The Wish Child Page 6

  ‘But he does seem unhappy,’ said Sieglinde.

  ‘I think he’s just tired,’ said Mutti. ‘Why would he be unhappy? He has everything he could possibly want.’

  ‘No one is kinder to animals than we are,’ said Vati. ‘In America they experiment on monkeys, and the French boil their lobsters alive –’

  ‘Thank you, Gottlieb,’ said Mutti.

  ‘Well. My point is, we look after our animals,’ said Vati. ‘Even the wolf is protected.’

  *

  Sieglinde says, ‘Mutti, the apartment is bigger.’

  I watch through the window, I sit with the crow. Do the dead take the form of birds? We wait and we listen.

  Mutti says, ‘Nonsense, Siggi. You shouldn’t make these things up.’ She has her powder compact open and is looking in its secret mirror, dabbing her forehead and her chin with the little pad she keeps in there to cover any blemishes.

  Sieglinde says, ‘But the living room is longer. Before, if I sat on the sofa and held out my arms, Kurt could walk all the way from the far wall in ten steps.’ (And when he reached his sister he would squeal as she swung him onto her knee and kissed his nose, and he knew he had done something good.) ‘Now it’s fifteen.’

  ‘Children are like that,’ says Mutti. ‘One day they can buckle their own shoes, the next day their Mutti has to do it for them again. One day they can feed themselves, the next day they’re rubbing stewed apple through their hair like a monkey and their Mutti must clean them up.’ Dab, dab, goes the little pad; just enough to look natural. The crow pecks at the window, its beak striking the glass like hail.

  ‘Monkeys eat bananas,’ says Sieglinde.

  ‘So they do,’ says Mutti. ‘You’re a clever girl, Siggi. No more stories, now.’ In her secret mirror the crow tilts its head.

  *

  The Heilmanns are happy in their marriage. Look at them: they are a suitable match, a good example; no crooked bones, no deficits, no shadows in the blood. Yes, they are happy, people say they are happy, even though Brigitte’s nerves are bad whenever there is a raid. It’s just leaflet drops, Gottlieb tells her. Nuisance raiding. But she flinches at any loud noise, any sudden movement; around her Gottlieb feels he is walking underwater. Still, when he considers other wives – the bad teeth and double chins, the veins and the moles, the poorly designed torsos – he counts his blessings. Brigitte does not wear trousers or lipstick or heels; she does not curl or starve or dye. She was just eighteen when they met; a respectable girl from a respectable family in Celle; as malleable as wax. She answered his newspaper notice, and there is no shame in that; lots of decent Germans advertise for the right sort of spouse. Besides, nobody remembers it now, and if they do, it is never mentioned.

  ‘England,’ he reminds her. ‘We are fighting the English. We are not at war with Britain.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ she says.

  ‘Still, we say we are at war with the English. That is what we say.’

  ‘But everybody knows we mean Britain.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why don’t we say it?’

  ‘Because we are fighting an island, not an empire. When we have won we’ll say it was an empire, but for now it is an island. You must listen.’

  *

  Here is Gottlieb Heilmann on a Monday morning, arriving ten minutes early to his job. See how he hangs his hat and coat on the hook that bears his name, how he places his briefcase at the right-hand side of his desk, sits down at his typewriter and removes its cover. The green carapace unclicks, the blank paper and the carbon paper twist into the machine and the letters raise their inky arms. Choice, he types. Opinion. Love. His office is one of dozens in the Division – perhaps hundreds; he does not know – but his name is painted on the frosted-glass door, and that is how he knows he is in the right place and has not taken a wrong turn, for the building is the sort of building that can make a man lose his bearings. So here he is, sitting behind the frosted-glass door labelled Heilmann, and from inside the office the name is backwards and makes no sense and is not his name, and the letters are painted in gold and shadowed in black to give them depth, the illusion of depth, like letters carved into a gravestone. And I say office because everybody says office, but behind the frosted-glass door the walls reach neither the ceiling nor the floor, and they are set with frosted glass too, winter windows that never clear, and above them drift the sighs and whispers of Gottlieb’s colleagues, and through them he can make out the hazy shapes of men like himself, but not their faces (never their faces).

  Gottlieb finds it curious to think he could not even type when he began working for the Division in 1939. It was his skill with scissors and blades that secured him the job, he discovered; his neighbour Herr Schuttmann, who had seen his silhouettes and who knew an official who knew another official, passed the information on. At the interview Gottlieb had the feeling that decisions had been made already, but when one of the men asked to see his tools he took them from his briefcase along with a sheet of paper and gave a demonstration, fashioning a tiny Siegessäule in a matter of minutes, black Victory wielding her black laurel. The man recognised the monument at once.

  ‘I choose only German subjects,’ said Gottlieb, and this was true; he felt no affinity with such distant marvels as the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon, wanting instead to reproduce his homeland, for the shape of a thing told what it truly was. He never invented, and he took pride in getting every detail correct: the raised hooves of the horses on the Brandenburg Gate; the slant of the artificial ruins overlooking Sanssouci; Neuschwanstein’s crow-stepped gable; Munich’s spiky carillon tower with its knight who died every day.

  The man kept the paper Siegessäule, slipping it into a file. Gottlieb did not catch his name, and when the same man showed him the office that would be his on his first day, he hadn’t liked to ask. The man was talking and pointing, making sure Gottlieb knew what was expected of him, ending each sentence with questions that did not seem to require an answer. Do you understand. Is that clear. Gottlieb was to type all reports and correspondence himself. He was to start each day with a summary of his output from the previous day, listing the number of words in each category and sub-category as well as the total number of corrections made, and then he was to confirm with a signature that the waste material had been disposed of in the proper manner. The man pulled open an endless drawer as he talked, its steel bed reaching clear across the room, the side-rails recalling the guards on cots that keep infants from falling during fretful dreams. Gottlieb ran a hand along its cool and impossible length. Was this not the kind of drawer that held the nameless dead? The hanged and the drowned, the victims of exposure? It would house Gottlieb’s daily reports, said the man, filed according to the title of the parent text. If a report included multiple titles, then carbon copies of that report were to be filed according to their respective titles, with an addendum clarifying that multiple texts were included, and listing the names of those other texts in order for cross-referencing if necessary.

  Gottlieb had assumed such matters would be seen to by secretaries: smartly groomed young women with neat desks and quick fingers. Perhaps, he had thought, he would even have such a woman assigned to him for his own use – a Silke or a Minna who always followed his instructions and for whom he would purchase small, suitable gifts on her birthday and at Christmas. She would blush when presented with these tokens of gratitude, and would not cast them to the back of a drawer all but untouched. She would not list them in a ledger as if they were soup bowls or pillowcases. She would not keep breaking them and asking him to glue them back together. She would keep the boxes they came in, filling them with love letters or seashells or dead flowers, and she would smooth the wrinkles from the paper that bore the names of elegant department stores: Hertie, KaDeWe, Wertheim; one could not argue with the quality of their wares, and besides, they were in German hands now.

  ‘I think there has been a miscommunication,’ Gottlieb said to the man whose name he did not know. �
��My position is Senior Retrospective Editor, Publications Division. This was in the letter.’ He retrieved the document – stamped and signed – from his briefcase, but the man waved it away.

  ‘Every employee at the Division takes responsibility for his own documents, even the Minister,’ said the man. ‘Nobody has access to another’s papers. It minimises risk. Words are only a means to an end.’

  ‘Nobody has access?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘So my daily reports – who will read them?’ said Gottlieb.

  ‘As I said, it minimises risk.’ The man removed the cover from the typewriter and set it aside, gesturing to the machine as if introducing a guest of some standing. Gottlieb stared at its rows of black keys, which were not even in alphabetical order, and the man, who seemed to understand, said, ‘It is not a difficult instrument to master.’ Gottlieb thought of his Onkel Heinrich’s accordion with its many clicking buttons, its papery throat; he thought of his uncle’s eyes closing as he picked out tunes from memory, and he remembered his own stumbling fingers getting every note wrong as the thing slumped and groaned in his grasp and his mother shook her head and said there is no music in the boy. Gottlieb felt short of air, and the man was leaving him now, leaving him to begin his work, and there were so many questions he should have asked and had not.

  Is it really two years since that first uncertain day? Why, he hardly gives his reports a second thought any more; they almost type themselves. He is fortunate, he knows, that the Division granted him a position. They saw something in him; some secret seed that took root and spread into his every hidden corner. There is a forest within him now, and it is full of sounds you will hear nowhere else these days, and the sounds perch lightly on the branches, and flit beneath the dark canopy, and sing and sing.

  He takes up his scalpel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with  , and the Word was  .

  *

  Each morning at the factory the new Führers wait, lined up on the tables in their dozens, glinting in the early light. They have cooled and hardened and now they are ready, and I see the women go to them, these newborns, cupping them in their palms and looking them over, checking everything is correct. Their production depends on so many people, a whole chain of people, all doing their part, and any number of things can go wrong: deficiencies and distortions, cracks and tears, crazing, contamination; there is no telling what will emerge when the moulds are opened.

  FRAU MÜLLER: This one’s not right.

  FRAU MILLER: It’s a bad batch.

  FRAU MÜLLER: The tip of the nose, the left ear …

  FRAU MILLER: That’s the fourth nose this week.

  FRAU MÜLLER: It’s not an omen.

  FRAU MILLER: Of course it’s not an omen.

  FRAU MÜLLER: Stop staring at it, then.

  FRAU MILLER: If anything were to happen to him …

  FRAU MÜLLER: I don’t like it when you talk that way. Nothing will happen.

  FRAU MILLER: Do you know that there are women who kiss his cold form every night?

  FRAU MÜLLER: I have heard of such women.

  FRAU MILLER: Can we blame them?

  FRAU MÜLLER: No. We cannot blame them.

  The heads are lighter than they appear, cast in base metal and finished to look like solid bronze. They warm beneath the women’s hands, coming to life, but if you turn them upside down you will find they are hollow; you will see the backwards mouth, the backwards eyes, the dark dome of the skull. The women touch the flow lines and the voids, the linden-leaf blemishes, deciding what they can correct with their brushes and cloths and what cannot be fixed. There might be a hole in the temple, the suggestion of a wound, a congenital fault: such examples are returned to the furnace and melted back down. I have witnessed this process, the malformed faces distending and collapsing, unmaking themselves.

  And here come the children.

  ‘This is a very special factory, boys and girls. You probably have one of their Führers in your house. Show me how many of you have the Führer in your house … Good. Good. Hiltrud, what about you? Irmgard? My goodness. That does surprise me. Well, perhaps your parents do have the Führer but have simply placed him on a shelf that is too high for you to see, yes, up on high in an honoured position. My own parents have done this with their Führer. These parents are the best sort of parents. And those few of you who really do not have the Führer can go home and tell your Mutti and Vati that they need to fix this, and the sooner the better.’

  *

  Brigitte Heilmann had always admired her sister-in-law’s samovar. Whenever she went to visit Hannelore in Dahlem it sat on the sabre-legged table between them like a trophy, hissing during the gaps in conversation.

  ‘It holds forty cups,’ Hannelore told her. Of course she meant the tea-glasses the Russians used, not proper German cups, but Brigitte had been taught the importance of good manners, and never corrected her sister-in-law on this point.

  The samovar – so Hannelore said – had belonged to the Russian royal family before her parents bought it, and indeed it was very grand, wrought from the heaviest silver, with feet in the shape of lion’s paws and rosewood handles to guard against burns.

  ‘Hannelore’s samovar is the most beautiful thing. I would love to own such a piece,’ Brigitte had said to her husband several times over the years, but he was not a perceptive man.

  She had never attended an auction before, although she had passed the salerooms around the Ku’damm often enough. She had seen the people picking over goods from deceased estates, scrutinising hallmarks, questioning provenance, testing the strength of chairs, the softness of sofas, inspecting crystal for chips and linen for stains. There was something distasteful to Brigitte about buying used wares – you never could be sure exactly who had used them – but lately there had been more and more sale notices in the newspaper, and one in particular caught her eye. General household effects: walnut dining suite, assorted feather beds, upright piano, fine Persian carpets, sewing machine, clocks, silverware, table lamps, costume jewellery, antique samovar, gas stove, typewriter, etc. She lingered over the word antique. Antiques were not the same as used goods; they were pieces of history, and one had a duty to preserve them. And besides, what with the shortages – which were quite necessary, of course they were, she was not arguing with that – it was becoming more and more difficult to find the things one wanted in the shops.

  On her way to the sale she fidgeted and worried, jiggling Kurt on her lap and willing the tram to go faster. Sieglinde had begged to come too, and had rushed home from her half-day at school rather than dawdling with her friends as she usually did, swapping pieces of shrapnel and feeding the squirrels in the Tiergarten and who knew what else. All the same, there was no time to spare, no time for Siggi to say a proper hello to Gottlieb and tell him what she had learned that day. Perhaps somebody else wanted the samovar. Perhaps it was not, in fact, antique. It could be dented, damaged in some way, or of inferior quality. Sometimes the newspapers stretched the truth … but no, she told herself. No; it was a beautiful early autumn Saturday, hardly a cloud in the sky, if you didn’t look for clouds, and the leaves were the colour of the sun and had not yet fallen, and there had been no real raids for weeks.

  She was surprised when they reached the right street to see that it was a residential part of the city, with no auction houses to be found.

  ‘Mutti?’ said Sieglinde. ‘Are we in the right place?’ Brigitte took the notice from her pocket and checked: yes, this was the right place – but had there been a misprint? Had the sale already started somewhere else, and was some other woman buying her samovar?

  ‘Quickly, Siggi,’ she said, and she rushed along the pavement, Kurt’s pushchair jolting and jumping. He did not wake. They passed a newspaper display – Who Is the Enemy? – and a butcher shop, a single pig strung up by its trotters in the window. Ahead of her she could see a mass of people gathered in a front garden where asters bloomed in the flower beds. Such a
crowd, and everyone trying to get inside at once; but still, they did not look like the sort who would appreciate an antique samovar. She and Sieglinde made their way to the fourth floor, dragging Kurt’s pushchair up every step and resting on the landings, ignoring the complaints of those impatient to get past. Woe to the nation that neglects its women and mothers, she thought. It condemns itself. The stairwell smelled of potatoes, and her stomach rumbled; they were missing their midday meal to come to the auction, but sometimes sacrifices were necessary. She could hear fragments of music and conversation as she moved past closed doors, and radios interrupting themselves with trumpets and drums to announce the latest victories. When she reached the fourth floor she caught her breath for a moment and straightened her hat and smoothed Sieglinde’s hair, even letting two or three other people go ahead of them. It would not do to appear too eager. Kurt had woken, and was struggling out of his pushchair.

  ‘Good day,’ Brigitte nodded to the woman at the entrance, then began moving towards the living room, where she could see a table stacked with neat piles of bed linen. ‘Come along, darling,’ she said to Kurt, who had sat down on the hall carpet and was playing with its fringe. Sieglinde, she realised, was already in the kitchen, looking at a marble-topped cabinet.

  ‘One moment,’ called the woman. ‘You need to register. You need a number.’ She tapped a pile of forms with a bitten fingernail.

  ‘Of course, yes,’ said Brigitte, and filled in her details. She smiled at the woman, because although she was anxious to get inside, she understood the importance of paperwork. ‘There’s a big crowd today,’ she said.

  The woman shrugged. ‘I’ve seen bigger. At the one in Delbrückstrasse last week – in Grunewald, you know – there was no room to breathe. Top-quality goods – a whole villa, three storeys. Chandeliers, everything. But who needs a chandelier?’

  ‘Who indeed?’ murmured Brigitte. ‘Siggi!’ she called. ‘This way.’

  In the living room she picked her way through the crowd, holding Kurt’s hand all the while, because it would be so easy to lose him. She paused to consider a piano stool, a pair of bookends, a beaten-pewter clock … and yes, there was the samovar, waiting on an armchair like a courteous host.