by Julie Mayhew
Katrin didn’t reply. There was a crackle and a clunk as my sister put a hand over the receiver. I got the muffled swirl of noise you hear when you put a seashell to your ear. She was saying something I couldn’t make out to a person there with her. The seashell came away.
‘Look, Jess, what do you want?’ she demanded. ‘I need to go.’
‘But you … But you called me,’ I fumbled.
‘Only because Mum told me to.’
‘Oh.’ Was Mum trying to get us to become friends? Wasn’t it all a bit late? ‘Right,’ I said.
‘So, what do you need to talk about?’ Katrin pressed, getting cross now.
‘Nothing,’ I bit back.
‘Well, fine!’ she snapped.
‘Fine!’ I echoed.
‘But I really do have to go.’
‘Well, go then!’ I yelled. ‘And you can …’
But I was shouting at the pay phone’s pips.
It was all leading up to this.
The following afternoon I walked in from school to find Mum sitting waiting for me in the hallway. She was wearing her good dress, her good shoes and her good wool coat. Outside, the needle was knocking twenty-four degrees.
‘Did someone die?’ I asked.
‘We’re going to the doctors,’ she replied. Her face was pale, her voice flat. She looked thin, all of a sudden.
‘Why?’ I dropped my bag. ‘Are you ill?’
I was going to take her hand, kneel beside her, do something, but she didn’t want that. She got up, swerved her hips around me and stalked off into the kitchen. Her gloves fell off her lap but she didn’t notice. They were her best ones, too – silvery grey with an embroidery cuff. The ones she wore to look respectable, rather than to keep warm.
‘Go to your room and re-plait your hair. We need to leave in five minutes,’ she instructed.
This was awful.
I picked up the gloves, placed them back on the chair and went upstairs to do as she said.
She was silent in the car, kept her eyes on the road. She wouldn’t answer my questions. My first was, ‘Is it serious?’ Followed by, ‘Does Dad know?’ And then, ‘Maybe we should have him come with us too, don’t you think?’ After a few moments searching for the right amount of courage, I eventually asked THE question: ‘Is it cancer?’
The only question she would answer was, ‘Where’s Lilli?’
‘She’s playing at Suki Franz’s house. No need to worry about her.’
I couldn’t get anything from Mum in the waiting room. Respectable people do not discuss their ailments within the earshot of others. It was talk enough that we were there in the first place. Though logic runs that the other people in the waiting room were there for some weakness too, so if they wanted to go and blabber about it they’d only be shaming themselves. And anyway, we used a different doctor to most of my friends. A better one.
Mum thrust a copy of Das Deutsche Mädel into my hands, one I already had at home. The front cover showed the Faith and Beauty girls from the birthday celebrations in April, an aerial shot of the culmination of their dance – WIR GEHÖREN DIR – which now only made me think of SS stiffies.
I was obedient. I flipped open the magazine and tried to read. There was an article about Jay Acker’s upcoming visit that I hadn’t bothered to finish in my copy at home.
It would not be a surprise if the boy requests asylum from his own brutal nation after seeing the freedoms of the Greater German Reich, read one enboldened paragraph. Some of the Faith and Beauty girls had been photographed for the piece too, with their opinions printed underneath.
I think that this is his true home really, said Anneka.
This will be like a homecoming for him, said Frida.
Blah blah blah blah blah something-something repetition-of-the-word-home, said robot-eyed Jenny.
I slapped the magazine shut. I was starting to think like Clementine. In the article, Jay Acker had explained, in German how thrilled he was to be visiting our nation. The writer had been very keen to emphasise that there was no interpreter, no translator, yet there was also no explanation of how he came to speak our language so fluently. The inspirational quotation on the wall of the BDM meeting hall that week had been: EVERYTHING IS GERMAN THAT BELONGS TO GERMAN HISTORY, IN WHOM GERMAN BLOOD FLOWS, WHO SPEAKS THE GERMAN LANGUAGE. Coincidence? Asked the voice in my head. Not Clementine’s voice any more, my voice.
Mother had not picked up a copy of Frauen Warte for herself. She stared straight ahead. I had pretty much decided she was definitely, certainly going to die. The doctor would break the terrible news to me. He’d explain how I was the woman of the house now and must give up my place at skate camp to become my little sister’s new mother. I would have to take on this information without crying, because both my mother and the doctor would be expecting great strength. I would need to be like the good deutsche girl on the cover of Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen. Chin up, eyes to the sky.
‘Fräulein Keller!’
The sound of my name sent an electric shock through my entire body. We stood, my mother and I, and it was only when the door of Dr Hardy’s office was shut behind us that I realised I still had the surgery’s copy of Das Deutsche Mädel in my hands – rolled up tightly, as if ready to use as a weapon.
The last time I had been in Dr Hardy’s room was for a damaged tendon in my arm, an injury I’d picked up skating, which Ingrid had initially suspected was a break. That was a couple of years ago. Dr Hardy had got a lot more beardy since then. I wondered how he thought I had changed. Did I seem mature enough to become the new Commander in Chief of my mother’s kitchen?
He gestured for us both to sit. We did. He cleared his throat.
‘And what can I help you with today?’ he asked.
He was staring right at me, wearing just half of his smile.
I opened my mouth, closed it. It felt like Katrin’s phone call all over again. I slowly shook my head and looked to my mother.
She cleared her throat. ‘I believe, doctor – and I’m sure that my husband and I can rely on your complete confidence in this matter …’
She paused so Dr Hardy could give her a nod – his signature on this particular deal. Her voice was strange, like polished metal. ‘You see, my daughter requires medication of some sort. A cure for … Well, she has some misplaced attentions, and I have been reliably informed that a course of hormone injections is all that is required to correct this … this …’ Her eyes went wide as she fished around for the right word, any word except THE word. And I realised I had got my mother all wrong. She did not call a spade by the right name after all.
‘To correct this blip?’ Dr Hardy offered helpfully.
He made me strip down to my underwear and lie on the bed. He measured my pulse, took my blood pressure and put an icy stethoscope against the warmth of my chest, only because he needed to make a good show of things for Frau Keller. That’s what I believe. The room was cold. A ropy old radiator chugged away beneath the examination table, warming only my left thigh. I lay there desperately trying to work out who had informed on me. This was far too brave an act for Fräulein Allis, too reckless for GG or one of her family. Had Helen Gross seen us? Could my father really read my mind?
Frau Keller stood at the end of the bed examining me as well, her eyes wandering all over my body, searching for clues. Any lasting evidence, maybe. Dr Hardy lifted each of my arms in turn and twisted my palms this way and that. He traced the path of my veins with a finger. He was faking it, just filling time. He asked me about the regularity of my periods and whether I experienced pain in my breasts, in my calves, in my chest, in my head. After each of my answers he pooched out his lips – big, fat, pink things buried in the undergrowth of his moustache. He chewed over my words as if deciding what to do. But we all knew – all three of us – that he was only ever going to do what Frau Keller had originally instructed.
And I let him do it. I made no fuss as he stuck the needle in my stomach. I said nothing as h
e calmly explained how this ‘blip’ was due to an imbalance in my hormones – something he could easily fix. I kept my mouth shut while I put my clothes back on, and I didn’t speak on the journey home. No words were needed when we repeated the trip the following week and the week after that. Even when the nausea got so bad I could barely eat and when my hair started to fall out in handfuls, even then I stayed quiet.
Because I was so ashamed.
I kept my silence at school, speaking only when a teacher asked me to.
‘What’s wrong, Jessika?’ asked Ruby, Erica, Angelika and the rest. ‘Are you ill? You seem really quiet. Why aren’t you eating your lunch?’
They knew, I told myself. Everyone knows.
‘Are you not talking to GG any more?’ they probed. ‘Has she upset you? Shall we have a word with her? Because we will do that if you want us to.’
I’d shake my head and off they’d go, to have a giggle and a sneer behind my back, I assumed. ‘Who would have thought it? Poor Herr Keller! The disgrace!’ That’s what I imagined them saying. The knife had sliced through the curtain to reveal me hiding there. I was naked in front of everyone. Bleeding to death in front of everyone. It didn’t occur to me then that Herr Keller was certain to have made sure that no one knew. And if they did, he would have made them quickly unknow it. To everyone at school it was just two friends falling out, and all they wanted was a little piece of the drama.
In the small moments when I thought I wasn’t being watched, I would steal a glance at GG, only to work out if she was getting the same treatment from Dr Hardy’s office. Was she looking puffy and dark in the face? Was she in any kind of pain? It didn’t seem so. She still went off behind the PE sheds to blow smoke across the town. At the BDM meetings she kept time in the march. She was fast and strong and took good aim. Her cakes rose. Her hospital corners fell at the perfect angle.
GG seemed to have escaped. Though Herr Keller was certain to have given her parents their instructions. If GG wasn’t feeling shame, she was definitely feeling fear.
The side effects, meanwhile, were killing me. My milk-skin broke out in red, headless lumps, my belly ached and my head swam.
Ingrid said I was a danger to myself on the ice.
In the middle of the rink, I lifted up my training top, just enough for her to see the pink welts and the small blue bruises where Dr Hardy pinched the skin of my stomach and stuck in his needle.
Ingrid’s gloved hands flew up to her face. Somehow I knew I would not need to explain to her what this was. Somehow I knew I could show her and she would not be disgusted.
‘Mein Herzchen,’ she whispered. My little heart.
She took the fabric of my top from my hands and pulled it back down, arranging it neatly over my practice skirt, looking over to the door as she did.
‘Es tut mir leid,’ she said. ‘Für dich, für uns beide.’
Two apologies. Both sides. So sorry for you, so sorry from me.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. But I could see how she might feel responsible. She had wanted me to have what she hadn’t, not realising it wasn’t there for anyone’s taking. Not even mine.
That morning I embraced the freedom of the ice more than ever.
My mother did not call me her ‘Herzchen’ or her ‘Schätzchen’. She came into the bathroom one evening to find me sitting on the edge of the tub, crying. As she spoke to me she pressed against the radiator on the opposite wall. I wanted her to hold me tight but she wasn’t going to do that. She insisted that I tell her the reason for my tears.
‘I have this pain,’ I said. ‘A burning. Down there.’
She nodded calmly, her only words of sympathy were that we must trust in Dr Hardy. Men grow up prepared to die for what they believe in, she said, and women must grow up willing to suffer. This was normal; this was expected.
That week’s inspiring quotation on the wall of the meeting hall: ONLY THE GREATEST SACRIFICE WILL ONE DAY REVEAL THE GREATNESS OF VICTORY. WHAT IS EASILY WON IS EASILY FORGOTTEN.
‘The pain,’ my mother told me, in a voice that had an edge of a warning, ‘is just the evil coming out.’
When I was well again, she assured me, the visits to Dr Hardy would stop. Did I understand?
She waited for my nod of agreement on this particular deal and I gave it to her.
The strongest piece of truth I took from Clementine’s essay notes: you have to make a choice. Do you fight, or do you keep your head down? Do you put your chin up and your eyes to the sky, or do you tremble like the aspen leaves and contemplate throwing yourself in the fast-flowing river at the bottom of the garden? Or is there, I asked myself, a way to do both? Can you be two people – someone to fool them, and also someone who is not a fool to yourself? Can you live like that?
After school the next day, I set out my books and papers on the dining room table – Ausgewählte Reden aus der Geschichte (Selected Speeches from History); Mum’s Compendium of Celebrations; the scrapbook of newspaper cuttings that mentioned Dad.
The best bait in the most irresistible trap. Here we were again. I knew the lines to this play and so did he.
As soon as he hung up his beige raincoat, his head was around the door. ‘What have you got going on, Jessika?’
There had been no direct discussion between me and my father about my treatment. None at all. That was women’s business. The way he had maintained the wonderful veneer of our relationship in the face of my sickness and tears had been astonishing. Flawless.
‘Oh, I’m just giving some thought to the Sonnenwendfeier,’ I sighed. I had the scrapbook open at the cutting from last June’s Summer Solstice festivities – Dad on his podium, the local HJs positioned around him. One side of their faces was in shadow, the other lit by the fire. ‘It’s only a week away, and I’m worried. Are our Kameradschaft and Mädelschaft doing things bigger and better than last year? I think we’ve let things slip in all the preparations for the Trafalgar Square concert.’
He stepped into the room, stood at my shoulder and watched me for a moment. I was sketching a plan for the bonfire – an ambitious basket-weave construction of logs around a belly of tinder and charcoal bricks. I like to think in that moment that I was being astonishing in return, creating a wonderful veneer of my own. I stopped shading the red centres of the flames and pushed my picture into a clear space on the table for my father’s inspection. I had drawn a circle of BDM figures around the fire, their arms lifted in salute.
He picked up the sketch and … the doorbell rang. My heart bubbled and skipped at the perfect timing of it all. This was how it felt to conduct the orchestra, not play the second flute.
‘I’ll get it!’ I sprang to my feet and slipped out into the hall before Dad could protest.
I could see the upright, brown outline of our guest through the mottled glass of the front door; the red, white and black on his sleeve. I took a moment to brush myself down, to remind myself that he would be far more nervous than me. After all, I knew what was going on.
I had asked him at the end of the previous evening’s meeting – or rather, ignoring my mother’s advice on how to speak to our HJ leader, I had told him – ‘We should like you to come to dinner.’ I made sure my announcement was not overheard by Ruby or Angelika, by Dirk or Fräulein Eberhardt, and especially not by GG, though I knew she would find out eventually.
Fisher had no choice in how to respond.
‘I’d be delighted,’ he said, all politeness, though I could hear that he was wary. Was he accepting an invitation to meet his prospective parents-in-law or booking his ticket to a private roasting by my father for abuse of rank that evening behind the curtains?
‘Felix!’ I cried as I swung open the door, loud enough for Dad to hear this informal address, loud enough to bring him curiously into the hallway. Fisher had given his uniform an extra iron before walking the short distance to our home, I could tell. (Would fewer creases lessen his sentence?) I could imagine him fretting over his decision to wear trousers rath
er than shorts – what would look most suitable for an audience with Herr Keller: knees or no knees?
Fisher opened his mouth to say hello but, seeing my father, went straight to a salute. ‘Heil Dean!’
‘Herr Fisher,’ Dad said, switching from the home voice he’d been using with me moments earlier to his official voice. ‘I don’t believe we were expecting you.’
I cut through the frost with a girlish laugh that was a little odd and surprising to us all. ‘I’m so sorry, Daddy.’ I leant in and gave my father a short, disarming squeeze to the wrist. ‘This is my doing. I so wanted Felix –’ I overemphasised the consonants of his name, relished them – ‘to help me plan the Sonnenwendfeier that in my excitement I completely forgot to ask if we could set another place at dinner. Forgive me.’
I stepped forward, onto our Willkommen! doormat and took Fisher’s hand, pulling him across the threshold. What a thrill! What a strange, powerful thrill! To initiate contact, to surprise Fisher with it, the smallness of my hand around his large fingers. I felt a little breathless and silly. I kept a grip on him, and turned to look at my father, to see the aftershock of this small physical action, and all its meanings, ripple across my father’s face. Fisher’s knuckles twitched in my grip. Dad coughed the discomfort from his throat, looked away from my fingers, his daughter’s fingers, interlaced with those belonging to a younger, more virile man than he. This was what he had wanted, after all; how could he now object?
‘I’m sure an extra place at dinner won’t be a problem,’ he replied.
And we all three went into the dining room to continue our work.
On my lined reporter’s notebook I had copied out some words by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn about the symbolism of the solstice flames, about how they served to fry the traitors, the troublemakers and the liars. ‘I don’t know if you’ve got your speech all sorted yet,’ I asked my father, ‘but I do know you are so extremely busy. I thought I would play secretary and make a start.’ I gave him a large, angelic grin and read aloud what I had on my page. As I did, Dad and Fisher circled one another like dogs trying to get the scent of the other’s backside. Fisher refused to sit if my father, his superior, was standing. My father, in return, refused to sit until Fisher, our guest, was seated first. Fisher sweated into the collar of his well-pressed shirt.
