The Hollow Bones

by Leah Kaminsky

  Ernst cleared his throat, realising this was not an invitation. It was an order. Not that it wasn’t his dream to go back to Tibet, especially if he might trek to the foothills of the Himalayas this time. He thought about how Brooky would have laughed his head off at Himmler’s esoteric plan, refusing point blank to have anything to do with it, but things were different in America.

  ‘I will personally make sure that only the finest of our scientists will be joining you.’ Himmler’s voice was calm and reassuring now. ‘They will be from every branch of science possible, each one a dedicated SS man, like your good self. I want the famed archaeologist Edmund Kiss to be part of the team. I have just finished reading his excellent book about the true origins of Atlantis.’ His voice dropped to a whisper again. ‘Tell me, my son, about your previous trips into Tibet. I am curious to know what the people there are like.’

  Ernst cracked his knuckles. Himmler had not yet mentioned anything at all about Ernst’s scientific qualifications; even so, he could feel himself warming to the idea of another expedition. ‘I found them very accommodating, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a smirk. ‘I’ve heard some stories about how friendly their women are.’

  ‘Oh! My apologies. I wasn’t actually referring to the women, although they do have a certain exotic beauty about them. I meant that, on the whole, Tibetans are hospitable and kind. But they are superstitious and strongly believe in magic, which, of course, as a man of science I find quite ludicrous.’ His words flew out of his mouth like a flock of startled birds.

  Himmler seemed not to have noticed the unintended slight. ‘Did you come across any natives with blond hair?’

  ‘No, Herr Kommandant. The peoples of Tibet are of a much darker complexion.’

  The Reichsführer got up from his chair and paced up and down the room, rubbing the back of his neck. He moved over to the window and looked up at the sky. ‘You have a lot to learn, young man.’ He turned to face Ernst, who had beads of sweat forming on his upper lip. ‘But I will take it upon myself to help you understand. Meanwhile, you will meet a group of us for lunch each month to discuss preparations for the expedition. I want you to leave as soon as practicable, which means we have much organising ahead of us. You shall receive further instructions shortly. That is all.’

  The meeting ended abruptly, with Himmler raising his right hand in salute: ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Ernst rose quickly from his chair. ‘Heil Hitler!’

  The sentries guarding the door led him back along the corridor, which was lined with the marble busts of generations of prominent German men. He glanced up at the vaulted ceiling, sunlight pouring in through huge arched windows. Ernst was escorted down a gilt staircase towards the front of the former art school turned Gestapo headquarters. The sentries saluted and waited for him to leave.

  Ernst walked back out onto the street and faltered for a moment, deciding which direction to take. Then he strode off, swinging his arms like a toy soldier.

  CHAPTER 2

  All the outdoor tables at Café Kranzler were crammed full at this hour. Cars vied with horse-drawn carriages spilling customers out onto the busy footpath. The waitress swept by and shook out a white linen napkin with a flourish, draping it over Herta’s lap. Around them, people jostled each other; men in suits and ties stood next to women who wore the latest summer frocks, with hats that matched their elegant gloves and leather clutches. They all waited in line to be seated. Above them an Olympic flag hung from the corner of the ornate building, fluttering in the warm breeze, in unison with another emblazoned with a swastika. The whole city was busy preening itself for the forthcoming Olympics; new trees lined the length of Unter den Linden boulevard, and flyers that until recently had screamed Jews not allowed were nowhere to be seen. Some estimated that more than forty million Reichsmark had already been lavished on construction.

  Herta twirled the corner of the tablecloth around her fingers. She watched the waitress bring over a tray laden with coffee and slices of Linzertorte, a blob of jam smeared on the pocket of her white apron. She mused that to an onlooker she would appear so separate from the busy, laughing crowd that was engulfing her. A slim young woman in a blue dress, her fair hair falling loosely around her face, there was a gravity to Herta’s expression uncommon for her age. She moved her flute case onto the chair beside her, saving a place for Ernst. He was over an hour late already; his meeting must have stretched on. A good sign perhaps, she thought.

  The lunchtime swarm pressed in on Herta, the owner of the café circling as though he might give her table to someone else if she so much as shifted in her seat. A raven cackled overhead, gaunt and ragged for a city-dweller. Herta tried to look busy, flipping through the sheet music for Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Lohengrin, the piece the new director, Herr Kittel, insisted she play for the summer concert. She missed the familiar sweet sounds of Mendelssohn and Mahler that her father taught her as a young girl, the music her new teachers at the Conservatory of the Reich Capital now referred to as a discordant pattern of perverted squeaks.

  Herta sipped her coffee and dug her fork into the cake, slicing off a tiny piece. Ernst would be pleased to see her eating; she had grown so thin since moving to Berlin. Their peaceful little town, Waltershausen, seemed a world away, an enchanted place she sometimes thought she must have evoked out of sheer longing. She dreamt of the endless skies of their childhood, filled with a riot of birds that changed with each season: swallows, skylarks, lapwings, plovers, hen harriers. Ernst used to observe them when he was a boy, as they grew restless in the lead-up to the Zugunruhe, the mysterious call of their migration. Late one autumn, Ernst had caught a tiny common whitethroat and kept it in a cage in his bedroom, carefully observing its behaviour, recording everything in the back of his algebra book. The bewildered bird fluttered and hopped about, tilting its head as if checking some inner compass, listening for a silent starter pistol that signalled the beginning of a thousand-mile race to its wintering grounds.

  Back then, Herta wondered how the bird knew in its heart when it was time to leave. What hidden message did it sense, what ghostly call to other lands? Was it the same force that drove Ernst to stray from home the moment he could walk? Twilight seemed to be when the bird was at the height of its distress. Young Ernst would place the caged whitethroat on the windowsill so it could see its fellow travellers soar across the darkening sky, Orion rising on the horizon. Perhaps they possessed some sixth sense that allowed them to follow the magnetic lines of the earth? Even as a child, Herta knew that one day her friend would become a great scientist who would try to find the answers to all these questions. Meanwhile, Ernst kept observing the creatures, collecting as much data as he could, writing down everything in meticulous detail. Herta would watch the pitiful whitethroat, which warbled as it darted from one side of its tiny cage to the other. She felt jealous of the birds that seemed to know instinctively when to migrate.

  Ernst was always coming and going, struck with wanderlust. He never wanted to be a businessman like his father. From an early age he was set on becoming a naturalist, a huge disappointment to Albert Schäfer. Now, in his mid-twenties, his son was already a revered veteran of two successful American–German expeditions to China and Tibet. Ernst was living and studying in Berlin, following a long line of great scientists who put Germany on the map, men who invented everything from the wire rope to the gramophone, geniuses who pioneered exciting new ideas such as synthetic materials and quantum mechanics. But Ernst’s wanderings had always seemed like mere folly to Schäfer Senior.

  Herta’s father hadn’t wanted her to leave either, agreeing only reluctantly to allow her to travel to Berlin when she was accepted to the famous Stern Conservatory in 1934. In those first lonely weeks in the city, Herta feared Vati was right: that it had all been a big mistake. She arrived during a winter fiercer than any she had ever known in Waltershausen. The streets seemed perilous and menacing, the ice slippery, everyone huddled into themselves.
Nature was in abeyance. Herta could never have imagined such desolation, such relentless chill. The tiny room she rented in Frau Lila’s apartment was draughty and damp, its small window looking out over a metallic wintry sky that hung above gloomy rooftops. She could see the mist of her own breath in the frigid air.

  Herta shared the room with Hildegard, the only friend she had made. The two girls would curl up under the covers of the iron-framed bed, cuddling Klaus, an abandoned kitten they had rescued. They whispered their dreams to each other. Hildegard was enrolled at the Berlin Drama School, hoping to become a famous actress and travel the world, performing on the stages of Broadway and the West End. Some nights she would recite her lines as they lay in bed and Herta would drift off to sleep, her mind filled with the doomed women of drama, Ophelia and Hedda Gabler, both abandoned to their particular fates. Each morning of that first long winter, the two girls sat together drinking bitter coffee and eating stale bread, before Herta left for her lessons at the Conservatory on Bernburger Strasse.

  After the deep snows melted, crocuses and forget-me-nots burst forth in celebration. Warm weather arrived on the wings of a pair of doves nesting in a linden tree outside the window. By the time winter finally ended, she found herself alone with Frau Lila. Like a doe-eyed protagonist in a cheap Hollywood movie, Herta’s young actress friend had been swept off her feet by a man she met at one of her theatre performances.

  Herta didn’t care much for Hildegard’s new husband. Bruno Beger was tall and handsome in a brutish kind of way. Along with his long, sharp nose and neatly parted straight blond hair, he cut the perfect image of a Nordic man. But the tone in which he spoke to his wife betrayed who he really was. He claimed that it was love at first sight when he saw the poised and luminous Hildegard standing in a pool of light on the stage. But Herta could see straightaway that Bruno was intent on being the only star in the relationship, and not long after the courtship began Hildegard gave up any notions of becoming an actress. They married at the end of spring and moved in to a cramped apartment on Marburger Strasse, not far from the zoo. Morning and night, the hyenas laughed at their penury. Bruno’s moods grew darker. The memory of his well-to-do childhood as the son of a family who had owned huge tanneries around Heidelberg plagued his restless nights. He was still a student, trying to scrape together enough money to support himself and his new wife.

  Returning to her own spartan room after classes, Herta would sit on the bed and look out of the small window. Often Klaus hobbled into her lap, licking his bad leg as he purred contentedly. When she used to dream of Berlin she never imagined such a forlorn existence. Since the Nuremberg laws had been enacted, Waltershausen seemed caught in cobwebs of silence. It was easier to turn a blind eye to small incidents there. Now though, living in the city, Herta’s eyes were open to an army of haters spinning their sticky threads among the populace. Every day, the newspapers were filled with tales of the ranks of pale, steadfast citizens performing their civic duty, proudly denouncing neighbours and friends. Stormtroopers ensured their shoes were polished before kicking Jewish shopkeepers to the ground.

  But then she found Ernst again. More than a year after Herta arrived in Berlin, they met unexpectedly at the Begers’ home one Sunday in May. Hildegard, who was already seven months pregnant by then, invited Herta to escape from Frau Lila’s dingy apartment and join them on a picnic in the woods with Bruno’s new friend. When she walked into the parlour and saw Ernst seated in an armchair beside the empty fireplace, she felt as if she was coming up for air after having held her breath for half a lifetime. Ernst looked up, barely able to speak when he saw that it was Herta standing there. She laughed nervously as he jumped up and took her hand in his.

  ‘Herta! I can’t believe it’s you. My, how you have grown into such a fine woman – eine schöne, blonde, grosse, erwachsene Frau.’ He turned to Bruno. ‘Where on earth have you been hiding this beautiful specimen from me?’

  In Waltershausen, their childhood friendship had turned into a fledgling love that sometimes overwhelmed Herta with its intensity. As children, they would make their way to a secret hide-out in the woods every day after school: a threshold of wonder, the portal to a world in which they were merely creatures among other creatures. Bees hovered over wildflowers as young Ernst and Herta walked across fields where horses flicked their tails at flies and farmers called to their dogs. Jumping from rock to rock across the stream in which fish were swimming like beads of quartz in porphyry, the children followed a slender path up a steep rise, walking hand in hand. A golden oriole sang to them, accompanied by the distant lowing of cows and the chiming of church bells. Herta would sit cross-legged in the small clearing among a copse of pines, threading berries onto a twig. Her favourite tree was a scarred old oak, grown tall in its solitude. It was the perfect listener, giving everything and asking nothing in return.

  Sometimes Herta’s sister, Margarete, joined them in the woods. As they sat together in the sun, Herta plaited the younger girl’s hair, which was sleek and blonde and reached down to her waist. Her features were so fine that Herta wondered if poor Margarete had been blessed with an abundance of beauty to make up for all she lacked. When Margarete was six months old, they realised she was deaf. Her paroxysms began around her fifth birthday. Her face would contort, her writhing little body bent backwards, arms reaching up like a ballet dancer. Finally, she would slump to the floor in a wet heap, lying motionless beside her wheelchair.

  Most days in their magical shelter, Herta would open Ernst’s school satchel and take out his books, helping him finish his homework. Even though she was two years younger, she wanted to save him from Herr Vogel’s fearsome strap. If she could get it done quickly, she might still enjoy what was left of the afternoon. Ernst usually ran off into the forest the moment they arrived. She knew, though, that he would return in time for them to get Margarete home without arousing any suspicion. Herta would set to work in Ernst’s exercise book, her pencil forming neat columns of figures as she answered the problems on Herr Vogel’s arithmetic worksheet:

  1) The construction of a lunatic asylum costs three million Reichsmark. How many houses, at 9000 Reichsmark each, could have been built for that amount?

  Answer: .....................................................................

  2) To keep a mentally ill person in an asylum costs approximately two Reichsmark per day and there are 300,000 mentally ill in care.

  a) How much do these people cost to keep per year?

  Answer: ....................................................................

  b) How many marriage loans, at 500 Reichsmark each, could be granted from this money?

  Answer: ....................................................................

  When Ernst turned fourteen, he left abruptly for boarding school. Each July he would return to Waltershausen, where he and Herta escaped to the woods together again, spending whole afternoons lying on the grass and watching the clouds move across the high summer sky. Their relationship began anew every year. Once school was over, though, and he passed his Abitur, Ernst finally stepped out into the world, first to attend the University of Göttingen. He eventually chose to leave their small town for good, travelling further afield to the East with a young American adventurer, Brooke Dolan. That first expedition in 1931 was when Ernst felt truly lost to Herta. She tucked his letters under her pillow, but after a while all he would send was a postcard filled with scribbled banalities. When the cards eventually stopped arriving, Herta marked Ernst’s absence by retreating from the natural world. The woods, stippled with sunlight, were as deserted as a silent graveyard without him, despite all the chirping, rustling and baying hidden in their greenish folds. She rarely ventured out into the forest again, preferring the bright notes of Vivaldi to wild birdsong. What nature had been for Ernst, music was for Herta. It became her life’s breath, animating the tedium of the years spent caring for her ailing sister. Herta played sweet notes for a girl who could not hear, and
for a boy who was far away.

  Occasionally, a reminder of those forays into nascent love with Ernst came creeping back when she saw a flicker of his image bejewelled in the wings of dragonflies, or a hint of his strong body sailing high among a gyrating flock of starlings. When Ernst had first left, Herta clung to the memory of their friendship, even though his life was somewhere else. Their secret forest hide-out, where she had flown in the air on the makeshift swing he fashioned for her out of vines, still held the fine dust of his being. But in time, her feelings for him began to calcify.

  On that Sunday afternoon in Berlin so many years later, reunited once again thanks to the Begers, they picnicked together in the Tiergarten. Ernst and Herta talked for hours, about the perils and wonders of his trips, and his work at the museum in Philadelphia. She told him how Waltershausen hadn’t changed much in all the years he’d been away. Hans the shoemaker still fought with Herr Hauptmann, the postman, who was always leaving letters on top of his mailbox instead of inside it, complaining that it was far too small and that Hans needed to build a larger one. The Felstyner family on Bremerstrasse found themselves evicted from their home the previous year, but no one seemed to bat an eyelid about their sudden disappearance. People simply plodded forward in time. Meanwhile, Herta saw that Ernst had become an exotic creature with a secret call. He asked her what she had been doing before she left for Berlin.

  ‘Vati found me a job at König and Wernicke, the old doll factory,’ she said. ‘But business dwindled, and they were forced to close down.’ She couldn’t bring herself to explain how she ended up spending most of her free time caring for her sister, and how much it broke her heart to leave Margarete behind. ‘You know I’ve always dreamt of following my passion and becoming a professional musician.’

  With the panicky impatience of a caged bird, she had begged her father for permission to apply to music school in Berlin. And, to her surprise, Vati agreed.