A Parachute in the Lime Tree

by Annemarie Neary

  When she was ready, she stood and clasped her hands together, just like Mutti did when she was about to burst into song. ‘We went up to Berchtesgaden,’ she said.

  She whispered the name, as though it was some magic kingdom. He remembered Mutti tapping the palm of her hand up and down on the table in delight. They’d been taken there, Emmi said, in the hope that the Führer would come and greet the wellwishers outside after his lunch, as he did now and then.

  ‘Oh Mutti,’ she sighed, ‘the weather was dismal. It was so disappointing. All the way up the mountain, the rain was so heavy we could hardly see anything at all. But when we reached the Berghof, the sun just burst out from behind the clouds. Everything shining, like glass.’

  Mutti crossed herself quickly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was happy enough as it was, the rain having cleared. But then a door opened.’

  It must have been around then that Oskar’s knife slipped. He remembered Mutti drawing out a handkerchief from her pocket and waving it in his direction without once diverting her attention from Emmi. He’d wrapped the handkerchief tight around his thumb and folded it over several times but still the blood seeped through.

  Emmi no longer seemed to be talking to them at all but describing some vision that was revealing itself to her as she spoke. ‘It was the Führer, Mutti. But dressed, well, like Vati or someone. Just like an ordinary man. So humble; just a grey suit with a felt hat. We all cheered and he raised his hat at us. He seemed to be about to go back through the door when one of his attendants came over and asked where we were from. He must truly love Berlin, Mutti, because when he heard he insisted on speaking to us.’

  Mutti was nodding vigorously. ‘Of course he does, my darling. Berlin has a special place in the Führer’s heart.’

  Emmi barely seemed to hear what Mutti was saying. ‘He brushed against a shrub, and the cloth on that shoulder was sprinkled with raindrops. And then, he stopped in front of us.’

  Oskar remembered how curious it was that the story no longer seemed to be Emmi’s story at all. It was as though the day had been memorised and sealed so that it had become part of some other, bigger story.

  ‘When he saw me, standing there holding Papa’s camera, he offered to pose for a photograph with the others. I was pleased, of course, but disappointed too because I would miss being in the picture. Can you believe it, Mutti? Not a moment’s hesitation. Right away, he turned round to one of his staff members and asked him to take the photograph so that I could be in the picture too.’

  Oskar recalled Mutti shaking her head in wonderment at the depth of the Führer’s feelings for his people, at his unfailing intuition. ‘Wonderful,’ she kept saying over and over again. ‘A man who can make the sun shine.’

  After that, Emmi and Mutti always referred to a blue-sky day with bright sunshine as Führer weather. Eventually, everyone else did as well.

  Oskar preferred not to think about Berlin and the sunshine that belonged to the Führer. Instead, he allowed himself to be distracted by a huddle of boys crouched at the edge of a pond that was busy with ducks. The thin sun caught the glint of metal in their hands as they cast off a row of empty sardine tins into the water. As the light breeze took them, the curled lids became sails and the tins scuttered along in among the ducks. He remembered summer afternoons at Teufelssee when he was nine or ten; he and Horst with their own little boats whittled from the bark of the sycamore tree. He was just thinking how lucky the boys were, and how little they realised it, when someone parked a black perambulator right in front of him, obstructing his view. Inside, a large red baby was holding his breath with fury. As it let loose a blood-curding scream, a woman flopped down on the bench next to Oskar. She shook the handle of the pram but the baby yelled even louder.

  ‘You’re one of those lads from the Legation, aren’t you? Pleased to meet you,’ she stretched her hand out for him to shake it. ‘I’m Cissy.’ She reached into her pocket for a large pink dummy, and shoved it into the baby’s mouth. He began sucking on it, in an exploratory kind of way; when he decided it would do, he shut up.

  ‘You must have an awful time with that boss of yours. I hear he’s a right so-and-so. Mrs Lacey had himself and the wife to tea one day, and she said he hadn’t a word to fling at the cat.’

  Oskar started to edge away from her but it didn’t seem to matter whether he answered her or not.

  ‘No offence, but Mrs Lacey says they’re an awful shower. Dull as ditchwater. Present company excluded, of course. Mrs Lacey says they’re even worse than the British, and God knows they’re bad enough. Still and all, she says, you have to keep inviting both sides. It’s like children, isn’t it? You’ve got to keep an eye on them for fear of what they’d get up to once your back’s turned.’

  Oskar looked to see if she was being overheard but no one else seemed to have noticed him. The boys were still at their race, making waves in the pond with bits of stick, and a little cluster of older boys had begun to gather around them. The girl leaned over the pram to adjust the baby’s blanket, and Oskar took the opportunity to move away from her. He had almost got to the end of the pond, when she caught up with him. He felt a sweat begin to break on his forehead.

  ‘Between you and me, though, I’d rather the Germans than the other lot. They had their chance, God knows, and what they didn’t do to us isn’t worth talking about. A few Germans round the place might do us the power of good. You’d not have a road the state of the one out there if the Germans were in charge.’

  Oskar looked back to see a group of women gathering around the abandoned baby who had now begun to scream louder than ever. The sound of the crying stopped the nursemaid in her tracks. As she turned, Oskar began to walk briskly away, moving as fast as he could without breaking into a run. It wasn’t until he went to unfasten a side gate onto the street that he realised his hands were shaking. He was shocked that, tweed coat or not, he was so obviously a German.

  The people who passed him on the streets were pasty-faced, their clothes poorly cut and colourless. The shops, too, were drab. A scattering of dead flies adorned a stack of faded biscuit tins in a café window. He stopped at a butcher’s, where strings of sausages lay coiled next to slabs of meat grained with yellow fat under a curtain of swaying carcasses. As a display of plenty, it was impressive. Each product was pierced by a triangle of white card bearing a price. He jingled the change around in his pocket but it was clear that it would barely buy a few sausages. He fingered grandpapa’s watch in his pocket and decided he’d pawn it if he had to.

  He felt the whip of the wind as he crossed the river onto a wide boulevard dominated by a tall column with a statue on top. He’d never been to Paris but he’d seen photographs of the troops marching down the Champs-Élysées when the city fell. He didn’t think this street was very much like Paris, but maybe Miss Effie had been making a joke. Here, the people seemed poorer still. There were hollow-eyed men on every corner and women in plaid shawls begged with their babies. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shop window and couldn’t understand what had given him away. He loosened his collar, and shoved his hands in his coat pockets to look a little less military. There wasn’t much he could do about his hair, which was too short and too blond. He made a mental note to look for a hat when he returned to Miss Effie’s. He spotted a pawnbroker’s sign in the distance. When he went to cross the road to reach it, a ragged woman pushing a battered pram swerved to avoid him. He glanced into the pram but there was nothing inside but a scattering of coal on a dirty pink blanket.

  When Oskar reached the pawnbroker’s, the window was coverd by a blind the colour of tallow. Through the glass door, he could see that the hallway was empty but for a pile of old boxes and an unstrung harp. It seemed the pawnbroker had moved on. He was just wondering what to do about a map when his attention was caught by a streak of blue. The girl was dark, light-footed, and she was moving in the direction of the river. He thought he remembered that dress, blue as lake water. He hardly dared breathe for
fear she might vanish before his eyes. He lost her a moment but then he spotted her again, rounding the side of a large building that was black with soot. Then, almost before he knew what had happened, she stepped onto a tram and was gone. It all happened so fast that he told himself it wasn’t Elsa. She could not have been and gone, just like that. He could not have been so close and then lose her. He had always had faith in happy endings but then so had Joachim, so certain that one day he would play that clarinet of his in Bourbon Street. Faith was no guarantee, but he was beginning to doubt, and he couldn’t afford that.

  Another tram arrived and he found himself jumping aboard it. He crouched at the window, scanning the street for a girl in blue. He handed the conductor Desmond Hennessy’s coins one at at time until the man’s fist closed over them. All the while, he was scouring the street outside, trying to cover both sides at once. The other tram was just up ahead and he was sure he would have seen her get off. But they reached the end of the line and there was still no sign of her. Dejected, and with only the two silvery coins remaining, Oskar got off the tram. That was when he saw the sea, unfolding grey in front of him. Gulls dipped and soared and wheeled across its surface. He filled his lungs with the smell of it and let the air wrap itself around his head. It was astonishing that this was all that divided him from the people he’d been bombing for months. He looked out to sea and tried to imagine what was on the other side of it. He’d heard that the English appreciated leisure above all else; that they would rather invent another ball game than fight another war. Vati used to say it was a pity it always seemed to be the English because they were just too damn easy to underestimate. They were that lazy idiot cousin who wasn’t much good for anything, yet somehow seemed to manage to beat you at tennis.

  Oskar had flown over so many English cities, yet he had no idea what any of them were like. He wondered if the houses were like these ones, with semi-circles above the doorways to let in the light. Speisekammer, Schmelztiegel, Loge. He could only remember their code names. He had no recollection of their real names, if he’d ever been told them in the first place. For him, they’d been crude matrices, that’s all; docks, electricity installations, factories. He passed a neat network of streets radiating off behind a gasworks and it made him uneasy to think of houses like this lying snug against his targets. For the first time in days, he thought of the others, limping home without him. What did they say had happened? Had they even been punished for not having managed to stop him? And what about Mutti and Vati and Emmi? Were there repercussions for them? It was the first time it had occurred to him. The idea horrified him, and he didn’t let himself explore it any further.

  War over there, and here the wait for it, and just this stretch of water in between. It didn’t seem much of a barricade. They would invade England once they’d softened it up and they would be here, too, soon enough. The world would keep on shrinking until there was nowhere left without a swastika on it.

  There was a long shrill whistle, and he realised that the building he’d taken for a school must be a railway station. Inside, there was a scattering of people but nothing blue. The names of the destinations had been blacked out, but in the distance were Effie’s two hills, one larger than the other, each a pyramid. When the train moved off in that direction, Oskar was on it.

  Whitecrest

  Someone for the Zoo Dance

  On the second day that Oskar failed to return, Kitty pulled the heavy curtains of the Receiving Room right back and let the light stream in. It robbed the room of its mystique, and for the first time she noticed how shabby the place was. How come, after all the excitement, she found herself stuck with Effie and that Ranjit person? She couldn’t imagine how Oskar would fare out there in the world, unless some other girl took a shine to him and fed him ham sandwiches and hot, sweet tea. Then again, perhaps he’d been picked up already and was locked away somewhere and she’d never clap eyes on him again. She must have stood at the window for an hour or so, watching the odd assortment of vehicles trundle down Pembroke Road, before Ranjit bustled in. He stopped dead in the daylight, then hurried to the window and pulled the drapes across.

  Aunt Effie was receiving that evening. There were candles to light and charts to prepare, and every spare chair in the house was brought into the Receiving Room and arranged there in some preconceived but unfathomable order dictated by Ranjit. Effie wore her velvet turban and a long embroidered shift, and her eyes were ringed in kohl. At around seven, a trail of elderly men and women began to gather on the front steps. Kitty wasn’t invited to the meeting, and when the Truthseekers were finally admitted, she made her way upstairs. Instead of going to her room, she climbed an extra storey up to the attic. She stood outside Oskar’s door and listened, just in case by some chance she’d missed him coming in. She knocked, and when there was no reply, she opened the door a crack. It was clear he hadn’t been back, so she stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. The bed was neatly made; the sheet turned down sharply over the blankets, the eiderdown folded at the foot of the bed.

  Like those people who leave Bibles in hotel rooms, Effie had left the same book by Oskar’s bed as she had by Kitty’s: The Key to Theosophy by Madam Blavatsky. She couldn’t imagine he’d get very far with that. There was also a copy of Robinson Crusoe, which must have come from the Receiving Room bookcase. She wondered if that’s what he felt like: Robinson Crusoe. The only other thing was a little leather journal. She recognised it as the book he was forever scribbling in when he was in the shed in Dunkerin. She thought it odd that he’d left it behind him; it gave her hope that he’d be back. The pages were edged in gold and the cover was like soft, buttery caramel. You’d want to have fabulous thoughts to be using a book like that. She flicked through it. The front and back were densely packed with his angular script. The middle pages were blank. The first few entries were written in an elegant hand but some of the later pages were stained, the ink blotted. One or two were completely illegible, as though he’d spilled something over them. Although she couldn’t read the German, she could just about make out dates and placenames. Vannes, Irland. She flicked to when Irland first appeared and examined each line of the first few pages for her own name.

  Something that looked like Kiti appeared a number of times, and she wondered whether this could be her. The first entry was headed ‘zum Frankreich’ and was dated 27 February 1941. It trailed down the page like a caterpillar. The lines were short but too long to be a list. A poem, perhaps? She ran her fingers down the reverse of the page. The indentations were deeper there than on other days and she wondered what it was he’d felt so strong about. She supposed he must have had some time to himself at Easter. She flicked to find the date. The entry was long and the handwriting curled down the page in tangles of blue. Had he flown that night? And if so, which English city had they bombed? And then she remembered Belfast, and realised that even on Easter Sunday he’d probably been off bombing something. She liked Oskar but she hoped he had the nightmares he deserved.

  Her own Easter had been a lovely one. Well, it had been a better day than most, anyway. Even though there were no children around to make it worthwhile, Mother had hardboiled some eggs after Mass and left them sitting in gorse water to turn yellow for the Monday. Later, they had afternoon tea in the Dunkerin Arms.

  ‘We’ll treat ourselves, Kitty,’ Mother had said, ‘for the day that’s in it. We’ll have a currant square for poor old Frank.’

  The afternoon tea went well. Mother left off the opera cloak for once. Her dress was moderation itself: an eau-de-nil two-piece and a small hat. She behaved herself with the waitresses and confined herself to nodding at Doctor Russell and not once mentioning bunions. It was hard to believe that just a week later, there’d be a parachute in the lime tree.

  The next morning there was still no sign of Oskar. Aunt Effie was exhausted from the Truthseekers the night before. She was on the chaise, with Ranjit feeding her tablespoons of thin soup. Down in the garden, a peacock screamed.r />
  Kitty couldn’t settle to anything. She tried to read but there didn’t seem much point in reading someone else’s story when she was in the middle of such a great big story of her own. There was no point in baking, either, since neither Aunt Effie nor Ranjit ever really seemed to eat. It would only make her fat and bad-tempered, and what was the sense in that? Whatever she tried, she couldn’t get Oskar out of her head. Aunt Effie didn’t seem the least surprised that Oskar had gone. ‘Leave the boy to his quest, Kitty,’ was all she said. ‘He’ll be back when he’s ready.’

  All the same, she fretted. What if he was off with those fellows Bobby mentioned, the ones in the hotel down in Wicklow? Sure, wasn’t it Wicklow he was always on about? Well, what if he was out there on the Sugarloaf right now, guiding in the planes that would blow them all to kingdom come?

  She wished she could read the diary and put her mind at rest. That’s when she remembered Rita. Right through school, Rita had a string of penpals. There was the Spanish girl who kept sending miraculous medals and scraps of dry skin that were supposed to be saints’ relics. There was the girl from Paris who sounded very flighty altogether. She was sure there’d been a German too. She thought she remembered a photograph of a great strapping girl on a mountaintop. She didn’t suppose Rita would have picked up much German from a penpal, but you never know. Anyway, she’d be glad to see Rita one way or the other. She felt so jumpy and cooped up she just had to get herself out of the house. She was beginning to feel a bit guilty about leaving Mother on her own down in Dunkerin, too. That’s what happens, she thought, when you do too much sitting around. You start brooding on things. She’d go and find Rita at the Commercial College; it would be good to have somebody to talk to for a change.