Never mind,’ she said when they slipped off. ‘You’ll grow into them.’

  Mutti owned just one piece of Heilmann family jewellery, given to her by Vati on their wedding day – a sprig of gold with green enamel leaves and white flowers. They looked like pearls, but really they were teeth: Vati’s baby teeth. Oma Heilmann had it made when he was still a boy. Mutti said it was not to her taste, but sometimes she let Sieglinde borrow it for a special treat, and when they came home from Tante Hannelore’s that afternoon, Sieglinde asked if she could wear it.

  ‘Is it edelweiss? Snowdrops?’ she said, running her finger over the tiny stem, smoothing out the safety chain that was so fine you could barely feel it. Mutti said she didn’t know; she thought there was no such plant, and no such flower, but that only made it more special to Sieglinde. ‘Was Vati really as small as Kurt once?’ she said, and Mutti said yes, Vati was once a baby, and here was the proof, his little teeth, right here in her hand.