The Boy Who Saw in Colours

by Lauren Robinson

Tomas agreed to hold the gun, but nothing more.

  Little did we know that in just a few short months, he’d become the best in class.

  A few days of the month were spent helping out at a farm that bordered the village, and we practiced military discipline, we bonded and shored up our beliefs of the Nazi cause.

  The town was filled with stalls. On Mondays and Fridays, we could go there accompanied by the school leaders and buy or trade tobacco rations, liquor, even sweets, and toys. Some older kids helped with odd jobs to earn money if their parents were too poor to send them anything.

  I stayed back and walked with Oskar. We listened to the crunching of the leaves as we walked. Erich Kröger walked ahead with some other boys.

  He walked with purpose and a slight limp in his step. Kröger knew what he needed, usually tobacco and alcohol. “In and out,” is what he always said. Kröger didn’t like staying in the same place for too long.

  The town was home to many strange yet unforgettable characters. Pieter-pick-a-Pfennig, nicknamed so by the children, was one such person. A crooked man who collected loose change on the streets. As the war advanced, it became harder to spot even a single Pfennig.

  I overheard a conversation between Von Bacchman and Penn Pichler. The twins came from a good family, amongst the wealthiest. They thrived during the war. Often times, their mother and father would send them a few Pfennigs each.

  “How much money do you have?” Von Bacchman hopefully asked.

  “More than you, dickhead.”

  It was almost dusk, and they were just a few stalls away from the red-haired sweet-shop owner. No one knew his real name, and if they did, no one ever used it. He was simply known to the children as “the sweet man”.

  “You know,” Von started, “we could buy some sweets to share, over there, from the sweet man.”

  “Get your own,” Penn said, jangling the money in his shorts pocket.

  Von shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  His nonchalant whispering made me grin.

  He gazed back at me alluringly and rolled his eyes.

  No other words were needed.

  I looked down at my boots.

  The stalls in the village were mostly run by people who lived there, but others had come from neighbouring towns to earn much-needed money for them and their families. In world war two Germany, everyone needed every Reichsmark they could get.

  One quickly caught my eye. It was run by an older lady and her daughter. The pair of them created artwork and other handmade crafts. I found myself walking towards it without saying anything to Oskar. He followed me.

  Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with works of art, I felt myself relax, and suddenly I was at peace.

  I traced my fingertips along the paint pots – there wasn’t colour that I didn’t like. The older woman spoke to me, but I didn’t hear.

  I was tempted to steal a few from the table, but I fought against it. I would have been caught, and quite frankly, one of Kröger’s corridor beatings put me off altogether. Kröger was trying to bargain with a stall owner who would not budge on the price of his tobacco. I instead focused my attention on Oskar.

  “Can I ask a favour?”

  At first, he said nothing. He was in the middle of rolling a cigarette, licking the paper and sticking it all together, which took immense concentration.

  “Oskar?”

  “Ja?” He finally replied.

  “I just wanted to know if I could get some paints.”

  Oskar laughed. A small grin directed at the ground.

  “Sure. Ask that bastard over there.” He was pointing at the man whose face was lit from stem to stern.

  He looked like a sagging plastic bag. I could not hear Oskar’s joking tone, and I couldn’t see his signals for me to return. I proceeded to walk towards Kröger after I clenched my fists hard together.

  Go on, Josef.

  You can do it.

  I spurred myself on.

  A shoulder tap.

  “Herr Kröger?”

  Manfret Wünderlich, Kröger, and the cider fumes turned around.

  “Yes, what?”

  A pause.

  I swallowed.

  “Can I get some paints?”

  I pointed to the stall.

  “Please.”

  By now, Tomas had made eye contact with me and gave me a look that suggested that I should just fuck off.

  I didn’t.

  “Paint?” A sly smile. He turned to pay the shop owner, who looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.

  “Yes, paints.”

  “Why do you want paint for?”

  “To paint a picture.”

  Kröger’s eye was like a pale blue cut-out on his face, and his monocled eye looked in different directions. You could never tell if he was looking at you or just past you. My eyes diverted to the monocled eye.

  “A picture of what?” He asked.

  “I – I don’t really know yet. Maybe flowers.”

  He laughed. Kröger’s laugh was a dangerous thing.“The flowers?”

  I would have been less concerned if he had punched me square in the face.

  Grown-ups laughing in the face of a curious child hardly inspired confidence. My face began to turn every shade of red there was.

  Manfret’s soft grey eyes stepped in, curly hair moving with him. “My sister paints.” He almost tripped over the words as he said them.

  Nodding. “See!”

  “Ja. It’s alright for his sister. For a girl!” Another sip of the cider and a mouth covered burp.

  “Young men are supposed to be playing with toy guns and riding bicycles. Not painting.”

  “So.”

  “So!” Kröger mocked. “So, people might get the wrong idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “You know damn well what idea.”

  “I don’t. Honest.” I reached a point of arguing with Erick Kröger that no boy should ever reach.

  Kröger shoved my words out of the way.

  “You’re not getting the paint, Josef.”

  I didn’t really mind. I didn’t moan or stamp my feet or cry. I simply swallowed my disappointment, and the next thing to come out of my mouth would be a risk. Not a risk I calculated in my mind at all, but a risk.

  “You really are a bastard!” I said it louder than I intended.

  He heard me.

  And he slapped me hard across the face.

  I returned to Oskar with a hand-shaped ring of fire, and he mocked me for several weeks.

  15

  The Good Jew

  *Good-Blue*

  We did many activities during the day, like camping. We piled into the mountains and slept underneath a blanket of stars. Singing songs, naming the stars, telling stories, and playing games.

  I will admit it was fun.

  I didn’t have many nightmares when we camped out in the countryside, probably because Tomas was always there. Sometimes, when all the other boys had gone to sleep, Tomas and I would stay awake and pretend to play soldiers, and sometimes we simply sat together and didn’t say a word. I loved that.

  On one such night, as we lay under the full sky after a long day’s work, Von started talking quite suddenly and out of the blue.

  “Everything would be fine, but this thing with the Jews is hard for me to swallow.” His thirteen-year-old eyes were melting in the moonlight.

  Oskar paused for a moment, cautiously, looking around and making sure the other youth leaders weren’t listening. The fireflies danced around him. “Hitler knows what he is doing, and for the sake of the greater good, we have to accept certain difficult things.”

  But I could tell Von was not satisfied with that answer. Others took his side.

  “Even if they are incomprehensible?” I asked. Surprisingly, it was the children who had the questions, which seemed backward. I thought it more common for an adult to ask the questions, and the children’s job was to stay inside their mental boxes becaus
e adults said so. Everything was inside-out.

  “Surely, not all Jews are bad,” Manfret said. “I knew one when I was little.” He crossed one leg over another. “My Papa worked with one.”

  “Meinst du, dass ich dumm wie Bohnenstroh bin? Do you think I’m as thick as two short planks? Of course, they are!” Derrick replied. “Papa said it’s got something to do with business.”

  Suddenly the attitudes in our varying home backgrounds were reflected in the conversation. Then, when a few hours had passed, and all the boys were asleep in the tent and the arguments fell away, Tomas’ smallness piped up.

  Penn, Tomas, and I were the only ones awake, but they both thought I was asleep.

  Tomas: “I knew one, too. A Jew.”

  Penn: “Not that again.”

  Tomas, shrugging from his lying position in the tent: “He was nice.”

  Penn waited for more.

  Tomas: “But he was always late for work.”

  In his mind, he remembered our father with lips like cardboard.

  Penn: “See! Those stupid Jews.” His ignorance was like a mild burn.

  There was a pillar of silent light.

  Penn argued for a good ten minutes before he finally won the argument, and Tomas was silenced. I could tell that he had more thoughts left to share.

  I said nothing, but I wish that I had.

  A recollected memory of the paintings in the clouds

  The day was probably a Monday, but it could have been a Friday. All I know for sure was that it had a powdered ebony taste.

  They were many nights where father and I spent under the stars. We lived in the city with the neon gods, so the stars weren’t so grand. Mother would call out from the window, not knowing that I was there.

  “Aren’t you lonely down there, Ben?”

  “Nein, Lis. I’m painting in the clouds.”

  I know it sounds mad, but I really did see them. Father’s paintings in the clouds. Especially when I closed my eyes tight and used my imagination extra hard.

  I caught myself laughing and stopped before anyone heard.

  We spent a restless hour in that tent, but afterward, we were just too tired, fell asleep, and the next day was inexpressibly splendid and filled with even more new experiences.

  After training, we would go to class, but only for four hours a day. Physical training was a priority. Hitler thought it was more important than memorising dead facts. Just about every task, no matter how big or small, was turned into an individual, team, or unit competition. This included boy’s and girls’ sports, the quality of singing during propaganda marches, and Winter Aid collections, all of it.

  16

  Rinse. Dry. Repeat

  *Red (Crayola) Red-orange*Redwood*Red Devil

  School was a terrific failure. On my first day of class, I thought I’d better make a good first impression and went outside and picked flowers for our teacher, Frau Simons. She threw the flowers aside and stared at me with cold eyes.

  Frau Simons was a middle-aged teacher who lived and breathed for the Führer. She always had a hawkish air about her. Even her nose was curved and beaked. She had eyes of the palest blue that fixed you in ice should you dare disagree or talk out of turn. If a child so much as answered a question wrong, she took it as a personal slight. She was willow-wand thin, so stick-like that it was hard to imagine her eating much at all, at least not without wiping her narrow lips after every bite. Her hair wasn’t so much blonde as a washed-out brown, like it just couldn’t be bothered to be any colour at all.

  One of the first things I did in class was to make sure my Heil Hitler was working correctly.

  It wasn’t.

  “Don’t you know the proper German greeting?” Frau Simons nose-dived.

  She made me walk out of the classroom and enter again, this time using the proper greeting, which I didn’t know, so I just tried to mimic what I saw others doing. I walked into the classroom, blushing to the roots of my hair, held out my left arm, and shouted in a pretend grown-up voice,

  “Heil Hitler.”

  “Nein!” She roared as she tried to calm down the hysterical children.

  She walked over to me, staring at me with piercing eyes and lifted my right arm.

  “Your right arm, you stupid child!” She said, marching me out to stand in the corridor for twelve minutes – one minute for every year.

  I never lived that one down.

  In later years, the left-handed heil Hitler would be a form of defiance, and one I would be rather proud of, too. But for now, it was a source of constant embarrassment.

  After a few moments, when I returned, she instructed me to come up to the front, to the chalkboard, and tell the rest of the class my name. The boys were staring and snickering at their new classmate. I looked at Von Bacchman because he was the only one not snickering.

  He was worth a stare. He was trouble.

  “Your name,” Frau Simons was getting impatient.

  My face went red again.

  “J.O.S.E.F … S.C.H.N…” I realised that I didn’t remember how to spell my so-called last name.

  “I can’t,” I said quietly.

  The snickering got louder.

  “What? Speak up, boy!”

  “I can’t spell it!” I yelled it this time.

  Simons was not impressed.

  Tomas’ first day was just as much of a disaster.

  New school, new teacher, new students, new clothes, but same old Tomas wanting to be anywhere but there.

  As he lined up with the other children to go into class, a smile hung limply on his face, but it would soon come crumbling down. Everyone was looking at him, their eyes judging him. “That’s the other Jew boy.”

  Suddenly, he could feel the muscles in his chin trembling, and he looked towards the window in the hallway, as if the light would soothe him, but it didn’t bring him any comfort. It was too late.

  He walked quickly away from the other boys, tears in his eyes, turning the rainy day into a whirlwind of greys and yellows.

  “Wo gehtst du?” Tomas’ teacher yelled out. “Where are you going?”

  But Tomas did not care to answer, and he had no idea where he was going.

  He ran right into the surprising arms of Kröger.

  “Was ist los?” He asked him, half bent in front of him. “What’s the matter?” When Tomas would not respond, he tried again. “Why the waterworks?”

  Tomas sobbed into his chest unceasingly, hands clutching at his jacket. He held him in silence, rocking him slowly as his tears soaked his jacket.

  “Has it got too much for you?” he asked, crouching.

  “Look, I have not met a single boy who came here and didn’t have a hard time at first.” He said it in the gentlest way Kröger could muster.

  A tiny lapse let Tomas him pull away, and he gathered his breath enough to speak.

  “I can’t tell you.” Tomas was sniffing his words.

  The pain must have come in waves, minutes of sobbing broken apart by short pauses for recovering breaths, before hurling him back into the outstretched arms of his grief.

  Kröger just held him.

  That was our life in Inland.

  Rinse. Dry. Repeat.

  17

  The Street Walkers

  *Schultz Sand*

  Saturdays after school were spent walking the streets of Inland with a youth leader or an older student, collecting materials for the war effort. Such materials were scrap metals, charitable donations from some of the wealthier people of Inland, and warm clothes for the soldiers on the eastern front. We’d choose a partner to walk with. Obviously, I chose Tomas, much to the dismay of Von Bacchman, who was gesturing to me as soon as Oskar mentioned the idea pairing up.

  Some boys rode bikes.

  Others walked.

  Regardless, we were all to meet back at our cabins at six o’clock.

  Viktor Link, a bossy fifteen-year-old boy, was assigned to walk with us. He didn’t say much to us, and
we almost always walked in silence, occasionally exchanging small smirks and smiles.

  Viktor would greet every person at the door with a docile smile, but as soon as the door was shut and we walked far enough down the road, he would curse those poor people, with all their laziness. Some were deserving of the roll call of scorn, slamming the door in our faces. But most people were just people. I liked it.

  See, to me, people are like colours on an easel. No two colours created can be the same as the last. You can have variations of the same shades, and some colours complement each other better than others, but never exactly the same shade. I think that’s the most beautiful part of life.

  “They think they’re too good for us,” Viktor would continue, despite our partial dependence on them. Especially later.

  Tomas and I enjoyed taking it in turns to knock on each door.

  “And this one,” Viktor pointed up to a larger house that looked important. “This one belongs to Herr and Frau Schultz.” They were two of the wealthiest people of Inland and, in turn, the most envied. Rumours with coats talked in their honour.

  It stood on its own. Their house was the only house in the town that did. “He’s a rich cunt,” Viktor pointed. “Made all his money from his father and spent it all on hookers and alcohol.”

  Tomas and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes in complete vexation. He continued. “Last time we came here, his wife told us to fuck off. She’s crazy.” He punctuated his words. “Absolutely. Fucking. Crazy.”

  Tomas was horrified.

  The Schultz’s owned a constantly moulting teddy-bear like dog, one small enough to fit in the arms of a child. We all patted his head. It usually took a long time to get the dog hair off our clothes and the smell from our hands.

  Although it was his turn to knock on the door, Tomas pushed me in front of him and stood back with Viktor and the dog. “You knock.” A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood atop a small flight of steps.

  “What?”

  “You knock this one,” he repeated, practically pushing me with his words.