The Aftermath

by Rhidian Brook

  ‘Thank you, Colonel. Thank you.’

  ‘Tommy, Russki, Yankee, French. Tommy, Russki, Yankee, French.

  ‘Every day they take our things,

  ‘And every day we smell the stench

  ‘Of Tommy, Russki, Yankee, French.

  ‘Tommy, Russki, Yankee, French!’

  The ferals sang the ditty, beginning softly then building in a crescendo to an almost spat-vomited ‘French!’ They sang less from defiance than from a need to distract themselves from the creeping cold. This time, the song petered out after two rounds.

  Ozi sat on a suitcase and tossed a hymn book on to the bonfire. As it flared from green to blue to orange the ferals shifted closer to the edge of the fire in the crater in order to receive its weak heat. Ozi was thinking about what to say. They were tired of moving, moving, moving, but that was what they were going to have to do.

  The abandoned church had been their home since they’d left the Tierpark Hagenbeck, where they’d lived, undiscovered, for three months in the cave beneath the artificial crag of the monkey-rock exhibit. God’s broken homes were safe places to hole up, but they had their limitations. The Christuskirche had a hole in the roof where a bomb had entered and a car-sized crater in the chancel. The great pock was a natural place to set a fire and they had been profligate with the hardwood pews and, since the cold snap, had started burning books, beginning with the sacred texts around them. Books made good kindling but poor fuel, flaring up quickly and brightly but giving off a thin heat. Dietmar had come back with The Complete Works of Walter Scott, found in the old university library, in a wheelbarrow, but they’d got through them in just a few hours. A million words to keep five children warm for just one night! Now there was nothing left to burn. Ozi watched the last pages of praise flake to black and float up into the vault above and decided to make his move. He clapped his hands.

  ‘Listen. Tomorrow we will go down to the Elbchaussee. There are houses there by the river, where the top-brass Tommies live. Houses with lawns running down to the river; houses with a bathroom for each person. Tommy takes all the nice houses, but he isn’t filling every one. Sometimes he puts a sign outside the house saying “Requisition”, but it’s empty until the Tommy family comes. And sometimes they don’t come and the house stays empty and they forget that no one’s there. Berti’s found a house he says we can move into soon.’

  ‘I like it here, in God’s house,’ Otto maintained. ‘We are safe here. And no one tells us what to do.’

  ‘We can’t stay here any more,’ Ozi insisted. ‘You’re keeping me awake with your shivering. We’ll go and find ourselves a fat banker’s house with chairs and beds and gold taps. We’ll each have our own bath. Baths big enough for the water to cover your knees. Not like Hammerbrook, where we used to hear old Langermaid farting in his tub next door. Then, when we’ve found a house, we will go and swindle all those refugees from Poland and Prussia in the DP camps. Those fuckers are so desperate they will do anything. They are all looking for papers and work and food. We can do a good trade with them. Pretty soon we will be millionaires and buy our own mansion by the river.’

  ‘What if we don’t find an empty house?’ Otto asked.

  ‘Then we get the scraps from Tommy’s top table.’ Ozi drew in an impatient breath. ‘Ernst? Are you in?’

  Ernst nodded.

  ‘Siegfried?’

  Siegfried raised his hand.

  ‘Dietmar, are you in?’

  Dietmar was not listening. He was running his fingers over the filigree on a collapsed and cracked reredos depicting the sequence of Jesus’s life in four scenes: nativity, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection. He stroked the carved white granite, trying to decipher the story being told in the cold stone. He was wearing an inflated life-jacket, with whistle and torch dangling, and he used the torch to examine the work more closely. The piece had become detached from the altar by the blast and had crashed to the floor, splitting right through. Ozi needed Dietmar’s approval. Despite being severely ‘fire-brained’ and given to repetitive, circuitous ramblings, Dietmar was useful. He looked older than the rest of them and knew his way around the city.

  ‘Didi?’

  Dietmar was still preoccupied with the religious artefact. ‘What is this meant to be?’ he asked, tracing his finger over the figure of Jesus.

  ‘That’s Jesus the Christ,’ Otto said. ‘The saviour of the world.’

  There was a half-reverential, half-uncertain silence.

  Dietmar shone his weak light on the baptism scene. ‘Why does he have a bird on his head?’ He started to rock on his haunches. ‘Why is it there?’

  Dietmar had to have an answer and, as his leader, it was important Ozi give him one. Ozi looked at the dove hovering over the semi-submerged saviour. Confused fragments of related stories, planted in his mind by his mother, combined to form an answer.

  ‘Jesus lived in a boat with loads of animals. But he really liked birds. Especially sparrows.’

  Dietmar had moved on to Jesus on the cross, and was greatly agitated by it.

  ‘Why are they killing him?’ Dietmar asked. ‘Why are they killing him?’

  ‘Calm it, Didi! It’s not real.’

  ‘Why are they killing him? Why?’

  ‘He was a Jew,’ Siegfried said.

  ‘He was a Jew. He was a Jew,’ Dietmar repeated, and this seemed to placate him for a moment. ‘He was a Jew. He talked to animals. He lived in a boat.’

  ‘My father gave me a German name, not a Christian name,’ said Siegfried. ‘He said Christians are weak.’

  ‘Is Tommy Christian?’ Ernst asked.

  ‘Tommy believes in demockery. And the King of Vindsor,’ Ozi said definitively, wanting to move on.

  ‘How can we trust Tommy?’ Siegfried objected. ‘One minute he’s killing us; the next he’s handing out choccies.’

  ‘Enough of this bibble-babble!’ Ozi said, his voice croaking with frustration. The smoke and dust he’d inhaled during the firestorm had left him with weakened lungs and a strange, husky whisper of a voice. Tommy had razed his home to the ground and incinerated his neighbours, but breathing in the dust of the vaporized dead had left him with an unexpected asset: a rasping growl that seemed to frighten kids into obeying him and to amuse or appal adults into giving him things. He now stood on top of his suitcase. ‘I know – better than any of you – what Tommy’s Heavy Angels did when they made the great fireball. I saw it, and my eyes nearly boiled in my head with the watching of it. That is a picture in my head that I don’t even have to go to the Einplatz to pay for. I can see walls of houses falling with pictures still on them, I can see a piano flying through the air and splitting with a kwangtingle, pages of books. It’s all in my head. Sometimes the pictures just come out on top of my day – when I haven’t asked them to. But I don’t want that picture. There are other pictures now. Like Henry Five and Oz Wizard. And Tommy isn’t so bad. I know he drives fat, useless cars. But he has some good things to share. We don’t have to pretend to be happy, like before. Stand up, sit down and salute every four seconds. Now you can say what you like, without some crony blowing your head off or reporting you. This is called demockery. And Tommy jokes about anything. Even the Führer’s balls.’

  Ernst laughed loudly, but the others looked at each other. Even now, this seemed a blasphemy too far.

  Ozi jumped off his suitcase and stood upright. ‘I’m not hanging around here. Let’s go.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ Otto said. ‘I like God’s house.’

  ‘Look, Otto,’ Ozi said. ‘You can stay if you want, but we’re going to get a mansion with a bloody bath and a bloody bed so s
oft you’d think you were in heaven anyway. I am done with holes in the ground. I am through with zoos. And churches. Soon we will be living like the Kaiser himself.’

  Otto was just about ready to be carried by Ozi’s prophecy.

  Ozi jumped down on to the last embers of the fire and stamped them dead.

  ‘Who’s coming with me?’

  Ernst was the first to stand.

  Siegfried pulled on his hat and said: ‘Let’s go and have a bloody bath.’

  Dietmar finally looked up from the reredos and completed the new liturgy: ‘Let’s go and have a bloody bath.’

  5

  As autumn became winter, Rachael felt the shortening days dragging out. With Lewis hard at work all day and a staff performing chores she’d usually do herself, there was little for her to do and too much time in which to do it. As if anticipating this, Lewis had encouraged her to take up the piano again. ‘I miss hearing you play,’ he’d said, adding that it would ‘do her good’. He’d always shown genuine enthusiasm for her playing and, in a blindly loyal way, thought her better than she was; but she knew that what he really wanted was for her to take her mind off ‘unhelpful things’. And so, every morning, while Edmund had his tuition with Herr Koenig, the teacher that Lewis had found at one of the refugee camps, she went and played the mini concert Bösendorfer.

  Having such a lovely instrument at her disposal should have been a boon, but it was not as straightforward as that. She had not played any piano since Michael’s death. Her elder son had been a very able pupil and she associated the piano with him more than anyone else. He had always been hovering at the old Norbeck upright (bought at a great stretch by Lewis on his measly subaltern’s wage), asking her again and again to play and sing Schubert’s spooky ‘Earl King’, with its threatening, insistent note and tragic arc, its story of the sickly boy asking his father to ride faster because he is convinced that the Earl King is coming to claim his life.

  She’d started with something light which she knew by heart – ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’ by Debussy. She managed to get halfway through then stopped. The overtones were too much. She lay her forehead on the rim of the lid and tried to recompose herself. She needed new music. How had Lewis put it that first day, at the Atlantic Hotel? ‘This country needs a new song.’ She dived into the piano stool for tunes without any associative baggage. The double seat was full of loose-sheet scores: a Bach prelude (too familiar), a deceptively tricky Chopin nocturne (too melancholy) and even her favourite Beethoven sonata – his last (too difficult). The head of every score was inscribed with an inked signature: ‘C. Lubert’. If the previous lady of the house had played all she’d inscribed, she must have been more than a parlour-room player, for no one with less than formidable technique would tackle these pieces for amusement. The idea piqued both a curiosity and a competitive response in Rachael; she formed a quick mental picture of Claudia Lubert sitting there at the piano, playing (of course) Beethoven’s ethereal and complex 32nd Sonata to a roomful of what Rachael imagined constituted high German society: bohemians, artists, poets and architects, alongside high-booted military. Of course, in this idealized image, the phantom rival was perfect: Claudia Lubert a brilliant and refined player, all balance, passion and restraint. And perfectly modest in the way she received the rapturous applause. The detail of the scene was full in every way, except for the face of its heroine.

  Rachael settled on a short composition by Schumann entitled ‘Warum?’ She didn’t know the piece, but she was a good sight-reader, quick to learn. Her parents’ rickety upright had offered free, swift transport to far from parochial worlds. She might have made the piano her vocation, but marriage, children and the war had limited her development to Christmas and birthday singalongs and the odd parlour-room performance at drinks parties. This piece looked interesting. It was slow and airy enough to find an easy way in, and once she’d got beyond simply grasping the tune she encountered a composition with depth in the pauses and a yearning draw in its melody. It was like coming across a small but very deep lake, and she dived into it, playing it over and over, like a keen schoolgirl cramming for an exam, determined to master it and, ultimately, losing herself in it. For the first time in months, she felt the meaning of things coursing through her veins. She’d found unexpected medicine in playing; it hadn’t just taken her mind off unhelpful things; she’d managed to forget herself.

  One afternoon, in the first week of November, Rachael went to put in an hour’s practice before Lewis got home. As she approached the drawing room, she could hear someone playing her ‘new tune’ – badly. She entered the room and found Herr Lubert, dressed in his blue overalls, hunched over the keys, playing the Schumann piece with the intense concentration of someone whose determination must make up for lack of talent. He played ploddingly, with far too much loud pedal. And his usually handsome face was made gormless by the effort.

  ‘Herr Lubert?’

  He was trying so hard not to make a mistake he did not hear her at first.

  Rachael moved to the space within the lifted lid where he could not fail to see her, and repeated his name, louder.

  ‘Herr Lubert!’

  Lubert jumped with the surprise of it, put up his offending hands by way of apology. He scraped the piano stool on the oak floor as he abruptly stood up, closing the lid over the keys.

  ‘Bitte verzeihen Sie mir, Frau Morgan.’ It was the first time she had heard him speak German. ‘I should have asked. Forgive me, Frau Morgan.’

  Rachael wasn’t sure what to say, and in the second’s silence that followed she self-consciously adjusted her hair.

  ‘I always used to do my half-hour practice,’ he said. ‘It is an old habit … hard to die.’

  She thought about correcting his mistake but did not want to encourage him. Lubert, however, continued in his familiar way:

  ‘I play very badly. No matter how I practise. Terrible, I know. But it helps me … I don’t play to get better. Just to … remember and forget. I have heard that you play very well. Your son tells me that you are an excellent player.’

  Even in their few, terse exchanges, she had sensed Herr Lubert lowering hooks and baiting her with questions and, although she wanted to answer him, she retreated to her original position just behind the lines of their original treaty.

  ‘I thought we had agreed on certain boundaries, Herr Lubert.’

  ‘Yes. I am sorry. I meant to come and ask you first. But I came home from the factory early today. There was a protest. I needed to forget the day but I ended up forgetting myself. I am sorry, Frau Morgan.’ And he looked at her with a crinkled brow that moved between impertinent and inquisitive. She could not decide.

  Again, he stepped into her uncertain silence.

  ‘“Morgan”. I have been wondering if this a common name in England?’

  ‘It’s Welsh,’ she said, nibbling the bait.

  ‘Wales,’ he reflected. ‘I’ve heard that it is a small but beautiful country.’

  ‘It was big enough to get bombed.’

  How irksome it was finding herself caught up in playing this role – one of a number of roles she felt herself reluctantly playing with people: the Grieving Mother, the Distant Wife and now the Curt Occupier. This last role was the one she had to do most to affect, and Lubert didn’t seem convinced by it – or even to notice it. He simply brushed off her quip with an understanding nod, leaving her to blush at her own put-down and the good grace with which he took it.

  ‘I will talk to Colonel Morgan about letting you use the piano,’ she said, in as conciliatory a tone as she could muster.

  ‘Thank you, Frau Morgan … I would be very grateful.�
�� And he smiled with what seemed like sincere gratitude.

  ‘I see that your wife played?’ Rachael asked, indicating the signatures on the top music sheets.

  ‘Claudia had many talents … She –’ Lubert broke off. The mention of his wife stumbled him. His guard dropped and the perky arrogance evaporated. ‘She was completely tone-deaf. Her mother was the pianist.’

  The news came as a relief to Rachael but, in bursting the illusion of Lubert’s perfectly brilliant wife, it further piqued her curiosity. The way he spoke of her and the expression in his eyes when he did, the hesitation between words …

  ‘I was wondering what the name of this piece meant? “–Var-um?" Is it "Why?"'

  The pronunciation as well as the question were a concession. Until now, she had stubbornly refused to convert the native ‘W’s to sound as ‘V’s.

  ‘It doesn’t translate exactly. It is “why?” But it is more “Why did this happen? For what reason?” Something like this, I think.’

  ‘It’s … lovely.’

  ‘It is … sublime.’

  Rachael nodded in agreement. It was heavenly. Somehow, ‘utter’. But, like a traveller suddenly realizing they’ve strayed too far up an unmapped road into unknown territory, Rachael looked to her inner compass and checked her step.

  ‘I will talk to Colonel Morgan,’ she said. And, with that, she made a little bow and withdrew from the room.

  Edmund ran his hand along the spines of the books in the library, whole worlds at the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t looking for a book to read – touching was enough for now – he was just getting the measure of his new playground. With its spacious and arcane rooms, science-fiction furniture and unpredictable encounters, the house provided him with all the stories and incident he needed. Indeed, it was less a home and more a living, organic set for a drama in which he was the lead player; while his mother trod like a nervous stand-in, Edmund, with his sidekick, Cuthbert, went from room to room like the protagonist in a mystery he was destined to solve.