by Chloe Mayer
‘Yes?’ I’m not sure if he heard me, because my voice was a whisper whipped away by the wind.
‘They make high-school yearbooks there, like they do in America, except they’re more like magazines than proper books. So my man checked Mittenwald Library archives – it’s a tiny little town, a village really, in the Bavarian Alps – and looked through a few different years and …’ He was slipping another piece of paper from his envelope. ‘This is him. Isn’t it?’ He leaned forward to point out an image on the page.
He looked so young! I nodded. Daddy leaned over to look as well.
It was another black-and-white image, and it was tiny, surrounded by dozens of photographs of strangers’ faces. But yes, it was Hans as a teenager. I’d know his face anywhere.
Only—
(Hang on a minute.)
Only … the name under the boy with the shy smile wasn’t Hans. It was Wilhelm. Wilhelm Gerhard.
40
… he sat next to the Snow Queen. She put her fur coat around him, and it felt as if he lay down in a deep snowdrift.
From The Snow Queen
There was a quiet knock on my bedroom door.
‘Oh,’ Daddy said, when he poked his head into my room. ‘I was going to ask if you need a hand with your tie, but I see you’re already dressed.’
I was sitting on the bed trying to make my head feel the right way before Mother’s funeral. I had that odd feeling of pressure in my skull again, that sensation of a kettle screaming inside my mind. ‘I have to wear a tie every day for Densford Secondary,’ I said.
‘Ah.’ I realised he’d never seen me in my school uniform. I still hadn’t been back there since the snow. ‘Well, Granny and Grandpa are downstairs if you want to come and say hello. Your other grandparents aren’t here yet.’
‘Yes, in a minute.’
He left and closed the door behind him. I fiddled with the pointed end of my black tie. I supposed the funeral would make Mother’s death feel more real. So far, I hadn’t felt very much. I’d always been so terrified of her leaving me. But it was like I’d always known she would leave in the end. It was like I’d been waiting for it. And, with Daddy home, things weren’t so very bad.
He was doing all the cooking, like he’d done before the war. And he was trying his best with the shopping and cleaning, too. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been doing for Mother, until Daddy started doing it for me.
Things were all right, really. Apart from the nightmares. Sometimes I woke up screaming, and Daddy would run into my room to tell me I was safe now, go back to sleep. But I couldn’t tell him what monsters were making me suffer. I pretended I could never remember the dreams. He probably thought they were just memories of Mother leaving and how I was trapped in the house in the snow.
Daddy and I were both trying so hard to get better. But yes, he grew very quiet sometimes, and went to sit in the bomb shelter in the garden, and I remembered how I’d heard him crying in there once before. I left him alone when he went in there now. I thought he was maybe thinking about the war, which he never talked about, and Mother, who he didn’t talk about much either.
I went to look out of my window. Tiny buds were starting to appear on the magnolia tree. Through the branches, I could see the pavement on the other side of the fence. Bunches of flowers and wreaths laid there for the village to see. Some of the neighbours, dressed in black, hovered nearby at a respectful distance. I saw Jean Bainbridge, who’d been friends with Mother, arrive and lay down a bunch of daffodils. She was wearing a black hat with a bit of black net falling across her face.
Mother was dead. And Hansel was dead, too. Did that mean they were together now?
‘Your Hans was a naughty boy,’ Detective Taylor had said. ‘He wasn’t who he said he was.’
Sitting at that table outside the Royal Oak I had felt a sudden rush of dizziness as if I was about to faint.
‘What?’
The policeman was actually grinning at me. He was thrilled. He winked at Daddy, like he was playing a fun game.
‘I love it when a hunch pays off,’ he said. ‘Now I knew his real name I could find out who he really was.’
‘But … but … who was he?’
And he placed his beer down and turned again to his manila envelope and I suddenly didn’t want to know. In a panic, I wondered how I could get Daddy to make him stop talking. I stood up, banging into the table hard, and my cup rattled in its saucer and a couple of the beers spilled over.
‘Daniel!’ Daddy cried, as the beer dripped through the holes in the iron table on to their laps.
I snatched up the photographs of Hans the woodchopper and Wilhelm the student and then grabbed at the envelope in the detective’s hand. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to get beer on it all.’
He stood up too. ‘I’m sorry, this was a shock. You said he was your, er, friend. I should have—’
‘No, no, it’s all right.’ I stuffed the photographs back into the envelope. ‘Sorry.’ They were all gaping at me. ‘I’ll go inside and get a cloth.’
I stumbled off into the pub, which felt dark and stuffy after sitting beneath the cold sky, and I rolled up the envelope so that I was gripping it like a baton in my fist. I walked past the bar and threw myself down at an empty table in the corner, to try to force my breathing to slow down. The barman gave me a strange look, but a couple came in so he turned away to serve them. I knew Daddy and the policemen were waiting for me outside, but I needed a minute to myself. There was an empty pint glass on the table, a dirty ashtray, and a packet of matches. There were three still in there, when I slid open the box.
I decided to burn the envelope.
There was already a fire burning in the pub but I thought it’d be too obvious if I walked over and threw it into the grate. The matches would work though; I knew there was a little metal rubbish bin in the men’s toilets – I could set it alight in there. I started to stand up. But the sudden memory of using another set of matches in another time, another place, to make a fire, made me hesitate. And then I felt sick. It would be like burning Hansel. And I leaned forward onto the table with my head between my hands.
It was a stupid idea anyway. How could I explain the missing envelope if I burned it? And the detective knew all the information inside it; destroying it wouldn’t really make it disappear. My heart eventually stopped spluttering in my chest and settled down to a steady beat, so I sat back up. The envelope was on the seat beside me.
I didn’t have long. They’d give me a few minutes, assuming I must be waiting for the barman’s attention, but then Daddy would probably come looking for me. I wasn’t sure if they realised that I’d taken the envelope with me. It didn’t matter: I’d decided not to read whatever was inside. I’d just sit there for a minute, catching my breath, before getting a cloth and going outside to wipe up the mess.
But the envelope, the paper inside it, was like a siren’s sly call to a lonely sailor at sea. There was a story inside those pages. And in the end, I wanted to be told the story.
I went into the toilets so I could shut myself in a cubicle, and I pulled out the detective’s report. And I began to read.
Some of what Hansel had said was true. Wilhelm Gerhard’s father, Kurt, was indeed a wealthy shoe manufacturer who had travelled around Europe with his family before the war. He was also a prominent figure in the local Nazi party, and his handsome son Wilhelm – the boy in the school photograph – had joined the Waffen-SS.
I didn’t need to be told what that meant. Everyone knew the SS set up the German police state and used security forces like the Gestapo to crush any resistance. And now, a few years after the war, everyone also knew about the SS’s other job too – running Germany’s concentration camps.
I’d closed the lid and was sitting on the toilet but I reeled backwards so I could avoid looking at the words for a couple of seconds. Then, worried that my time might be running out, I quickly scanned the last couple of pages.
They were ju
st dry facts, I understood that. Wilhelm’s father may have forced him to join the SS. Wilhelm may have secretly been against everything they stood for. But why would he lie to everyone about his name? Why would he say he was called Hans?
Records had been hurriedly destroyed as the Germans lost the war and so – despite his best efforts – Detective Taylor was unable to find out exactly when and where Wilhelm had been at any given time. But, he wrote in his report, it was standard practice to rotate SS members in and out of the camps. They’d be moved around according to manpower needs or to give them a break from the front lines. There was a very compelling argument, he said, that every single member of the SS knew about the existence of concentration camps and, more than that, knew exactly what went on within them. That’s why the whole organisation was deemed liable for crimes against humanity. That’s why this report into Hans said he almost certainly knew about – and had, in fact, likely participated in – the extermination of the Jews (and the gypsies, and the homosexuals, and the religious, and the communists, and the handicapped, and all the others deemed unfit to live).
Hans was probably a Nazi after all.
Grandma and Grandad’s car pulled up outside the house, and I saw them nod awkwardly at the mourners before walking up the path into the cottage. I heard Granny greeting them in the hall. I’d have to go downstairs in a minute. The hearse would arrive soon and then it would be time for Mother’s funeral procession.
But I couldn’t get thoughts of Hansel out of my head. I was back in the toilet cubicle, with the tall walls either side of me, as I tried to learn what I could about a man I’d once believed to be a woodchopper-prince.
Detective Taylor couldn’t find Wilhelm’s family. His report said some old neighbours claimed they’d been killed by a bomb, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. They were well-known party members; they may have run away, changed their names. If they were still alive, then they still didn’t know what became of Wilhelm.
Towards the end of the report, the policeman described Mother’s necklace. It was found in the PoW’s skeletal fist. The chain was broken, so they suspected he’d pulled it from her throat to rob her. He’d have to rewrite that page now, now that I’d told him it couldn’t have happened that way. The report would say the chain had broken one day when Mother happened to be at the orchard, and the prisoner had stolen the necklace then. I thought about the broken chain. The tiny links had probably worn away with time and the weather. Or perhaps the delicate silver had snapped as Hans held it and waited for me to save him. I liked the thought of him looking at it. Why else would he do that if it wasn’t love?
The last page of the document gave me another shock. Mr Higgins had walked into the police station in Densford, a week after Hans had been discovered at the bottom of the mine. He said he’d been walking in the woods when he’d tripped over and found a body. Bones, just about buried in what must have been a shallow grave. He’d been wracking his brains, he had, on the drive to the police station, and remembered an old tramp who used to be seen about the village sometimes, but who had disappeared around the same time the prisoner escaped. Mr Higgins could only assume – according to the desk sergeant, who told Detective Taylor, who wrote it in his report – that the PoW had killed the tramp at some point during his getaway. Perhaps the man had tried to stop him, and there’d been a struggle, a fight. Did the PoW have a weapon? A gun, a knife? No? Well, he was young and strong, wasn’t he, from all that wood-chopping. Perhaps he’d grabbed a branch or log, from the ground, and used that? To batter the man. Mr Higgins wasn’t a policeman, although he had been in charge of the Bambury Home Guard, so he’d leave it to the officers to investigate. But if he was a gambling man, he’d bet this new body he’d stumbled across in the woods was connected to the PoW. It must have been dislodged by the melting snow, which was why he’d found it that day. It was lucky, really, a funny coincidence. But it was justice too. Now everybody would know the PoW killed the tramp, and that would be the end of the whole sorry mess.
Granny came up to fetch me. ‘Ready, dear? Don’t you look smart?’ She squeezed my shoulder as she guided me downstairs. ‘Things will get better after today,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get through today.’
Then she took me into the sitting room and I let Grandma kiss me and Grandad shake my hand. And when the hearse came, men in black top hats put the flowers into the car, and we walked behind it, and the rest of the mourners walked behind us, for the short distance to the church.
The sun was out and I felt warm in my black school blazer, which Granny said would do for a funeral jacket with my white shirt and new black tie. I looked at Grandma and Grandad, because they were Mother’s parents and I wondered how they would react. But they just looked sad, and neither of them cried. They looked like I felt. I remembered Mother’s row outside the station with Grandma. I didn’t know if Grandma was thinking about that, or other things.
The priest said: ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’
Then he started to speak about stories from the Bible, because even adults liked to listen to stories like that, and he talked about her eternal life. I wondered if Mother had met Hansel yet, in this new life she’d started. I wasn’t quite sure what to think about Wilhelm, but I liked the thought of Mother and Hansel being together again. Daddy told me ‘the PoW’ had been given a pauper’s burial – well, a cremation – since no one could find his family. So he’d been given a funeral at last, I thought, just like Mother.
Daddy led me over to a pile of soil not far from the grave. We each scooped up a handful of earth and threw it down into the hole; on to her coffin.
41
They took each other by the hand and walked out of the great palace … The winds were still; and as they walked, the sun broke through the clouds.
From The Snow Queen
There was something nice about packing everything away neatly into boxes. The cottage was disappearing into wooden crates in each room. The last of the clutter that Granny had missed, when she came to clean the house after the snow, was being thrown away. The rubbish piled high in cupboards and crammed into drawers was a fluttering stream that trickled out of the house into the bins outside, and Mother’s clothes, and the ones too small for me, were birds that flew away to the Red Cross to be given to refugees.
The removal van was arriving tomorrow, and it would carry Daddy and me and our things and our furniture all the way to Norfolk. We were going to live in a house just two streets away from Granny and Grandpa. Daddy said his war pension and the money from the sale of the cottage were all we needed, but he was talking about trying to get a job at a bank in Great Yarmouth.
I’d have to start a new school. I’d missed quite a lot of the term, but Harry had written to me and promised it wouldn’t be a problem. The master was a good chap on the whole, he said, and I hadn’t missed much. And his friends were all looking forward to meeting me. He’d told them all how I survived by eating snow on my own for weeks without any parents there. They couldn’t wait to meet a real-life hero, he said. And, his messy handwriting added, we’d be able to walk to school together every day because we’d practically be neighbours.
Starting a new school where I’d hardly know anyone made me feel nervous, but then maybe that was the best thing about it; I could be a completely different person there. In any case, I felt sick with relief that I’d never have to go back to Densford Secondary.
I looked around my room to see what else I still had to do. My small bedside table had to be taken downstairs into the front garden so I picked it up and carried it outside. Daddy had promised one of the neighbours she could have the bits and bobs we weren’t taking with us, and there was a little collection under the magnolia tree for her to inspect. I put the table next to a pair of mismatched wooden chairs on the lawn, which was dotted with pet
als.
‘What’s all this?’
I turned around to see Mr Higgins just coming to a stop on the other side of our fence. He rested a thick hand on a wooden post, and I tried not to look at it.
‘Ah, hello Higgins,’ Daddy said, as he came out of the front door carrying a footstool.
‘Patterson.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘On my way to visit Evelyn Moore – my cousin’s widow, by way of marriage. Like to pop by to check on her from time to time.’
‘Ah, yes, that’s nice. Please pass on my regards.’
‘I might ask you the same question, anyway – what are you up to?’
And Daddy told him we were moving away. I looked up at Mr Higgins and saw something slowly change in his expression. His scrunched-up face seemed to get smoother. He’s relieved, I thought. By ‘finding’ the Troll himself, he’d made sure no one would ask any questions and had managed to pin it all on Hansel. And now with Mother and Farmer Dawson dead, and me moving away, there were only a few people left who knew what he and the nice man did that day. And they had their own reasons for keeping quiet.
Mr Higgins congratulated Daddy on the move, then said to me: ‘Well, you be a good boy for your father. Don’t give him any trouble now, will you?’
Of course I could hear the threat creeping underneath his words, and I hated having to obey it. But I looked down at the table on the grass and pushed my thumbnail into the soft wood and said: ‘No, sir. I’ll be good.’
Sometimes I wondered if I should tell Daddy what had happened, just to tell someone so that I wasn’t alone in the knowing of it. But how could I explain about the Troll without also explaining about Hansel and Mother and everything that’d happened that summer? I supposed I could keep some of it back from him, but even if I just told him about the Troll he’d be upset, and the thought of adding to his upset, of making him go to cry in the bomb shelter, sealed my lips. And, the truth was, I didn’t want him to know what I’d done. I didn’t want him to think badly of me. Things were so good now he was home again I didn’t want to do anything to ruin it.
