by Dan Smith
‘I’m fine.’ I was still thinking about what I had just seen.
‘You’re sure?’ He came closer and took hold of my arm to inspect it.
‘I chipped my tooth.’
‘Let me see.’
I opened my mouth and he peered in. ‘Doesn’t look too bad.’
He made me recount the accident blow by blow, and wanted to know all about Kriminalinspektor Wolff coming to the house. He looked very worried, but started to relax when I told him about Lisa, and about how we had made friends.
I didn’t mention the writing on the wall and I didn’t say anything about the hole I’d seen cut into his jacket.
When I finished, Stefan smiled and took a cigarette packet from his shirt pocket. ‘It’s good you’ve got a friend,’ he said, throwing it down on the windowsill and unbuttoning his work shirt.
‘Since when do you smoke?’ I asked.
He looked up at me and shrugged.
‘And where did you get them? Are they black-market?’
‘Black-market?’ He stopped what he was doing and pretended to look shocked. ‘As if I would.’
‘You’ll get into trouble.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t worry about me, little brother.’
‘So who’s that girl you were with?’ I asked.
‘A friend from the factory.’ He took off his shirt and dropped it on the floor. ‘She’s pretty don’t you think?’ Stefan started humming as he took a clean shirt from the wardrobe and slipped his arms into the sleeves.
‘What’s that you’re humming?’ I asked, coming to sit on the bed.
‘Just some song.’
‘I’ve never heard it.’
‘Of course you haven’t,’ he said fastening the buttons. ‘You’re one of the Führer’s little soldiers, aren’t you? You’re— wait a minute.’ He looked up through his long fringe and narrowed his eyes at me. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t notice. Who are you and what have you done with my little brother?’
‘What? I am me,’ I said.
‘So where’s your uniform?’ He took a step back and made a show of looking me up and down. ‘What the hell have they done to you?’ He walked around me, prodding my back and sides, making me giggle. ‘Who did this to my brother?’
‘Get off.’ I couldn’t help laughing, and then I was trying to prod him back but he was too quick and strong and eventually I collapsed onto the bed, saying, ‘I give up!’
‘Say I win.’
‘You win.’
‘Say I’m the best and the cleverest.’
‘Never!’
‘Say it.’ He started tickling me again. ‘Say it.’
‘All right, all right. You’re the best and the cleverest!’
‘Quite right too.’ He released me and sat next to me on the end of the bed and we were quiet for a moment, catching our breath.
‘Oma said Mama didn’t get up today.’
‘No.’ I shook my head.
‘Maybe tomorrow, then.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’ I looked at him.
‘You still haven’t opened your birthday present.’ He tipped his chin towards the chest of drawers. ‘I reckon you’ll like it.’
‘I was waiting for Mama to get better.’ I hung my head. ‘Is she going to be all right? It feels like she’s fading away.’
‘That’s why I need you to help me be strong.’ He nudged me. ‘Strong as Krupp’s steel, isn’t that what you lot say?’
‘I don’t feel strong as Krupp’s steel.’ I rubbed my face and wiped my eyes.
‘Well, maybe you should just open your present now.’ He went over and picked it up, holding it out to me.
I tried to protest, but he was insistent, so I untied the twine and carefully took off the brown paper. Inside, there was a plain cardboard box.
The lid slipped off easily, and a few pieces of shredded paper fell out onto the floor. The box was full of the strips, but nestled among them was a pocketknife.
‘Where did you get this?’ I said, taking out the knife and admiring the brown, dimpled handle. ‘It’s like a real soldier’s!’ I opened the biggest blade and held it up to the light.
‘Well, every boy should have a good pocketknife, and we knew yours was broken,’ Stefan said. ‘Mama and I saved up.’
I folded the blade back into the handle and wondered if I deserved it.
‘I was paid today,’ Stefan said before he sat down for supper in the kitchen. ‘And I want to give some to you.’ He looked at Oma when he spoke. ‘To help with looking after us.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to—’
‘Please,’ Stefan interrupted. ‘It’s only right.’ He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a fold of notes.
But as he did it, something else came out of his pocket and fell to the floor at his feet.
We all saw it.
A small square of black cloth embroidered with a flower.
Yellow centre. White petals.
Stefan quickly bent over to pick it up and stuff it back into his pocket.
‘Be careful,’ Opa said to him with a serious voice. ‘Please be careful, Stefan.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘The flower. What does it mean?’
All three of them turned to stare at me.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Don’t let anyone see that,’ Opa took his eyes off me and spoke to Stefan. ‘Not anyone.’ He looked at me once more. ‘And don’t you breathe a word of it to anyone, Karl.’
‘Why won’t you tell me what it means?’ I asked. ‘Why won’t—’
I stopped because Lisa’s words came back to me, about children reporting their parents, and everything was suddenly very clear to me. I knew exactly why they wouldn’t tell me. It was the same reason why they never mentioned that Papa didn’t want to fight the war.
‘You think I’ll tell someone,’ I said, backing away towards the kitchen door. ‘None of you trusts me.’
I ran upstairs and went straight into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. I felt angry and sad and frustrated and confused and everything was muddled in my head. But underneath it all, I couldn’t blame them for not trusting me.
INTO THE CELLAR
That night, I woke to an awful sound.
One moment I’d been lying in bed, trying to think of a way to make Stefan tell me what the flower meant, and the next I was jarred awake by the nightmarish wailing and screeching of the air raid sirens.
My whole body felt numb, and cold fear gripped me in a tight fist as I flung back the bed covers and turned, looking for Stefan. It was too dark to see anything, though, and the darkness danced and sparkled in my eyes.
‘You all right?’ My brother’s voice was filled with urgency.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Everything’s fine. We’ll be fine. We’ll get to the cellar and … Mama,’ he said, and I knew what he meant. We had to get her up.
I fumbled for my torch and switched it on, then we rushed across the landing, stumbling into Mama’s room, just as Oma and Opa were coming out of theirs.
‘Mama. We have to get down to the cellar,’ Stefan said as he pulled back her sheets. ‘Quick. They’re coming.’
There wasn’t much time. The sirens had been wailing for a few minutes already; the planes would be here soon.
Mama stirred just enough to open her eyes. ‘Oskar? Is that you?’
‘No, it’s us. Stefan and Karl.’
‘What’s happening?’ She started to sit up, looking about and sounding confused. ‘A raid, is it? Oh, well, just … just leave me. I’ll be all right.’
‘We’re not leaving you here.’ Opa came in to help but Stefan just grabbed her arm as she tried to lie back down.
My thoughts were wild with images of bombs falling towards us. A thousand of them raining from the flying beasts, all of them coming right at us and in just a few seconds they would hit us and we would be engulfed in a storm of fire and rubble. ‘Please, Mama,’ I
begged her. ‘Please. You have to come.’
‘Oskar?’ Mama said.
‘It’s Karl,’ I took her hand. ‘Please get up.’
‘You’re afraid?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Please get up.’
‘Of course, my darling. Of course.’
Mama climbed out of bed and Stefan put his arm around her waist to lead her from the bedroom and down to the hallway.
Opa went straight to the door under the stairs. It stuck in the frame, so he had to yank it hard, and then he lifted the cellar trapdoor.
‘In,’ he said. ‘Come on, quick.’
The cellar was a musty, higgledy-piggledy mess of unwanted junk and forgotten treasures. An ancient wooden sea chest with thick iron bands around it. A stack of chairs with flaking paint. There was an old bicycle and a paraffin heater that gave off an oily smell.
There was the boiler, too; a dark demon that skulked at the far end of the cellar. It was quiet now, hardly alive in the summer, but in the winter months Opa fed it glinting black chunks from the coal pile in the corner and it would roar with life. Its heat would clatter and clank through the house, rattling the pipework and banging in the night, hissing steam from the radiators.
Stefan and I used to dare each other to go down the rickety steps and stay there, in the dark, for as long as we could. It had been a place of monsters and ghosts. Now, though, it was our place of hope. Somewhere that might save our lives.
Opa had cleared an area directly under the single naked light bulb, and put out a few chairs and a table so there was somewhere to sit during a raid. He had put up shelves that were lined with tins of nails and screws and assorted odds and ends, and Oma had brought down packets of food in case we were stuck here for a long time. There were buckets of emergency water, as well, changed every few days to keep them fresh.
The sirens were nothing more than a faint droning now the door was shut, but we’d feel the bombs when they came.
I’d only been in an air raid once before, when we were in the city. It had been the most terrifying and the most exciting night of my life. The bombs had fallen for ever and we had felt the ground shake. We had huddled in the communal shelter under our building and, afterwards, we’d seen the flames and lights in the distance. The next day, at school we talked about the damage and how we hated the enemy more than ever.
Right now, though, I felt nothing.
‘Is it a false alarm?’ I whispered, because whispering seemed to be the right thing to do.
Opa shook his head and held up a finger. ‘Listen.’
Boom b-boom boom-boom. B-boom.
It was faint, but we could all hear it.
Boom b-boom boom-boom. B-boom.
‘Eighty-eights,’ Stefan said. ‘That’s not bombs.’
Opa nodded. ‘You’re right.’
It was the sound of the 88 mm Flak guns that protected the city. There were a number of them put in along the route that bombers were expected to take, but they could be moved anytime – towed away by a tractor or a half-track. They fired clouds of hot metal into the sky, to rip through the enemy planes and bring them howling to the ground. Often, it was the Hitler Youth boys who manned them, desperate to shoot down the enemy. I had always hoped I would get the chance to fire them one day.
‘I don’t hear any bombs,’ I said.
The eighty-eights continued to boom and cough their flak into the sky and I knew that even if there weren’t any bombs dropping, it wouldn’t be safe to be out in the streets. The flak would be falling back to the ground like hot, sharp rain.
‘It’s the roads and the railway they want,’ Opa reassured us. ‘Factories and things like that. They don’t drop bombs on people.’
‘They did at Münster,’ Oma sounded afraid. ‘Just dropped them like there wasn’t any target at all. The radio said they didn’t know how many people were killed.’
‘Münster’s much bigger than here.’ Opa narrowed his eyes at her and shook his head in a tight movement. ‘They’re not interested in us.’
I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted it all to stop. It wasn’t exciting any more. It wasn’t about being the best any more; about Germany making everywhere else as good as it was here. It wasn’t about being proud of Papa. Now it was about dying and being scared. It was about Mama being sad. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.
I moved closer to Mama and put my arms around her, and there was a scary moment when it was like hugging a doll. It was as if she hadn’t noticed me at all, and that was worse than any bombing or being stuck in any damp old cellar. Her words came back to me – the ones she had spoken not long ago, when we’d tried to get her out of bed.
‘Just leave me’, she had said, as if she hadn’t wanted to come. As if she didn’t care about the raid.
As if she didn’t care if she was dead.
‘Please,’ I whispered and hugged her again; tighter this time. ‘Please.’
Then a breath of life ran through her – as if she woke up from a long sleep. She lifted her arms and gathered me to her. She put her face to the top of my head and breathed deeply. She kissed me and squeezed me. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
A mixture of surprise and hesitant relief washed through me, and I glanced over at Stefan who was watching her, wide-eyed. Oma and Opa seemed just as shocked to hear her speak.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so useless,’ Mama said with a croaky voice. ‘But I think I’m going to be better now.’ She looked around at everyone. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been …’ and then she burst into tears as if she’d been holding it in for all these days, allowing it all to build up.
‘Oh, darling.’ Oma sounded pleased and sad at the same time, and tears sparkled in her eyes. ‘Let it out,’ she said, getting up from her seat. ‘Let it out and you’ll feel so much better.’
I didn’t want to let Mama go, but Oma moved me aside so she and Opa could get close to her.
‘I miss him so much,’ Mama sobbed. ‘So much.’
Oma held her tight. ‘We all do. But we have to remember the good things, not …’
‘You mean like when he used to chase me and Karl around the garden with a bucket of water in the summer?’ Stefan looked over at me. ‘Or when he used to come back and tell us to check his pockets and there’d be chocolates in there – one for each of us.’
I couldn’t help smiling when I remembered that, picturing Papa coming to the door and making a show of pretending he’d lost something in his jacket pocket, patting himself down. He’d laugh so much sometimes, running away as we tried to grab him, to pin him down and check him for sweets. Eventually he’d trip over on purpose so we could jump on top of him.
Despite Mama’s tears, her change had a great effect on all of us. It lightened the mood in the cellar. Even with the air raid sirens outside, and the distant booming of the guns, we all felt better. When she heard us talking about Papa, she listened to the stories and even managed to smile a little. It was odd that it had taken an air raid and being cooped up in the half-darkness to breathe some life back into her.
She wasn’t back to normal just yet, but at least it was a start.
When the raid had passed over and everything had been quiet for half an hour, Opa decided it was safe to venture out.
‘Strange we didn’t feel any bombs,’ Stefan said as we climbed the steps.
‘Maybe they were too far away,’ I suggested, but I was beyond caring much about that now. I was so pleased Mama was talking again.
‘We should have at least heard something,’ Stefan said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
Opa led us into the hallway. ‘Maybe we should go outside and look.’
‘Is it safe?’ Oma asked.
‘I would think so. I don’t hear any sirens, do you?’
I clung to Mama like I wasn’t going to let her go, and we all went to the front door and out into Escherstrasse.
There were other people at their doors, too, and many had come out
into the street so there were men and women and children standing in the road. They hardly spoke at all, and it was unnerving to see everyone like that – motionless, like stunned ghosts, all looking up at the sky, all of them gawping, just as we did.
None of us had expected this.
CONFETTI
No bombs had been dropped.
The planes had left something else instead.
Amid glowing red parachute flares and the piercing beams of the searchlights, the sky was alive with the confetti of a million leaflets that flickered and flashed as they caught the light. They spun and sailed and fell and floated and buzzed and rattled as they came to earth. Then the gentle wind snatched them up again, before leaving them to fall like a magical rain.
They landed on the rooftops, on the road, the pavement. The wind pressed them to windows and deposited them on cars and blew them along the street like the aftermath of a great celebration.
Above the leaflets, the rods of the searchlights touched the ceiling of clouds, creating huge shimmering circles that rippled blood-red from the colour of the parachute flares that floated and fizzled, dropping as if through water. It was mesmerising and terrifying all at once, to see the night filled with a glow that was both hellish and beautiful.
I couldn’t stop staring at the sky and the strange storm of lights and paper.
‘Isn’t this exciting?’ said a voice beside me.
I tore my eyes from the spectacle and rubbed my stiff neck as I looked about.
‘It’s like a giant party.’ Lisa was wearing pyjamas almost exactly the same as mine and had a huge smile on her face.
‘What are they?’ I asked her. ‘What’s going on?’
Some of the younger children started to chase the confetti along the road, laughing and spinning in circles as they gathered handfuls of the paper, but their parents were quick to call them back. They took the leaflets from their children’s hands and threw them down as if the paper burned their fingers.
‘It’s all lies.’ Frau Oster was standing close by, shaking her head. ‘Just horrible lies.’
