In the car, Toni hissed at Willy, “Don’t tell me you’re going to go and fight, because you’re not.”
“Do we stand aside while they overrun Poland?”
“You know what I feel about Poland.”
“If the Legion fights, my darling, the treizième DBLE will need every man.”
“Not you.”
“Toni. Please, look at me.”
But she looked away and would not talk to either of them.
At the hotel, as Toni clicked angrily away across the marble lobby in her high heels for a last drink at the bar, Willy took Ilse’s arm and saw her to her door. All the way up in the lift, she kept thinking the same silly thought about how she might persuade Willy to be her blood brother. The way to do it was to make a little cut and collect a few drops of blood in a basin. They could mingle them and drink the liquid, dissolved in water. That meant that they were one soul with two bodies. But there was not time to suggest this, for Willy was hurrying back to his wife.
Willy took her for a drive very early in the morning. The weather was beautiful, the air so clear, the mountain peaks tinged with pink. As soon as they got out of town and onto the open road, he stopped the car and told Ilse to drive. She, still small for her age, sat on his lap while he worked the pedals, peering over the steering wheel on which he rested one negligent arm. Willy, looking over the top of her head at her reflection in the mirror, kept laughing at her serious face. She was concentrating. The air smelt fresh and good. Driving the car was her favourite thing in the world. But even through the intense happiness of smelling his shaving lotion and being in his arms, Ilse felt, louder and louder, the knocking of her anxious heart.
“Life goes on,” he said. “It’s important to enjoy each day. Things change. That is what life is.”
Mutely, Ilse shook her head.
“When my first wife died, I thought I could never smile again. But look at me. Look at me and Toni. How happy we are.”
Ilse thought of Toni’s beautiful little face, set in an angry pout.
“What happened to your first wife?” She tried to control her wobbly voice. But the secret was a sad one, even worse than she had imagined, for young Liesel had died tragically in childbirth. Then she did not want to drive anymore.
Willy turned the car round in a cloud of pale dust. “I must get back—I’m concerned about Toni,” he said. “She’s worried about her people.”
“What people?”
“Her family. In Warsaw.”
“But what are they doing in Poland?”
“They are all Poles, my darling. Like her. Her family couldn’t get out, you see. Same problem as you. And now, who knows?”
Ilse was very stupid. She had not realised that Toni was Polish, let alone Jewish.
FOUR
Hamburg, October 1939
Nicolai chewed at his pen, watched water running down his tree, slicking it black against a grey world. Rain drummed on the roof of his dormer window. His exercise book lay open. He had enjoyed Bible study, which was interestingly full of miracles and disasters, floods and plagues. Now the headmaster taught Lebenskunde10 instead, stories about the leader’s youth and the history of the Party. It was very dull. The essays he set for homework all had the same titles: “We want to work and we shall work.” Or: “We were a broken people but now we are one.”
He flicked ink on the blotter, doodled the blots into giant Zeppelins. His father might have mocked the titles, but he would have helped him with the work. Now that he had gone to officer training school the house was too quiet. Nicolai had taken one particularly good photograph of him laughing, head thrown back, elegant in the field-grey uniform. He reached for the camera. Smoothly, he removed the 35mm lens, screwed on the 50mm, pulled it out and twisted it. There was a faint chance that his father might buy him the Elmar telephoto, if he came on leave, if one could be found. He slotted the viewfinder onto the bayonet shoe, adjusted the knurled ring. The optics were the finest available; the very smallness of the camera was astonishing. He relished the weight and solid feel of it in his hand for a moment, then lifted it to his eye, framed a couple of shots, carefully focused: the window, sheeting with rain, the room. No point wasting film.
His mother was out. Roaming through the house, a dog sniffing his usual places, he tiptoed into his father’s study, swooshed the whisky round the decanter, poured himself a tot and drank it down. It caught in his throat, its fiery progress down his chest made him shudder. The old faint cigar smell lingered. He played with the lighter. His father would have pulled out a book from the back of the shelves, one of the banned ones behind the innocent front ones; he would have found something to make him laugh. The house was so dull, Nicolai would even have welcomed Wolfgang. But his half-brother had written to tell their mother that he would be visiting less often; Hitler Youth and sports rallies took up all his weekends. At breakfast she had read the letter twice in her proud Wolfgang voice, unbearable now that his father was not there to deflate it with his twinkling eyebrows or sidelong wink.
If only Sabine had not caught those stupid measles. Fräulein Lindemann would have given him ideas for his essay. She was very clever at history and at turning a phrase, but she had been busy with his little sister all week. Sabine, though sweet, was not company. She greeted Nicolai with yelps of delight, she laughed because he did, but she was not a person one could talk to. He had clicked at the big silver lighter too often; it was out of fuel and would not light. He banged it down.
“War is using us all up,” he declaimed dramatically.
The empty room mocked him. Everything was annoying. He trailed past the forbidden territory of the kitchen; Magda had banished Nicolai until suppertime. Hot-faced, she slaved in clouds of steam, scalding rubber seals and glass jars, stirring the vat of slowly bubbling sugary fruit. Purple damsons, split and stoned to show their yellow hearts, massed along the wooden board. He descended the cellar staircase, dragging his feet. The supplies multiplied; gleaming jars of peas and red cabbage lined the cellar wall. Shelves filled the space where he used to park his bicycle, which now had to live in the garden shed. Passing Fräulein Lindemann’s room, Nicolai spotted a suitcase open on her bed. What was that for? She wasn’t going anywhere. He paused. He was not supposed to enter her room, nor Magda’s. Dubbed “the sentimental shrine” by his father, Magda’s room was crammed. Little china animals and flowers hid every surface, hand-hooked rugs covered the floor. Next to the Führer portrait hung a large, wobbly watercolour of her home, a farm on the Eifel, and beside that a photo of her brother, who looked exactly like her. His father called them the holy triptych, because she worshipped all three.
He put his head round the door. Fräulein Lindemann’s room was so bare. There was nothing on the walls at all. Perhaps she was going to leave them. Perhaps she had packed her things already. An anticipatory dread tugged at him. He stepped over the threshold. Her spare navy uniform hung on the wardrobe door, cuffs and collar starched vivid in the dim greenish light from the high window. On the bedside table a clock emitted four chimes. Though late for the Jungvolk, he took a further tentative step on the spotless linoleum floor. The room smelt faintly of talcum powder. A pile of household linen lay stacked on the desk alongside cotton reels, a wooden mushroom for darning and a fat pincushion. She mended and embroidered. Everyone agreed that she was the best nursemaid they had ever had (certainly the best paid, his mother said tartly). His mother, who enjoyed finding fault with her staff, complained that the Fräulein kept running into town upon any whim. This seemed unfair. Even he had noticed that in the six months she had been with them she had scarcely taken a day off, always offering to look after Sabine on Sundays. Occasionally, driving to church they passed her, walking fast, head down, hands deep in the pockets of the grey coat she always wore. She never looked up. He wondered where she went. She was the first nursemaid he liked, because she didn’t fuss him.
The suitcase lay open, expectantly. It was a cheap cardboard one with frail metal
clasps, lined with tartan paper, part of which was peeling away. Inside was a brown crocodile handbag. With a quick glance at the door, he opened it. There was an identity document, a fat envelope. The young face of Fräulein Lindemann of Seiterstraϐe 11, Wuppertal, looked just about to smile. A mass of hair fell to her shoulders. The woman he knew wore a faintly pained expression, as if the hair had been strained back too tight, the hairpins holding up the thick twist of hair on the back of her head pushed in too hard. The envelope contained a lot of money, hundreds of Reichsmarks. He riffled along it with an envious finger. It reminded him that he needed money for the Winter Relief collection. Upon an impulse he took a ten-Reichsmark note. She would never miss it. Quickly, he pushed the envelope back into the bag. He really had to hurry.
“The Führer has made Germany live again,” a solemn voice intoned. “Nothing will divide us from our leader.”
The troop sat cross-legged round the shiny brown Volksempfänger.11
“Nothing will divide us,” breathed Peter on his left, a boy about whom a sour smell hung, acute even over the general damp doggy one. He had the irritating habit of repeating every word he heard and a big, slack mouth that tended to hang open.
The Führer was speaking next. They scrambled to their feet. “My only desire is peace with France and Great Britain. Peace with honour,” he said.
“With honour,” whispered Peter wetly.
Peace was supposedly the objective, though it was obvious to Nicolai that everyone there was mad for war. When the broadcast was over, their leader drew back the curtain and lit the candles, which, nearly spent, guttered dramatically in the draught under the cellar door. One wall was draped in black cloth, emphasising the white of the Siegrune† on the bloodred flag. A steel helmet with real combat dents sat in front of the big poster with the text of the “Horst Wessel Lied.”12 Friedrich announced that every boy had to donate thirty pfennigs for new candles, and distributed the text for the week. The theme was “Martyrs of Germany.” Peter opened the pamphlet and his mouth; he mumbled along, even when others were doing the reading.
Nicolai, gazing at dead heroes with chiselled features, could not stand the accompanying monotone. “Peter. My brother Wolfgang’s a Stammführer13 over in Lübeck,” he whispered.
Peter swivelled his pale eyes round. “A Stammführer? So what. My father’s in the army,” he said. “And my brother.”
Nicolai saw that he had done scant justice to Wolf’s glory. “He’s in charge of six hundred boys. Before that he was a Fahnleinführer14 training forty boys his own age, and that’s a fact.” He was babbling. “Of course he’s my half-brother, not a full brother really—”
“Shut up, Bucherer!” called out Friedrich.
“Shut up!” repeated Peter, smirking and looked down at his text. The boy on the other side was sniggering. Eyes fixed on the coarse paper, in dull concentration on the exact spot where the grainy halftones of the unknown hero’s dead cheeks gave way to the darker dots of his mouth, blood beat through Nicolai’s head in slow waves of shame. Boasting was futile. Every attempt to connect went wrong. The readings went on and on. Floating up to the smoke marks on the ceiling, looking down at the circle of cross-legged Jungvolk, heads bowed, partings neat, fingers on text, he observed with distant interest his own long legs, his distinctive dark head, shaped, he saw, just like his father’s.
The group divided into pairs. One group was learning how to repair a bicycle, the remainder laying telephone wires. He would have far preferred the bicycle, but nobody chose him. Perhaps he gave off the wrong smell to these boys. Over half were the children of workers; he got on equally badly with the boys who went to Gymnasien like his. Paying out the heavy cable on his own, he felt its weight like an affront, while they flicked at chains and pumped air. They loved the work and belonging and the whole idea of Gleichschaltung.15 There was always talk about the workers knowing best, about youth being one heart, one soul, one body for the cause. Only one thing was worse than being in the troop and that was being excluded. Weeks earlier, Jochen had disappeared from their Gymnasium. His fortitude, amplified by absence, grew more heroic. From this safe distance, Nicolai could imagine himself sharing it. One true word from Jochen, always so quiet in the babble of idiocies at school, would have been worth having. But he had not dared try for a real friendship. He could never have borne humiliation as Jochen had. He had no expectation of finding a friend in the Hitler Youth proper; big boys would be worse. They would all be like Wolfgang.
“Have you brought your donation for the Winter Relief Fund, Bucherer?”
“Yes sir.”
He delved in his pocket. Their eternal struggle was to beat the Blankenese troop, the one Heini belonged to—Häschen, who no longer wanted to be his friend and who said cruel things behind his back. Not that he cared. He had ten Reichsmarks, much more than anyone else. Friedrich, pocketing the cash, did not even smile at him.
Released from the smoky basement into the clean air, Nicolai saw that it was still light. The rain had stopped. He did not have to go home. He could close his eyes, cross his arms, let the bike go where it would, let the air carry him. With the petrol shortages there were few cars to worry about. He let the bicycle run free, enjoying the swish of rubber on the wet road. He calculated the exhilarating seconds before he opened one eye a crack in time to catch the handlebars, to swerve away from the kerb where a bicycle might tip, where a boy’s skull might crack open like a nut, spilling his brains onto the pavement. He kept going all the way to Blankenese, head down for the uphill struggle, then along Ferdinands Höh, peeling away in the direction of the Sülldorfer Kirchenweg. He wheeled into the graceful curve of the Bismarckstein. It was a green and private place, the road winding round a thickly wooded hill, the few houses half hidden under the overhang and nestling into the slope. Nicolai got off the bicycle, crept up to the hedge and peered through it. A table was set for dinner, a big man sat with his hands clasped, head low. With so many children, their house was always full. Slowly, the maid carried in a brimming tureen. There sat his friend, his long, paler face distinctive among the ruddy ones. He framed the shot with his hands. Häschen could not be praying, for his eyes were open, he was laughing at one of his brothers who was making a face behind their father’s back. No, it was that idiot, Langenscheidt, his teeth, his fat smile. How could he choose to befriend such a fool? Somebody came forward and pulled the blackout down, closed the shutters. Turning, returning, the light was gone. Luckily there was a moon. All along the gleaming river under the malevolent blind stare of blacked-out houses, he sang the sad song of the Lorelei: I don’t know, what can it mean, that I should feel so sad? But he did know.
He went in at the cellar entrance; blundering past the cupboards because there was not enough light, his jacket caught on something. He tugged. The crash of the jar breaking on the hard floor was shockingly loud. He crouched down, feeling for the shards with both hands and hearing glass crunch under his boots, hardly caring if he cut himself or not. A triangle of light fanned out of the doorway and spilled down the stairs. As she stepped forward, the loose tendrils of hair caught the light in a brilliant fuzzy halo. Fräulein Lindemann wore something white, a nightgown; her figure was distinctly outlined. He could not help staring.
“Can I help?”
She was always calm. He liked that.
“It’s only me. I broke some glass.”
“Stay where you are.”
He waited. Wearing slippers and a dressing gown, she came past him with the brush pan and swept the pieces up. He did not move. She smelt, very faintly, of vanilla.
“Is anything the matter?”
Then he followed her to her room, wanting something, hardly knowing what. He needed to be with her, just for a moment. “Fräulein Lindemann, I wondered—”
“Yes?”
He hoped for some word of reassurance. But because she had her back to the light, he could not read her expression.
“Will you want to stay? You’re not like
the others.”
“That depends, I suppose.”
He could hardly bear his own awkwardness, could not look or think straight.
“We’re not so bad, are we?”
“No. Not so very bad.”
“Well,” he said with thundering clumsiness, “that’s good then.”
“It’s simple enough, Nicolai. I work for money.”
“You have so much—” He shut up, dumbstruck at his own idiocy. A brilliant red stain shot up her throat and spread, mottling her face. She knew. Nicolai fled, feeling on each alternate step the ugly scratching of broken glass embedded in the leather of one sole.
Sunday morning, usually so precious, dawned bleak. He waited on the top landing until the weary hour had ticked away. Stealing down through the silent house, he rapped on the door; she opened it at once. She looked drawn and tired. She must have stayed up late with Sabine.
“What is it, Nicolai?”
He hung his head. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m sorry. I took your money.” He held out a ten-Reichsmark note which he had wiggled out of his savings box the night before. She showed no surprise. He was a thief and she knew it.
“I would rather, Nicolai, that you didn’t go through my things.” She made to close the door.
“You think I stole it,” he said, despairing.
Those large, pale eyes saw right through him. “I expect you were just borrowing it,” she said.
Now his cheeks burnt at the kind lie. “I did steal it. I’m so sorry. I won’t ever come in your room again. I swear it on my life.”
“Thank you, Nicolai.”
The door closed quietly and for a long moment he stood there, hands balled in frustration and self-hatred.
FIVE
The Children's War Page 8
