The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Erika said shakily, her broken soul unable to deal with the least aggression, even from Bertel, today.

  ‘Well,’ Bertel waved her clawed hands about as she spoke, enthroned in that chair, clad in black, her witch-coloured hair coming loose, appearing to Erika like a diabolical antithesis to the priest she sat opposite, ‘when someone loses their parents they become an orphan. When someone loses a husband they become a widow. When they lose a wife they become a widower. But when you lose a child what are you? Is there a name for that? I was just wondering, because I can’t think of the name for that.’

  Isabel pulled a face as if she had just been punched in the stomach, but her eyes shone with delight as she grasped Jenny’s arm. Erika felt as if she had been punched in the stomach and for the first time Max took his eyes off Jenny and watched his wife trying to politely swallow the fishbone of a notion Bertel had just fed her.

  ‘Father, can I interest you in a ham sandwich?’ Martha said tactfully.

  ‘So you’re the caretaker,’ Edgar asked Herr Ritter in an attempt to divert attention from his friend.

  Bertel was right, Erika winced, there was no word for what she was now. Because it was an unnatural state of being. No one should live to see their children die. It was supposed to be the other way round. She had read of cultures in Africa where, when a parent dies, the children throw a party and celebrate that the natural order of things has prevailed. She tried to put her cup down quietly but it crashed onto the table as she hurried out to the kitchen, past Max who still lingered in the doorway, feeling the need to vomit. The last time she felt that way was in Frau Beltz’s bathroom when she had morning sickness, pregnant with Emmy, and the memory of her joy then made her pain now seem all the more vicious.

  She held onto the sink for a moment then felt two long hands rubbing her shoulders.

  ‘Hey. Don’t listen to that dotty old bag,’ Edgar said.

  ‘I want to die,’ she cried.

  ‘Ah, don’t say that!’

  ‘If I die I can go and be with Emmy right now. I shouldn’t be here without her, that’s not the way it should be. Bertel’s right.’

  In the doorway Max had his back to the kitchen and his eyes trained on Jenny, as they had been almost constantly since they returned from the church. But he was listening to everything, and Erika’s words cut him then as much has Bertel’s had a minute before, and as much as Eva’s had in the cemetery earlier. The thought of Erika wanting to die, the thought of her dying, the thought of losing her, was the last nudge that Max needed. He couldn’t bring Emmy back, he couldn’t stop the bad dreams, the moods, the flashbacks and the turbulent nights, but there was one thing that was killing his wife which he could do something about and he’d been examining it ever since they’d got back to the house this afternoon, and he could see just how shallow and manipulative and vain it was now and how he had made himself a fool for it ever since it had swanned back into his life and he had dropped everything for her beauty… no, not her beauty, her physical form, which he knew as a doctor, was nothing more than flesh stretched over bone, flesh that deteriorates with time, he thought, throwing a glance at Bertel, bone that breaks, he thought, glancing at his father’s wrist as he poured more cognac for the priest. Stood there next to the callous Isabel, he saw Jenny more than ever as a simple parasite and the woman he had his back to as a complex, intelligent, independent, strong and soulful human being – his match.

  As he stared at her, Jenny smiled at him through pursed lips, which parted seductively as he crossed the room towards her.

  ‘You have to go,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling?’

  ‘I want you to leave this house. We don’t need your services anymore.’

  Jenny’s eyes darted desperately about his face looking for the joke. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Are you kicking her out?’ Isabel yapped.

  Max looked at Isabel as he had looked at his first gangrenous limb as a student and she shut up.

  ‘I’m not doing this to my family anymore,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’ Jenny raised her voice, silencing any other murmured conversation in the room.

  ‘Just go, please,’ Max said through gritted teeth now. ‘Don’t make me throw you out.’

  ‘Now you want to throw me out? But… I was all right to have around when you needed a chat, a laugh, when you needed a shoulder to cry on.’ She desperately wanted to say when you came crawling into my bedroom. The shock waves that would ripple through this room would be fabulous. It was true, he had come to her bedroom one night after a particularly harrowing nightmare. He had managed not to wake Erika and went to Jenny in tears. He felt he could cry in front of Jenny, because she knew what he had to cry about. He didn’t have to be the man Dr Siskin demanded of him, that he demanded of himself in front of his wife and child. In front of Jenny he could be the mouse. However, he might have come crawling to her bedroom, but he never crawled into her bed. When he was empty of tears that night sitting on the edge of her bed, he simply went back to his own.

  Max saw the flash in her eyes as she contemplated all this, as she weighed up whether to drop a vengeful grenade or not, so he grabbed her by the arm, yanking her out of the room so quickly she couldn’t get another word out until she was on the doorstep.

  ‘What the hell, Max!’

  ‘I kept you on as long as I could. Everyone else would have had you out a long time ago. This situation is ridiculous. It’s selfish.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being selfish, Max. Did you not learn anything in Gegesha? Look after number one, that’s what I say. You think she’ll ever understand what we went through up there?’

  ‘She does nothing but try to understand,’ he fumed, at himself as much as Jenny.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ Isabel was there bristling, eager for a fight.

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right,’ she sneered at Max and took a few steps away from the house before she stopped and looked suddenly forlorn. ‘What about my things?’

  ‘I’ll leave them outside later. Come and get them tonight, but if you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of a wake right now.’

  He saw her wither. ‘Of course,’ she whimpered. ‘I’m so sorry about Emmy.’

  He closed the door.

  ‘Come on, Jenny, love,’ Isabel tugged at her sleeve, ‘let’s get out of here.’

  Jenny looked up at the house and the Tiffany window, just as she’d done the day she first knocked at the door, and as her eyes fell to earth again she saw Josef and Netta sitting on the steps of the school watching her. Netta could barely contain her excitement and, after some deliberation, decided it was safe to stick out her tongue at the housekeeper, who, as ever, allowed herself to be led down the road by her friend.

  And so things were changing again. Netta wondered why her heart jumped whenever changed happened, even the good changes, like Jenny leaving and her mama being happier, as if the good changes were as frightening as the bad – like going to secondary school.

  Josef didn’t pass the exams to get into the same school as Netta – that was one rotten thing about secondary school. The other rotten thing was, unlike primary school, her new school was not next door to home, and it took an hour and a half to get there on the tram. Peter and the others that Netta knew from Mengede, who went to the same school, travelled there by train and it only took them ten minutes. But they all looked like stretched versions of their primary school selves now and Netta, still underweight and short for her age, couldn’t reach the door handle on the train, so the tram was her only option. And the school was not run by her Opa, unlike her primary school. This one was run by nuns. Nuns like Schwester Hildegarda – and that was the very worst thing about secondary school.

  ‘Pay attention, Anetta!’ Schwester Hildegarda would gobble across the classroom when she noticed Netta staring into space as yet another equation stumped her. Schwester Hildegarda’
s words always sounded like the shrill gobbling of a turkey to Netta. Not just because of the sound, but because they came from a wrinkly red face strapped up in the big black and white plumage of a nun’s habit.

  The nun waddled over to Netta and stood over her, her biro raised as if it were a rolled up newspaper ready to swat a fly.

  ‘If x plus 2x is thirty-three, what is x?’

  ‘Er…’ Netta said, delaying the inevitable.

  ‘How on earth did you ever pass the entrance exam for this school if you can’t even master simple algebra like that?’ Schwester Hildegarda scoffed and whacked Netta on the head with the biro. ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘Erm,’ Netta said through clenched teeth as her scalp stung with the blow.

  ‘Oh come on!’ Hildegarda whipped at Netta’s head again and this time the clasp of the pen became entangled in her golden locks. ‘Ugh!’ the teacher said as if Netta was not only rubbish at Maths but rubbish at getting her head whacked by a biro too, and she yanked at the pen to free it. It didn’t come away immediately. Netta yelped and slammed a hand on her head which burned with a pain that made her feel sick, but Schwester Hildegarda yanked again and then the pen came away along with a handful of Netta’s hair.

  Netta saw Peter’s worried face looking back at her as if through a fish bowl as her eyes filled with tears, while the nun picked the hair from the clasp as if it was nothing more than fluff on her habit, saying:

  ‘You’d better snap out of that stupor, young lady, if you want to amount to anything in this life. Now, Barbara, if x plus 2x is thirty-three, what is x?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Peter asked at break time.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Netta sighed, ‘but what’s going on over there?’

  Peter followed Netta to the playground wall where a small crowd of first years had gathered. The smell reached them before they reached the crowd – the warm, sweet, stomach-growling smell of the bakery which stood next door to the school. Even Netta was hungry at the sight of all those fresh doughnuts piled high in the shop window. Now why couldn’t they feed us doughnuts back in the children’s home on the island every day, Netta wondered. I would be as big and strong as that old battle-axe Auttenberg had wanted me to be if she had served up those instead of mouldy milk after every breakfast.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, they’d never let us out to go and buy some,’ one of the girls was saying.

  ‘Well, someone should bunk over the wall and get them for everyone,’ said another.

  ‘Yeah, right! And who’d dare to do that?’

  ‘I will,’ Netta said.

  ‘Netta!’ Peter said with fear and excitement tickling his face.

  ‘But the deal is you all have to give me a little more than the price of a doughnut so I can get one for myself.’

  ‘Ah that’s not fair,’ a boy said.

  ‘Then get them yourself,’ Netta said, hoping they wouldn’t. She liked the idea of getting a doughnut for free. And if she made a habit of it, she thought, she might grow big enough to reach the train door handle in no time and then she wouldn’t have to go all that way on the stinking tram every day.

  ‘Yeah, that’s fair,’ said the girl who came up with the idea of bunking over the wall in the first place. ‘That’s her payment for taking the risk. She’ll be the one who gets done if she’s spotted, no one else.’

  The boy thought about this for a moment with pursed lips then said, ‘Oh all right then,’ and dug around in his pocket for the necessary coins.

  Netta collected up the money from everyone feeling like a rich and successful businessman then, with a foot on Peter’s cupped hands and a quick look around the playground for any sign of the nuns, she scrambled over the wall.

  The baker’s wife who served behind the counter looked as if she’d eaten a plate full of smiles. She welcomed Netta into the shop and wasn’t the least bit concerned about why this schoolgirl was not in school. I’d be as happy and kind as her, thought Netta as she left the shop with a bag full of doughnuts, if I worked in there all the time – I bet she can have as many cakes as she wants and she doesn’t even have to pay for them, she marvelled as she blinked in the September sun and focused on the sight of Schwester Hildegarda and Schwester Anna marching towards her.

  She shrank back instantly into the shop, reassuring herself that since they were deep in conversation neither nun had noticed her, but Hildegarda’s gobbling reached her ears long before the teachers reached the shop and the sweet aroma in there suddenly turned sickly when Netta heard her say, ‘Well, I don’t think the Lord would condemn us for indulgence if we were to have just one more, do you? No one makes almond slices quite like this baker.’

  Netta scrunched the bag tightly in her hands and spun round to face the baker’s wife, looking for a back door. The lady smiled – she’d never stopped – and asked Netta if she had forgotten something. There was surely a back door beyond the counter where the baker worked, but she couldn’t very well bolt through without permission; that might even be enough to wipe the smile from the baker’s wife’s face. And if she did ask for permission, the lady would know she was doing something naughty and would probably feel it was her duty, or some other strange thing like that which adults say when they get children into trouble, to hand Netta over to the nuns, who were now looking longingly in the window at the almond slices, as yet oblivious of their wayward student just beyond their focus.

  Netta heard Schwester Anna say with a quivering voice, ‘Oh, well, all right then. Come on!’

  She looked with eyes fit to burst at the shopkeeper.

  The shopkeeper’s smile stayed on, but her brow furrowed a little, anxious to hear what it was Netta had forgotten.

  Netta opened her mouth to speak. But she had no idea what it was she wanted to say. She took a step towards the counter. Flicked her eyes at the doorway to the back room. Heard the clip-clop of two pairs of sensible shoes in the doorway behind her and thought she was going to vomit.

  ‘Hildegarda! Anna!’

  The clip-clop of the shoes came to an abrupt halt just inside the door and Netta saw the shopkeeper’s attention was now on the nuns, who she could tell from the sound of their voices had turned in the doorway to face the woman who had called their names.

  ‘Mother Joseph,’ Anna said, her voice quivering more than ever.

  ‘Well, don’t look so surprised to see me,’ said the headmistress of the school. ‘It is I who should be surprised to find two of my staff indulging in cake just minutes before they are due to be in class teaching, standing up in front of young impressionable minds as fine examples of temperance and observance.’

  ‘Y—y—yes, Mother,’ Anna spluttered, ‘but, you see, Schwester Hildegarda said—’

  ‘I said no such thing!’ Hildegarda gobbled more than ever, ‘I was merely attempting to counsel Anna in the dangers of indulgence and get us both back to school as quickly as possible.’

  Netta heard Anna gasp and Mother Joseph say, ‘Well, despite your impressive prescience when it comes to what Anna is going to say, it seems, Hildegarda, you have failed to counsel well, as now you are both stood inside the baker’s shop.’

  An awful silence followed in which Netta was convinced all the nuns had turned to look at her, until Mother Joseph spoke again. ‘Perhaps I can offer some more effective counsel to you both in my study later, but first I suggest you hurry along to your respective classes before you not only fail to be fine examples of temperance and observance, but of punctuality too.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ the nuns murmured and Netta heard the sensible shoes scurrying out of the shop.

  She remained as still as a statue until she heard the third pair of shoes clip-clop away, then she felt as if her body was melting with relief.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ the baker’s wife said, her permanent smile now seriously at odds with the rest of her face.

  ‘No thank you,’ Netta said and darted out of the shop and back over the wall, tossing the bag of bounty into Peter’s
waiting hands first.

  ‘About time!’ said the other boy.

  ‘Oh shush!’ Netta said, brushing off her uniform. ‘You wouldn’t dare do it.’

  ‘Nice job, Netta,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘Yes, nice job,’ Peter said, tucking into his doughnut and handing Netta’s reward to her.

  ‘Excellent!’ said someone else.

  ‘Netta’s the best!’ said another and, to Netta, the praise and attention tasted as good as the doughnut.

  ‘They reckon the Allies are preparing to leave,’ Karl said, tapping at the newspaper and looking over at his son in the other armchair. But Max had fallen asleep so Karl looked for someone else to tell the news to. ‘They predict they’ll be out of the country by the end of the year,’ he said in Erika’s direction, who sat at the table finishing up her notes.

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ she said.

  ‘If they do, it says, we’ll have the right to rearm and become a fully-fledged member of the western alliance against the Soviet Union. Apparently the plan is that we’ll be able to establish a military force of up to half a million men.’ Karl’s voiced trailed off and his gaze drifted over to his son again.

  Erika followed his gaze and shared his fears, until Netta stomped into the room and plonked herself on the piano stool.

  ‘Here she is!’ Karl beamed. ‘Big girl Netta from big school. How is it over there, my dear?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Netta said, finding the darkest sounding chord she could on the keyboard.

  ‘Shh!’ her mother said, nodding at her sleeping father.

  Netta huffed and stopped playing.

  ‘What’s so rubbish about it?’ Karl folded the paper into his lap.

  ‘Schwester Hildegarda, that’s what.’

  ‘One of your teachers?’

  ‘If you can call her that. One of my torturers, more like.’

  Erika scoffed at her daughter’s histrionics, but Karl was intrigued.