by Julie Mayhew
It was all so horribly ordinary. Did they not have any idea whose things they were touching?
I saw them box up crockery and bed linen, watched them throw the living room rug over the washing line for a beating before rolling it up and taking it back inside. Frau Hart had some nice pieces of silver jewellery. The sight of them suddenly came to me, sharp and clear in my head – lovely delicate stud earrings with falling flowers rocking on a chain link as she moved. I wondered who would be getting those.
The following day, the Sunday, I overheard Dad talking to Lilli in the garage as he fixed her bike. The chain kept slipping, making her heels strike off the pedals. She had red scrapes up the insides of both legs. Mum had sent me from the kitchen with glasses of orange juice – ‘for the workers!’ – and I was carrying a bag of biscuits in my teeth.
I was just about to turn the corner, round the wall, out of the side passage and onto the front driveway, when I heard him.
‘Good news, Lilli, we have new neighbours moving in soon.’
I stopped dead, hidden by the wall.
‘Oh?’ I heard Lilli say. She sounded bored. She wasn’t interested in helping, she just wanted the bike fixed. I listened. There was the ting of something metal hitting the concrete floor of the garage, then the tick-tick-tick-tick of the bike wheel being spun. Ask him, I thought, my teeth gritted tightly against the paper bag of biscuits. Ask him. She did.
‘Where’s Clementine gone then?’ Her voice was all high and innocent. Casual, because she didn’t realise she needed to act it. I held my breath.
A pause, then …
‘To music college,’ Dad said.
All the air went from me, all the blood, all the bone.
For a moment, I became my little sister; I let myself believe him. Because I wanted to. I wanted Clementine to be there, in a light and dusty classroom, banging out something passionate on a beautiful grand piano, her hair falling with the movement, learning to love a bit of Wagner after all. Because if it was true I could write her a letter, exchange news – my preparations for skate camp, her new life at college, who I’d seen on the high street, who was looking tired, whose son was being good, the everyday and the ordinary. But I knew I mustn’t trick myself. It was so easy, so comforting, but I mustn’t.
I returned to my own body, my own mind.
I willed another thought out to my sister on the other side of that wall. To ask about Clementine’s parents. My tears dripped onto the bag of biscuits, soaking into the paper.
Lilli didn’t say it though. I doubt if Herr und Frau Hart, being grown-ups just like any others, had ever registered as real people to my little sister. Dad carried on.
‘This new family,’ he said, ‘they have a little girl exactly the same age as you.’
And, oh, the whole world joined up in a perfect circle.
‘Yeah?’ said Lilli, sounding interested now.
I tipped sideways. I slid down the brick, sandpapering my arm. I set the orange juice on the floor very carefully, the biscuits too. I crouched there, crying as quietly as I could, fat, hot tears rolling down my chin and arms. Someone had lifted the corner of the grass, like it was only a carpet, and revealed beneath the clockwork mechanics. I was much happier when I believed it all to be natural, magic even.
I stayed on the floor until the tears stopped and my breath was my own again. I wiped my face and the wet streaks from the paper bag of biscuits. Then I lifted my father’s glass of juice close to my mouth, hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and I spat.
The sessions began. Three of them each day. They would happen at any point, even during the night. I think they were trying to surprise me by switching the times around, but the sessions were the only thing I was ever expecting, so as surprises went, it was pretty useless. I felt sorry for them, if that was the best they could manage.
A female warden would collect me and walk me down a series of windowless corridors to the chosen room. Every movement around the building was done with handcuffs, which only ended up making me believe I was terribly important or terribly dangerous, or possibly both. The opposite of what they wanted to achieve, I’m sure. I began to feel really exceptionally sorry for them.
Once inside, the warden would instruct me to sit on the hard chair, opposite a man in uniform at a desk. She’d free herself of me, then turn on her black, ugly heels and leave the room.
‘So, Fräulein Keller,’ the man would say – big, patronising smile, a pair of fat fingers pushing down the red dot and the arrow on the tape player at the same time. ‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’
The first time, I cried, told my interrogator that I had already done this with the fat man, Herr Hoffmann, and with Fisher (I was told off for not calling him Herr Fisher – you can’t win). ‘And do you know who my father is?’ I wailed.
‘Yes,’ said the uniformed man. He slid a sheet of official paper across his desk so I could see the ink. ‘This is his signature on the order that brought you here.’
I think it was then that I stopped feeling sorry for everyone else, and concentrated on feeling sorry for myself.
Three men took it in turns to question me, though their faces began to blur into one. There was hardly any natural light in the place. I kept falling asleep in fits. They gave me coffee in the mornings that tasted suspicious and not nearly enough food to keep my head straight – stale bread, thin soup.
‘What you did was a sin,’ said the uniformed man – whichever one it was. It didn’t matter. They were the same person really, the same machine, saying exactly the same things, over and over. They pushed me back through time, to where they thought it had all started, then they pulled me forwards, making me relive it in words. Then we’d go back again, forwards again. I was a dirty piece of clothing going up and down the washboard and maybe soon I’d be spotless.
A week or so into the sessions, I was given a stack of books and told to read them – Das Buch Isidor, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a collection of Hölderlin’s poetry, Mein Kampf. All of the compulsory books from school. The books that everyone else had pretended to read, books I actually had read, because I was a good girl and did exactly as I was told. I read them again. I gobbled them up, actually. I was so grateful to have something to do. And it was more educational the second time round, with my new eyes, the eyelashes properly grown back.
The sketches in Das Buch Isidor didn’t seem funny any more and the romantic imagery in Hölderlin no longer filled me up. The Myth of the Twentieth Century was a big slog, just like it had been the first time, but Mein Kampf, that was useful.
People will more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
People who are good don’t lie, I knew that.
But this was new – people who are good don’t lie, except when they do.
I lied all the time. Of course I did. It was in me because I had been trained well. Subterfuge, denial, dishonesty … I excelled at them all. So when the uniformed man said to me at our next session, ‘What you did was a sin,’ I replied, ‘Yes.’
There was joy beneath the surly mask of his face. I was sure there had been a wager on who would get me to admit to it first.
‘It’s not something that is in you,’ he went on.
‘No,’ I said.
I wanted to know what this something was. What was this stuff that could not be rinsed out? What was it woven in there since I was very little, or maybe even before?
‘These people are cunning and wily,’ said my interrogator, offering me a way out.
‘Yes,’ I said, taking it, not knowing who ‘these people’ were he was referring to.
‘They lead you astray.’
‘Yes.’
‘So tell me, Fräulein Keller, of your duty …’
‘To be faithful, to be pure, to be German.’
‘Good girl.’
At the end of that session, I earned mys
elf something – a bra, and one of the things from my confiscated belongings.
What I really wanted … Clementine’s essay notes. I could see the edge of them, inside a clear plastic letter file, beneath the other documents on the desk between me and my interrogator, the loops and smudges of her passionate handwriting. I could still remember every word. I’d always had a good brain for that – lines in plays, shopping lists. I pictured how the words were laid out on the page and the picture stuck. That was why I always did well in the BDM task where we had to read instructions, eat the paper, then carry out the order.
But still I wanted to see those notes again. Touch them. They would have given me something – strength. Comfort, maybe.
But of course, I couldn’t ask for that. I chose a warm sweater instead.
He told me that he lived in the Party-owned boarding halls on the road that climbed north from the high street. He’d said this when we were out on a date at the cinema.
One evening during the week of the press interviews, he had turned up unexpectedly on our doorstep telling my mother that he had tickets for a film and would Jessika care to join him. I thought that after the concert he might leave me alone. That he would be embarrassed by his conduct in that interview room, or that he would now view me as dangerous. But no.
‘I’m too tired,’ I said. It was true. Wearing a hero’s mask had been exhausting. But my mother pushed me to go.
‘It’s just what you need right now,’ said my father, joining the conversation in the hallway and having the final word.
I suspected Fisher had been instructed to take me, to draw me out further on how Clementine had come to do what she did. But if that was Fisher’s mission, he made a poor job of it. He spent the entire film (another war movie where we pummel the Americans and the guy gets the girl) working his hand slowly up from my knee to a just-acceptable section of my thigh. His touch made me feel hot and eager yet repulsed all at the same time. As we stepped into the sharp outside air, I felt queasy from spending ninety minutes on the edge of something. That was when he gestured up the road, showing me where his halls were located. There was the suggestion that we could go there, continue the movement of his hand up my thigh. I told him it was getting late and he walked me home instead, just like Herr und Frau Keller would expect him to.
Heading to the halls in broad daylight, I was anxious about who might see me. But I realised as I crossed the high street in front of the Party building, it was silly to fuss about that. Everyone would notice me. EVERYONE. I was no longer just my father’s daughter, I was the Reich’s favourite daughter. There was nothing I could do about it, only exploit the benefits.
I prepared myself as I walked, built up my character, what I was going to say. It could all slip away so easily if I was made to wander through the corridors asking all those military men which room to go to. They’d know exactly what I was there for. Or they’d think they knew.
The stars were on my side though. There was a bank of named buzzers, nestling between the branches of the wisteria that climbed, all blousy and purple and out-of-place, up the front wall. I found his name next to Dirk’s. An electric fizz sounded through the building as I pressed. I straightened my hair, positioned myself, chin up, in the lens of the small camera beneath the buttons. I didn’t get a greeting though. There was just a loud click and another electric fizz with a different tone. I pushed my way in.
The hallway had a red patterned carpet and a white painted staircase. There was a telephone table and dark wooden pigeon holes for post. It was silent and soulless. It stank of disinfectant and boys.
‘Hello?’ I called.
‘Jess?’
The voice came from above. There he was, leaning over the banister, wearing a tight white T-shirt and baggy grey trackpants, his hair falling forward, all shaggy and wild, not combed down neat like usual. You could almost smell the sleep, the bedclothes …
I made myself think of Herr Hoffman, and how he had so easily turned Fisher into a puppy dog.
‘You should have answered the door in person,’ I barked.
I snapped my head back, faced the blank space in front of me where I expected him to be. ‘Did you not see me, on the camera? Did you not see who it was calling?’ I had been too meek at the cinema, too submissive. I was in charge. I was the Reich’s favourite daughter.
But Fisher wasn’t rolling over yet. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’ His voice was playful, teasing. ‘Come on up!’
I stayed staring forwards.
I had never seen him without his uniform before, never seen his bare feet – which were pushing through the gaps in the banister, firm and brown and sinewy.
‘Come on up!’ he called again. I glanced his way. He beckoned me with an arm – an arm covered in that fine blonde hair. Then his voice dropped, in line with what he was thinking. ‘I want to show you something.’
I was thinking it too, of course. There was something in me, really in me, that liked it, that wanted it. It was a craving – for a touch that would send a charge through my brain. It got the better of me, made me forget what I was doing, who people really were. It stopped me being faithful and pure and German. It scared me. No one else is like you, I told myself. Only men obey commands of the blood. Men and animals.
‘My father has sent me,’ I announced, cutting through the possibilities with a knife.
‘Oh.’
I heard his footsteps creak across the landing, then the quick dum-de-dum as he skipped down the stairs. He was in front of me then, smelling just like I thought he would.
‘My father has asked me to collect the keys for the meeting hall,’ I said.
‘Oh?’ The shine of his eyes levelled into that metallic, drilled stare he used at the HJ and BDM meetings. He put his arms behind his back, stood a little straighter. Off-duty Fisher was slowly morphing into on-duty Fisher. He waited for me to say why I needed the keys. He expected the rest of my orders to include him.
‘Well, aren’t you going to get them then, Herr Fisher?’
Herr Fisher. The address made him curl his lip into the beginnings of a smile, his eyes flashed. He thought it was a joke, a come-on. He studied my face for a moment. Wait until my father hears about this! I said, over and over in my head, hoping the words came out in the tiny movements of my face. His smile disappeared. He stepped backwards and without another word, jogged upstairs. Moments later he was in front of me again, holding out the bunch of keys. I felt a surge of relief, a jolt of victory. I reached for them, and he snatched them away.
‘Frau Gross has a set,’ he said. ‘For the Frauenschaft meetings. She only lives across the street from you.’
I held his stare. I could have told him that she’d lost her set, or that she was away on holiday right now, but they were small lies. They would have unravelled as easy as a badly stitched hem the moment Fisher bumped into the old goat on the high street.
He was smiling again.
‘There is to be a meeting,’ I said, in a whisper.
The smile cracked.
‘A secret, off-radar meeting.’ I made him hear quote marks around ‘off-radar’. These were not my words.
The smile faded completely.
‘It is to be between my father and a representative of the American judiciary regarding the arrest of Amanda Levy …’ I spoke fast and urgently so he had to lean in. I left gaps in the story for him to fill. That’s how you do it. The other person must always join up the circle.
‘No one,’ I said – pause for emphasis – ‘is to know about this, or to jeopardise its security. Which is why this obscure location has been chosen.’
He was nodding now, his mouth a little open.
This is your moment, I told him, and myself, without having to say it at all, the moment you’ve been waiting for all your life – a great big crisis that you can stand on top of, hands on hips, and demonstrate your brilliance. Don’t fuck it up this time.
‘Okay?’ I said, feeling my head swim with the power.
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He nodded, and handed over the keys.
One day the warden who collected me was different. Not old or gnarly or rough, but young, with a warmth and a light glowing from beneath her pale, freckly skin. She had tight brown curls pinned back from her temples like wings. I was thrilled just to be near her. Everything else in that place was so ugly.
We went on a longer route to my session, one that took us outside for a moment – OUTSIDE! – through a covered walkway between two of the site’s buildings. The shock of the light hurt my eyes, even though it was nothing more than overcast. The blast of wind whistling through the gap in the buildings was amazing – delicious! I promised never to take the weather for granted ever again. I would dance in the rain, write poems about lightning.
And that wasn’t even the best bit.
As we travelled between those two doors I saw other girls – OTHER WOMEN! – in grey smocks and rubber clogs just like mine, standing in pairs and threes, talking to each other – actually talking! – not handcuffed. Some were upright and smoking, others bow-backed and coughing. There was a whine coming from a tinny speaker at the top of the fence. Music, I think.
Some of these women looked my way as I passed through the walkway, making me all of a sudden realise that I still existed. Because I had begun to wonder. I drank in gulps of the cold, fresh air like it was a beaker of milk.
‘What day is it?’ I asked the warden as we pushed back through the double-doors, forgetting the hierarchy of things in my excitement and speaking before I was spoken to.
‘Sunday,’ she answered, not Shut up, bitch or Watch your mouth. This, teamed with my first, exhilarating footsteps in fresh air, made me believe this warden was kind, that the journey outside was her idea, because she wanted me to see that I wasn’t alone, that I was working hard and soon I would be free. Or at least, freer. She was a good person. She had recognised the same in me. I decided to talk to her some more.
‘Gosh, the wind travels sideways round here, doesn’t it?’ I exclaimed.
