My Brother's Secret

by Dan Smith

  ‘Maybe it’s not true,’ I said, clinging to the tiniest speck of hope. ‘Maybe the letter is wrong. Maybe it’s someone else.’

  Stefan said nothing.

  ‘It’s not fair. The war was supposed to be short,’ I sobbed. ‘It was supposed to be over. Everyone was supposed to give up when they saw us coming.’

  ‘That’s what they want us to think,’ Stefan said. ‘That everything will be all right.’

  ‘I thought …’ I swallowed and tried to organise what I thought. It was difficult with so many things spinning through my mind. I hadn’t expected the overwhelming feeling of shock and emptiness. ‘I thought that … that I was meant to feel proud of Papa if … if …’

  ‘If something happened to him, you mean?’ Stefan leaned back to look at me, and his face darkened as if he were angry.

  For a second, I thought he was going to say something else, but then he bit his lip and wiped his eyes and put his arms around me again, so I just stood and cried against his chest.

  Stefan’s action, though, had pulled open his jacket, revealing a white flower embroidered on his inside pocket. It was small, perhaps the size of my thumbnail, and the stitching was crude, as if Stefan had done it himself.

  At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but it was right there, staring me in the face, and the longer I looked at it, the more I became aware of it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘That flower.’

  Immediately, Stefan drew his jacket closed and looked at me. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘You didn’t see it.’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t …’

  ‘Just forget it.’ Then his face softened and he closed his eyes. He sighed, letting his breath come out through his nose in one long whoosh. When he opened his eyes again, he said, ‘Really; it’s nothing. It’s just a flower.’

  Stefan took the death notice from my hand, as if the paper were alive. He folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket, and I caught a glimpse of the white flower again.

  ‘We have to tell Oma and Opa,’ Stefan said. ‘I’ll go on my bike, it shouldn’t take me more than an hour.’ He went to the door and began to pull on his boots.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, you stay here. I’ll be quicker.’

  Glancing over at the foot of the stairs, my gaze wandered to the top, and settled on Mama’s bedroom door. Then I looked back at my brother. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

  ‘I won’t be long, I promise.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’ Stefan came over and hugged me once more. ‘You’re strong, remember. You’re tough. You’re a Friedmann.’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he called as he slipped out of the front door and pulled it closed behind him.

  I waited for a second, stunned by the speed at which everything had happened, then shook myself and went to the window.

  Outside, Stefan was untying his bike from the place where it stood next to mine against the railing. When it was free he threw one leg over and glanced up at the window. He nodded, then raised his hand and rode away along the pavement.

  PAPA

  It was deathly quiet in the house. Or quiet and noisy at the same time, which was strange. I could hear the air in the room; hear it moving in and out of my ears and circling my head. The thump, thump, thump of my heart was like the drums when we marched. The kitchen clock was like a ticking bomb, each click of the hidden cogs echoing in my head.

  Waiting at the window, I watched the cars and people. A horse and cart went past, loaded with barrels and crates. I felt more alone than ever before. Out there, everyone was carrying on as usual. Ralf and Martin would be doing what they always did; they wouldn’t know anything about what had happened to Papa. Then I remembered there was a photograph of Papa in the drawing room, so I went to look at it.

  We didn’t use that room much; mostly it was for if we had guests, and it smelled musty inside. Mama always kept it clean, but the furniture was old and the soft cushions soaked up the dust. If you banged them out on a bright day, when the sun was streaming through the windows, you could see the dust floating in the air.

  It wasn’t bright in there that morning, though. The heavy red blackout curtains were still pulled shut, and the only light that came in was from the open door.

  My feet were quiet on the worn carpet as I crossed the room. Reaching the sideboard at the far end, I stopped and stared at the unframed photograph propped against an empty vase.

  Not much bigger than a playing card, it was a close up of Papa in his uniform tunic. He was looking just to his left and there was the slightest suggestion of a smile on his lips, as if he’d seen something funny and was trying not to laugh.

  A hint of his close-cut hair was visible beneath the cap set at an angle on his head. On the front of the cap was the badge of the German Army; a bold and angular eagle clutching a wreath that circled the swastika.

  I often used to sneak in to look at that photograph. Especially after the talks at the clubhouse. Sometimes someone would come from the army or the Nazi party to talk to us about racial theory or tactics or Nazism or just about how special we were. We were the youth, they told us; the future of our country. We were important. That always made me feel proud, and afterwards, I would come home and creep into the drawing room to look at the photo of Papa, who was out there making the world a better and stronger place.

  I wiped a tear from my eye. ‘I wish you were here,’ I said to the photograph.

  When my grandparents arrived, they came in like a whirlwind. Well, Oma did, anyway.

  I heard her before I saw her. The old car pulled up with a splutter and a squeak, and then her voice was there, filling the street, getting louder as she came to the door. If the other people in the building weren’t already awake, they would be now.

  ‘… to be looked after. I won’t take no for an answer,’ she was saying, and then there was a quick hard knocking at the door, just as I reached it and pulled it open.

  Oma wasn’t big – in fact, she was quite skinny – and if you saw her from a distance, you wouldn’t think she was much of anything. She was neither tall nor short, but had settled somewhere in between. She didn’t dress for attention and her face was creased with the same lines that anyone her age would have. But, close up, you could see the fire in her eyes. And when she opened her mouth to speak, you could tell, right away, that she was not a woman to be trifled with.

  ‘Karl,’ she said, pulling me into her and pressing me against her chest. ‘You poor, poor boy. Now, where’s your mama?’ She released me and marched upstairs calling, ‘Hannah! Hannah! Where are you? Ah, there you are, my darling daughter. I’m so sorry. So sorry about Oskar. He was a good man.’

  Opa came in a few seconds later. A tall, thickset man who would always stand out in a crowd. He had been a boxer in the army when he was young and he still had something of his athletic build. He did fifty press-ups and fifty sit-ups every morning when he woke and another fifty of each every night before he went to bed. He didn’t talk a lot – he always said Oma did enough talking for the both of them – and he had friendly creases around his eyes that stretched right back to his ears when he smiled.

  He wasn’t smiling now, though.

  He closed the door behind him and put a hand on my shoulder and nodded. ‘Be brave,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Stefan?’ I asked.

  ‘Waiting at home. Now go and collect your things, you’re coming with us.’

  A NEW HOME

  Oma packed a bag for Mama while Opa sat on my bed as I wandered around the room in a daze, gathering a few things for Stefan and myself. I was already wearing my uniform, which I wore most of the time now, so I didn’t have much to pack. A few spare clothes, my penknife with the broken handle, some schoolbooks and my prized copy of the Führer’s book, Mein Kampf.

  Then we were back downstairs and Opa was carrying our bags to the car while
Oma helped Mama into the back seat.

  ‘We should never have let you stay in the city,’ Oma was saying. ‘The moment this … war started and Oskar went away, we should have brought you to live with us.’

  Mama was a nurse at the hospital and she hadn’t wanted to be too far away from work, that’s why we had stayed in the city. That, and because she said living with Oma and Opa would get on her nerves. Right now, though, Mama didn’t say anything at all. She just stared ahead and let Oma do everything. Her face had taken on a blank expression, and she looked empty, like she wasn’t Mama any more.

  ‘We’ll organise everything,’ Oma said to me. ‘Don’t you worry. Everything will be settled. You’re coming to stay with us for a while and that’s that. We’ll let school know.’

  ‘And the Deutsches Jungvolk?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. We’ll tell them too.’

  Before we left, I sneaked into the drawing room and went to the photograph of Papa. Something felt final about the way we were going – as if we weren’t ever going to come back to this house – so I snatched up the photograph and slipped it into my pocket. At least that way Papa would be coming with us.

  In the kitchen, I picked up my present. It was about the size of a cigarette tin, but a little thicker, so it was probably a cardboard box. There was something heavy inside.

  ‘Karl!’ Opa called. ‘We’re waiting. Where are you?’

  I stuffed the present into my other pocket and left the house.

  ‘What about my bike?’ I asked Opa as he turned the key in the front door. ‘Can’t I take it with me?’ I rode it to school every day, I rode it to the Deutsches Jungvolk clubhouse, and when I didn’t have any meetings, I would go out and cycle round the streets just to make myself fit and strong.

  ‘I’ll never get it in the car with everything else,’ Opa said, glancing at the black vehicle at the side of the road. It wasn’t much, but he’d had it as long as I could remember and he loved to tinker with it. He was always leaning over the bonnet to fix this or that.

  When he turned back to me, he saw the look on my face. ‘I’ll tell you what – I’ll come back for it after I drop you off. How’s that? I’ll have to come back anyway to tell school why you’re not there.’

  ‘And my troop,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yes. Them too.’ He didn’t look right at me, though, and I saw him share a quick glance with Oma.

  When we arrived at the red brick house on Escherstrasse, Oma and Opa took Mama up to the room she’d had when she was a girl. Oma settled her into bed while Opa drove back to collect my bike.

  ‘Will she be all right?’ I asked Stefan. ‘She looks funny. Like she’s not there.’

  The two of us were standing alone in the kitchen, not really knowing what to do.

  ‘I think so,’ Stefan said. ‘She’s … sad, that’s all.’

  It was hard to believe that we would never see Papa again. It didn’t feel real at all, and I began to imagine that someone would knock on the door at any moment and tell us it was all a mistake.

  ‘… look after her.’

  ‘Hmm?’ I looked up at my brother.

  ‘I said, Oma and Opa will look after her. Us too.’

  I nodded.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ he said, but I could tell he was being strong for my sake.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. Mama didn’t come out of her room and I didn’t eat anything.

  Early that evening, I went up to the bedroom where Stefan and I slept when we visited. For years we had spent two weeks of every summer with Oma and Opa, but last year I had come alone because Stefan couldn’t leave work.

  I stood Papa’s photograph on top of the chest of drawers, placing my unwrapped birthday present beside it. Then I said goodnight to Papa and climbed into bed.

  It was still light outside when Oma pulled the curtains shut and kissed me goodnight.

  When I woke up, though, it was dark. Not just dark, but pitch black. There wasn’t a shred of light in the room. And the worst thing was that I’d forgotten where I was. I had this horrible sense that something awful had happened but I couldn’t quite remember what it was. My stomach felt empty but heavy. My heart was beating fast and my whole body was covered in sweat.

  I sat up, pushing the sheet away. ‘Mama? Papa?’ My voice was weak and scared, crackling from my dry throat.

  ‘Karl?’ my brother replied. ‘You all right?’

  I heard Stefan’s movement and felt his weight settle on the bed beside me.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said, putting out a hand to find me in the darkness. ‘I’m here.’

  Then I remembered. Everything rushed back as if sleep had let it float away and now it was all being sucked back into my head.

  Papa is dead. That was the first thought that slammed into me.

  Mama is sick. That was the second.

  And those two things welled up inside me, drowning me in a terrible, cold sadness that ached in the back of my throat and brought stinging tears to my eyes.

  Out in the sunshine, with my friends, all the talk of soldiers and fighting was exhilarating, but everything felt so much worse in the dark, in the dead of night. ‘I hate this war.’

  ‘Me too.’ Stefan swung his legs up onto my bed and lay beside me, putting his head next to mine on the pillow.

  For a time we just stayed like that, not saying anything.

  ‘There’s this boy in my class called Johann Weber,’ I said after a while. ‘His papa was in the Luftwaffe. No one important, just a—’

  ‘Papa wasn’t important,’ Stefan said. ‘Only to us. Not to your precious Führer. Not to the army.’

  ‘Papa was a sergeant,’ I reminded him. ‘An officer. He was important.’

  ‘Not so important they kept him alive.’

  ‘But that’s … no … maybe there was nothing they could do.’ Stefan’s comment made me angry. ‘He was probably doing something brave like rescuing his men or …’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Stefan said to calm me down. ‘Just tell me about this kid … what’s his name? Johann someone.’

  Only, I didn’t feel like telling the story now. It didn’t seem to matter any more. ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose we’ll stay here until Mama is better. Opa said he can get me a job.’

  ‘And I’ll go to the local school? Join the town’s Deutsches Jungvolk troop?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think Oma and Opa want to keep you here for a bit, make sure you’re all right. Anyway, maybe some time away from all that stuff would be good for you.’

  ‘How would it be good for me?’ I turned towards him but it was too dark to see him. I could feel how close he was, though.

  ‘It’ll give you some time to think about … I don’t know,’ he said, ‘other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  He paused for a moment. ‘Maybe … maybe about what’s important.’

  ‘The Deutsches Jungvolk is important.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s just that maybe Oma and Opa think Mama’s struggled a bit with us. You know, with me getting into trouble last year and then you being so …’ he stopped as if he were trying to find just the right word, ‘well, sometimes it’s as if you like all that Nazi stuff a bit too much.’

  ‘Too much?’ I pushed myself up onto one elbow. ‘What are you talking about? How can I like it too much? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will. One day, you will.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I was beginning to feel frustrated and angry that he was being so mysterious, and it reminded me of the flower I’d seen inside his jacket earlier that day. He’d been strange about that, too, avoiding my questions.

  ‘And I want to know what that flower is,’ I said, thinking he might tell me now. ‘What is it? Does it mean something?’

  ‘Mean something?’ He sounded surprised. ‘Why should it mean something? No it doesn’t mean anything. It’s nothing. Forget
it.’

  After that, he wouldn’t say any more about it, so we just lay there in silence until I fell asleep.

  When I next woke, it was light and I could hear movement in the kitchen, so I dressed in my uniform and went downstairs to where Oma was preparing breakfast.

  Before I went in, though, I checked the coat hook in the hallway. I opened Stefan’s jacket and looked at the inside pocket.

  A neat square of cloth had been cut away and the flower was gone.

  PRISONER

  Life at Escherstrasse was dull and I missed my friends. Oma and Opa wouldn’t let me go outside or do anything I wanted to do. It was different for Stefan, though; Opa had a friend who owned the mill just outside town, so he gave Stefan a job straight away.

  ‘Stefan needs to be busy,’ he had said, but I think they just wanted to keep him out of trouble. They had even managed to persuade him to stop wearing his colourful shirts, telling him it was best for Mama and me if he didn’t draw attention to himself. They were the kind of shirts that rebellious boys wore – boys who sometimes fought with the Hitler Youth. Stefan wasn’t happy about it, but had eventually agreed and started dressing like everyone else.

  Stefan left early every morning and came back at five o’clock in the afternoon, dusted with flour. For three days, he stayed at home in the evening, but on the fourth day he went out on his bike after dinner.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Opa had asked him.

  ‘To see some friends,’ Stefan told them.

  ‘What friends?’

  ‘People I met at the mill.’

  ‘People like you?’ Opa asked.

  Stefan shrugged and I could tell they wanted to stop him, but there wasn’t anything they could do; he would have gone whatever they said, so they just stood at the door looking worried as he cycled away.