The Wish Child Read online

  ‘We did make some rearrangements,’ said Brigitte.

  ‘How clever you are!’ said Hannelore. ‘It’s so much bigger.’

  Brigitte knew this could not be true, not really. If she were asked to turn away and sketch the room from memory, she reasoned, she would make mistakes. She might place the sofa too far from the door to the dining room, or draw the radio too big in relation to the end table. She would be sure to get the perspective wrong, because even when dealing with the most familiar, the best loved, memory is imperfect. No, the room was not bigger, and the Führer’s portrait was just where it always had been.

  Gottlieb looked up from his black chapel. ‘It’s an excellent likeness,’ he said, nodding to the portrait. ‘Very close to the real person.’

  ‘Have you met him?’ said Brigitte. It was quite possible, and she did not know why this had never occurred to her before. The work Gottlieb did at the Division was of national importance, whatever it was, so why wouldn’t the Führer visit? Had they shaken hands? Exchanged words?

  ‘No,’ said Gottlieb. ‘I have not met him. But even if I had, I couldn’t tell you about it.’

  ‘So you have met him, then,’ said Brigitte. ‘Imagine Hannelore’s face!’ Hannelore, with her Mother’s Cross pinned to every outfit. Hannelore, with her spacious Dahlem apartment, and her four Wehrmacht sons who sent her coffee from Belgium and furs from Norway. Hannelore, who had never even remarked on Brigitte’s samovar, when clearly it was a finer example than her own – and now she had volunteered to work at a first-aid station at night. Brigitte could never compete with that.

  ‘Hannelore is not to be told that I have met him. Nor that I have not met him. Which I haven’t.’

  ‘So … you haven’t not met him.’

  Gottlieb returned to his chapel.

  I know that Gottlieb Heilmann has never met him. It is true – or it is said, which amounts to the same thing – that the Reichskanzler visits the Division now and then, and that he has been introduced to several colleagues, including Gottlieb’s immediate neighbour. Gottlieb believes he witnessed this through the frosted glass: a flurry of straight-armed salutes, an exchange of pleasantries he could not quite make out. It was just as difficult to make out the figures; the glass blurred them to ghosts, and before Gottlieb could decide who they were the footsteps were retreating down the spotless corridor. Still, he feels quite justified in withholding this information from his wife. It is safer if the Führer’s movements are kept secret, so that – in theory – it is possible he is everywhere at once, like the Lord God Almighty, like gas in a sealed box.

  The German Face

  O bird, are you     now?

    I delivered you into

      sister-hands

  Perhaps they might still    you from your   ;

  Was there no    to be found?

  I saw two eyes, as black as your own,

  Meet your gaze, and then

  Its    went out.

  Did they    to you of   ?

  Come now, if they proved    to you,

  Then your    was not so  .

  July 1942

  Near Leipzig

  In the honey jar on his windowsill, Erich keeps his precious things: an empty snail shell, an acorn, a dead and perfect bee, even the wings untorn – do bees turn to dust when they die? This one is still whole, but why then is the world not carpeted with bees? – and the paper flags from the parade, which have faded to pink and grey, like an evening sky that promises good weather. There’s a banknote in there too, worth ten thousand marks – or it was, at one time, when the people who lived in the cities carried their money around in laundry baskets. Erich’s father had given it to him before he went to be a soldier.

  ‘Look,’ Papa had said, pointing to the illustration on the note. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A man,’ said Erich.

  ‘Look closely.’

  Erich peered at the figure. The man was wearing old clothes and an old hat and was looking out of the picture and towards the middle of the note, where its value was printed, and he seemed to be frowning, unable to believe what he read.

  ‘Turn it sideways,’ said Papa. ‘Now do you see?’

  ‘A … sideways man?’

  ‘Look at the farmer’s neck.’

  ‘ Is he a farmer?’

  ‘Doesn’t he look like a farmer?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Look at his neck. Here. And his collar. See?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Erich. ‘Yes, I see.’ But he saw nothing, just the farmer lying on his side, as if he had fallen and could not get up, and all the zeroes piled one on top of another like a stack of stones.

  Later that afternoon, when Papa was talking to the inspector from the Reich Food Estate, who had come to measure their fields and count their hens and weigh their cows, Erich examined the note again, turning it to one side and looking and looking. He looked until his eyes hurt. He held the note at arm’s length and squinted; he brought it close to his face and felt the soft, wrinkled paper brushing his lashes. It smelled like autumn. He saw nothing.

  It was the second summer that Papa was away, but the wheat and the barley still rose from the ground without him, and the ears of corn swelled in their husks, and Ronja pulled the wagon and the cows let down their milk and Mama chopped the heads off the hens, all without Papa.

  ‘The Führer will provide for us,’ said Mama, and when the foreign workers came to help on the farm, she said, ‘You see?’

  They slept in the barn, the foreign workers, one section of which they converted into basic living quarters; that was their first job. Erich was not to go there by himself and not to talk to them, no matter how friendly they seemed, because they came from other places and could not be trusted. They spoke almost no German, and who could tell what they had in mind? If they saw him listening to them they stopped talking, but sometimes, if his bedroom window was open, he could hear them. Their language was softer than German, looser, and Erich repeated to himself a few of the words he could catch. They shushed and buzzed in his mouth, and he thought he might know what they meant – he could almost understand them, if he shut out everything else – but it was like trying to remember a dream after you have opened your eyes and risen from your bed.

  Mama had to mime to the foreign workers the jobs she needed them to do, and every now and then – when they knew they were out of her line of sight – Erich saw them smiling to one another as she milked invisible cows, plucked invisible hens, dug invisible holes with invisible shovels.

  He lay in the long grass and spun his circle of card back and forth, rolling the strings between his thumb and forefinger, watching the two halves of the face merge and separate, merge and separate. The hives were murmuring and bees floated above him, their wings and bodies backlit and black. I turned first to water and then to ice, said the hive of Luise. We could not drink from the wells, said the hive of Great-Onkel Gustav. Erich could not tell how close or how far away the bees were; perhaps they were just specks of dust in his eyes; perhaps they were great distant birds. At school his teacher had pinned a chart to the classroom wall: German planes and enemy planes seen from below, so that everyone could learn the shapes and know when to be afraid. Erich was aware that some people feared bees, freezing if they saw a single one, or thrashing their arms about and gasping for breath, drowning in air. Lina, one of the girls from the Reich Labour Service, was like that. She’d been sent to help on the farm, as well as the foreign workers, because all Germans had to do their duty and it was an honour to serve. Erich had hoped they might host a refugee family from one of the big cities that was being bombed; some of his classmates were hosting such families, and were already firm friends with the children. It would be like having brothers and sisters, he thought – but Mama said they must make do with the foreign workers and with Lina, even though she didn’t know one end of a cow from another, and refused to go near the hives.

  �
��Now then,’ said Mama when she found her shaking in the stable. ‘There’s no reason to be afraid.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lina, crushing straw in her hands, turning it to dust. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something about bees?’

  Lina nodded.

  ‘Well, it’s true they can attack if they feel threatened, and it’s true they are wild creatures, and cannot think the way that you and I can think. But it’s also true that we can train them to do as we wish. We can correct nature – stop up a stream to alter its flow. Yes?’

  Lina nodded again; Mama was good at explaining away frightening things. Erich had heard her talking to Tante Uschi once: a child who has been frightened in his early years by stories of the bogey man, she said, will often retain a fear of dark rooms, cellars and the like. On the other hand, threats that are never brought to his attention will be ignored.

  ‘But of course,’ Mama went on, ‘although the bees cannot think the way that you and I can think, still we must win them over.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lina.

  ‘And so we let them sting us now and then, for our own safety, and it does not hurt, or only as much as a pinch from a spiteful sister, so quick that it’s over before you notice.’

  ‘ It’s true,’ said Erich, ‘it doesn’t hurt, and anyway, you get used to it.’

  I knew what the girl was thinking, even as she nodded and agreed. Where am I? What is this place, and what is this safety? And perhaps it was not just the bees that frightened her but the hives themselves; the carved faces that watched through the trees when she looked for windfalls in the grass. She kept her distance from them, sitting at the other end of the orchard or in the garden when she took a break, picking buttercups and white hemlock flowers. She pushed off her shoes and socks and hitched her dress up above her knees, and the hair on her legs was fine and pale, and the light fell over her face and shoulders and she looked like one of the ladies in the book Tante Uschi had lent Mama, with the pictures of people doing nude gymnastics in forests and fields, and bringing in the harvest with no clothes on.

  Erich showed her how to put on Papa’s bee-keeping suit, how to make sure not a single patch of skin was exposed – like Siegfried and the linden leaf, he said, but she did not understand – and when she had tucked the trousers into her boots and pulled on the gloves and lowered the veil she might have been Papa, back from the war. She might have reached for Erich’s hand and said, ‘Shall we have a look at Pictures from the Life of the Führer?’ and taken the album from the shelf and leafed through it with him, pointing out favourite pictures and wondering if they would ever find the missing ones to fill the gaps. But she coughed when Mama lit the smoker, and stumbled on a root, and pushed the veil away from her mouth even though Mama told her that bees are attracted to breath – and she was not Papa, and Papa was still not there.

  ‘We must keep writing to him,’ said Mama. ‘We must keep telling him all the happy things in our lives, and only the happy things.’

  On Sunday afternoons, when they sat together at the kitchen table and composed their letters, Mama looked over Erich’s shoulder to check what he wrote – not for spelling mistakes but for traces of sadness, which were also a kind of mistake. Erich told Papa about the foreign workers (no, said Mama), and about Lina (yes, said Mama), and about the Hitler Youth boys who came to help with the harvest and who showed him their belt buckles and their daggers (yes, said Mama). He told him how tall his copse of larches had grown (yes, said Mama), and how he hoped Papa would be back to see them change colour in autumn (no, said Mama). He told him that he could trim Ronja’s hooves by himself now (yes, said Mama), and that they were lucky she was old and the army didn’t want her (no, said Mama). He told him how Frau Ingwer had compared all the boys and girls in his class to her chart of The German Face, asking them to come up one at a time and stand next to it while she measured their skulls and noses and jaws and pointed out certain features with her stick. Erich was the perfect German, she announced, which was to say, he was Nordic, and as a prize she let him sit in her chair at the front of the classroom while all the other children made drawings of him and his German Face. (‘You didn’t tell me about that,’ said Mama, and Erich said, ‘Is it a happy thing?’ For he could not be sure.)

  I see the teacher congratulating Erich, shaking him by the hand and showing him to her chair beneath the Führer’s face, and every eye in the room is watching, and he shifts and fidgets as his classmates begin to draw him, to copy his correct forehead and approved ears. One or two frown at their books, look up at him and frown again. They cross him out; they cannot get him right. Erich still feels the touch of the callipers at his temples, the hands at his mouth and neck, and he stares at the map of the world on the far wall with its rows of swastika flags pinned to mark the advancement of the German troops. They leave little marks each time the children shift them – tiny punctured lines, an army of holes. One day there will be more holes than land.

  ‘What’s this?’ says Frau Ingwer, bending over Heinz Kuppel’s drawing, but before Heinz can answer she has torn it from his book, crumpled it in her fist and thrown it away. ‘Monstrous,’ she says, though Heinz had not meant to make a monster. Still, a punishment is in order, even for an accidental monster; the Führer does not tolerate art that warps and degrades the thing depicted. Frau Ingwer goes to her desk and takes out a booklet and finds a suitable page. I see the other things she keeps inside the drawer: a broken comb, a glass marble, a photograph of a man holding a white cat, and Erich sees them too, though he should not be looking, it is rude to look. Is Frau Ingwer about to cry? I find it difficult to make such predictions – I had so little time to cry myself – but she cried when she spoke of the Führer losing his sight in the Great War, and she cried when she showed the children a postcard of the cell that was his home for nine long months, and again when she repeated Reichsminister Goebbels’s words on the occasion of the Führer’s birthday – We felt as if we had to see him, be it only in a photograph, to gain the strength we need – and she finds no pleasure in punishing the children, and only does so because it is right. As she closes the drawer we hear the marble rolling around and around in the dark. ‘Start here,’ she says to Heinz Kuppel, placing the booklet in front of him, and he begins to write:

  Courage is a characteristic of people of German blood. In the past, one understood the concept of Germany as the territory that belonged to the German Reich. It was the Führer who taught the German people that Germany is the community of those with German blood. State borders are not created by nature, as are races and peoples, but rather are the work of men. With this knowledge, we realise that the German people extends far beyond Germany’s state borders.

  After the children have finished their drawings, Frau Ingwer says that it is time for everyone (except Heinz Kuppel) to go outside and pick their herbs: yarrow to staunch bleeding, chamomile for pain, foxglove for the heart, linden flowers to sedate. They are dried in the school’s airless attic and the weight is recorded, reported, and each child must pick two kilos per year to help heal the wounded soldiers and to show that they are good children who love their country and want to win the war. And it would be a very fine thing if their school were to exceed the required weight and to pick the most per head in their region, because the Reich Association for Medicinal Plant Science and the Provision of Medicinal Plants publishes the results, and everyone can see at a glance which schools are lazy and disloyal and which are filled with the right sort of children.

  Erich has not seen the attic with all the leaves and flowers spread out to dry; each week Frau Ingwer selects two boys to take the bags of herbs up there, but he is still too young to be chosen. He imagines it as a meadow – this is how he describes it to Papa in his letter, before Mama tells him he cannot write about gathering plants to make into medicine for wounded soldiers – but of course, it is not like that at all.

  *

  Tante Uschi also wrote letters. Her fiancé Gerhard was somewh
ere in the desert, just as Papa was somewhere in Russia. Uschi and Gerhard had never met: his train had passed through Leipzig one day when she happened to be at the station, and it slowed down but did not stop, for the men were on their way to the steppe, to the desert, to the ocean, to all the places where borders were shifting. The young women on the platform waved to the men, and the men opened the windows and let the scraps of paper fly, and the scraps read Joachim Kalb, 09589B, and Peter Eckstein, 18608A, and Ulrich Portner, M13039, and that is how Ursula obtained her Gerhard, by snatching at his name as it blew towards her in the slipstream of a train, and what a story to tell their children, because there would be children, one day. Ursula did not see Gerhard, and Gerhard did not see Ursula, but the warm gust as the train passed by ruffled her hair like a lover’s fingers, and she wrote to him in the desert, and sent him the photograph of herself in her polka-dot blouse, which made her collarbones look prettier than they were. And Gerhard wrote to Ursula – call me Uschi, she told him one month in – and he sent her a handful of sand, which scattered itself across her when she opened the envelope, and although she knew that it was the past ground to dust in her hands, it was also the future: a day at the beach, salt water drying on warm skin, a silky pebble slipped into a pocket.