by John Boyne
Bruno nodded and walked away sadly, knowing that ‘some people’ was a grown-up’s word for ‘Father’ and one that he wasn’t supposed to use himself.
He made his way up the stairs slowly, holding onto the banister with one hand, and wondered whether the new house in the new place where the new job was would have as fine a banister to slide down as this one did. For the banister in this house stretched from the very top floor – just outside the little room where, if he stood on his tiptoes and held onto the frame of the window tightly, he could see right across Berlin – to the ground floor, just in front of the two enormous oak doors. And Bruno liked nothing better than to get on board the banister at the top floor and slide his way through the house, making whooshing sounds as he went.
Down from the top floor to the next one, where Mother and Father’s room was, and the large bathroom, and where he wasn’t supposed to be in any case.
Down to the next floor, where his own room was, and Gretel’s room too, and the smaller bathroom which he was supposed to use more often than he really did.
Down to the ground floor, where you fell off the end of the banister and had to land flat on your two feet or it was five points against you and you had to start all over again.
The banister was the best thing about this house – that and the fact that Grandfather and Grandmother lived so near by – and when he thought about that it made him wonder whether they were coming to the new job too and he presumed that they were because they could hardly be left behind. No one needed Gretel much because she was a Hopeless Case – it would be a lot easier if she stayed to look after the house – but Grandfather and Grandmother? Well, that was an entirely different matter.
Bruno went up the stairs slowly towards his room, but before going inside he looked back down towards the ground floor and saw Mother entering Father’s office, which faced the dining room – and was Out Of Bounds At All Times And No Exceptions – and he heard her speaking loudly to him until Father spoke louder than Mother could and that put a stop to their conversation. Then the door of the office closed and Bruno couldn’t hear any more so he thought it would be a good idea if he went back to his room and took over the packing from Maria, because otherwise she might pull all his belongings out of the wardrobe without any care or consideration, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody else’s business.
When he first saw their new house Bruno’s eyes opened wide, his mouth made the shape of an O and his arms stretched out at his sides once again. Everything about it seemed to be the exact opposite of their old home and he couldn’t believe that they were really going to live there.
The house in Berlin had stood on a quiet street and alongside it were a handful of other big houses like his own, and it was always nice to look at them because they were almost the same as his house but not quite, and other boys lived in them who he played with (if they were friends) or steered clear of (if they were trouble). The new house, however, stood all on its own in an empty, desolate place and there were no other houses anywhere to be seen, which meant there would be no other families around and no other boys to play with, neither friends nor trouble.
The house in Berlin was enormous, and even though he’d lived there for nine years he was still able to find nooks and crannies that he hadn’t fully finished exploring yet. There were even whole rooms – such as Father’s office, which was Out Of Bounds At All Times And No Exceptions – that he had barely been inside. However, the new house had only three floors: a top floor where all three bedrooms were and only one bathroom, a ground floor with a kitchen, a dining room and a new office for Father (which, he presumed, had the same restrictions as the old one), and a basement where the servants slept.
All around the house in Berlin were other streets of large houses, and when you walked towards the centre of town there were always people strolling along and stopping to chat to each other or rushing around and saying they had no time to stop, not today, not when they had a hundred and one things to do. There were shops with bright store fronts, and fruit and vegetable stalls with big trays piled high with cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers and corn. Some were overspilling with leeks and mushrooms, turnips and sprouts; others with lettuce and green beans, courgettes and parsnips. Sometimes he liked to stand in front of these stalls and close his eyes and breathe in their aromas, feeling his head grow dizzy with the mixed scents of sweetness and life. But there were no other streets around the new house, no one strolling along or rushing around, and definitely no shops or fruit and vegetable stalls. When he closed his eyes, everything around him just felt empty and cold, as if he was in the loneliest place in the world. The middle of nowhere.
In Berlin there had been tables set out on the street, and sometimes when he walked home from school with Karl, Daniel and Martin there would be men and women sitting at them, drinking frothy drinks and laughing loudly; the people who sat at these tables must be very funny people, he always thought, because it didn’t matter what they said, somebody always laughed. But there was something about the new house that made Bruno think that no one ever laughed there; that there was nothing to laugh at and nothing to be happy about.
‘I think this was a bad idea,’ said Bruno a few hours after they arrived, while Maria was unpacking his suitcases upstairs. (Maria wasn’t the only maid at the new house either: there were three others who were quite skinny and only ever spoke to each other in whispering voices. There was an old man too who, he was told, was there to prepare the vegetables every day and wait on them at the dinner table, and who looked very unhappy but also a little angry.)
‘We don’t have the luxury of thinking,’ said Mother, opening a box that contained the set of sixty-four glasses that Grandfather and Grandmother had given her when she married Father. ‘Some people make all the decisions for us.’
Bruno didn’t know what she meant by that so he pretended that she’d never said it at all. ‘I think this was a bad idea,’ he repeated. ‘I think the best thing to do would be to forget all about this and just go back home. We can chalk it up to experience,’ he added, a phrase he had learned recently and was determined to use as often as possible.
Mother smiled and put the glasses down carefully on the table. ‘I have another phrase for you,’ she said. ‘It’s that we have to make the best of a bad situation.’
‘Well, I don’t know that we do,’ said Bruno. ‘I think you should just tell Father that you’ve changed your mind and, well, if we have to stay here for the rest of the day and have dinner here this evening and sleep here tonight because we’re all tired, then that’s all right, but we should probably get up early in the morning if we’re to make it back to Berlin by tea-time tomorrow.’
Mother sighed. ‘Bruno, why don’t you just go upstairs and help Maria unpack?’ she asked.
‘But there’s no point unpacking if we’re only going to—’
‘Bruno, just do it, please!’ snapped Mother, because apparently it was all right if she interrupted him but it didn’t work the other way round. ‘We’re here, we’ve arrived, this is our home for the foreseeable future and we just have to make the best of things. Do you understand me?’
He didn’t understand what the ‘foreseeable future’ meant and told her so.
‘It means that this is where we live now, Bruno,’ said Mother. ‘And that’s an end to it.’
Bruno had a pain in his stomach and he could feel something growing inside him, something that when it worked its way up from the lowest depths inside him to the outside world would either make him shout and scream that the whole thing was wrong and unfair and a big mistake for which somebody would pay one of these days, or just make him burst into tears instead. He couldn’t understand how this had all come about. One day he was perfectly content, playing at home, having three best friends for life, sliding down banisters, trying to stand on his tiptoes to see right across Berlin, and now he was stuck here in this cold, nasty house with three whispering maids
and a waiter who was both unhappy and angry, where no one looked as if they could ever be cheerful again.
‘Bruno, I want you to go upstairs and unpack and I want you to do it now,’ said Mother in an unfriendly voice, and he knew that she meant business so he turned round and marched away without another word. He could feels tears springing up behind his eyes but he was determined that he wouldn’t allow them to appear.
He went upstairs and turned slowly around in a full circle, hoping he might find a small door or cubby hole where a decent amount of exploration could eventually be done, but there wasn’t one. On his floor there were just four doors, two on either side, facing each other. A door into his room, a door into Gretel’s room, a door into Mother and Father’s room, and a door into the bathroom.
‘This isn’t home and it never will be,’ he muttered under his breath as he went through his own door to find all his clothes scattered on the bed and the boxes of toys and books not even unpacked yet. It was obvious that Maria did not have her priorities right.
‘Mother sent me to help,’ he said quietly, and Maria nodded and pointed towards a big bag that contained all his socks and vests and underpants.
‘If you sort that lot out, you could put them in the chest of drawers over there,’ she said, pointing towards an ugly chest that stood across the room beside a mirror that was covered in dust.
Bruno sighed and opened the bag; it was full to the brim with his underwear and he wanted nothing more than to crawl inside it and hope that when he climbed out again he’d have woken up and be back home again.
‘What do you think of all this, Maria?’ he asked after a long silence because he had always liked Maria and felt as if she was one of the family, even though Father said she was just a maid and overpaid at that.
‘All what?’ she asked.
‘This,’ he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Coming to a place like this. Don’t you think we’ve made a big mistake?’
‘That’s not for me to say, Master Bruno,’ said Maria. ‘Your mother has explained to you about your father’s job and—’
‘Oh, I’m tired of hearing about Father’s job,’ said Bruno, interrupting her. ‘That’s all we ever hear about, if you ask me. Father’s job this and Father’s job that. Well, if Father’s job means that we have to move away from our house and the sliding banister and my three best friends for life, then I think Father should think twice about his job, don’t you?’
Just at that moment there was a creak outside in the hallway and Bruno looked up to see the door of Mother and Father’s room opening slightly. He froze, unable to move for a moment. Mother was still downstairs, which meant that Father was in there and he might have heard everything that Bruno had just said. He watched the door, hardly daring to breathe, wondering whether Father might come through it and take him downstairs for a serious talking-to.
The door opened wider and Bruno stepped back as a figure appeared, but it wasn’t Father. It was a much younger man, and not as tall as Father either, but he wore the same type of uniform, only without as many decorations on it. He looked very serious and his cap was secured tightly on his head. Around his temples Bruno could see that he had very blond hair, an almost unnatural shade of yellow. He was carrying a box in his hands and walking towards the staircase, but he stopped for a moment when he saw Bruno standing there watching him. He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs. Instead he gave Bruno a quick nod and continued on his way.
‘Who was that?’ asked Bruno. The young man had seemed so serious and busy that he assumed he must be someone very important.
‘One of your father’s soldiers, I suppose,’ said Maria, who had stood up very straight when the young man appeared and held her hands before her like a person in prayer. She had stared down at the ground rather than at his face, as if she was afraid she might be turned to stone if she looked directly at him; she only relaxed when he had gone. ‘We’ll get to know them in time.’
‘I don’t think I like him,’ said Bruno. ‘He was too serious.’
‘Your father is very serious too,’ said Maria.
‘Yes, but he’s Father,’ explained Bruno. ‘Fathers are supposed to be serious. It doesn’t matter whether they’re greengrocers or teachers or chefs or commandants,’ he said, listing all the jobs that he knew decent, respectable fathers did and whose titles he had thought about a thousand times. ‘And I don’t think that man looked like a father. Although he was very serious, that’s for sure.’
‘Well, they have very serious jobs,’ said Maria with a sigh. ‘Or so they think anyway. But if I was you I’d steer clear of the soldiers.’
‘I don’t see what else there is to do other than that,’ said Bruno sadly. ‘I don’t even think there’s going to be anyone to play with other than Gretel, and what fun is that after all? She’s a Hopeless Case.’
He felt as if he was about to cry again but stopped himself, not wanting to look like a baby in front of Maria. He looked around the room without fully lifting his eyes up from the ground, trying to see whether there was anything of interest to be found. There wasn’t. Or there didn’t seem to be. But then one thing caught his eye. Over in the corner of the room opposite the door there was a window in the ceiling that stretched down into the wall, a little like the one on the top floor of the house in Berlin, only not so high. Bruno looked at it and thought that he might be able to see out without even having to stand on tiptoes.
He walked slowly towards it, hoping that from here he might be able to see all the way back to Berlin and his house and the streets around it and the tables where the people sat and drank their frothy drinks and told each other hilarious stories. He walked slowly because he didn’t want to be disappointed. But it was just a small boy’s room and there was only so far he could walk before he arrived at the window. He put his face to the glass and saw what was out there, and this time when his eyes opened wide and his mouth made the shape of an O, his hands stayed by his sides because something made him feel very cold and unsafe.
Bruno was sure that it would have made a lot more sense if they had left Gretel behind in Berlin to look after the house because she was nothing but trouble. In fact he had heard her described on any number of occasions as being Trouble From Day One.
Gretel was three years older than Bruno and she had made it clear to him from as far back as he could remember that when it came to the ways of the world, particularly any events within that world that concerned the two of them, she was in charge. Bruno didn’t like to admit that he was a little scared of her, but if he was honest with himself – which he always tried to be – he would have admitted that he was.
She had some nasty habits, as was to be expected from sisters. She spent far too long in the bathroom in the mornings for one thing, and didn’t seem to mind if Bruno was left outside, hopping from foot to foot, desperate to go.
She had a large collection of dolls positioned on shelves around her room that stared at Bruno when he went inside and followed him around, watching whatever he did. He was sure that if he went exploring in her room when she was out of the house, they would report back to her on everything he did. She had some very unpleasant friends too, who seemed to think that it was clever to make fun of him, a thing he never would have done if he had been three years older than her. All Gretel’s unpleasant friends seemed to enjoy nothing more than torturing him and said nasty things to him whenever Mother or Maria were nowhere in sight.
‘Bruno’s not nine, he’s only six,’ said one particular monster over and over again in a sing-song voice, dancing around him and poking him in the ribs.
‘I’m not six, I’m nine,’ he protested, trying to get away.
‘Then why are you so small?’ asked the monster. ‘All the other nine-year-olds are bigger than you.’
This was true, and a particular sore point for Bruno. It w
as a source of constant disappointment to him that he wasn’t as tall as any of the other boys in his class. In fact he only came up to their shoulders. Whenever he walked along the streets with Karl, Daniel and Martin, people sometimes mistook him for the younger brother of one of them when in fact he was the second oldest.
‘So you must be only six,’ insisted the monster, and Bruno would run away and do his stretching exercises and hope that he would wake up one morning and have grown an extra foot or two.
So one good thing about not being in Berlin any more was the fact that none of them would be around to torture him. Perhaps if he was forced to stay at the new house for a while, even as long as a month, he would have grown by the time they returned home and then they wouldn’t be able to be mean to him any more. It was something to keep in mind anyway if he wanted to do what Mother had suggested and make the best of a bad situation.
He ran into Gretel’s room without knocking and discovered her placing her civilization of dolls on various shelves around the room.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she shouted, spinning round. ‘Don’t you know you don’t enter a lady’s room without knocking?’
‘You didn’t bring all your dolls with you, surely?’ asked Bruno, who had developed a habit of ignoring most of his sister’s questions and asking a few of his own in their place.
‘Of course I did,’ she replied. ‘You don’t think I’d have left them at home? Why, it could be weeks before we’re back there again.’
‘Weeks?’ said Bruno, sounding disappointed but secretly pleased because he’d resigned himself to the idea of spending a month there. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Well, I asked Father and he said we would be here for the foreseeable future.’
