The Wish Child Page 7

  ‘Oh!’ said Sieglinde, for she had seen it too. ‘It’s just as nice as Tante Hannelore’s!’

  ‘Don’t you think? If not nicer,’ said Brigitte. Perhaps it too had belonged to royalty; clearly its provenance was sound. The silver possessed that soft bloom seen only on antique pieces, and the handles were of ebony so smooth it might have been black bone.

  ‘Mutti, look at the little tap!’ said Sieglinde – and indeed, it was a fine feature. It took the form of a fish, its body curling serpent-like back on itself before flaring out into a graceful tail, its open mouth the point from which the boiling water would gush. There was even a matching tray in the shape of a silver keyhole.

  ‘Tante Hannelore’s samovar doesn’t have a matching tray,’ said Sieglinde.

  ‘No, Schatz, it doesn’t,’ said Brigitte.

  A little time remained before the auction started, so they explored the rest of the apartment, Kurt trailing behind. The kitchen was very well appointed, with two separate sinks, which she had never seen before.

  ‘One for the pots and pans, and one for the plates and glasses,’ said Sieglinde.

  ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ said Brigitte. Siggi was such a logical child; she took after her father.

  Breadcrumbs sprinkled the table – a miniature trail through the trees stitched on the pretty cloth – and without thinking she cupped her hand and swept them up. That was better. Next to the oven stood a large cabinet with a marble top – the one Sieglinde had seen when they arrived. She pressed her palm to it, feeling the stony coolness that she knew was the secret to the best pastry. She could make perfect Apfeltaschen – Gottlieb’s favourite – if she owned a cabinet like this. Sieglinde was opening the little china drawers, each bearing the name of its fragrant contents: Cloves, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Ginger. They smelled like Christmas.

  ‘Careful, Siggi,’ she said. ‘Don’t spill anything.’ Her own spice rack was a small wooden affair that always made her think of a doll’s chest of drawers, as if she were just playing house. She had never cared for it. She searched the cabinet for a catalogue number but could find none, and when she tried dragging it away from the wall to check its back she discovered it was fixed in place.

  ‘Isn’t it for sale too?’ said Sieglinde.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Brigitte.

  ‘But it would be so nice in our kitchen. And look, it still has lots of cinnamon. We don’t have any left.’

  In the bathroom a showerhead as broad as a sunflower jutted from the ceiling. Brigitte imagined herself standing beneath it, the water surging over her hair and down her body, her own private storm. A facecloth hung over the edge of the bath, and she nudged it with the tip of her shoe. It had dried into a stiff curve and it made a gentle thunk as it fell to the floor, like a book dropped from a sleepy hand late at night. Kurt picked it up and began to chew on it, but Sieglinde took it from him and said, ‘Dirty,’ and led him away before he could register he had lost something.

  They slipped into a bedroom where two women were circling a bassinet. One made a tutting sound as she identified areas of chipped paint on the wicker, while the other, ignoring her, thumped the bare mattress and the pillow.

  ‘Mutti, look!’ said Sieglinde, pointing to a vase on the dressing table – a white china vase in the shape of a hand, exactly the same as the one on Brigitte’s dressing table at home. She picked it up – no damage, no repairs, just a single dead fly rattling around inside. Sieglinde was tugging at the front of her blouse, saying, ‘You’ve done it wrong. Mutti, that’s wrong,’ and she caught sight of herself in the wardrobe’s mirrored door and realised that her blouse buttons were in the wrong buttonholes. Well, really – could the woman who had taken her details at the door not have spoken up? Did people no longer look out for their neighbours? At least, she told herself, fixing her error, those of good breeding would recognise that the blouse, although incorrectly buttoned, was of the best quality – none of this rubbish made from wood pulp. She was careful with her clothes; she made them last. Inside the wardrobe she found two dozen or more empty coat hangers, each padded with satin in the palest shades of peach, yellow, mint, powder blue, the wire hooks adorned with tiny bows in contrasting shades. She ran a finger along them, setting them swinging.

  When she returned to the living room she saw a man examining the samovar; he turned it upside down and its lid fell off, clattering back against the tray. Brigitte winced, but it was not her place to say anything. She busied herself with a pile of children’s books, trying to distract Kurt. How curious, she thought: at the moment the samovar belonged to nobody, but within the next hour or so it would be hers, and she would be quite within her rights to report anybody who treated it so roughly. I write to inform you that today an item that has been in my family for many generations was mishandled and possibly damaged by an individual who obviously has no idea of the value of such artefacts and who is exactly the sort of person we as a nation can do without.

  The auctioneer took his place at a small lectern, as if intending to read from a holy text – and the auction was under way. Hands shot into the air as the woman with the bitten fingernails held item after item aloft. Everything was for sale: the potted plants, the gramophone records, the carpets on the floor, the blinds at the windows. Up and down went the arms of the buyers, saluting the acquisition of these new possessions, and Brigitte, too, found herself bidding on things she had not even known she wanted – things she had not even inspected to make sure they were sound. Her hand seemed to fly up of its own accord.

  As she and the children left the house she saw a woman in the garden frowning at the trampled asters.

  ‘Look at this!’ said the woman. ‘I shall be making a complaint to the authorities.’

  During the tram ride home, Brigitte cradled the samovar on her lap. She could see herself in the silver, the curved surface warming to the temperature of her blood, pulling her face into expressions she could not name.

  *

  The days are shrinking; the field-grey sky descends over the city, and the war keeps on rolling in like bad weather, and the troop trains keep on leaving. Things are wearing thin; even the books are full of holes. Some pages are missing so many words that those remaining cannot support themselves, and they collapse and tear. Slipshod, faulty, it’s all coming apart. In the east they are kicking at Moscow’s door, waiting for the whole rotten structure to come crashing down. And in Berlin the Führer is visiting the cemetery, he is inspecting the graves, and they are clean, they are spotless, as tidy as a German hearth, and the people have made their contributions, the living urged to keep the dust from the dead, and this shows pride and national spirit; yes, the living have paid, and the Führer inspects the dead, watching from behind his postage-stamp moustache, a black square sent from a dark country, and the trees hold their leaves in check, the grass orders its blades, the stones keep to their ranks, in their thousands they are still, the wind itself holds its breath, and beneath the earth the dead make their dirty salute.

  *

  For the first time in his life he found himself face to face with a    not to be appeased or fobbed off by a    or a   , not to be placated by     or song or impressed by clink of spurs and arms, not to be wooed or wheedled with charming ways and light   . For once the boy of twenty-four felt   ,    ,    . It was not the clear, tangible    of the situation – that his child lay   , that tomorrow he had to rejoin his regiment, abandon Cornelie to almost certain and the  of  .

  ‘Look at this,’ Brigitte said, holding up a page. ‘You can see right through it.’

  Gottlieb did not reply, but the book was one of his; he recognised the clean, assured cuts. Brigitte did not grasp the danger of an uncorrected text. He once heard of a bible in Stockholm, written with the help of the Devil and containing his red-clawed image, and that page, the Devil’s page, was the most consulted in the entire volume, the most thumbed and soiled. People were drawn to such things. He could
see fragments of his wife through the corrections; a small green eye, half a lip, a strand of curly dark-blond hair. Yes, that was definitely one of his. He took pride in making his excisions as neat and as small as possible, placing a thick sheet of card beneath the pages so he did not slice through more than one layer, positioning the blade at the exact beginning and the exact end of each word, taking no more paper than was necessary. He had a feeling for how to manipulate the scalpel so that it skimmed the precise point at which white became black and black became white.

  Complaints about the books had been noted, however; they had been collated and typed up and filed.

  ‘Could we not ink out the words in question?’ Gottlieb had asked, demonstrating, he believed, exactly the kind of strategic thinking that would win the war. His suggestion was considered; it was expanded into a three-stage report; it was analysed and edited and reviewed.

  But no. Then the words would still be there, crouched beneath their inky disguise. And besides, it had also become clear that it was not as straightforward as cutting them out, because underneath those words were more words, and they simply took the place of the missing ones, and although they might function perfectly well in their original context, the meaning shifted and changed when they slipped into the holes. And there were other complaints: removing a word on one side of a page interfered too much with the text on the other side. There had even been reports of people pasting in their own words. All sorts of stories were taking shape. Why had nobody thought of this?

  As soon as the Division realised how many altered texts were circulating they established a new procedure, instructing Gottlieb and his colleagues to take only the top layer of the page, and equipping them with blades fashioned from the best surgical steel, blades so thin and so fine they all but vanished when viewed along their cutting edge. It took a little patience to perfect this new procedure, but nobody could say it was not sensible, and after one or two false starts – a torn page, a sliced thumb – it was hailed a great success. Bibles still presented one of the most difficult challenges, of course; their pages refused to behave and often disintegrated entirely, and so a special sub-procedure was established for these cases, and a special blade developed that could scrape away only the ink from a page, leaving it fit to be written on again, and by this means God was replaced with Hitler.

  Was Gottlieb ever tempted to take some of the deleted words home with him? To slip them into his pocket, to fan them out on his dining table, to plant them in other books, perhaps, or toss them to the sky like confetti, like wishes for a prosperous future? No. He was not that sort of man. At the end of each day he carried the material to the cellar and emptied it into the trapdoor that led to the furnace, and on his way home, as he walked to the U-Bahn, he could see the smoke rising from the outstretched chimney. The words were meaningless now; unrecognisable. Tiny specks, lighter than air, dissolving into the clouds. By the time he reached the station they had disappeared.

  Sometimes he disembarked one stop early and strolled along Tauentzienstrasse and the Ku’damm, pausing to look at the window displays. They appealed to him, these little scenes, arranged along the shops’ glassy façades like postcards propped on a mantelpiece: women in Japanese kimonos sitting in flower-covered boats; bolts of cloth caught into starbursts and waterfalls and sails; shoes without feet and gloves without hands and hats without heads. Most of the goods were not for sale, naturally, due to the shortages, but the shops still had to display them as if they were. Today a woman was assembling a man; he lay in pieces before her, open-eyed, and she fastened him together limb by limb and dressed him for autumn. Already she had fixed dead leaves to the glass – she had an eye for these things – and she nailed piano wire to the sky and drew it down length by length, holding it to the floor, considering its slant, fine-tuning the rain. The weather was turning, and whoever was homeless now would never build a home.

  On the corner of Bleibtreustrasse a man was playing ‘No Lovelier Land’, and Gottlieb dropped a coin into his accordion case to pay for the memory the song revived. When Onkel Heinrich returned home from the Somme he had lost his voice, and although no doctor could locate any wounds, any damage, he never found it again. Instead, he played his accordion: ‘All Men Are Criminals’ when his sister’s heart was broken, and ‘Five Wild Swans Once Went A-Roaming’ on Totensonntag; ‘The Moon Has Risen’ when he wanted guests to leave, and ‘Bring Me the Blood of Noble Vines’ when he was thirsty. Sometimes on Sundays he took Gottlieb to Luna Park and let him have a sip of his beer in the Bavarian village, and held his hand as they careened down the water slide and into the lake. They lost their footing on the shimmy-steps that never stopped moving, and watched the Somali villagers drumming and stamping, and the swivel-house threatened to topple right over and so did the high-wire walkers, and afterwards Gottlieb tried to explain it all to his mother and father, who did not care for such places, and Onkel Heinrich just smiled and played ‘Not Every Day Is Sunday’.

  The accordion fell from his hands when his heart failed, letting out a rattle as it hit the floor, the bellows splitting open, the buttons coming loose and skittering away like knocked-out teeth. Gottlieb did not know what happened to it after that. Perhaps they buried it with Onkel Heinrich, two broken things shut in a box. Perhaps, by now, it was threaded through with roots, stopped with dirt. Rise up, rise up, brave comrades.

  But times were better now. This war was nothing like the last. And despite the people Gottlieb passed on the street – the women dressed in mourning and the men with their missing arms and bandaged eyes – he felt a great lightening; a bubble of something like happiness expanding in his chest and buoying him homewards along the pavement. Yes, why not happiness? It could be generated if you tried hard enough. When the Olympics were coming people were happy. The Labour Front declared a Week of Jollity – scheduled to last eight days – and Berlin obeyed and was cheerful. What did the source of happiness matter?

  *

  One Sunday afternoon there was a knock at the door. Brigitte was halfway through counting the cutlery and waited for her husband to answer it, but he called, ‘I’ll lose my place.’ She knew there were times when he could not leave a silhouette; she thought of him shut in those dark structures, no windows and no doors until he cut them himself. There was another knock, and she put down her pen. Eleven, she said to herself. Eleven. It was probably the Hitler Youth boys collecting rags and paper and bottles and fat and razorblades and bones and goodness knows what else, they were always asking for something, those polite boys with their Blood and Honour and their lists of names – but there at the door stood her neighbour from across the landing.

  ‘Frau Loewenthal. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you – I just have a question, if you’ve a moment to spare.’

  Brigitte wondered if she would have to invite her inside or if the matter could be handled on the threshold, away from the disarrayed china, the piles of knives – quite apart from the mess, it wouldn’t do for her to be seen asking such a person into her home. They Are Our Ruin! They Incited the War! The War Is Their Fault! She could see the Loewenthals’ hallway from where she stood, and it was the mirror image of their own: the same shape and size, but everything reversed. The whole apartment was like that – or so Brigitte assumed, since she had only ever caught glimpses of it when the door was open. Except: there were the overcoats hanging dark and slack from their hooks, breasts freshly stitched with the yellow star. Well, that was only sensible, because it was the law now, and the Loewenthals were sensible people; they had sent their children away even before the bombing began – although Brigitte did not quite approve of the sending away of children. But they put their rubbish into the bins in the courtyard without dropping cores and peelings and crusts that would attract vermin, unlike other residents she could name, and they always made sure the buckets of sand and water on their landing were full, and they never beat their carpets outside the permitted times. And they stayed in their apartment when
the sirens sounded, and did not go down to the cellar with everyone else, because that also was the law.

  ‘What is it, Frau Loewenthal?’ she said.

  ‘Well … you’ll think I’m mad, but I keep hearing noises in the night.’

  ‘Noises?’

  ‘They seem to be coming from your apartment. I’m not accusing you of anything,’ she added in a rush.

  ‘What sort of noises?’ said Brigitte.

  ‘It’s hard to say. A kind of dragging – or a heavy creaking. And our apartment, our living room – I can’t explain it, but I keep feeling that it’s … smaller.’

  ‘What an odd thing to suggest,’ said Brigitte. ‘Smaller? A very strange thing to say. Perhaps it’s the darker days – the loss of light. At any rate, I haven’t heard any noises. I haven’t heard a thing.’

  She returned to her ledger. Now, where was she? Where was she? Quite lost. The knives were all a jumble. Nine? Twelve? It was no good. She sighed and started counting again, slipping each knife into its felt-lined slot as she went, trying not to think about what Frau Loewenthal had said. Really, it was too much – neighbours calling on other neighbours on a Sunday, unannounced, and making strange suggestions. There was nothing going on, nothing at all. And even if there were – even if certain realignments and corrections were under way – they were certainly not in her control, nor indeed in Frau Loewenthal’s, and there was nothing to be done about it. Nine, she said to herself, a clock chiming the hours. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

  When she had finished she went into the living room and sat in her usual chair. She stared at the closed piano, which she had not played in months; she could not think of any songs. Gottlieb was still busy cutting his new silhouette – a bombed-out chapel, made whole in his hands – but where would they put all these shadows? She did not know how to enter them into her ledger; she could not describe them. Sometimes she thought she might take up the scissors herself and cut out a different skyline, broken and falling, every day less of it intact. She considered the Führer’s portrait that hung above the sofa. If the house were bombed, that wall would not be destroyed – so she had heard. To her eye it did seem more distant, as if the wall had moved, as if the room held more and more space in which shadows could fall – but maybe it was just the season, the darker days, as she had said to Frau Loewenthal. That was logical, wasn’t it? That made sense. The samovar sat on the Heilmann sideboard, freshly polished. She had displayed it there so that Hannelore would be sure to see it, but her sister-in-law had not remarked on it once. Perhaps, Brigitte thought, she should actually use it when Hannelore visited, but it was in such perfect order, and she did not want to risk spoiling it. A collision with a teaspoon, a knock against the kitchen sink … these things happened; they happened. Last time Hannelore came she paused when she entered the living room, and Brigitte thought she had finally noticed it, but all she said was, ‘Have you shifted something?’ She turned and turned, trying to get her bearings.