The Wish Child Page 4
‘Did you have a nice time?’ said Vati, who liked to stay at home by himself on Saturday afternoons and work on his silhouette pictures.
‘I tried on her bracelets,’ said Sieglinde. ‘They used to be gold, but now they’re iron.’
‘We had a lovely time,’ said Mutti. ‘The apartment is so immaculate; I really don’t know how Hannelore does it. Especially given how large it is.’
Vati laughed and said women have a special skill that men lack: they can kiss a friend and at the same time stick a needle into her.
*
Brigitte heard the noise again that night, and again she rose from her bed to see if she could identify its source. She pulled up the blackout blind and peered through the bedroom window, but all was quiet down on Kantstrasse. She listened. The noise seemed to be coming from the living room, and indeed, when she turned on the light the space did seem different – had something been added, something taken away? The gramophone stood between the windows; the radio and the blue lamp rested on the end table; the sofa and chairs occupied their usual positions, the antimacassars shielding the upholstery from heads and hands, and the portrait of the Führer hung above them, a wall to himself. There was the piano, its stool pushed in just as was proper when the instrument was not in use, the songs shut away beneath the needlepoint lid, and in the corner the tiled stove crouched, still warm. Twists of newspaper lay piled next to it, ready for the morning, now and then fluttering their inked wings of their own accord. Think of Victory Day and Night. Dutch Island of Tholen Capitulates. 13 English Fighter Planes Shot Down by 6 Messerschmitts. The tassels all lay straight on the Persian carpet – not genuine Persian, but so close to it that only a Persian himself could tell the difference, and as the likeable young man at Wertheim’s had asked, how many Persians came to visit? He and Brigitte had laughed at the thought – a Persian gentleman, with his billowing trousers and his funny little curl-toed slippers, calling on the Heilmanns of Charlottenburg, Berlin! And there in the corner sat the cherrywood sideboard, a remnant from another time, too large for the apartment, in truth, but along with the grandfather clock one of the few pieces remaining from Gottlieb’s family villa in Grunewald. It always looked as if it were about to topple forward, pinning beneath it anyone who happened to be passing; Brigitte would have preferred the oak settle carved with bears, but that had gone to Hannelore. Here in the dim light she caught sight of her reflection in the polished veneer, an indistinct figure, out of place too. But no, she told herself – the room was the same as ever. It was the same room in the same apartment in the same building. All was as it should be.
*
‘Gather round, children, gather round; I have no intention of raising my voice today. Now, do you see the rows of beautiful new radios? At the moment they are quite empty, of course. They all start out like that, in much the same way humans do, but by the time they have made their way along the production line they will be fully functional. Functional, children – a useful word – who can give me another word for functional? Excellent, Sieglinde. Add functional to your list of useful words, everybody – just in your head for now, but when we’re back at school we can write it in our vocabulary notebooks so that we will learn it. Now, here we can see the workers fitting all the different parts together that will make the radios go. Remember, if you have an intelligent question, you may ask it. So many separate pieces, children, aren’t there? And if just one of them is left out, or fitted incorrectly, the radio will be defective and therefore useless. Defective, children? Defective? Another one for the list. You can see what complicated machines these are, and yet they are also affordable machines, because in this country we believe that every family should have its own radio, and this is why we call them our Volksempfänger, our People’s Receivers, and so we shall pause for a moment and say thank you to our Führer Herr Hitler and thank you to our Gauleiter Dr Goebbels, even though they are not here in person.
‘And do you know what makes our radios so special? They are very particular about the company they keep. What am I getting at here, children? What is my meaning? Well, in addition to being affordable and beautiful – and yes, Jutta, I suppose they do look like little churches, churches for dolls and mice – they will pick up only German stations. Our Volksempfänger simply refuse to listen to transmissions from anywhere else. English and American radios, on the other hand, do not discriminate, and will blurt all kinds of dangerous and disgusting stories that have no place in a decent home. They catch whatever is floating around and they pass it on. But look how particular our workers are – how clean and exact. These radios are built to house the Führer’s voice, and the Gauleiter’s voice, and the stories that describe our latest victories, and Beethoven and Bach. They do not stuff themselves with gossip and slander and weird syncopations. No, they bring us the Request Concert that unites us with our brave soldiers who are listening at the front, and together we can hear “Good Night, Mother” and “Three Lilies” and the amusing “Nothing Can Shake a Sailor”, and we can hear the names of newborn babies whose fathers are away at war and may not yet know that they are fathers. And look, the last man on the production line – what is his job? Once the insides are where they should be and the back is screwed down? What is he doing, children? We can’t ask him because he doesn’t appear to speak any German, but we can see that he is the man who attaches the warnings, the little signs that tell us how to behave, because we must not mistreat our Volksempfänger and we must not try to listen to enemy broadcasts, and it is sensible and proper to remind ourselves of this.’
*
At home, only Vati was allowed to handle the radio. It occupied a small table at the far end of the sofa, a dark block sitting with its back to the wall, watching the family, working up a temperature. Being a prophet is a thankless business, it said. We National Socialists seldom make prophecies, but we never make false ones. When the signal faltered, when ghostly voices talked over the broadcast, Vati knew how to fix it; he took the wire and cut through the ghosts until the proper words became clear, until they buzzed through him like blood. He did not listen to Sieglinde when it was talking. If she opened her mouth to ask him something, he held up a hand and she knew she had to wait. What if Germany won the war, but missed the announcement?
In the evenings, Vati liked to sit with a tray on his lap and cut out his silhouettes, and Sieglinde sat beside him, watching the shapes emerge from the black paper: cathedrals and mountains, fir trees and foxes, night birds that dipped their wings above dark houses. The light from the ceiling lamp struck Vati’s spectacles, and sometimes, from certain angles, Sieglinde could not see his eyes at all, just the glare of the glass. She knew that other girls sat on their fathers’ laps and listened to stories – but the silhouettes were Vati’s stories, and she did not mind that it was these he held instead of her. She studied his wristwatch as he worked, cupping her palms around it to see its lopsided arms shining pale green and poisonous; little arrows pointing now at her mother, now at herself, now at the black paper falling like leaves, now at Vati’s own heart. Gently he pulled his hand away and continued with his cutting, making not just a bird but a bird-shaped hole; not just a house but the space a house once filled. When he removed the watch each evening, Sieglinde knew, it left behind a pale patch on his wrist, a memory of itself, so that he would not forget to put it on again in the morning when he was getting ready for work. He had an important job, and could not be late, and never was.
Vati timed himself with the watch when he cleaned his teeth at night – one minute for the upper row and one minute for the lower – and then he placed it next to his bed, where it carried on ticking even when he was asleep, the hands meeting once every hour, a pair of scissors snipping away at the night. If Sieglinde crept into her parents’ room after one of her bad dreams she could see the hands glimmering from Vati’s bedside cabinet, moving too slowly for her to catch. She wanted to witness time passing, to know that morning would come, and she tried fooling the hands, pretend
ing she was not looking, watching them from the corner of her eye. And there on the dressing table was the hand-shaped vase, as white as the moon – was it also moving? Its fingers trembling at the sound of distant planes? On these nights, when the planes were almost too remote to hear, Sieglinde wished she could climb into her parents’ bed. But this was not a gypsy camp; this was not a den of dogs.
*
Brigitte scanned the meagre contents of the pantry and frowned. She looked in kitchen cupboards and drawers; she looked on bookshelves and in the sideboard in the living room where she kept the good tablecloths and the little green demitasse cups. She opened the medicine cabinet and the wardrobes, the hatboxes and the cake tins. If something terrible happened – there had not been many bombs, not so far, but everyone whispered that more would come, and she could not rest, she could not sleep. And if she had no proof of what she owned – if there were no records – then where and who would she be? It was curious, she thought, how an object embedded itself into a person’s life; how it disguised itself in familiar surroundings. The person might touch it every day without giving it a second thought – a particular coffee pot used each morning, or a ring with an inscription rubbed almost smooth, from a time when pet names still applied. But if that object were suddenly destroyed, could the person describe it beyond its most superficial qualities? White with blue trim. Rose gold with a milled edge. Brigitte recalled a stage act she had seen at the Wintergarten with Gottlieb in the early days, shortly after they met: the performer asked the audience to make up a story, calling out lines to him, the more complicated the better, and then he relayed them back to the delighted crowd word for word. She had glanced at Gottlieb as they clapped and cheered with everyone else, trying to imagine a future time when she would have committed to heart the line of his jaw, the reach of his long fine fingers, the secret swirl of his ear. What was the trick? Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
She unwrapped the ledger. She had chosen it for its thick spine and marbled cover, its calm weight a wonder to her restless hands. The latticed pages, ruled up in columns and rows of red and blue, held no surprises, no shocks, each one the same as the last. She began to count.
*
When Sieglinde and Jürgen returned home at lunchtime Mutti had all the crockery stacked on the kitchen table and was going over it piece by piece, her fingernail a bird’s beak tapping at the plates and cups and bowls, checking each pile not once but several times before making a note of it in a book. Every cupboard and drawer stood open, and Sieglinde felt uneasy at the sight of her family’s belongings laid bare, even the special and dangerous things, the things she wasn’t allowed to touch: the valuables and breakables, the knives and the poisons.
No food simmered on the stovetop or sat cooling on the table, but perhaps Mutti had just arrived home herself; perhaps she had been busy queueing at the market, only to find nothing left by the time it was her turn. Sieglinde could hear Kurt crying from his cot at the other end of the apartment. Jürgen crawled underneath the table and began running his soldiers down with a tank one by one, each little man of lead dying many times over.
‘Mutti?’ she said. ‘Shall I help you make lunch?’
‘We must prepare an inventory,’ said Mutti. ‘Do you see? Each item must be described, then given a code – a number – according to its size and use, and then it must be listed in order of its position in the room.’
Sieglinde said nothing, beginning instead to prepare some bread and paper-thin slices of sausage for the boys. Mutti seemed not to notice, and did not stop to eat – there was too much to do, she said. But how could she not be hungry? Sieglinde was hungry all the time.
Over the following weeks Mutti worked her way through the entire apartment, taking stock of slippers, books, jigsaw puzzles, gramophone records, searching every centimetre of every room as if she had lost something. She counted Jürgen’s soldiers and Sieglinde’s hair-ribbons. She counted the everyday tablecloths and the white damask ones kept for Tante Hannelore’s visits. She counted the green antique coffee cups with their little gold handles that were almost too small to hold. She counted the light bulbs in the lamps, the envelopes in the desk; she counted the scraps of old aprons and shirts torn into dusters. Cakes of soap. Pairs of scissors. Knitting needles. Piano keys. Vases made into hands. Teeth made into brooches. Old razorblades rubbed sharp on the inside of a glass jar. Glass jars. Pins and pens. Stamps and buckets. And when she had finished, she began again, because of course mistakes were possible, she was only human, and besides, things changed, they changed all the time, whether you were watching or not, but especially if you were not. Sieglinde watched as she rechecked the cutlery, the wine glasses and the china, everyday and best, recording the latest figures in the marbled ledger. You had to keep on top of it, she said, asking Sieglinde to unfold pillowcases and sheets and hold them up so she could inspect them for flaws, then getting her to refold them and return them to their proper row on the proper shelf, neat white squares, clean white squares. It was a relief to have everything sorted and accounted for by the end of the day, she said; she could sit down in the evening and relax.
*
Vati has made a Christmas silhouette: a cottage alone in the falling snow, far from anywhere, the smoke from its chimney spelling out a greeting: Frohes Fest. For whom are these weightless words? The snow, the moon? On Christmas Eve I see him hanging it in the branches of their tree, a spangled forest in the middle of the city, four floors up. And Sieglinde and Mutti have assembled a gingerbread house, and in the candlelight it looks almost real, almost like the gingerbread houses they have made for other Christmases, with their walls iced together and decorated with sweets, and liquorice slates on the roof. Vati says they have done a marvellous job, and it’s only when you look closely that you notice it’s cardboard painted brown and pasted with bits of coloured paper.
The Führer is everywhere present this evening, wherever Germans gather; He will your salvation be; children, let me enter, so cold is the winter, doors to me open, lest I am frozen. Wherever we gather he is there, glittering in the frost on the glass and in the candle flames on the green-black wreaths, adding his voice to our carols; a spotless rose is growing, sprung from a tender root; God has left His throne on high. He is falling so gently on the roofs and the sills; still, still, still; gathering on the thresholds and pushing at the doors, changing the colour of the world; he is covering up the ugly and the barren and bare; let us be glad and merry; he is breathing down our chimneys to coax the fires high. And he is touching his wine glass to ours, and he is stealing into silent rooms and hiding gifts; tomorrow, children, you’ll get a surprise; and he is bowing his head and giving thanks for what is to come, and he is cutting the dead-eyed head from the fish and warning of the bones.
And is he also in the cold notes of the church bells? And in the church, too, calling through dolorous pipes as thick as a man’s trunk and as narrow as a finger? Is he in the stable, is he watching the manger, is he the bringer of good news? Is he the great forged star, hard with hope?
I have seen him in these places; I have seen him take these forms.
April 1941
Near Leipzig
One of Erich’s first memories is this: his mother holding him by the wrists and spinning him round and round, the garden blurring into ribbons of green and yellow, and only her white skirt in focus, the bell-shaped centre of the world. He remembers his laugh falling from his mouth, and hers falling from the sky. He remembers the feeling of spinning faster and faster, gaining such momentum that it seemed the very air was pulling him away from her, and he thought he might catapult from her grasp and travel so far and so high that he would land in an unknown place, from which he could not find his way back.
This is how he feels when he wakes in the night with a fever: as if he is spinning. He has had a bad cold and Mama has been keeping her eye on him, refusing to let him outside – you can’t be too careful, she says – but now, despite her being so caref
ul, it has turned into pneumonia. I watch her sponging his face with a cool cloth, holding her hand to his forehead, lifting him to sip from a glass of water. (What is fever? What is thirst? If I knew them, I would only long for someone to take them away.)
For two weeks Erich must lie in isolation, all visitors forbidden from entering the room and Papa choosing not to. Tante Uschi and Oma Kröning call to him from the passage, asking whether he feels any better.
‘Not even a little bit?’ they say. ‘Are you sure?’
He cannot make out their faces but he can see the gold cross around Oma Kröning’s neck when it catches the light, and Tante Uschi’s pale blond hair, which is the same colour as Mama’s only much thinner and shorter. Mama brings him meals at all the correct mealtimes, as well as a selection of books he can look at by himself, and games to be played by one person, and she piles four feather quilts on his bed to try to break the fever. Papa even lets him borrow his cigarette card album, which is not just an album but a proper book with stories about the Life of the Führer. Papa has pasted the pictures into the correct gaps – they are numbered so you cannot make a mistake, you cannot mount the picture of the Führer visiting the Schiller House in Weimar alongside him meeting Mussolini in Venice, just as you cannot have him consecrating the flags with the blood banner next to the one of him being light-hearted in the Harz mountains. That would not match the story; it would make no sense.
‘I know you’ll be careful with it,’ Papa calls – but Erich cannot focus on the album; the photographs begin to blur and swim, and he vomits on his sheets.
On Sundays Mama lights a candle on his windowsill because he cannot go to church; from his bed he listens to the bells ringing, and in the double panes the little flame is reflected twice over, the second fainter than the first, its pale memory. And are two doves alighting in two linden trees? Are two Ronjas grazing on the grass in two apple orchards? Are two Papas tapping the ash from their pipes, the briarwood bowls as shiny as chestnuts, and two Mamas making Leipzig larks in two kitchens, their faces bright with the heat of two ovens? Does everything tow its own ghost?