The Boy Who Saw in Colours

by Lauren Robinson

sie is ja ausganga und kimmt neamer hoam

  und lasst das kloan Biabele ganz alloan!

  Aber heidschi bumbeidschi bum bum,

  aber heidschi bumbeidschi bum bum.”

  “Sleep long,

  your mother has gone out and won’t come home again.

  And leaves the little boy alone.”

  “Heitschi” is not a word you can find in any German dictionary. I’ve looked, believe me. It possibly originates from Bavaria and means to rock someone to sleep. To soothe them.

  The tune was the same, but Oskar sometimes changed the words a little, depending on varying degrees of drunkness. He sometimes sang;

  “Your mother has gone out whoring and won’t come home again.”

  After three weeks, he held me tightly in his unconscious arms, as I struggled mightily to defeat the nightmares. He picked me up and sat with me on the damp ground until it ended. Something about Oskar not knowing what he was doing was very reassuring to me. He accepted my screaming words and kicking like it was gifted. Snot adorned his shirt, but he didn’t mind.

  We would never speak of it in years to come. I’d never properly thanked him, nor did he expect a “thank you”. The most said about it was a typical Oskar response in April. We were smoothing out our beds for the daily Teichmann inspection.

  “You’re a horrible singer,” I said.

  Oskar laughed with the most beautiful response.

  “Du bist ein Warmduscher.”

  Loose translation: you are a pussy.

  But this is different. In Germany, there is a myth that warm showers aren’t masculine, and so the term literally means someone who takes a warm shower. Despite the rumours, the German language can be colourful.

  Many of the other youth leaders would’ve mocked me or beat me if they’d so much as heard an unmanly whimper. It must have been fate, sheer luck, or maybe something else entirely that brought Oskar to me.

  Tomas wasn’t so lucky.

  He didn’t have an Oskar of his own.

  Instead, he had Erick ‘tin eye’ Kröger, so called because of the monocle fixed to his left eye. No one knew how he lost the eye, but the children of Inland liked to spread rumours anyway.

  Derrick Pichler told me he lost it when he fought in the First World War. Some said he challenged a pencil to a fight – the pencil won. Others commented that a boy from Inland did it. All of those answers were right to some extent, eh, except maybe the pencil thing. But I think the number one reason can be summed up in one, small yet powerful word.

  Love.

  The strongest thing on earth.

  He was a sharp-edged man with a nefarious glare that seemed to discourage the very idea of misbehaving. Except, his idea of misbehaving was rather odd, unfair even. If Tomas even uttered a whisper that sounded like Mama or Papa, he’d be met with a wooden cane, or worse, like on this occasion, a fist.

  Kröger adopted a soldier-like posture, stiff and tense, a refrigerated voice and breath that reeked of heil Hitler.

  A small lesson on parenting from the Schulleiter – school leaders.

  Things you will need.

  A fist.

  If your child misbehaves, you will give them a hiding.

  If your child cries, give them a hiding.

  If your child gets an answer wrong in class, hiding.

  You get the idea.

  The answer to everything was a hiding.

  Boys were beaten daily in Inland.

  I learned a lot about punishment there. I learned that it happened because of love. We tried to cry out for help, but we soon realised that no one would listen. No matter how loud we screamed and cried, we couldn’t stop or change what was to be our fate, and no one was going to come for us. We were tortured, and they told us it was for our own good. We needed discipline. Betrayal is too simple a word to describe the overwhelming pain and loneliness we felt.

  If we questioned a sigh Hitler made, we were beaten. The younger children were too small and weak to fight back, and the ones who could, had their hands tied to a post.

  There wasn’t a thing that was fair about it.

  Echoes of screams were in the air.

  The obvious thing would have been to run away. Run away and never come back. But where would we go? Who would we run to? There was no one. The children with parents would likely be captured again by the Gestapo, and who knows what would have happened to their parents.

  In Nazi Germany, it was safer to go to the root of the virus and kill it before it had a chance to spread. And kill the people who helped those people, the people who assisted those other people, and a few more just to be safe.

  We believed the things we were taught because we were conditioned to believing them. And if at the end of our ‘training’, any conscience or social status was still left, the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) would take care of that.

  13

  Screaming Dominoes

  *Silver Sand*

  We played a lot of games in Inland.

  One such game was called Totgeschlagen.

  Translation: beaten to death.

  A younger boy and an older boy were taken in the night.

  A team was formed.

  The older of the two was forced to beat up the younger ones, or they would be beaten themselves – and worse.

  I was half awake and half asleep in arms of the cotton blankets. I was terrified of the dark thing inside of me. Oskar lit a candle, so I wasn’t so scared, but he didn’t realise that in doing so, he also cast a shadow on the wall that mimicked outstretched hands.

  On the small, single bed beside me, I could feel the sheets rising and falling with Oskar’s breathing. His books on the nightstand beside me were on fire. I heard the sound of a boy deep in concentration in the bunk above me and the familiar sound of a page being turned in a book. In my half awake-half sleeping state, I thought I had imagined it – a trick of the mind.

  Everything around me was still for once, and just as I found myself drifting back to sleep, misery came knocking at the door in the form of two suited men. Oskar woke up.

  “It’s alright.”

  They wore masks.

  They smelt like cheap rum, sweat, and urine.

  Panic stood up in my throat. Oskar’s voice tightened its grip.

  He repeated it.

  “It’s alright.” He told the shadows to get out.

  As the darkness fell, there was a shift in Oskar that night. It travelled and wandered through the lines on his forehead. It was tense and calm, but it disclosed no answers. Not yet.

  His midnight face, as I called it. Of course, this face wasn’t confined to midnight, but that’s when I saw him make it the most. When people couldn’t read it like a bad book.

  The monsters dragged Penn Pichler and Stefan Rosenberger from their beds. They were screaming in a chorus of misery.

  “Nein.”

  I can still hear them. They smelt like pain and blood. I could taste it.

  I didn’t know where they were taking them, but judging by how much they resisted, they knew. And judging by Oskar’s midnight face, he knew too.

  For a while, there was nothingness. I couldn’t hear, nor did I want to.

  In the door that never fully closed, there was a small gap, big enough to see through. The other boys found themselves gravitating towards it, all pushing each other for space.

  Curiosity got the best of me. I had to see.

  Then I saw it.

  Penn punched the sobbing Stefan, his ten-year-old hands too small to protect or defend himself, before he pushed his foot down on his head, kicking him and twisting it down on the little boy’s skull.

  I tried to stifle a terrified scream.

  Oskar was now sitting atop my bed.

  He tried to coax our gaze from the door.

  “It’s alright. Don’t be scared. It’s just a silly game.”

  It didn’t look like any game I would like to play.

  “How about we have a game of dominoes?”<
br />
  But we were too curious and afraid. No one dared intervene and help the boys. I wanted to help, but what could I have done being skinny and twelve?

  After being slapped again, the terrified victim screamed when a lit cigarette was thrown down his shirt by one of the masked men and –

  I could look no longer.

  I gave in to the dominoes and Oskar, letting him pull me close to him, and I covered my ears with my hands. The screams could not be defused.

  I was given seven, small tiles.

  I did nothing. I said nothing.

  I wished I did.

  It was easier to just keep quiet, sit back and take it all in. If you did that, you’d have a reasonably good life in Inland.

  Later, when it was all over, Oskar had a hard time calming down the hysterical boys. Penn sat on the edge of his bed, staring blank-faced at the wall. His brother sat with him for the majority of the night, falling asleep at the bottom of Penn’s bunk. The boy could not cry.

  Tomas took a beating of his own. I sat waiting for him in the cold. Only, he was taking longer than usual. I put it down to him not being able to tie the laces of his boots – something he had trouble with, and I always had to help him. Since arriving at Inland, I’d become very protective of my brother. We often came to the rescue of each other. Our dependence upon one another wasn’t too unusual, because we were the only family we had left.

  When Tomas came into view, for a second, I didn’t recognise him. He was far away, but his gait was all wrong. He walked like a scarecrow more than a boy, and all crooked at that. As he neared, my heart fell through to my boots. He was more purple than pale. His left eye was swollen. He couldn’t have seen a thing out of it, and he would not for a while. His face still bore congealed blood, and his clothes were an utter mess. When he tried to say my name, his cracked lips failed at the first syllable.

  “J…”

  But he didn’t need to. I was already on my and feet running.

  At first, I couldn’t say anything to him. I just stood there; arms stretched out my side, and my legs shaking ferociously. It took a few moments to staple the words together.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing. Just leave it.”

  “The hell nothing. Look at you.”

  The look he returned seemed to suggest that he knew what he looked like, and he didn’t need me to state the obvious.

  “What did you do?”

  “I was bad.”

  What had Tomas done that was so bad? He asked to see where they had buried our parents. For closure. A final goodbye. Only, the trip would never happen. It could never happen.

  Tomas’ grief came and went like he was jumping in and out of puddles of misery. One moment he’d be laughing, playing with me, having fun with the other boys; the next, he’d be in tears, calling out for our mother. When he cried, I couldn’t bear to look at him. He had Mother in his eyes, and every time I’d stare into them, her eyes in his eyes would cry to me.

  He suffered crippling separation anxiety for a few weeks, sometimes screaming at me if I got ahead of him on our morning runs, and he couldn’t see me, even if it was just for an instant.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  At other times, he got angry and occasionally his words lashed out at other children, which got him another bruise. The boys were often sitting in constant states of confusion. For although anger was occasionally frowned upon, the school leaders would also encourage it and teach us to direct it towards our parents and other children.

  Our childhood memories seemed so far and distant in Inland.

  He would whisper the word “Mama” and see mother’s face a million times in a single afternoon. When the events of our story were over, I would often find myself going back – looking at all the people I crossed paths with. How did those people breathe? How could they move? I am often in awe of what humans are capable of – especially the younger ones. Life without our mother and father was still life, and we were determined to live it.

  I started seeing my father in crowds. It reminded me that he was still there. Sometimes, whenever I was completely alone in the tiny washroom, I would cry silently when I missed him, but I was still glad to be awake. Nothing compared to the nightmares. In those moments, I’d never felt so completely alone.

  14

  The Painted Markets

  *Paint-Pale-Rust*Papaya Whip*Pastel Green

  As I’m sure you’re aware by now, there were many cast members in Inland.

  To be precise, one hundred and twenty four more.

  Yes, there were a lot of children in Inland, but very little childhood. All of the boys had old eyes. Old souls trapped inside the bodies of children.

  In my time there, only a few of them touched me, and their colours intertwined with my own, creating different hues and shades. Oskar, Kröger, and Teichmann were only a few of those colours.

  Others included:

  Rouvon Bacchman – a kind boy one year older than me, with skinny legs, who slept on the top of the same bunk as me. He preferred to be called Von rather than his given name. There was an unusually light, delicate air in that boy’s step. He would soon become one of my best friends, and in a sense, my partner in crime.

  Manfret Wünderlich – a squashed boy, with a nervous look in his eyes, who had a tendency to apologise. Even the air around him whispered the words, “I’m sorry”.

  Stefan Rosenberger – a ten-year-old with a fragile, short life. He spoke in oddities and riddles, and almost no one questioned it. An odd boy that everyone was fond of. He didn’t let it bother him, though. He took what life had given him and tossed it right back in its face.

  Penn Pichler – a boy who was constantly in fights, but also the school favourite, so he never got into trouble. He was a horrible soccer player.

  Derrick Pichler – the identical twin brother of Penn Pichler and his shadow. He had a pink river of skin painted across the joints of his arms and legs. Upon arriving in Inland, I couldn’t tell the two apart.

  We were Germany’s future with no future.

  Life in Inland went as follows.

  Oskar would wake us every morning at six and not a minute before or past. Beds had to be made up perfectly, without a single thread out of place. Some of the older boys helped the younger ones when they were finished. They were inspected by Teichmann, or one of her cronies, who would often shout profanities at us and tell us, “we don’t have all day”. Oskar made mincemeat out of us if we made it incorrectly.

  There were compulsory training uniforms: mossy green shorts with the Inland crest stitched onto our pocket; two acorns crossed and a white tank top, that was really more grey than white from all the dirt.

  We were lined up for our early morning run through the countryside. Much to the shock-horror of our classmates, Tomas and I were good at this, and we got even better as time went by. We would run until the sun fell on top of us if we could. I slowed down for Von so he could catch up, and once he did, I tried to race him. I stole secret glances as I overtook everyone. He cheated and tripped me up so he could get ahead.

  The countryside lay like a divine fingerprint, twisting and curving, no two parts the same. The dip and sway of the land, the patterns, the ever-changing sky, and wind. It was my favourite thing about Inland. Every day was a new snapshot in time. For even from that one place, from one of the fine oak trees on the hill, the view could never be exactly the same two days in a row. Little by little, the seasons would bring changes.

  And the colours – the colours were so beautiful. They circled above my head.

  My mind would wander back to the faraway city of our home. But the beauty of the countryside would draw me back. It had a way of reminding me that I wasn’t apart from nature, but a part of it. When I ran, I thought of painting it – every stroke of the brush – every shade of green I would use. The wind blew them all on my face.

  Tomas would reach out to touch the bark of the trees as he passed or feel the sof
tness of the new leaves between his fingers before a group of boys would initiate a fistfight by throwing a fistful of leaves at another.

  Kröger taught us about weapons. We would throw mock hand grenades and be taught how to duck and cover if one was ever thrown at us – all precautions, apparently. Compasses, maps, MG34s (machine guns) and rifles all made their appearances throughout the lessons. The rifles were too big for our tiny bodies to hold properly, but a lot of us became confident in aiming and firing at targets, with help from Oskar and the other school leaders, of course.

  Others were rusty, but eager to learn. There were a few accidents that required consoling a crying child or digging out a bullet from their arms, but it deterred none of us. Great relish came from the quieter days where heads would hover and huddle together while an older boy showed us how to read a map.

  Some boys frolicked around like “dastardly creatures,” as Kröger put it. The annoyance lingered on his face. His forehead wrinkles shouted swear words.

  Two-finger guns + two disruptive yet imaginative boys + an audience of giddy children = a highly frustrated teacher.

  Boy 1: “Bang. Bang. You’re dead. I killed you, you rotten French bastard.”

  Kröger in between and ever so small: “Will you stop playing guns and listen?”

  Boy 2: “I’m not French; I’m British.”

  It was a time of mine that I shall never forget, along with the friends that I shared it with. It struck me as odd that the very same person who was teaching us to fire at targets, not two hours ago, forbade us to play with pretend guns. An adult mind is not very grown-up times.

  We were not forced to take up arms – we did so with fierce joy.

  You give a little boy a gun, and he’s not going to turn it down.

  Except for Tomas.

  He refused to shoot at anything during our first training day.

  “Mama wouldn’t want me to,” he said.

  “Your Mama’s not here,” one leader told him. “Come on. Just like this.”