The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  They also filmed me giving a talk to the Jungmädel.

  Ruby Heigl, their new troop leader, was made to stand aside, her face like a puckered balloon as she led the cheers and rounds of applause for me. The television crew filmed her doing an introduction, which she was asked to redo over and over again.

  ‘With a little more passion, Fräulein,’ said the director, a slim, good-looking man with a wave of blonde floppy hair and a lovely patterned tank-top. ‘This is our national hero we have here!’

  The girls stared up at me, open-mouthed, when I began to talk, describing how I had run from my position on the stage, grabbed the jacket and plunged into the flames. Then, without any prompting at all, I found myself telling them that I had been carried back to the hotel by the crowd, passed across a joyous sea of arms.

  No one came back for hours. I was shivering. I wanted to curl up in the chair behind the desk, but guessed that would be against the rules. Would a good girl put her naked self on a wooden seat that would later be used by her superiors?

  I had to get my stuff back. It wasn’t about the things. It was about proving that I was good and I deserved them.

  I shifted my attention away from the chair to the slatted blinds. But, oh god, even in a half-empty room I couldn’t help but find temptation. Now all I wanted to do was open the blinds and see daylight. I wanted to look around and try to place where I was. (Of course, I did know where I was, I wasn’t stupid. But I only knew it by name. Just as a concept or an idle threat. Not as a real place, positioned on a real piece of landscape, reachable by real people, like me.) But I didn’t look. Because there was a camera mounted on the ceiling in the corner watching my every move.

  When the man in the white coat walked in I was lying on my side on the floor, hugging my knees, almost asleep.

  ‘Aufstehen!’

  I stood, trying to keep myself covered with my arms. He pulled a torch from his top pocket and shone it into my eyes. Another blinding.

  ‘Look up …’ he said. ‘Look down … Look left … Look right.’ I did as I was told.

  ‘Now open your mouth. Say “ah”.’ He counted my teeth.

  The torch went off. He ticked and scribbled into his folder of paperwork, gave me occasional disappointed glances as he wrote. I wondered if I would feel any less humiliated if I just let my arms drop. Standing there with one hand clutching a breast and the other between my legs wasn’t feeling anywhere close to respectable. But I didn’t have the nerve to let go. I thought about what his notes might say. Good height, sturdy build, features well within acceptable limits, no clear outward signs …

  He didn’t have a stethoscope or a pump to measure my blood pressure. I was only going to be checked like a dog or a horse, for my shiny eyes and solid teeth.

  Then he said, ‘Are you hiding anything on your person?’

  This made me choke, almost laugh. It also made me drop my arms. I wanted to show him that, despite his expert’s white coat, he was clearly being an imbecile. How could I be hiding anything on my person when I wasn’t wearing any clothes?

  The doctor’s face stayed steady and serious. He looked me up and down. But mostly down.

  And I really had done so well up to that point, managing not to cry, but my voice cracked when I said, ‘Please don’t.’

  Wait until my father hears about this! is what I should have said. Wait until he hears of this insult to his rank and family! But I was too shocked.

  A nurse came in.

  ‘Shall I cut off her hair, Herr Doktor?’ she asked as she passed him in the doorway.

  My hands went instinctively to my head. I didn’t care about covering myself up any more. I’d thrown away my dignity.

  ‘No,’ muttered the doctor. ‘Just make the usual checks for contraband.’

  And the nurse did exactly as she was told.

  We sat down as a family. And, I confess, I was excited. It was the night we would watch back my interview on the Evening Show on the People’s Television. Mum had prepared us drinks and snacks. (Drinks and snacks, in the living room! A total infringement of the ban on anything that could potentially stain the best furniture.) This was a very special occasion.

  We sat through the previews for the week’s dramas, the weather report predicting a drop in temperature, the tension building all the while. This is what it must feel like, I thought, to be a famous actress arriving at the Kino Babylon in a silk dress, ready to see your face on the big screen. I had been seduced by it all, this hero worship. I had swallowed the wonderful pill. And then there it was, straight off the back of the hellos and welcomes, while my head was still in Horst-Wessel-Platz signing autographs – my face!

  ‘Look, look, look,’ gasped Lilli. ‘Our living room!’

  In which we were currently sitting! Having drinks and snacks!

  Mum let out a delighted squeal. Lilli grabbed hold of my arm, digging her nails into my skin with her excitement. I felt so sick I thought I might actually be sick.

  But it was the oddest thing. The peppermint lady’s hair didn’t look nearly as tall and sculptural as it had in real life. The screen reduced it somehow. For me, the camera lens had the opposite effect. I was bigger. Sort of grotesque. It didn’t feel like watching myself at all. The girl travelling across the rink in a wash of pink light, all snappy and breezy, her upright spins as neat and tight as any Dani Hannah could manage … that wasn’t me. The girl looking so cocky and sure as she stood in front of the Jungmädel telling them they must always be ready, always be prepared, because evil lurks behind every corner … that wasn’t me either. The girl sitting on a sofa with such an admiring mother and sister, telling a lady in a peppermint suit about ‘a sea of joyous arms’ … that certainly wasn’t me.

  Yet it was. It was my shape and outline.

  But my soul?

  That wonderful pill was stuck, fast, in my throat.

  When our moment on screen ended, Mum, Dad and Lilli began applauding, babbling and cooing about what they’d just seen. I didn’t join in. The programme returned to the male presenter behind a desk. Time to discuss the serious stuff surrounding the Jay Acker concert. The presenter didn’t call it that though. The name ‘Jay Acker’ had been crossed out. The day was now known as ‘The Concert’ or sometimes ‘The Incident.’ Did the boy go straight back to America? In the build up, there had been talk of him seeking asylum in the Reich. Since ‘The Incident’, no word.

  For days they’d been promising to reveal the identity of the ‘terrorist’. I somehow knew that tonight would be the night, because Dad was carrying himself looser, a button undone at the top of his shirt, his cuffs rolled up. He had stayed over in London, at the office, the night before my first interview and when he came back he was fired up again, not brooding. He’d seemed ready to throw his energies into home. Into me. There was a momentum, and I felt part of it. The television interview had been the culmination of something.

  In contrast to Dad, I was coiling tighter and tighter. They hadn’t asked any direct questions about her in my interviews – not her as an individual, only her as an abstract concept, her as a fire to be put out. I was grateful for this, of course. How would I have even said her name without collapsing into despair? But the silence, it was ominous. I couldn’t figure it out, how they were going to do it. How would they tell the nation that this ‘terrorist’ was our neighbour, my friend? Someone right under our noses, someone on our watch, someone whose father worked with my father? Someone who was one of us.

  ‘Authorities have today revealed the identity of the terrorist who made an attempt on the lives of our young people …’ said the presenter. I was breathing so fast I felt dizzy.

  Her picture filled the screen.

  She was an American, they said.

  She’s called Amanda Levy.

  She’s a Jew and a Bolshevik sympathiser, they told us. The girl in the picture had a cross and messy little face just like Clementine. She was wiry and white-blonde the same as my friend. But it wasn’t her.
It was a picture of someone else.

  My mouth opened, ready to argue, but what could I say? Who would I say it to? Mum and Lilli were still squealing about their television appearance. And my father … I didn’t dare look at him. But I could feel him looking at me.

  Next on screen was a series of images of men with dark skin and misshapen features. These were also Americans, they said. These were the men who had instigated the plot. They had taken this Amanda Levy girl under their wing. She was an ‘asocial’ and an ‘idiot’, they told us (so not a calculating political sympathiser, after all). She had been their puppet.

  It made no sense.

  That’s what I would have said, had I had the courage to speak. No one is going to buy this, because it doesn’t make any sense! All those people at home may not have seen her face, her real face, but they would have heard me in my interview – only moments ago on that very programme! – clearly saying how I wanted to save my friend. Yes, I had said that. I had managed that much. I had leapt onto the flames, I told the peppermint lady, because I wanted to save ‘my friend’. And now they wanted everyone to believe that I was friends with an American! With a Bolshevik sympathiser! With a Jew! How could I be a hero to them if I was friends with an American Bolshevik-sympathising Jew? How could my father let anyone believe that his daughter was friends with …

  No, that’s not what I had said.

  I hadn’t said ‘my friend’ at all.

  Of course I didn’t. They wouldn’t have allowed that.

  I’d been asked to say something ever so slightly different, the distinction barely registering at the time. I’d said yes to everything just to save my own skin.

  They’d asked me to say ‘my friends’.

  I leapt onto the flames, I told the peppermint lady, because I wanted to save ‘my friends’.

  Just one letter – and I had crossed out her name, erased her message.

  All that she’d done had been for nothing.

  Even the people who were actually there, seeing it with their own eyes, hearing it with their own ears, they were too drunk on the music. And suppose just for a moment they weren’t, would any of their memories have survived the debriefings we were given to help us ‘understand’ what had happened that day? Even within our own Mädelschaft and Kameradschaft, the people who knew and recognised her, would any of them have managed to hang onto their belief that they had seen her – Clementine Amelia Hart – so desperate to be noticed, so desperate to be heard that she had set herself on fire?

  That’s not what you saw, the visiting Schutzstaffel officer had said in our debriefing in the meeting hall. He’d said that, without having to say it at all.

  ‘This was the act of a terrorist,’ he told us, slowly, methodically replacing her face, her very existence with a word – terrorist. I could see it now – the process of it, the system.

  ‘And we do not engage in discussions about the motivations of terrorists,’ he went on, ‘for there is no justification for acts of violence against the Greater German Reich. We simply condemn their acts,’ he said, ‘and then we seek revenge.’

  It was only me. Her message had reached only me.

  Sitting in the living room that evening with my family, I spat out that wonderful pill. It tasted bad. Very, very bad.

  On the television, the man behind the desk was summing up, declaring this tragedy ‘a victory’. Enemies of the state had been captured before they could do any damage, because we had infiltrated and dismantled their intricate but naive little plot.

  ‘And all this has been achieved,’ the man said, switching from a straight face to this strange little grin, ‘with the help of the Reich’s favourite daughter.’

  A smiling picture of me in my BDM uniform came onto the screen, the wind whipping up the loose strands of my hair, my eyes on something pleasing in the distance.

  I had killed my friend. Me.

  In came a female warden, all jaded round the eyes and gnarly at the edges. Rough, basically, despite her starched collar and scraped-back hair. I was given a pile of grey things – a smock, a large pair of pants, some rubber clogs – and told to dress. The warden stood and watched, her head tipped to one side as if calculating the marks she might give me for technical merit and presentation.

  ‘If you are good,’ she said, while I buttoned up the front of the smock, ‘you will earn yourself a bra.’

  She handcuffed her wrist to mine and we left the room. We walked along a white hospital corridor and through a series of locked gates, stopping outside a flat, steel door with a sliding shutter.

  I was expecting the worst, so it came as no surprise – the metal bed, the bucket toilet, the cold. The window had bars and frosted glass that let in milky light but offered no view.

  But I didn’t care about that now. I didn’t need to work out where I was. I had decided to absolutely refuse to believe that this place existed. This place was nothing but a concept and an idle threat. I wasn’t here. Soon they would see that I was good – and then I’d be set free. I’d go back to my family. We would forget that all of this had ever happened.

  I was left with a white cloth rectangle printed with the same number from the sign they had hung round my neck. 23674. I’d been instructed to sew it onto the front of my smock. Along with a black cloth triangle. Vagrants, beggars, idiots, workshys, the diseased, the damaged, the dissolute, alcoholics, prostitutes, pacifists … I pulled my smock up and over my head, baring my chest to the cold, ready for the sewing. I would show them exactly who they were dealing with via the beauty of my invisible stitching. But I didn’t get the chance. The gnarly warden returned after just five minutes, demanding I hand back the needle and thread.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ she barked, forcing me to switch to big, lazy loops to get the work done fast. The untidiness of it made me want to cry.

  After that, with nothing to do, I spent my time on my back, on the lumpy straw mattress. I picked at the edges of the white rectangle and the black triangle on my chest, making the stitching even worse. I listened to the distant hum of the motorway, to the birds, to the wind in the trees and the sirens that went off all hours of the day but didn’t seem to have any relevance to me. I heard orders carried across the breeze, the trudge of feet, sometimes metal against stone, the squeak of a wheelbarrow. At night, I heard the conversations of owls, the whistling of bats, the screams of foxes – nature doing what it had always done for years and years and years.

  I would wait this moment out. I took my inspiration from Ingrid. Wasn’t that how she was treating her whole life – as one long wait? Keep your head down, keep safe, allow time to move on. I just needed to remain still until things changed around me. This went entirely against everything I had ever been taught though. You must do! You must work! You are nothing but your actions! I had never been still. Never been allowed to. Even when I was sick.

  But this stillness became strangely, weirdly, sort of … nice.

  Every so often I had to move, of course, or I would be overwhelmed by the cold. I did bursts of star jumps and squat thrusts to help keep the blood flowing. When I did this, I pretended I could hear Fisher’s voice shouting out the order. I imagined Fräulein Eberhardt crouching beside me, hissing insults into my ear because I wasn’t doing the leg thrusts right. I made myself feel Dirk’s boot on my neck, the smell of grass and mud up my nose. This was also strangely, weirdly, sort of nice. I was wishing for normal, I suppose. Because I knew what to do with that.

  The day after the screening of the television interview the men came with their flatbed truck. A team of efficient-looking women in housekeeping smocks pulled up in a small red car.

  Up until then the Harts’ house next door had been a dark, looming question waiting for an answer. Or rather, a question waiting to be asked – a question even Frau Gross wouldn’t have dared put to my mother. When the truck and the red car turned up, Frau Gross was straight away in her front garden, gloves on, trowel in hand, pulling up non-existent weeds.

&nbs
p; The men did the heavy lifting and packing, while the women sorted and cleaned. I watched what I could from my bedroom window, my arms resting on the flat top of the trophy I had won at the Reich’s sports day for the BDM the year before. Later I watched from a deckchair in our back garden while I pretended to read a magazine, enjoying the benefit of Dad’s shorter fences. An image came to me as I sat there: me, looking down on Dad through the gap in my bedroom curtains, his sleeves rolled-up, his brow all sweaty in the moonlight, as he took a chainsaw to the heads of the Harts’ new leylandii. I couldn’t understand where it had been hiding, this memory. What door had I opened to let it out?

  Frau Gross would have given anything to have this front row seat on proceedings at the Hart residence. I would have given anything for it not to have been happening at all. I should have been down at the tree swing by the river, watching my friend glide through sunlight, collecting leaves in her hair and dirt on her heels, as she talked me through the seduction of a banana split.

  The clearance team didn’t build a bonfire in the garden, or throw everything on the back of their truck for landfill as I expected. Each item was handled very carefully and methodically. Two women went into the back garden to make the most of the last September sun and laid out the Harts’ clothing on the picnic table, holding up each piece for inspection – Herr Hart’s black v-neck jumpers and grey trousers, Frau Hart’s billowing shirts and skirts, Clementine’s uniform and that striking bikini – folding the ones that passed their test, placing them in sacks like the ones we used when distributing clothes during the Winterhilfswerk. As they worked they chatted about their families, and people they’d seen on the high street the day before. Snatches of their conversation cut through the birdsong.

  She’s looking tired, don’t you think?

  But their son has always been good like that.

  If you just add a bit of warm water to the mixture it turns out fine.