Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  “Something’s going to happen before long. Everyone seems to be co-operating. The Russians and East Germans haven’t made any objections about all the troops being there. They’ve offered to help.”

  “They’ve already killed five people. They’ve just been holding on to all those children for all this time.”

  Jo flicked at the mobile hanging above his bed, a quick, angry action. “They found somewhere to fly to when they’d killed Mum.”

  Something cold brushed against Corrie’s lips. It was one of the figures from the mobile. The eight silvery-metallic sea-gulls swooped and soared in the slightest current of air. He moved back, rubbing at his mouth.

  Their newspaper, The Guardian, had said “17 KILLED IN AIRPORT ATTACK.” A more popular tabloid had had the headline “GOOD FRIDAY MASSACRE,” adding “ONE BRITON BELIEVED DEAD.” That had been Mum. She had been returning from a conference in Rome, a discussion of recent research into cancer. There was still hope of a breakthrough in finding a cure. She had gone even though she was pregnant.

  He had stared at the photographs in The Guardian: a man swabbing at a floor with a mop, two men carrying something in a blanket between them. When he was watching the news report of the shooting at the school that afternoon, he had leaned forward to see the body of the woman in more detail. He had wanted to see her face.

  The usual clutter of extraordinarily assorted books lay on the carpet beside Jo’s bed, around Corrie’s feet: The Little Prince, Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, an American photographic magazine, The Mouse and His Child, a paperback edition of Small Is Beautiful (“There’s a book here about us,” he had said to Corrie when he bought it), an old school edition of Emil and the Detectives. His changes of subject-matter from day to day were unpredictable.

  His school rough-work book was lying clipped to his drawing-board. It was covered with his tiny neat printing: Open only in case of earthquakes, tornadoes (gale force, assorted debris zooming about), custard pouring from volcanoes, Martians turning into cheese (Camembert), giant bats chewing gum in discothèques, the bus population going green (with ivy, not envy), celebration of annual haircut of Cato Levi, Saturnalia getting divorced from Copernicus, undulations in oscillating rhythm on British Rail track (1st class only)…A length of wood, club-shaped, lay alongside the drawing-board, next to his flute, with the same printing on it in black felt-tip pen at the thinner end. YOB BASHER. HOLD THIS END. Groin: 10 points. Legs: 3 points. Head: 25 points. Arse: 4 points. At one end of it a black circle was labelled Self-destruction button.

  Corrie looked at it, then picked it up, waving it at Jo, and spoke in his most refined and sophisticated voice.

  “I say, how frightfully childish!”

  “Well, we are children,” Jo said, quoting from Emil and the Detectives. He reached over the other side of the bed, away from Corrie, and pulled up his Winnie-the-Pooh, clutching it to him and sucking his thumb noisily. In one sudden movement, he slid beneath the bedclothes, until only his eyes were visible above the sheets.

  The ceiling had been entirely covered with Charlie Brown strip cartoons, clipped from a Sunday newspaper colour magazine, bright primary colours of red, blue, and yellow. Corrie thought of the reproduction of Breughel’s “Children’s Games” hanging in the school sanatorium. He had seen it when he had gone to visit Cato, after his appendicitis operation. Mechanically, joylessly, like troops drilled in some repetitive movement, the swarming children filling the streets played their games, each compelled to act the part of a child. Not a single child was laughing, or even smiling. With intense seriousness and concentration, they performed all the actions expected of children, over and over again like clockwork figures, a wound-up toy. Unseen, in the distance, was a refuge, a place to which they could escape if only they realised it was there. Beyond the trees, beyond the river, open green fields stretched emptily away towards a wide horizon.

  Beside Jo’s bed was the light Corrie had thought of when he had seen the cake at Lilli’s: a pottery model of the gingerbread house, made so that the light would shine through the windows of the house when it was switched on. The front was open, and miniature furniture inside was clearly visible: the table, the chairs, the tiled oven.

  “Neely? “

  “Yes, Jo-JO?”

  They were nicknames from early childhood, now used rarely, and half-jokingly.

  “Tell me about Rousseau.”

  This had been the usual request when he had sat on Jo’s bed when he was younger.

  Rousseau was the name of the mythical land Corrie had invented with Jo three years ago. Dad had been working on the notes for his paperback edition of Émile when they had been trying to think of a name for their land. On the wall beside Jo’s bed, alongside one of Lilli’s posters for The Winter’s Tale, was the large detailed map of Rousseau drawn in coloured inks by Jo. There were other posters on the far side of it: a photograph of the earth from space; a Peaceable Kingdom, the animals grouped around a standing lion; and the programme for the Victorian Evening. Corrie read the first lines.

  Mama, Papa, Edmund, and young Albert

  invite you to attend

  A GLITTERING SOIRÉE.

  Poetry, prose, music, and drama of an unimpeachable

  moral tone, expressly for your delectation and edification.

  Musicians:

  Cello: Master C. Meeuwissen.

  Flute: Master J. Meeuwissen.

  Violin: Mrs. M. Meeuwissen.

  Pianoforte: Mr. P. Meeuwissen.

  Jo blew at the mobile, and the silver birds rose and fell, spinning above the bed.

  “Wings soar in the silence.”

  “Birds float above the sea.”

  “Falling waters from the cliff-tops.”

  “Lonely Rousseau waits for me.”

  Jo grinned. “You remember exactly.”

  “I still go there sometimes.”

  On the edges of the world, hidden by mist, lapped by the waters of an undiscovered sea, is the uninhabited solitude of a green and distant island. The only sounds are the waterfalls, plunging down over rocks to the distant unprinted shore, and the faint cries of birds, wheeling and turning like white fragments borne up by the wind…

  It had become a real place to him, existing outside his own imagination, when he had looked at one of the art books at Lilli’s, the Christmas they had stayed with her, and saw reproductions of paintings that were scenes from inside his own head green leaf-fringed shadows in the depths of cool woods and found that the painter’s name was Rousseau. He could still write fluently and rapidly in the script and language they had invented for it.

  “Wings soar in the silence.”

  They both watched the silver birds slowly steady themselves, and stop.

  “Do you think Matty liked his present?” Jo asked.

  “Yes. He made enough noise with it.”

  “It’s just as well we had a German Christmas and opened all our presents on Christmas Eve. Someone told him about Father Christmas at play school, and he was a bit scared of it happening in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t blame him. How would you like a hairy old geezer coming into your bedroom when you’re fast asleep?”

  “Treading reindeer muck into your carpet. Anyway, if he goes off his present, I’ll play with it instead.”

  Jo emerged from beneath the bedclothes and sat up beside Corrie.

  “Corrie?”

  “Mmm?”

  Jo hesitated for a moment, looked at Corrie again, and then reached down under his bed, bringing up a flat, square parcel in a plastic bag from a record shop. He placed it carefully on his knees and smoothed his hands across the top of the bag, smoothing out all the wrinkles.

  He spoke with his head down, looking at his hands moving across the thin plastic.

  “This is Mum’s Christmas present.”

  Corrie watched him.

  “I bought it last January, when we were in London in the New Year. It was just the right thing, and I had to b
uy it then. The records she had had got scratched. I kept it hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe.”

  He looked up at Corrie, staring at him very closely.

  “She’s bound to have seen it, isn’t she?”

  “What did you get her?”

  “The Saint Matthew Passion.”

  Jo dropped his gaze, staring down at the package on his knees again.

  “You couldn’t afford that, could you, Jo? That’s four records.”

  “They were having a sale. In Oxford Street. That’s why I had to get it then. They’d had an incendiary bomb, and the box and the booklet had been damaged. They were selling a lot of records and things off cheaply. You remember…”

  In the railway stations, and on the underground, were warnings not to touch unattended packages or bags, and to report them to staff. They had had their bags searched several times, in theatres and concert halls, museums and art galleries. When they had gone to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, a man sitting in front of Corrie had left during the performance, and he had seen a parcel still lying under his seat. He had said nothing to anyone, afraid of making a scene, causing a disturbance, and sat throughout the second half of the play—as Juliet sobbed, drank the drug, was lamented, as Romeo rode to Verona to join his bride in death, wept beside her body in a feasting presence full of light, as both Romeo and Juliet killed themselves, as the Montagues and Capulets were reconciled with tears over the bodies of their children—thinking only of the green Marks & Spencer carrier-bag lying on its side in front of him. Beneath the surface of everyday life, nothing was what it seemed, and mutilation could lurk beneath the commonplace: a car, a pillar-box, an unattended parcel, an envelope with unfamiliar handwriting. In nearby streets were the sounds of the sirens.

  Jo slid the contents out of the plastic bag. He had made a new box to hold the four records, and, in water-colours, had painted a cover showing the road to Calvary. He had done it beautifully, copying the style of one of Lilli’s paintings.

  He had chosen the interior of a family house, rooms opening out into deeper rooms through open doors, each room represented in close detail. In the different rooms, glimpses of a family could be seen, dressed in the fashion of the 1930s: a woman sewing, a boy bent over a toy, a man peering through his spectacles at a book, a little girl stroking a cat. Through one of the windows—unseen by any of the family, a casual detail almost lost in the general pattern of the picture—a crowd in the street was watching someone who had fallen down. His feet were just visible beyond the edge of the window. A man, fully visible, was standing immediately above the fallen figure, his arm about to rise and bring a whip down upon him. The faces of the crowd were neither gleeful nor excited. They were just gazing blankly at an occurrence of events over which they had no control. One or two were smiling. A few were averting their eyes.

  Jo ran his hand around the edge of the box.

  It had been their mother’s favourite of all Bach’s works. It had been played at her funeral.

  “She’s bound to have seen it, isn’t she? Isn’t she, Corrie?”

  The school clock began to strike midnight. They both listened until it had finished and the echoes died away. The bells of the clock above the restaurant chimed, and then began to play their folk-song.

  “Happy Birthday, Jesus.”

  “Happy Christmas, Jo.”

  “Fröhliche Weihnachten, Corrie. I enjoyed Lilli’s German Christmas.”

  six

  “FOOL!” said the woman. “If we do not do this, then all four of us will die of hunger. We must destroy them in order to live ourselves. Otherwise you might as well start making the coffins for us all now.”

  The man’s heart grew heavy, and he would not agree with her. She did not leave him alone until he had agreed to her plan. He said to himself, “It is not right,” and yet he agreed.

  Hansel and Gretel, tormented by hunger, had been awake all this time, and had heard everything that their father and stepmother had said about them.

  Gretel wept bitterly, and said to Hansel, “They do not want us. We cannot live when we’re all alone in the world.”

  “Don’t be frightened, Gretel,” Hansel said. “I’ll think of a way to save us both. I’ll always be here to look after you.”

  When the adults were asleep, Hansel got up, put on his coat, and tiptoed downstairs. Very quietly, he opened the front door, and went outside. The moon was shining brightly, and the white pebbles which were scattered on the ground in front of the house glimmered in the moonlight like newly polished silver coins on the dark earth. Hansel bent down, and began to gather up the pebbles, dropping them into the pockets of his coat until they were both crammed full.

  Then he went back into the house, closed the door very quietly, and tiptoed upstairs, where Gretel lay waiting for him, frightened to be alone.

  “God will not forsake us,” Hansel said to Gretel. “Don’t believe that we can ever be totally abandoned. Sleep peacefully, my dear little sister.”

  CORRIE sat on the window-seat in the first-floor bedroom at the back of the school music rooms, holding the postcards from Katherina Viehmann, and Peter and Aline Goetzel. The door set into the wall was open, and piles of carefully stacked papers were on the floor at his feet. He was leaning over, reading “Hansel and Gretel” from the Grimm’s Fairy Tales lying open on the window-seat beside him, next to his music notebook, on top of his atlas. It was the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of December, his birthday.

  He had always written music, increasingly so over the past two years, short pieces to be performed by the Elizabethan World Picture, or by his family, and he had written songs for Levi’s, the group formed by Cato Levi. (Cato kept reminding him that his grandfather Michael Meeuwissen had compiled the classic Folk Songs of Europe.) After the success of Corrie’s music for The Winter’s Tale, Mr. Passenger, the teacher who had produced the play, asked him, during the party after the last night, if he had ever thought of writing the music for an original opera or musical to be performed in school.

  That was all he had said, but it had stayed in Corrie’s mind.

  Just after the end of term, he had been lying in bed one night, his eyes upon the “Hansel and Gretel” painting.

  There was something he felt a need to express about those two figures.

  “Hansel and Gretel” moved and affected him deeply—it was a story he had read and reread as a small child, and in the last few months—and he felt that he wanted to convey what he felt the story was trying to say, the atmosphere of Lilli’s painting. It had been a mood, rather than a clear conception of what he might do, like the struggle for the words to describe a vivid but half-forgotten dream.

  It had come to him that he might be able to express his feelings through music.

  Over the past week he had started to sketch out ideas for a musical adaptation of the story. He wanted to make it free of the kind of inaccuracies he had seen in previous adaptations. Unlike the Humperdinck opera, there would be no caring parents, no Sandman, no Dew Fairy, no guardian angels.

  Berlin-Charlottenburg

  14.x.1935

  Dear Mr. High,

  Please send me a prospectus of your school. I write having received the best recommendation of Your school by Mrs. Viehmann, my dear friend, who I know since years. I must send my two children from Germany, a boy of twelve, and a girl of ten. As German Jew I have to select the Institut not only for the study, but I am forced to seek a school, the fees of which are corresponding to my reduced capital. I am a woman author, and my husband is a lawyer. We are both since 2 years without possibility of earn money. I hope You understand my incorrect English.

  Yours faithfully,

  Ruth Grünbaum

  WHEN he first opened the door set into the wall in the music rooms, his ideas started to take shape. The mood had crystallised and the structure had begun to emerge: a cantata, with a narrator, a chorus, and mime, rather than a conventional operatic or musical treatment. “Auf meines Kindes Tod” was
to be the final song for the chorus.

  HE PICKED up his bookmark in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and looked again at Nickolaus Mittler’s postcard:

  …Please pardon me about my stammerings, but my will is stronger than the words I know. We will be diligent in our study and becomingness, and prove ourselves worthy. We will be good boys…

  The music rooms, some distance behind Dunwich Green and the rest of the school buildings, were in the Ferry House, an early-Victorian building, away from the main built-up area of the little town. It had been the original headmaster’s house until Tennyson’s, on the east side of the Green, backing on to the low cliff above the beach, was built in the time of the third headmaster. Passers-by who walked along the western boundary of the school fields, down the footpath which led from the town towards the ferry across the River Blyth, often heard confused fragments of music as they passed the Ferry House in term-time

  His favourite room for practice was a first-floor room at the back of the building, looking out across the school playing-fields towards the sea, beyond the wall and the low sand-dunes. It had originally been one of the bed-rooms in the house, high-ceilinged, tall-windowed, beautifully proportioned, with an ornate white-painted fireplace curly with leaves and bunches of grapes. He would borrow the key from his father—it helped, sometimes, to be the headmaster’s son—and spend hours there during the long holidays, when all the boarders had gone home, and there was no one there to disturb him, bent over his cello, at the piano, or just sitting in the cold bare room, above the quiet, wall-enclosed fields.

  ON THE morning of Christmas Eve, sitting on the windowseat of the practice room, he had looked down at Jo acting as goalkeeper for Matthias on the First Eleven football pitch. Immediately after breakfast, he and Jo had spent an hour or so together in the Ferry House, practising “Auf meines Kindes Tod” and the other musical pieces they were going to perform for the German Christmas. Jo kept making spectacular and carefully unsuccessful attempts to save the goals that Matthias kicked in from six feet away. Matthias, knees bent, had to pump his arms up and down to keep his balance, and occasionally fell flat on his face. He was encrusted in mud, and the fine drizzle of the early morning was intensifying into rain. Baskerville hung uncertainly about in the background, occasionally making hesitant little forays towards them.