The Wish Child Read online

  The doctor comes with his black bag that is dark and deep, and he examines him and confers with his parents, who nod at everything he says, because one agrees with such men; that is simply the proper thing to do. They arrange for a girl from the Reich Labour Service to come to the house and bathe him, too: what is she called? Fräulein Else, Fräulein Ilsa? Erich cannot hold on to her name, nor her face, but he knows her hands, strong and thick, wringing the cloth in the steaming bowl and washing every part of him. She lifts his limp arms, cups his heels in her palms, rolls him first one way and then the other. The water is almost too hot to bear, but her touch does not sting, not exactly; she is so quick that his skin, while failing to register pain, still tingles with the relief of it passing. She does not speak as she works, tending to his body as if laying it out for the family’s final viewing. And yes, he has heard them talk of his death, Mama and Papa, peering in from the passage as if trying to catch sight of it in the darkened room, and for a time it lies in the bed beside him and does not sleep. And a wolf sits in the fireplace and watches him, and this too is his death, and the birds on his bedside lamp turn their black eyes towards him, and they too are his death. He thinks of the wicked things he has done: skimming the cream from the milk when nobody is there to see; tearing the story about the thumb-snipping tailor from his Struwwelpeter book and stuffing it into the oven in the kitchen.

  One morning Oma Kröning marches into Erich’s room and says she does not care about catching pneumonia. She helps him to sit up, and he can see the apple orchard, where the blossom is cloudy white. Near the trees stand the beehives in the shape of people, and Oma Kröning settles herself on the edge of Erich’s bed and tells him how Opa Kröning carved them himself, decades earlier: he went far into the forest, to where the oaks grew, and marked the dead ones with his axe. He was still a young man then – this was well before the blood cancer took him – and he sawed down the rotten trees and hollowed out their hearts, standing back and studying each of the trunks in turn, deciding where to cut the eyes, where to open the mouths. On a cool autumn day, when the air was rich with the scent of turned earth and burning chaff, he grasped his chisel and recalled the face of his brother, fallen at Saint-Privat, and the wood took on the shape of this remembered boy. Your Opa was very clever with faces, says Oma Kröning. Look at the high forehead, the narrow shoulders: Gustav is home. Nothing is lost. And perhaps when Erich is better, Papa will carve a hive that has his face, Erich’s face. Would he like that? Yes, he says – but I can see that he is not at all sure.

  ‘Who are the other hives?’ he asks, although he has heard their stories many times before. Oma Kröning enjoys telling them; she says it is important these things are not forgotten, and one day Erich must tell them to his own children.

  That one, she says, is the little Frankish butcher who came with his knife when the pigs and calves were ready, and that one is the thin-haired pastor in his black peaked hat. The most slender trunk, she says, carries the image of Luise, Opa Kröning’s first love, who married another and died not yet twenty; he was careful when he carved her, aware of how easily his chisel could gouge and pierce. But Saint John the Baptist in his lambskin cloak? asks Erich. And the hook-nosed moneylender? Opa Kröning didn’t know them, did he? No, he didn’t know them, says Oma Kröning, but even if you have never seen a wolf, all the same, you can describe one. And she tucks him back into bed, and kisses his hot forehead, which is very strange to me; I think she really must not care if she dies.

  Later, when she has gone, and Erich’s fever is again on the rise, a breeze picks up. It ruffles the apple trees, runs its fingers across the nearby lake and gushes into the hives. And the bees come and go through their open mouths, and the bees fill their breasts with honeycomb hearts and their throats with glassy wings, and black and gold are the thoughts of the dead. The wooden figures begin to speak, their voices breaking into a thousand thrumming parts, and this is what I think I hear but do not understand. And this is what I think Erich hears but does not understand. Forgive me my errors:

  I loved your grandfather but my sister loved him also, and she walked with him in the forest and picked wild berries, and he chose her, my sister with the sweet-stained fingers and the hair that smelled of the trees. I wanted my sorrow to sink me beneath the lake and hold me there until I turned first to water and then to ice. I wanted my sorrow to drag my sister under, and Anton too. The man I married was a good man, a kind man, my second love, and he did not walk in the forest with another, nor eat wild berries from her hand. In the slow hours of my death, my newborn son already cold beside me, I thought of Anton, your grandfather, and I thought he was right to have chosen my sister, because he would not lose me now, and I spoke his name as my husband stroked my hair.

  For hours we marched in the high heat of August. We could not drink from the wells; it was said the French had poisoned the water. We came in at the battle’s end, when our men had taken Gravelotte; they had forced the French across the ravine, but the dead lay so thick to their backs that they could not retreat. At

  Saint-Privat the sun was sinking. The air was full of shot and shells and flashes from the French guns that stabbed at the falling night, and above the smoke and fury the terrible grinding roll of the mitrailleuse. We built barricades from the dead. Heralds on horseback would take word to the king: twenty thousand. In the morning we would be buried, and our rifles fired until they too were empty. The road to Verdun reached out to the horizon.

  I make the sweetest honey – so much gold in the pockets of my long black coat – but I will bake my bread from the blood of your children.

  I grew so weary of them. Week after week they brought me their souls; they thought I could untangle their every sin. Yet the things they confided took root in me: the stolen coins and the whipped dogs, the curses and the covetings. They clogged me up. I wished they would leave me to my own cruelties, which were my familiar and quiet belongings.

  As a boy I travelled from house to house, learning from my father the craft of killing, and when my son reached the proper age he learned it from me. Blood was as usual to us as milk to the farmer; it pattered into the pails at our feet, fat with life. The knife, ash-handled, warmed as I worked, a comfort in my palm. I felt a loss when I laid it down; it brought me a calm unknown since the cradle. We took the clotting blood, my father and I, my son and I, and mixed it with the fat of the animal, and pushed it into the unwound guts of the animal, and this was to us a wonder: a rearrangement of flesh, a restoration. Great meaty ropes we made, the boneless limbs of an uncharted beast. I find myself thinking more and more of the knife. Of its heft and shape in my hand. Of its utmost suitability.

  Whom think ye that I am? I am not he. But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes of his feet I am not worthy to loose. O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

  The next day the doctor listens to his chest, and Erich fears he will hear his thoughts about skimmed cream and torn books – and his thoughts about Fräulein Ilsa or Else, too, which flare in the stethoscope’s shrewd ear, a peculiar fever he cannot douse.

  ‘Hmm,’ says the doctor, and ‘Aha,’ and ‘So so,’ and Erich lies as still as he can and watches the clock that Mama has placed on the mantelpiece.

  When he feels a little better he plays Black Peter against himself, and always wins, and then he has to be quick about packing the cards away – it is correct to keep one’s things tidy and clean – or else Black Peter begins to rise and to sprinkle the room with soot. Fräulein Else or Ilsa comes and goes, and the doctor listens in on his heart, and the wolf watches from the fireplace and the birds from the lamp and the hives from the orchard, and Papa makes his way up and down the passage and does not stop, passing by his door like a spirit.

  And when his death has left him, again he hears the doctor outside his room: His growth will be stunted. He will always be a weakling. But this cannot be true, thinks Erich: I beat the disease. I did not die.

 
*

  It rained the morning of the parade. Mama kept going to the window to check on the weather, glaring at the clouds as if she could make them vanish.

  ‘He will still come,’ said Papa. ‘He was at the Somme.’

  By afternoon the sky had cleared, and the Krönings put on their church clothes and made their way into Leipzig. There was a hum in the spring air, the first phase of a swarm; people were straightening ties and adjusting collars, smoothing hair and levelling hems, now and then glancing towards the black hands of the clock. Banners and bunting hung from every window, turning all the puddles red, as if something terrible had happened, and all the church bells were ringing, and the sun caught at the pieces of mirror on homemade periscopes and sent signals flashing like code. Papa bought paper flags on sticks, one for each of them, and when the first soldiers marched into view and everybody began to wave at once you could feel the air flex and shift and change. Erich was not tall enough – all he could make out were shoals of red pennants slipping across the blue sky – but Papa lifted him up high and it was both the same and not the same as when Mama had spun him around in the garden. The cheering crashed against the cobblestones, louder than anyone expected (but were there not persons ensuring this din? Were they not mingling with the crowd, dressed in normal clothes?). The Krönings waved until they thought their arms would crack. Girls strewed flowers in front of the advancing soldiers, and when the Führer’s car at last appeared it moved slowly through this instant meadow, its occupant looking to the left and the right as if trying to find a particular address.

  Erich held his flag so tightly that his hand hurt, and when they were home again he could still see the furrow in his palm: a life line, a love line. Mama and Papa gave him their flags to keep too, and he put them on his windowsill in an empty honey jar that had a chipped rim and therefore could not be used again for honey. Mama turned on the radio and hummed along to ‘Friends, Life Is Worth Living’, and Erich asked permission to look at Papa’s cigarette card album about the Führer. There were still a few blanks on some of the pages, waiting for pictures Papa had not managed to collect, and he never would collect them now, because the current ones were about Baroque Painting and England the Robber State, and you certainly couldn’t paste them into the Life of the Führer. For those sections, all Erich had to go on were the captions, and from them he imagined the missing scenes: Again and again the Führer is seen surrounded by children; A simple stew, even for the Chancellor of the German Reich; Everyone wants to shake the Führer’s hand; Hitler has given us tanks again; ‘Here, my Führer, is my grandchild’. In a way these were his favourite pages of all, because he could picture himself in them.

  *

  I have watched Erich growing taller and older, swimming as fast as a fish in the lake, building dark shelters in the forest and believing Mama cannot find him. I have watched him lying beneath the needles, so still, so still, listening for the beehive voices that tell him their lives in little pieces. Above the smoke and fury the terrible grinding roll. Whom think ye that I am? When Papa goes away to Russia to be a soldier, Mama says that Erich must not hide any more. He is too happy with his own company, she says, sees nothing wrong in playing on his own while the other boys in the village take one another prisoner. Now that he has started school, he must make an effort to form allegiances.

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ he says.

  ‘Friends,’ she says. ‘You must make friends. Don’t you want to join in?’

  But while he was trapped in bed, all the other boys chose their friends. ‘I have nobody,’ he says, and in that instant I am in his skin and behind his eyes.

  He shows Mama a game he has made: a circle of card with a length of string fastened to either edge. He has drawn half a face on the front and the other half on the back, but when he takes the strings and spins the card the halves combine, and the face is whole.

  The Wax Woman

  The garden   ,

  Cool rain sinks into the flowers.

  Summer shudders

  Quietly towards his  .

  Leaf after leaf drops golden

  From the high acacia tree.

  Summer gives a   , astonished

  In his    garden’s  .

  For a long while he lingers

  At the roses,    for  .

  Slowly he closes

  His great,    eyes.

  September 1941

  Berlin

  ‘What do you do at work?’ Sieglinde asked her father, swinging his hand in hers as they set out along Kantstrasse. They were visiting the zoo, a treat for Jürgen’s birthday, and Mutti and the boys had gone on ahead. Sieglinde was wearing the little brooch made from Vati’s baby teeth, and every so often it caught on her braid and made Vati laugh.

  ‘Stop biting me!’ she said.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said.

  They turned into Joachimsthalerstrasse and soon they could see Mutti and Jürgen and Kurt waiting at the Lion Gate, which led not to the lions but the elephants. Against the bright sky to the north the flak tower rose like a castle, and it was full of paintings and sculptures and priceless objects – the head of Nefertiti, the altar of Zeus – and it held an entire hospital, and plenty of air, and it could not be bombed.

  ‘But what is your job?’ she asked again.

  ‘I make things safe,’ said Vati.

  ‘What sorts of things?’

  ‘Just things.’

  ‘Buildings? Bomb shelters?’

  ‘Not those sorts of things.’

  ‘Sharp things, then. Razorblades. Broken glass.’

  ‘It’s not like that, Siggi.’

  ‘Ropes on pianos, for all the people moving out of their apartments.’

  Vati laughed again.

  ‘The water. The sky. Air. Conversations!’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not like that.’

  ‘What is it like, then?’

  ‘I take dangerous things away, so they won’t be dangerous any more.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sieglinde, and she thought: polio, lit windows, neighbours? She didn’t ask, though; she supposed this was another question nobody would answer. Vati would not tell her what he did at work, just as Mutti would not tell her why Dr Rosenberg was no longer their doctor, why a different man sat at his desk, tapping Sieglinde’s bones and counting her heartbeats. ‘What if your building is bombed?’ she asked instead.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Vati. ‘They’ve covered it up so it looks like a forest, and put up false ones somewhere else. Isn’t that clever?’

  Sieglinde nodded; yes, it was very clever indeed.

  They had caught up to Mutti and the boys now, and Vati bought their tickets and they filed through the gate. First they stopped to watch the elephants in their enclosure, which wasn’t enclosed at all, because there were no walls, just a ring of spikes that would hurt the elephants’ feet if they tried to walk across them to where the people stood. The tree-trunks were wrapped in spikes too, because otherwise the elephants would eat the bark and the trees would die. There must have been a time for every elephant, though, Sieglinde thought, when it tried to eat the bark, or cross the spikes – mustn’t there? Before it learned that it could not? She wanted to ask Vati, but already he and Mutti and the boys were moving on, because Titine the chimpanzee was riding her bicycle, which was not to be missed. The chimpanzees could smoke cigarettes and sit at tables and eat with spoons, just like human beings, and Jürgen said he would like to have one for a pet, but Vati said that would not be natural.

  ‘You know,’ said Mutti, ‘when I was a little girl, they used to put Indians on display. Indians, and sometimes Eskimos, and African warriors with bones through their noses.’

  ‘Can we see them?’ said Jürgen. ‘Do they have spears? And poisonous darts?’

  ‘Oh no, they don’t display them any more,’ said Mutti. When they reached the lions Vati said they should have their photo taken, because there were three lion cubs and thre
e children, and so they waited while another family had their turn, and everyone laughed when the French zookeeper put a cub into the other family’s pram, right in with the baby, and Sieglinde tugged Mutti’s sleeve and said, ‘What if they take the baby lion home, and leave the baby boy here?’ but Mutti did not answer her, because she was talking to the other Mutti and saying, ‘Six children, my goodness, what a busy life you must have.’

  Then it was the Heilmanns’ turn, and they sat on the bench and the French zookeeper put the cubs on their laps, and Kurt’s cub kept trying to bite his nose and even though the French zookeeper said he was just playing, Kurt would not stop crying, and the photo was ruined.

  The bear looked bored. It sat behind its bars and stared at nothing, not even caring about all the people who had come to see it, which was quite rude.

  ‘I don’t think he likes it here,’ said Jürgen.

  ‘He does look gloomy,’ said Sieglinde.

  The people stood before the enclosure and waited for the bear to do something: to show its teeth, to growl, to stand on its hind legs like the one in the brochure. A man looked at his watch. A young soldier roared at the bear, but still it did not react. Behind a thousand bars, no world.

  ‘I think it’s broken,’ said the soldier.

  ‘Boken,’ said Kurt, trying out the word in his mouth.

  ‘Is he broken?’ said Jürgen, looking as if he might cry.

  ‘Of course not, of course not, what a thing to say,’ said Mutti, glaring.