The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘Guten Tag!’ I said as it wound itself through the gap in our door.

  Miaow! it replied, loud and demanding, mimicking the patterns of my speech.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  Mi-miaow!

  I went over and lifted up its tail – it was definitely a girl.

  It continued to visit every day, so I gave her some ham scraps and a saucer of milk. But she only sniffed and took a quick lick. She seemed interested in the idea of food but not the actuality.

  When Jan saw the cat he said he would have to take a spade to it.

  ‘It can barely walk,’ he said. ‘There’s something wrong with it.’

  ‘It seems happy enough,’ I said.

  ‘Happy enough for what?’ he asked.

  ‘I dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘Life?’

  It’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re only talking about a cat.

  Jan and I married in March, just when the buds were starting to show on the lilac trees. He’s not so bad, Jan, and I could have done worse. I like him enough (that word again, ‘enough’) and I think I might get to like him more. He’s kind and gentle and not so arrogant that I can’t open my mouth and have an opinion every now and again. Some of the girls at Elmdene got sent off with some real chest-beating bears, let me tell you.

  Jan looks exactly like the big, blonde boys in the picture plates of our biology books from school – all chest muscle, pumping arms and strong thighs, striding through the long grass in running shorts with their eyes on the horizon. Angels, gods, paragons of animals. It’s sort of disgusting if you think about it. So I try not to.

  I enjoy the touch of him though. I suppose I’ve never really had much of a problem with that.

  We sat through hours of brain-bogglingly embarrassing lectures on sex at Elmdene. Women, unlike men, are always capable of intercourse. Women should keep themselves attractive or must hold themselves responsible for the rise in male homosexuality. That kind of thing. It only left me wondering how happy I might have been if I had lived in a world where I could have settled down with GG. Or Clementine.

  What a piece of work is a man.

  I wore one of the white dresses they kept in the cupboard for the ceremonies. They tried to make it seem sacred and special and mystical. There were flowers, a shrine and pledges to the Fatherland. It reminded me of that day in April when I was ten years old, being sworn into the Jungmädelschaft:

  I promise

  In the Hitler Youth

  To do my duty

  At all times

  In love and faithlessness

  To help the Führer

  So help me god.

  Back then, when I was ten, it had felt like the biggest deal, such a huge responsibility, but the marriage ceremony? Deep down, us girls all knew (or at least I did and really not that deep down at all) that these marriages were just a formality. They weren’t going to let us out of Elmdene unless we did it. So we did.

  Now I’m Davina Gunn. They thought it best that I ditch the first name too. Just in case. A proper fresh start. It sounds like a movie star, I think – Davina Gunn. Too much of a name for someone who works a vegetable patch, mucks out chickens and feeds a few pigs.

  Babies will be the next job, I guess.

  We spent much of our days at Elmdene in the nursery helping bathe the babies, feed them, change their nappies. Once they’d been with us a while and we knew that they were healthy they were handed over to waiting couples. Nice families. When I did my first handover I got a bit upset and was taken into Matron’s office for a talking-to.

  I had been thinking about Lilli as I shifted that warm weight in its blanket into the arms of a new mother. The truth finally came and choked me. Lilli had never been ours. I was sure of it. She had arrived fully-formed one day, with her blonde hair and her blues eyes, looking absolutely nothing like Katrin or me. Of course I didn’t tell Matron this.

  So many things fell into relief at Elmdene, and at the most unexpected moments. During one of our lengthy evening talks by the fire in the drawing room, Frau Catchpole had us discussing Himmler’s diaries. All of a sudden, I remembered that I had, for years, read and memorised parts of Clementine’s diary whenever I was at her house and she was out of the room. The memory of it came to me so fresh and vivid, yet I’d not let myself recall it until then.

  In one entry, back when we were still very young, she’d written about the robot costume Mother had made for me for the Jungmädel summer fancy dress competition. I had a cardboard box on my head and another around my middle, cardboard tubes on my arms and legs. Any exposed skin was sprayed silver. I had won first prize. Of course.

  Or rather, her mum won first prize, Clem had written. Jess could barely move, couldn’t dance about or enjoy any of the food or drink. She got told off for sweating because it made the paint run. I feel so sorry for Jess and how her parents use her as a weapon in their ugly war.

  I burst into tears, right there in the drawing room, in front of everyone.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Frau Catchpole had asked, forcing me to pretend that some passage of Herr Himmler’s memoir was so perfectly phrased that it had sent me emotional.

  To Matron, after I had got upset about handing over a baby, I said, ‘It will never happen again.’ I told her that I had got too attached to that particular child – a boy the nurses had called Sebastian – and that was why I had quivered, gone dizzy and refused to let him go. This wasn’t exactly a lie. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how those other girls felt, the valuable girls who were sent to Elmdene because they had got themselves into trouble with valuable boys. If Fisher had had his way that evening in the meeting hall …

  They arrived at Elmdene, those girls, all saucer-eyed, and full and fat, only to leave empty-handed, expected to go home and act like none of it had ever happened. Or go back to their correction camp and get back to work, fielding all the ‘Jerry Bag’ name-calling, because they’d dared to sleep with a member of male staff to get an extra bit of bread.

  They made me feel lucky. At least I didn’t have to go back anywhere and pretend.

  I have a new life.

  And it makes me see how my old life was chaotic and noisy, everything jerky and unexpected. The calm isn’t as terrifying as I’d thought. I sit with it – this quiet filled with birdsong and barking and the distant sound of tractors. Sometimes there are the voices of cows and sheep, whatever is let out to roam in the field next to ours. I let that quiet in. I don’t get out-of-body experiences any more. I don’t feel the need to sing or march or recite anything to keep the feelings at bay.

  I am Good Jessika and Bad. All of it is in me. But I am whole. And I am here.

  Still, I let myself go backwards and forwards in time occasionally and think about what might have been. If I had gone to skate camp, would I be competing for my country now? I find it hard to picture – me doing something so beautiful in the name of the Reich. To pull off a triple you need a strong belief, and without Ingrid there, I’m not sure who I would have been doing it for. Ingrid, I know, will be training some new little six-year-old now who skates like she was born with blades for feet. I think about Fisher and guess that Ruby Heigl probably swerved into his lane as soon as I left. I imagine how our marriage might have been, a lifetime of sideways glances, double-crossing and doubt. I think about Lilli and what story my parents might have told her to explain where I am. I think about what story my parents told themselves.

  My story? I run through it in my head all the time. Sometimes I pretend I am in a meeting room much like the one at the grand hotel in Trafalgar Square – carpeted, air-conditioned, air-freshened – except this one is in America. I am being detained, interrogated and counselled. I try to work out what my ideals and beliefs really are. It feels like being thrust into Red Block all over again, that moment of not knowing which version of the truth to tell. What I feel and what I should feel get mixed up. Sometimes I tell my story as if I am back in one of those white-washed roo
ms at Highpoint with the three faceless men and the tape recorder whirring. I slip into old ways of thinking as easily as I slip into my German tongue. I try desperately to get myself off the hook, only to realise that I have incriminated myself all over again.

  But usually I imagine myself telling my story to you. A girl much like me, a woman ready for life to begin – except that you have spent your life reading those magazines of Clementine’s, wearing your trousers too tight and listening to boys sing about love. It’s all nothing, I imagine you thinking. It’s all so easy that I don’t really have to think at all.

  When this gets too exhausting, I read. I disappear into other people’s worlds. When we took over the farm, the house was completely derelict. It was our job to bring it back into shape. I found a box of old books in the loft.

  ‘Maybe some of them are illegal,’ Jan suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said with a smile. ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  I’m working my way through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at the moment.

  And the coming wind did roar more loud

  And the sails did sigh like sedge.

  Perhaps the real reason I do not complain or kick back about my situation is because I see this time as penance. And there is penance more to do.

  And I am happy to do it.

  Ready.

  Deutschland erwache!

  The cat sleeps in the kitchen now. I took an old crate for her, and put a folded towel inside. She snores, because she is fat and because there is almost certainly something wrong with her nasal passages as well as her legs. She grumbles in her dreams in a way that reminds me of Wolf and makes me homesick. He is my weak spot.

  The snoring is another thing that makes Jan want to fetch his spade.

  ‘I like the sound,’ I tell him.

  ‘She rattles like she’s faulty,’ he says.

  ‘So what?’

  Jan puts his hands on his hips, watching her sleep, twisting his mouth as he tries to work out this puzzle.

  ‘She might have kittens,’ he says.

  ‘Won’t that be nice,’ I reply.

  The cat is my first victory. Softly, softly catchee monkey.

  When I left Red Block, with hugs and kisses and messages for loved ones, Clara had great expectations for me. She liked to use the image of a forest fire. That was how protest and defiance spread – fast, from one tree to the next. Clementine got her idea from Egypt, Clara said, they were all doing it there. Just one person at first, then another, then another. So who in the Greater German Reich, in England, would be next?

  I told her, ‘I’m not sure that Clementine did the right thing.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Clara gasped.

  ‘Because what good is she now?’ I said. ‘Locked up … Or worse.’

  Clara exhausted all her contacts trying to find out what happened to the Hart family. We never got anything conclusive. Sometimes I am grateful for this. If she’s not certainly dead, then she must always stay alive. Though in the camp I so often thought to myself, Death must be so much nicer than here.

  ‘She got her message out, didn’t she?’ Clara snapped back at me. ‘She ruffled some feathers.’

  But we both knew there was no revolution back in August. Not really. Only inside of me.

  ‘The strongest rebellion is to stay alive,’ I told her. ‘That way you can change things, have your say. Outnumber them.’

  In our biology textbooks at school, there was this repeated phrase alongside those images of the ‘right’ kind of families and the ‘wrong’ kind:

  Deutschland must live, even if we die!

  The same went for us, I told Clara, if we ever want to have our voices heard.

  After celebrating Christmas in Red Block, singing ‘O Tannenbaum’, though we had no tree with lovely branches to sing it to, I believed they would take me away from the camp to be executed. The inspirational poster on the wall of the factory canteen towards the end read: BEFORE THE EARTH TAKES YOU BACK, HAVE YOU MADE IT FRUITFUL? I hadn’t. For most of my life, I’d been part of the problem, not the solution. On the table, a prisoner who had eaten there long before me had etched into the wood, THEY’LL SHOOT YOU ANYWAY.

  So I couldn’t have been more surprised when they dropped me off at Elmdene, a stately rectory in the countryside with large, wood-panelled rooms, crisp white sheets, decent food and flower-filled gardens. I’d been washed clean of my sins, I’d learnt the meaning of hard work and now I was to be taught to be civilised again.

  I got proper Faith and Beauty classes after all. Eat your heart out, Angelika Baker. I became an expert in hairstyles and all those lovely dances. Cooking too, weaving, darning, flower-arranging – skills that have been almost completely useless while I’ve been living with Jan.

  I spend my days in wellies, in the company of sows, hoping that Nina is back with her piggy family somewhere. I imagine GG in the same get-up as me, wellies and overalls, only in the more glamorous company of horses. Of course I also imagine that she may not have made it to Gloucestershire, that her bus was also replaced by a large black car. But I don’t let myself dwell on that too much because I will never know the answer, just like I don’t let myself stare when Edith Bauer at the cottage down the way chats and laughs with her mother at their front gate. I will never have that either.

  In weaker moments, I doubt that the signature on the order to lock me up was genuine, and I believe that my family are still out there waiting for me to return. In stronger moments, when I can be honest with myself, I know it can’t be true. And more than that, I cannot see myself slotting back into my old position.

  I am not what I was.

  So I continue to build this new life. I have no real foundations, no clear structural plans. I’m laying bricks on top of riddles and secrets – the ones that belonged to my parents and their parents before them and their parents before them. I’m laying bricks on ghosts. It’s not the easiest task, but I’ll make it stand up if it’s the last thing I do. I have an image of how it’s going to look, at least.

  Of course, in recounting all this to you I have told you a lie. Or rather I have left out something that you might consider to be crucial.

  I did get to use the lovely dances with Jan. Once. We were driven out to the market town near Elmdene at the beginning of the year for a local festival with lights and food stalls and music. The Elmdene leaders thought it would be a good chance for us to get to know our prospective husbands. We ate giant pretzels and sipped spiced wine to keep back the cold, and then danced in the square following the shouts of the caller. ‘Allemande left! Weave the circle! Bow to your partner and blow him a kiss!’

  They had also installed an outdoor ice rink as part of the festivities. This was just beyond exciting to most of the girls. And the men – though they tried not to show it. I didn’t join in. I stood at the edge and watched as the girls tried swirling to the lilting breaths of the prelude from La Traviata, while also avoiding the daredevil knee-sliding of little boys threatening to poleaxe them at every turn. I used to think that the only place I could ever be free was on the ice. Now I believe otherwise.

  Jan refused to skate too, thinking he must keep me company. He held my hands to keep them warm. This was when I realised he had potential, that there was something in him, really in him, and that I could make him see it too in time. This is what Clementine must have thought when she first met me. I hope. Or in that moment when I did the ‘wrong thing’ and kissed her. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.

  She was the princess, I was the frog.

  Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.

  My turn.

  I have the name of the village in Cornwall memorised, and the name of the cottage too. It is in me – as if I once slipped the paper it was written on into my mouth, chewed it up and swallowed. Clementine knew I read her diary, she must have done. Why else would she have put it in there?

  One day Jan and I will go and visit,
not because I think we should escape, but because I want to convince the people who go there to stay. What will we achieve if we all run away to America? I will tell them. What will change if we do not take arms against this sea of troubles? I will make them see that the Reich cannot control our desires, which makes it a fight worth fighting. A fight we are likely to win. It will be difficult, I know, but I am trained well. For now, I must keep my head down like Ingrid, while slowly delivering knocks and taps, like I learnt from my mother. Then, when the moment is right, with a fire in my belly and in my heart, slow and steady … REVOLUTION, ARSCHLÖCHER.

  ‘I used to know a girl who was good at ice skating,’ I told Jan that evening as we watched the others slide and stumble. We had been asked not to talk about our pasts, but that didn’t seem fair. These boys were taking us on with assurances that our heritage was good and that our sins had been erased, but no actual information on what any of us had done. I felt I owed him something, even if they were exactly like us, being forced to marry to atone for the terrible things they had done before.

  ‘Really?’ said Jan, pulling my hands up to his mouth and blowing warmth into both of our gloves. I think he could see that there was something in me as well. A truth, maybe; the one that can only belong to you. ‘How good was she?’ he asked. ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Oh, she was really good,’ I told him. ‘She was really, really good.’

  GLOSSARY OF GERMAN WORDS AND PHRASES

  aber but/however

  aber ich habe einen … but I have a …

  alle in die zugeteilten Räume! Sofort! go to your designated room! Now!

  an einen Ort, von dem ich nicht zurück kommen kann somewhere I can’t come back from

  antworte mir! answer me!

  Arschlöcher arseholes

  aufstehen! get up!

  Ausgewählte Reden Selected Speeches

  Ausgewählte Reden aus der Geschichte Selected Speeches From History

  Bund league/association (as in Bund Deutscher Mädel – the League of German Girls)

  dann then