Then she found it in Netta beside her.
‘Stop playing with your food and eat,’ she chided lightly, ‘You’ve hardly eaten a thing yet.’
‘She might not have a clue what happened yesterday,’ Martha said, kissing her sister’s claw, ‘but her long term memory is pristine.’
‘It certainly seems to be,’ Edgar said, admiring the dame, who was busy chasing a small tube of parsnip around her plate again. ‘Talking of memories,’ he continued with a mischievous expression, ‘Do you remember the case of the exploding penis?’
Martha gave a yelp, Erika instinctively put her hands over Netta’s ears and Karl told himself he knew it was only a matter of time before a man like that tried to drag them all into depravity.
‘Oh dear, so sorry.’ Edgar smiled at Netta. ‘I almost forgot she was there, she’s such a quiet well behaved thing.’ He took a large draught of his wine. ‘But really, it was the most unusual case,’ he crashed on, despite the horrified looks of three of the adults at the table. ‘A man in the camp at Gegesha used to urinate on the machines at the factory that made cement bags. This would cause them to mysteriously break down and the Russian electricians loved that because they got plenty of overtime out of it, fixing the machines.’
Erika should have stopped him talking about exploding penises and urination in front of her little girl, but he was talking about Gegesha and Max was nodding along with a smile on his face. At last, she thought, she was going to get some insight into her husband’s life over the last four years, the life he never talked about.
‘So the electricians would give our boys some bread for making the machines break down and the man kept on peeing into the machines. Until one day his luck run out, he caused an explosion and boom!’ Edgar whacked the table a little too hard, Bertel looked as if she was about to arrest, but Max was laughing as much as his friend.
‘It certainly made a change, didn’t it?’ Max’s eyes were bright with the memory. ‘A change from the endless cases of typhoid, yellow fever…’
‘…Frostbite and lacerations.’ Edgar finished the list for him and Erika’s own excitement at being allowed a glimpse of that world was tinged with envy for the telepathy such a shared experience had clearly given the two men.
‘Frostbite!’ Max declared. ‘You could never know just how cold it got up there,’ he said, looking at his parents who were all ears, nodding encouragingly.
‘We saw some fingers and toes go all the colours of the rainbow, didn’t we, buddy?’
Max nodded.
‘And try to get warm when you’ve got nothing in your stomach either!’
‘I stashed away twenty grams of bread from my daily ration for three weeks in order to have enough to make a birthday cake for…’ Max hesitated, ‘…for Horst.’
Martha and Karl stiffened at the name of Max’s friend, whom they’d known since he was a boy; whom they’d watched grow up and grow closer to their son with every summer that passed.
‘Begged the kitchen staff for a gram of sugar and put a few handfuls of berries from the forest in it.’ His eyes were still shining but Erika couldn’t tell if it was tears which gave them their lustre now. He was focused on the plate opposite him, still full of food. Netta’s plate. ‘I put candles on it. Made from spent rifle cartridges.’
And then with both hands, far harder than Edgar had, Max struck the table as he propelled himself upwards and his chair over, bellowing at his daughter, ‘Your mother said don’t play with your food. Now eat it, you ungrateful child!’
Netta felt sick after forcing some of that dinner into herself. She felt sick because she just wasn’t hungry. And she felt sick because this skeleton stranger who had turned up out of the blue calling himself her father was shouting at her and punishing her. Only Opa and Oma and Mama (and Tante Bertel sometimes) were allowed to do that because of all the good things they did together in between the telling off. Opa sat at the piano with her, teaching her how to play music which sounded like fairies. Oma sat her on the kitchen table and taught her how to bake cakes, and allowed her to lick the bowl out afterwards. And Mama read her stories at bedtime while this man sat downstairs, his head in books about medicine and diseases. He had all the time in the world for Dr. Keinzler, but none for the Brothers Grimm.
He’d gone upstairs to bed now, after he’d gone around locking all the doors and windows and then checking them all over again, as he did every night before bed. When he finally disappeared her mama told her she could stop. She didn’t have to eat all the food on her plate. Not tonight.
Edgar, the very tall man who said the word penis, had left too. Netta liked him. He was funny. And he was her father’s friend. If she liked Edgar and Edgar liked her father, then perhaps one day her father would like her too. She liked it when she saw him laughing at the table tonight. He looked more like a boy then, not so much like an angry old man. She’d once asked her mother how old this newcomer was, and her mother answered, ‘Thirty-two.’ Netta’s eyes were wide with disbelief. Just a year older than Mama! That could not be.
‘He’s just worried about you, darling,’ Mama was saying, stroking Netta’s goldilocks hair. ‘We all are. You’re very small for your age. You need to eat more to get big and strong.’
Netta wasn’t sure if she wanted to be big and strong. She wouldn’t fit in the basket on the front of her mother’s bike if she was much bigger. And those times doing house calls with her were such special times. Not just because it was like flying, but because it was the only time she had her mama to herself, without him being around. When he was around her, Mama was too busy making sure he was OK to pay Netta any attention. When she was younger she used to sleep with her mama in the bed under the pretty coloured window. Now she had a small bed by the door on the other side of the room because there was no room for her in the big bed anymore.
He was snoring like a pig when Mama tucked her in. And not long after that her mama seemed to be asleep too. But Netta was wide awake, afraid he might get up and start shouting at her again.
She heard the floorboards grate on the landing just outside the door. Karin must be home and coming up to bed.
‘Karin!’ a hushed voice blew up the stairs after her.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Karin squeaked.
Stairs creaked as Karin descended a few and Netta’s Oma met her halfway.
‘I’m sorry to say this, but you are not to see that man again,’ Martha whispered.
‘Rodrick?’
‘Yes. He’s bad news I’m afraid.’
‘Oh. Really? But why?’
‘I won’t go into detail, but it would be very dangerous for you to go on seeing him.’
‘Dangerous? What has he done?’
‘So much so that if you continue to see him we cannot be held responsible for what happens to you, so we would have to let you go.’
‘Let me go?’
Netta imagined Karin to be nothing more than a ghost from the way she kept echoing Oma’s words.
‘Yes.’
‘You mean I would lose my job if I went out with him again?’
‘It’s quite simple. Now I don’t want to hear another word about it. He’s a monster. Stay away.’
More creaking and two doors clicked shut, the second some shocked and protracted moments after the first.
Behind one door, trembling with the thrill of the recent confrontation, was a mother focused on protecting her boy. Behind another, on the floor above, was a young woman weeping with confusion and loss. Behind a third, just across the hall, a girl lay in bed wide-eyed at all the scary men in her little world.
Netta was running for her life.
At least that’s how it felt when you were trying to outrun the boys. And she often did. She would much rather be charging around with Peter and Josef than sitting about chatting with Mia and Inge and swapping Glanzbilder with their soppy images of kittens in dresses and angel-faced children.
Josef was the son of Herr Ritter the school caretaker,
whose entire family lived in the dingy basement under the school. Peter’s parents were both dead, he said. Now he had to live with his aunt – the witch who ran the sweetshop. No wonder the two of them couldn’t wait to run about the woods with Netta whenever they got the chance.
They had stood on the edge of the woods, fists in tight little balls, the way they had seen Olympic athletes stand in Peter’s magazine.
‘First one to the canal is the champion,’ he’d said.
‘Last one is a rotten egg,’ Josef had added.
Netta was smaller and younger than them both but there was no way she was going to be a rotten egg. Besides, this race was downhill nearly all the way, through the woods and out to the canal, which ran by her house. She was already as sure as she could be that she wouldn’t be last.
‘Ready, steady…’ Peter had said very slowly and everyone had slid their front foot through the grass a little hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.
Netta couldn’t bear to wait another half a second. ‘Go!’ she’d squealed and shot off with the boys complaining and running at the same time.
The complaining soon stopped as Peter and Josef needed all the breath they could get to speed them between the tree trunks, over the logs and under the branches. She heard their shoes getting closer and their panting like a couple of dogs. Then a yelp and a shiver of leaves told her one of them had fallen over. She didn’t dare look behind to find out which, in case she fell too. And then the ditch was before her and, with all the speed she’d gathered so far whooshing down the hill, she took off like a swallow and landed safely on the other side.
She heard Peter’s Wooo! and hoped that meant he was impressed by her jump over the ditch. But he was probably just enjoying his own little flight. And the thud on the ground behind her as he landed told her that was so.
Her little lungs were burning, her legs were like jelly, her ears were throbbing, but she broke through the tree line ahead of the boys and the canal was only yards away.
She had done it!
But what about stopping?
Winning was so important she hadn’t thought about what happened after, when your body kept going whether you wanted it to or not. When all the speed you had gathered from going downhill just kept you going straight into the water.
Peter and Josef were quick to help her out. They knew she couldn’t swim yet and her falling in the canal was just desserts enough for winning. They could tease her for it endlessly, but in order to do that, they had to save her life first.
The three wet kids slapped along the towpath in the grey afternoon back to the schoolhouse where they could use the communal showers. Netta’s family came here most evenings anyway to wash, as it was much bigger and better than the bathroom at home, which was so tiny you had to go in one at a time, so the wait could be forever.
The teasing started only a few yards down the path, but Netta was too proud of her win to be hurt and too interested in trying to work out who that was in the shadow of the trees by her house, staring at them as they passed.
But even the watcher was soon forgotten under a shower of liquid sunshine. Netta sat on the smooth blue tiles with the hot water pouring over her and she felt like a snowman melting. Peter had gone next door to ask Netta’s Oma for some dry clothes for her. He was glad her mama was too busy working in the surgery to be disturbed – she would be so much angrier about it, Peter thought, because her face always looked so serious.
After the shower, Josef had to stay in as it was nearly dinner time. Peter had to go too, so Netta had no choice but to walk home. She wasn’t ready to go inside yet, so she walked the short distance to next door as if she were a snail.
It was funny how she could get so out of breath walking so slowly when she’d run all that way through the woods like an athlete. She looked at the yellow clouds above the trees as if she knew they were responsible, and that’s when she could have sworn she saw someone hiding there again. She started walking faster and fixed her eyes on the front door of her house up ahead. She heard a sound of leaves, a bit like when Josef had fallen during the race earlier, then footsteps heavier than hers were on the street behind her. And she ran for the door and hammered on it with all her might.
Her mother rushed from the surgery where she was finishing her notes for the day to answer the door in case it was an emergency.
‘What are you doing banging about like that?’ she said to the top of her daughter’s head as it rushed inside to the living room and the safety of the piano.
‘There was someone out there. They were hiding in the trees. Watching me. They were watching Peter and Josef and me earlier too and just now they started chasing after me.’
‘Who was watching you? Who was chasing you?’ her mama huffed, peering out into the empty street before closing the door.
‘Someone. I don’t know. I couldn’t see them.’ Netta began lightly fingering the keys. Their padded bounce was reassuring.
‘Well, if you couldn’t see them, they couldn’t have been that close, could they?’ her mama said, going back to the surgery to finish her work.
‘Unless it was a ghost,’ Martha said, poking her head in from the kitchen with a mischievous grin on her face, which was meant to distract and cheer up her granddaughter, but only served to frighten her further.
‘Did they make a sound? Did they speak at all?’ her father’s voice made her jump. She hadn’t even realised he was back from the Klinik already, sitting by the window, one of those blasted medical books on his lap. Yet since he was the only one who seemed to be taking her seriously she was happy to answer him.
‘No. They never spoke.’
‘Was it a man or a woman?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She wasn’t being much use and she didn’t want to disappoint him so she added, ‘A man, I think.’ Because who’d ever heard of the Bogey Woman?
‘Did you get a look at what they were wearing? Normal clothes or a uniform, like a soldier?’ he said, leaning forward.
This was the longest conversation she’d ever had with her father. This was the longest he had ever looked at her with such interest and concern. She didn’t want to ruin it by having nothing interesting to say. ‘It sounded like they… like he was wearing boots when he started to run after me.’
Her father leant back in his chair and looked out of the window. He had heard enough. The country was still riddled with Allied soldiers. He might have been freed from the labour camp, but who’s to say they couldn’t come around here and pile them all into trucks at gunpoint again? He knew all too well how cruel and fickle soldiers could be. He knew all too well now the horrors committed on all sides and the vengeful rage that those horrors fuelled.
His daughter turned back to the piano and prodded out a few forlorn notes. He looked over the top of his glasses at his frightened little girl. He got up, crossed the room and put his hands reassuringly on her shoulders. He was surprised at how big his hands looked there against her tiny form. Since he had left the monochrome world of the camp and come back to the glaring light of an infinitely diverse and well-nourished life, they had seemed skinny and frail to him. For a moment he managed to catch a welcome glimpse of himself as a protector again.
And then Karin came in, sobbing uncontrollably. He found those rejuvenated hands of his grabbing her forearms, guiding her to a chair and asking her what was wrong.
‘I… we… Rodrick and I… it’s over between us.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said, genuinely concerned for her wellbeing, but aware also of a well disguised rush of delight pumping through his veins that his pretty little housekeeper was no longer another man’s concern.
The sound of a plate being pulled jubilantly from its pile in the kitchen brought Karin to her senses.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ she said, realising the real source of her pain might be listening in in the next room only a few feet away. ‘I suppose we just weren’t right for each other,’ she added, discerning from the anguish on Max’s face that
he clearly wasn’t party to Martha’s awful ultimatum.
‘He didn’t do anything to hurt you, did he?’ Max asked, feeling more protective by the second.
‘Oh, no, no, no. It was nothing like that.’ But she knew she couldn’t tell Max it was she who had finished the relationship with a curt I just don’t feel the same way about you, Rodrick. And it was Rodrick who she’d left bewildered and quietly weeping, wringing those enormous and calloused hands of his, wondering why Erika then Karin had both lavished him with so much affection then one day turned their backs on him without warning. That she’d kept a cold composure until she’d got back to the house, then it had all come pouring out – the injustice of it all, and her guilt over what she’d done to poor Rodrick.
‘Well, not to worry,’ Max offered a little lamely, but he had been surrounded by nothing but men for so long it was hardly surprising. ‘You’re home now and you’re around people that care for you.’
She looked at him, on his knees in front of her, and marvelled that there could be such a difference between mother and son.
‘And don’t concern yourself with work until you’re ready. We’ll all survive for a day or two,’ he said with a consolatory chuckle.
Martha stayed out of sight in the kitchen preparing dinner, but her ears were trained on the mutterings from the living room like a seasoned intelligence operative.
Netta sat at the piano, hands resting on the keys, but she was glaring over her shoulder at the stupid girl who had stolen her father away from her just at the moment they were finally beginning to connect.
Erika stood in the hallway, unable to enter the room or go back to the surgery, stunned by the vision of her husband on his knees in front of the bloody charwoman, holding her hands as once he had Erika’s on the stairs in front of their digs after the summer ball where they first kissed.
For one who had just broken up with her gentleman friend, Karin was curiously buoyant. She busied herself with the housework and, if Netta wasn’t mistaken, was doing so with a hint of a song in her throat and the smudge of a smile on her lips. But then Netta was six, going on seven, so what could she be expected to know about ladies and their gentlemen friends? ‘I understand only train station,’ as her Oma would say when the world made no sense to her.
The Watcher Page 3
