The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘Sorry,’ Netta mumbled and began to quietly cry.

  Hildegarda inflated herself triumphantly at the sight of the little girl’s tears, as if they were her food. Max observed all this clearly. He observed the way she softened her approach, now she felt she had won, and cooed at Netta, ‘What does Proverbs twenty-eight tell us, mmm? The one who keeps the law is a son with understanding, but a companion of gluttons shames his father.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think we need to go that far,’ Max interjected, ‘I am certainly not ashamed of my daughter.’

  Netta looked up at him for the first time and he gave her a comforting wink, but the nun carried on utterly oblivious of his words. ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple, Anetta, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple,’ she said, waving the doughnut in the girl’s face again, ‘God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. One Corinthians, chapter three, verses sixteen to seventeen.’

  Max had heard enough. ‘Indeed she is God’s temple,’ he said calmly, but firmly, ‘so who in their right mind would dare to think of destroying it in this way?’ He stepped towards his daughter and separated her hair where the scalp was still sore from Hildegarda’s pen and a clump of hair clearly missing. He stared at the nun waiting for an answer. The teacher was suddenly struck dumb. Her great inflated plumage wilted. Her red face paled. She tried to say something, but only the weak gobbling of a disorientated turkey came out of her mouth, and he quickly silenced that with his final words to her:

  ‘Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. James, chapter three, verse one.’

  He held out his hand to Netta. She grasped it in both of hers and they left the nun alone with the half-eaten doughnut, which she stared at in great dread for a minute or so before devouring it with a libidinous moan.

  ‘Papa, where are we going? School’s not finished yet.’

  Max looked down at his daughter as they stood hand in hand on the front steps of the school and smiled. ‘It is for today.’ Then his face dropped in mock dejection. ‘Unless you’d rather spend the afternoon with Schwester Whatshername instead of your papa?’

  Netta giggled and squeezed his hand to show where her preference lay. ‘But what about you? Don’t you have to go to work?’

  Max took a sharp breath in as the thought of his normal routine threatened to mar his effort at spontaneity. He looked up at the sky, as if the weather had the answer to this dilemma. The sun was slicing through the clouds invitingly. ‘Well, I think Frau Beltz and the rest of them will survive if they have to wait until tomorrow to see me, don’t you? I don’t know about you but I’d rather go for a spin on the bike.’

  Netta stood on tip-toe as her body stretched full of excitement. She hugged his arm and cheered, ‘Yes!’

  They scampered down the steps together and hopped on, Netta in front of her father, encased in his arms as he steered out of the school grounds and hurtled off through the streets of Dortmund, going recklessly fast on purpose every so often because it made Netta squeal with joy every time he accelerated. The sound of her elation was intoxicating, even more so knowing it was he who was responsible for it.

  After half an hour of riding, with Erika’s pleas to drive safely still ringing in his ears, Max thought he should quit while they were both still in one piece and he stopped, with a little skid as a final gift to Netta, much to the disgust of a middle aged lady with a bag full of shopping who was walking on the pavement nearby.

  ‘Where are we?’ Netta asked, reluctant to get off.

  ‘Well, I thought since you didn’t get to finish all of your doughnut you might like some more here,’ and he gestured to the ice cream parlour behind them as a ring master does to his circus acts.

  Netta looked stunned. Max felt a tide of anxiety wash over him. She doesn’t want to, he thought. She’s not interested in food after all. Not even ice cream. I’ve ruined our afternoon already. Or perhaps it’s me. She never seems to be comfortable eating around—

  Netta’s eyes bulged. ‘Yes please!’ She licked her lips theatrically and skipped off ahead of Max, who shook his head at his own neurosis and at this little wonder he had played a part in creating, but who was so much more than the sum of him and Erika.

  He continued to marvel at her as they devoured cake and ice cream together. He marvelled at the white moustache which soon formed over her lip and how acceptable it was, if not beautiful. He chuckled at the thought of himself sitting here in the café with an ice cream moustache and wondered at what age it became unacceptable to have one.

  ‘Schwester Hildegarda is horrible to me, but I did eat the doughnut in her class on purpose, to be naughty.’ Netta’s tongue was loosened by the flood of sugar through her veins and the renewed affection in her father’s manner toward her.

  ‘And where did you get the doughnut from?’ Max asked, trying to keep a straight face – not wanting to appear angry and destroy the bridges they were building, nor too amused by her antics, as any responsible father shouldn’t be, although he was.

  ‘I climb over the wall at break time and buy doughnuts from the baker’s for lots of the kids.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And they buy me one as a reward for daring to do it,’ she added quickly in an effort to impress her father with her bravery and her thrift.

  He shovelled some ice cream into his mouth to smother a smirk. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thank you for being honest with me about it, Netta. And although you must stop being naughty in school, you also need to know that there is no excuse for that teacher to harm you like she does. And if she does it again, you come and tell me and I’ll be over to that school like a shot.’

  ‘OK.’ Netta nodded at her cake, trying to hide the sparkle in her eyes at the thought of her papa going to tell Schwester Hildegarda off again.

  ‘Do you find Maths very hard?’ Max asked softly.

  ‘Yeah, I really do.’ Netta kept her eyes shamefully on her bowl.

  ‘Well, perhaps I can ask Opa to give you some extra help sometimes, and then you’ll be so clever your teacher will have no excuse to be horrible to you, what about that? Eh?’

  Netta looked up to answer her father and was stunned to see him sitting back in his chair with ice cream smeared all around his mouth and a silly grin on his face.

  ‘Papa!’

  ‘What?’ he said, relishing her amused embarrassment.

  She picked a napkin from the holder and stretched across to wipe his mouth for him. He leaned back further out of reach. ‘What are you doing? I’m fine,’ he laughed, ‘I don’t need a napkin.’

  ‘Papa!’ She giggled and jiggled about.

  Max caught the eye of a young couple watching him. They exchanged smiles and on this abnormal afternoon, he felt more normal, more stable, more at home than he ever had since he’d come back from Siberia.

  ‘Come on!’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘I know where we can go next.’

  Netta was so beguiled by her father’s new energy now she even left some ice cream in the bottom of her bowl in order to keep up with him. They crossed the busy street eventually and headed towards an enormous building which loomed over an intersection. It reminded Netta of their own home, but an upside-down version: the long, severe, dour looking windows made up most of its façade, but the ground floor was where its version of the Tiffany window was – rows and rows of brightly lit windows, in fact, which stretched down the street, but instead of stained glass Netta could see straight through to the fashionably dressed mannequins and the mountains of cakes inside.

  Max furtively examined Netta’s reaction as they approached the entrance of the Karstadt department store. She looked excited and yet a little unsure whether she was really invited to the party which surely waited for them beyond the double doors.

  ‘Mama hates shopping,’ Max informed her, ‘and since we don’t have anyone to help us these days I r
eckon it should be you and I that do that job from now on, eh? Don’t you?’

  Netta nodded frantically, lest any other reaction stop her papa from carrying on through the doors. He grinned and ushered her through, out of the sunlight and into the artificial glow of an Aladdin’s cave. Both father and daughter stood there agape for a moment. For Max, it was by no means the first time he had been here, but the presence of his overwhelmed little girl next to him seemed to give him permission for the first time to be overwhelmed too, by the sheer abundance of stuff, of clothes, of food – and the utter cruelty of the imbalance of things in the world almost sent him running back out into the street. More people came through the doors behind them and a sharp tut at this inconsiderate man and his little girl standing in the way pierced any images of skeletal men dressed in rags which threatened to fog this golden moment for him.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered, as he tended to in church, and led her towards the grocery.

  Netta stepped carefully among the towers of tins and the pyramids of fruit. Glass cases shone with the treasures inside – mountains of butter and more cheeses than Netta knew existed.

  ‘What do you think we should get?’ Max asked her. With his own Biblical warning to Schwester Hildegarda ringing in his ears still, he was trying to involve her, empower her as he taught her, and therefore make food something she had some control over, not something that was merely forced on her.

  ‘Is that butter?’ Netta asked, not wanting to appear foolish, but doubtful that something so big could be just butter.

  ‘It is. Should we get some?’

  She nodded and just as she was wondering how they would transport such a heap home, with a word from her papa, the man behind the counter scooped off a small section of it and began to beat it with a wooden paddle, which would have filled Netta with fear and visions of the crow lady on the Isle of Sylt, had the shopkeeper not carried out his work with an amused squint and a wink at Netta. She watched in awe as this shapeless blob was transformed by the harshest of experiences into a perfectly solid and sturdy form.

  ‘Some cheese?’ Max asked Netta as he took the kilo of butter from the shopkeeper.

  She could only nod again. Some cheese would be great, she thought, but which one? There were too many to choose from.

  ‘What about some quark?’ her papa said, pointing at a glass bowl full of wet white lumps which reminded Netta of the congealed edges of the glass of double cream Frau Auttenberg used to set before her every breakfast time.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said politely before allowing herself to be distracted by a more attractive looking slab of yellow cheese encased in a dark, rich looking rind. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘The Rauchkäse?’ the shopkeeper asked Max.

  ‘OK,’ Max murmured doubtfully.

  ‘Perhaps the young lady would like to try some first?’ And the shopkeeper cut a slither from the block and handed it to Netta, who felt very important, not just because she was called a young lady, but because she didn’t see anyone else being allowed to try the cheeses before they’d even bought some!

  Luckily for Netta, the cheese reminded her of sausages and bacon, so she could tell the shopkeeper with all the authority of a young lady that the cheese was good and they took a kilo of that too.

  They bought bread and fruit and vegetables, and since Max had come without a shopping bag, they even bought two new bags to carry it all in – one each. As they finally came back out onto the street, Max looked down at Netta doing her best to look unruffled by the load she was carrying. ‘You wait here with both the bags,’ he said, relieved to be putting the heaviest one down, ‘and I’ll bring the bike to you. That way we don’t have to carry these all the way down the street, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she echoed.

  ‘I’ll be very quick. Don’t move.’

  Netta watched him run and weave his way through the crowds. He was so fast! She watched him cross the busy street where cars and lorries zoomed towards him. He was so brave! She could just about see him still when he reached the bike outside the ice cream parlour and she thought she heard it roar into life, but there were so many other vehicles going by it could have been one of them.

  He sat on his bike, revving the engine and waiting for a rare gap in the traffic flowing away from the Karstadt so he could pull out across to the other side of the road and drive up to where Netta stood. He could just about make out her blonde hair reflecting the sun. Blonde hair like his. Nothing like her mother’s raven hair. He found himself drawing breath deeply at the thought of Erika, as if he had just injected himself with an opiate. He could see Erika, nearly a decade before, on a street on the other end of the country, a cobbled street with a little brook running through it, waiting for him to come out of the bar where they had just heard his favourite poet reading. He had thought she was feeling sick and had left to get some fresh air, but it turned out that she, still flailing about in formative doubt, felt like he was forcing this poet’s anti-establishment words down her throat and was sulking outside in the street. When he found her outside, they had argued about religion and the Nazis and it was like a knife in his guts.

  ‘Bloody Hell!’ she’d mumbled. ‘Trust me to fall in love with a…’ She’d stopped herself from spitting on his religion then. She’d waited for his question: With a what? With a what? But it never came. Because all he had heard was the notion that she had fallen in love with him. He had taken off his glasses then, instinctively because he was finding it hard to see, his eyes were so full of tears and his heart felt so big that he didn’t know if he could carry it all the way home. Their friendship and their differences had kept them skipping through the streets and hopping over the brooks since they had met and yet now they had introduced love into the equation, actually articulated it and let it hang in the air between them, everything felt so much heavier and serious, as if the skipping and the hopping were done. The differences now seemed like ravines that needed to be negotiated, not things to laugh at and celebrate.

  And yet here he was looking at the fruit of their negotiations, standing patiently for him outside the department store and his heart swelled so much it seemed to restrict his windpipe. He couldn’t wait to get home and embrace Erika. He knew she would be surprised, after his recent behaviour, but he had an overwhelming desire to just lie on their bed, wrap himself around her and kiss that raven hair again and again.

  He saw his moment and pulled out across the traffic, keeping his eye on the beacon of his daughter’s hair. And in doing so, neglected to judge the distance between him and the lorry eager to make its delivery at the Karstadt. As he tried to accelerate away from it, the lorry ploughed into the back wheel of Max’s bike.

  Netta watched as the lorry seemed to bite down on the bike, rip at it with its metal teeth for a moment before it and her papa were swallowed by the beast. There was a great groaning sound from the road and screaming from some shoppers, then Netta saw her papa being dragged along the road under this awful monster’s belly. The great metal brute lurched about like a ship on rough seas and eventually came to a halt right outside the Karstadt vomiting out its human meal, which went hurtling across the pavement and slamming into the wall of the store where it finally came to rest.

  Netta felt her body empty of everything – blood, breath, even piss. She stood completely still as the world rushed around her, elbows and hips bumped her as adults ran to help the man who’d been mown down by the lorry, whose driver climbed from his cab on jelly legs, tugging at his hair and shrugging at the few people who were looking his way.

  All eyes were on Netta’s papa. She shifted her gaze to him too, or rather the mush of man on the pavement like a bloody pile of quark. Why didn’t he get up and brush off his trousers and come over to make sure she was all right? He had told her not to move, told her he’d be right back. She had all the shopping with her and they had to get it home soon before the butter went too soft.

  Someone was taking charge. It wasn’t a policeman. The man wa
s dressed in normal clothes. He was ordering people about and telling them to get out of the way. It reminded Netta of what Uncle Edgar had said the first time he came for a dinner party – that when her papa was a boy of sixteen he was at the theatre with Tante Bertel when a tram collided with a beer lorry in the street outside. Tante Bertel was the first to get out there and start helping the injured. She told her papa to grab a ladder from beside one of the shops and to help carry the injured up to the Klinik. The man was taking charge just like Tante Bertel did. Uncle Edgar said that Bertel was her papa’s inspiration. That she made him want to become a doctor.

  Netta picked up her bag and dragged the heavier one across the pavement to get closer to her papa and the crowd which was beginning to swallow him up. He was a doctor. His job was to make sick people better. He couldn’t get hurt himself, Netta reasoned, because who could fix the doctor if the doctor was broken? She looked about her for a ladder that she could use as a stretcher to take her papa to hospital, but there was none. She started to panic as the wail of an ambulance echoed down the street. Uncle Edgar worked at the hospital, didn’t he? He was a doctor too. Perhaps he could help her papa, she thought, then panicked even more because she didn’t know where the hospital was and what part of the hospital Uncle Edgar worked in. Her mama was a doctor too, she remembered. Surely she could help him, but she was at home and home was so far away and how could she let her mama know that Papa was… she peered through the legs at the face of her father, bloody, slashed, eyes closed, mouth open, looking as if he was… Netta began to weep, but the cry of the approaching ambulance drowned her out. Two men in white suits hurried from the van and set about transferring her papa to a stretcher. They seemed to be careful but every movement caused her papa to scream with a gurgly voice. The first scream from him told Netta that he was alive and this hushed her sobs for a moment, but every awful groan of pain from him thereafter set her off again, her bawling mounting until she felt a big soft hand on her shoulder.