The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  The Wehrmacht boys drew down the roller blinds in the reception lobby. Walls of glass became walls of fabric. This muffled the chaos outside but also made it louder somehow, because now our minds put images to the sounds instead. The blinds had been rushed – they hung at different lengths, just a centimetre here or there – so the pretty, bossy girl with the looping plaits came out from behind that huge sweep of a reception desk and made it her job to correct them. The day had been mangled beneath the wheels of a steamroller and there she was tying a ribbon around it all, thinking that would make everything fine.

  Clementine’s voice was in my head: ‘It’s all window dressing, Jess, nothing but window dressing.’

  My sight had returned too late.

  I didn’t see what they did with her. And I’m not talking about her body, an empty shell without a soul, but all of her. Because she was still alive. I heard her screaming – I’m sure I did – as I was carried away.

  I was frantic to ask. Someone would know. GG would have seen. She was right next to me on the stage. But when she came over to my corner of the lobby, her face white with shock, I pushed her offered hand away. Did you know? Her eyes were asking. Did you know this was going to happen?

  I shook my head.

  Then I was told to stand.

  This would be my goodbye, I had started to believe.

  I was taken away. To that small meeting room along the marble-floored corridor. With Fisher. With the fat man – the man I knew, yet didn’t.

  I thought about asking them, before Fisher started his cross-examination. Is Clementine going to be okay? Because if my fate was already sealed, asking this could bring me no more harm. But I didn’t ask. Mainly because it was a really stupid question. Alive or dead, Clementine Hart was never going to be okay again.

  The fat man quickly got impatient with Fisher’s questioning. His grilling of me had started well – persuasive, authoritative, no hint of any particular softness – but it went nowhere fast. The fat man huffed and puffed and readjusted his position against the wall. He must have known what Fisher was to me, to the Kellers. It was as if he expected him to fail, wanted him to, even. The fat man made the portrait of Herr Dean behind him scrape against the plasterboard. Fisher began to repeat himself and fumble. This was his chance to impress. This was the moment he’d been waiting for all his life – a great big crisis he could stand on top of, hands on hips, and demonstrate his brilliance. He was sliding down the side of it.

  I tried to help him. And myself. ‘Shall I run through things exactly as they happened, Fisher, or …?’

  The fat man planted his grip on Fisher’s shoulders. No words were needed. Fisher got up and the fat man dumped himself down opposite me in his place, the leather of the seat doing a fart as he did so. It made me want to laugh – even after everything – because what a relief it would have been to let go with a fit of hysterics. I wanted to gather together the Mädelschaft and take them down to the basement toilets again and pull faces in the huge, gilt mirror, wearing silly hats made from the flannel hand towels. As if nothing had happened.

  The fat man coughed phlegm from his big, barrelled lungs. Fisher took up a position by the door, his head hanging, like a puppy that had messed on the carpet.

  ‘Do you know who I am, Fräulein Keller?’ The fat man leant forwards on his elbows, so far forward that the heat of his breath was burning my sore eyelids.

  Yes, I wanted to say, you are Frau Hart’s very best customer, because GG’s story was much preferable to facing up to the real reason the fat man kept visiting Frau Hart and Clementine, why he was in our kitchen the evening after Frau Hart chopped down the flagpoles, why the Harts had been moved into the house next to ours in the first place. Believing that he was a sweaty, sex-hungry brothel-goer, that Frau Hart was an asocial prostitute, was so much nicer than reality.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to the fat man. ‘You are Herr Hoffmann. You work for my father.’

  ‘So let’s get everything straight before he gets here, shall we?’ He opened his eyes wide. Okay, little girl? I was beginning to understand what this was. I nodded slowly. Just outside the door a man started shouting, no, shrieking, in German.

  ‘Alle in die zugeteilten Räume! Sofort!’

  Go to your designated room! Now!

  There was the satisfying ch-chunk of a gun being readied.

  ‘Woah, man, cool it, cool it,’ came a high-pitched American voice – a man’s voice. I don’t think he’d understood. The Americans are lazy people – I had been told at school – they are falsely convinced of their own superiority so they do not attempt to learn the languages of other, greater nations. But this man understood the gun. There were boots in the hall, then quiet. Herr Hoffman waited for this short audio play to be over before he began again. I wondered if he needed to hear it, to know what was going on, or if he needed me to hear it so I knew what was going on.

  ‘Fräulein Keller, were you complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

  ‘Sorry?’ My head was still outside the door, still staring down a rifle.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Herr Hoffman snapped back. ‘Sorry that you don’t understand? Sorry that you were complicit …?’

  I was back in the room.

  ‘I’m very sorry that I didn’t hear you, Herr Hoffman.’ I used my BDM line-up voice, my soldier voice.

  Fisher lifted his head. He was no longer the lowest person in the room.

  ‘We’ll try that again, shall we, Fräulein Keller? Are you ready?’

  I swallowed, nodded.

  ‘Were you complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

  What a word. Why that word? Because with a word he’d changed it. It wasn’t terrorism, I was sure of it. That was done by men with bombs in their briefcases, who made friends with wily American journalists. Clementine was a girl (is a girl) who was desperate (is desperate). Herr Hoffman didn’t know what he was talking about. They had driven her to it. They had made her. Left her with absolutely no choice whatsoever. What did they expect? If anyone in this room was complicit in any act of terrorism, it was him.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Aloud, please, Fräulein. Were you, Jessika Davina Keller, complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t a lie. I had only wanted her to escape.

  ‘Say it.’

  I had only wanted her there, selfishly, to say goodbye.

  ‘I was not …’

  ‘No!’ He slammed a hand on the table. I flinched. Fisher flinched. This was how it was done. Fisher had much to learn.

  ‘I, Jessika Davina Keller …’ said Herr Hoffman, feeding me my line.

  ‘I, Jessika Davina Keller …’ I parroted.

  ‘Was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

  ‘Was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

  ‘Again!’

  ‘I, Jessika Davina Keller, was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

  ‘Again!’

  ‘I, Jessika Davina Keller, was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

  ‘And do you condone acts of terrorism against the Greater German Reich, Fräulein Keller?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sag es!’

  ‘Ich, Jessika Davina Keller, dulde keine Terrorakte gegen das Großdeutsche Reich!’

  ‘And is she your friend?’

  He was switching languages quickly, on purpose, to make me lose the thread. ‘Am I friends with …?’

  ‘WITH CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART!’ he shouted – shrieked – using the same voice as the man with the gun outside the door. ‘WITH THE TERRORIST CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART! IS SHE A FRIEND OF YOURS, JESSICA DAVINA KELLER?’ His spit landed on the surface of the lovely, glossy table. My ears rang. My body began to shake again, my teeth began to chatter. Fisher and Herr Hoffman were sweating.


  ‘Was she a friend of yours?’ he said quietly now, remembering all of a sudden who I was. He didn’t really want to make me cry.

  I had no choice. I shook my head.

  He was almost whispering now. ‘Was Clementine Hart a friend of yours?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Was she ever a friend of yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was she?’

  What IS she? What IS she? What IS she? I desperately corrected him in my head to keep her alive.

  ‘Ein Staatsfeind,’ I said. An enemy of the state.

  Maybe I was outside of my body then, looking back at myself, when those words came out. Maybe my body was speaking, not my soul.

  ‘And what happens to enemies of the state, Fräulein Keller?’

  His eyes were unblinking. The whites had edges of yellow.

  ‘Death,’ I said, my stomach clenching at the word. I would not let myself cry. I pitched my gaze upwards, my chin too. The profile of a perfect deutschen Mädel.

  Silence.

  Then: ‘Ja, gut,’ said Herr Hoffman, chirpy almost. Job done. Fisher’s head bobbed into a fully upright position. Herr Hoffman pushed himself to standing with a grunt. ‘Well, I’m glad we have agreement on this, Fräulein Keller. You are free to go.’

  Fisher saluted. For a moment I thought Herr Hoffman would shake his hand. But no. He reached past him and straightened the portrait of Herr Dean on the wall. He tutted at Fisher as he did this, as if he held him responsible for its wonky angle, as if he held him responsible for everything unsatisfactory in the room.

  ‘Watch her until Herr Keller gets here, will you?’ said Herr Hoffman, and he slipped out of the door with a wink.

  Silence.

  No, not silence.

  Zwischenraum. The space between.

  ‘Jessika …’ Fisher said.

  I didn’t reply. There was nothing I could say.

  ‘Jessika …’

  ‘What?’ The word came out like a dart.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  He made to move away from the wall.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I repeated a little louder, keeping him where he was. ‘My father will be here any minute.’

  I was alone for a long time, in a room with a short metal bed. I had a rough blanket, a sink with only the cold tap working, a bucket (for the obvious), no radiator. I’d realised what was going on before they took me by the arm and steered me in, locking the door behind me. But maybe not on the journey over. I let go of the lie when I saw the gateway.

  I was here to work, and that work would set me free.

  In the first room, a sign was hung around my neck with the name of the place and a number.

  23674.

  ‘Look left,’ said the woman in the grey smock, blinding me with the flash. ‘Look right,’ she said, blinding me again.

  In the second room, she took away my watch, my neck-chain and Party pin. I handed over the small purse of money Mum had strung around my neck before I left. If she had known, I told myself, she would never have given me this. Next I removed my clothes – my BDM jacket, my woggle, the knot in my necktie, my shirt, my skirt, my shoes and socks. My bra next, then my pants. I signed them away, along with my trunk.

  ‘When will I get them back?’ I asked, feeling silly to be speaking while completely naked.

  The woman shrank down further into the collar of her grey smock, adding more chins to the two she’d had from the start. ‘When you are good,’ was the reply.

  My dressing down from Herr Hoffmann was not the end of it. I was punished, and in the most ingenious way. They gave me what I had always wanted. They made me their hero.

  My picture was in the newspaper – the national one, not just the local – and I was interviewed for the radio. Then – the pinnacle – a crew from the People’s Television came to our house. They filmed me in our living room, sitting next to my mother, who was told to beam with pride, while Lilli sat at my feet, as if I were a god, or she my dog. (They tried to get Wolf to sit in too for what they called the ‘ahh-factor’ but he would only keep still if provided with something to chew. The sound of him cracking bone with his back teeth was too loud to accommodate, so he was shut outside in the garden and the microphone hardly picked up his whimpering at all.)

  What choice did I have but to go along with it? And anyway, hadn’t I always wanted to be loved like this? As long as I didn’t think too much about why I was there, I thought I might come to enjoy it.

  Before we recorded the piece for television, I sat down with the interviewer to work out exactly what I would say.

  ‘So you actually went blind for a few moments,’ gasped the woman in the neat, peppermint-coloured suit. ‘What did you expect to see when you could open your eyes again?’

  She was one of the People’s Television’s main presenters – but only for the interviews with wives and daughters. And animals. They got a man to do the stories about money and war and industry. She was incredibly pretty, with large, impossible eyes, which meant the old-fashioned suit she was wearing didn’t exactly look awful. Her hair was styled all high, sharp and rigid. Her lips were painted a very vivid red. ‘To show up on the camera,’ she explained, as if it was a terrible chore to be allowed to wear lipstick.

  ‘Well, I could hear screaming and some fighting,’ I answered, ‘and when we got back to the hotel there was the sound of glass breaking outside, bottles and things like that, so I thought, oh god, this is bad, this is …’

  ‘Oh, HAHAHAHA.’ The woman cut me off with the loudest, strangest laugh. She seemed to think I was telling a joke.

  She grinned at my father. What an adorable daughter you have, Herr Keller! the grin said. But it was also a little flirty. I glanced at Mum to see what she was making of it all, but she had her eyes tight shut while a girl in a checked skirt and black blouse was poofing powder onto her face. Our living room was all activity – men setting lights, mounting cameras on tripods, Lilli bothering each one of them in turn with her questions. Through the window, I could see Frau Gross standing across the street, craning her head around the television crew’s van, trying to see what was going on.

  ‘No, we won’t say that,’ the woman in the peppermint suit told me sweetly. She clutched my knee to stop me skipping off in any more giddy directions. The newspaper and radio people hadn’t wanted my real answer to that question either. I thought the television people, in the whole hierarchy of things, would be more discerning. They would like this injection of excitement. But in the end, they flattened out the story like everyone else. I just couldn’t see how I could be a hero if we hadn’t been in any danger in the first place. I was only trying to help them. Or maybe my ego had let me get swept away with it a little. The live broadcast of the concert had been stopped before the fire, thanks to that time delay. No one had seen this part, when she had …

  I wouldn’t let my mind go back to it, not properly. I just couldn’t. It was too much to bear. The sight of my friend, like that … So really I was only making up my own safe story, just like they were making up theirs.

  ‘You must have heard the crowds cheering your quick actions,’ the peppermint lady said. ‘You must have expected to open your eyes to the hugs and kisses of your comrades?’

  She positioned the question so that saying anything other than ‘yes’ would have sounded completely idiotic.

  ‘Oh, um, yes.’

  ‘So shall we say you were carried back to the hotel by the crowd, passed across that joyous sea of arms?’ She was a little bit in love with this image.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, because I didn’t want to disappoint her, or my father who was watching carefully from the sidelines. She beamed a big-teeth smile. ‘And, gosh, how did that feel? Being carried like that?’ Her eyes were shining, making it all instantly true – that joyous sea of arms.

  ‘Um, wonderful?’ I suggested.

  I saw that Dad was no
dding encouragingly, so I came up with more words.

  ‘Thrilling, unexpected, totally overwhelming …’

  They needed some pictures to ‘cut away to’ during my interview, so they came and filmed me skating.

  Ingrid had hugged me so tight that first time I’d returned to the rink.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she’d said into my hair.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

  She continued to hold me close so she could speak quietly.

  ‘Is everything to go on as always?’ And I realised she wasn’t really worried about me. No, that is unfair – she wasn’t only worried about me. Her life, I saw, was inescapably associated with mine.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re fine.’

  ‘I’m so pleased,’ she said, louder now, patting my back and moving away. Then she set about getting me into the pole harness so I could work on my triple axel.

  When the peppermint lady and the People’s Television crew invaded the rink, disturbing the hushed focus of our practice, Ingrid had to work hard to hide her irritation. She stamped her blades impatiently against the rubber flooring as the make-up girl straightened her hair and powdered her nose.

  ‘It’s so cold in here, isn’t it?’ the girl kept saying as she teased the strands of Ingrid’s fringe. With each repetition of this stupid rhetorical question, I expected Ingrid to swipe a paw at the girl’s unsuspecting face.

  The crew played around endlessly with the lighting available until it fitted the mood they were trying to create, until we were all frozen to the bone waiting. At last I did my routine to Bruckner’s Fantasie but I was so cold and nervous that I went wrong in a number of places. I knew I was letting Ingrid down, dinting her pride, in front of all these people.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the peppermint lady. ‘We’ll edit it to make you look fantastic.’

  ‘She is fantastic,’ Ingrid hissed.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, she is! Absolutely!’

  The peppermint lady may have been tall and blonde and magnificent but no one would have fancied her chances in a fight against small, dark, cat-like Ingrid.