The German Boy Read online

  On the drive back to the hotel, Maud fell asleep. George tucked her against him and Christina leaned into his other side, feeling his warmth even through the overcoat.

  Elisabeth drove too fast, grinding through the gears of Mr McCrae’s Hillman as if she had forgotten how to drive.

  The rain stopped, smoke hung above farmhouses and cottages, and faraway cut-out hills held up the granite clouds. Stefan sat in the front and Christina watched him gaze at the road ahead, with his profile against the greening evening sky, lit up sometimes by the headlamps of another car or the lamp on a pony cart going home. She had never seen a boy so shocking or so beautiful as this white-skinned, bruise-eyed German.

  After a while, the hills and the sky became a single black. The car bumped along a track and the windows of the hotel flashed through the trees. Mrs McCrae was there to welcome them. The yellow light from the open door tapered away into the darkness.

  ‘Mr Mander, here you are at last!’ she said, clasping her meaty hands beneath her bosom and beaming as if George’s arrival was a relief for her as well. She reared back a little when she saw Stefan. ‘Good evening to you too, young man.’

  They all bunched together beneath the dusty stag’s head in the hall while Mrs McCrae gave directions about supper, addressing only George. Christina was used to this. Women liked her father, especially old trouts like McCrae.

  • • •

  Stefan went up to his room and fell asleep. He didn’t wake up for supper, or for breakfast the next morning, or for lunch. Maud loitered by his door, kicked it softly, leaned on it, picked at the whorls in the wood. ‘When’s he coming out?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Christina. ‘He’s hibernating. He’s been fighting in the war and his side lost.’ She took Maud’s hand and they went downstairs to the guests’ sitting room which looked across a lake to hills. Veils of rain washed out the colours. From time to time the clouds pulled apart to show a rag of sky miles up and solid blue, the sun shone through and everything turned opalescent. A rainbow sent Maud speeding for her boots and coat although by the time she had them on, the clouds had swollen up again, the rain had come back and the miracle had gone.

  ‘No one’s doing anything. What shall we do? He just sleeps.’

  ‘What do you want to do, Maudie-mouse?’ Christina said. She patted the sofa and Maud sat beside her.

  ‘Will he live with us?’ Maud asked.

  ‘Yes, but he’s going away to school.’

  ‘Is he the enemy?’

  ‘He was, but he isn’t any more.’

  ‘This is the nastiest holiday we’ve ever had,’ Maud said, blowing upwards at her fringe.

  ‘I know.’ Christina pulled Maud on to her lap. ‘Shall I read my book to you?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Valerie Learns to Love.’

  Maud put her thumb in her mouth, leaning in, and her head beneath Christina’s chin smelled faintly of biscuits.

  Upstairs, Elisabeth and George were talking in their room – the subject would be Stefan. It didn’t matter what the details were, Christina knew it would go like this: George says it will be all right and Elisabeth says he just isn’t seeing that it won’t. George irons his hair with the flat of his palm, tests his chin for stubble and watches Elisabeth as if she is a vase about to topple off a shelf. Elisabeth twirls her earrings, fiddles with her hanky or her buttons. Her eyes have their barricaded look. Later, they will call a halt and come down for tea, but for the afternoon Christina is left with Maud.

  Christina tired of skipping the paragraphs where Valerie was kissed. Maud got tired of listening, yawned and slid off the sofa to select a jigsaw puzzle from the cupboard. She tipped the pieces on the carpet, stirred them with her hands, sat back on her narrow haunches. Her pale lemon hair lit up the gloom.

  After a while Mrs McCrae came in to feed a morsel of coal to the fire and as she bent, her tweed skirt creaked, so did her brogues, then she rearranged the pearls on her fawn three-ply bust and went out.

  Christina pondered on what Mrs McCrae had beneath her cardigan; bosoms should be separate and pointed, as conical as possible. She hoped hers shaped up like Joan Fontaine’s in The Constant Nymph and not like Mrs McCrae’s.

  Christina curled inside the brocade walls of the sofa, opened her book again and listened to the rain stop, start, stop, start, forgetting to turn the page because her eyes were closing with the soporific wheezing of the fire which was miserly with heat and generous with smoke. She leaned her head on her arms and thought of Stefan, who couldn’t wake up. His sleep was trickling down between the floorboards of his room and down the staircase, piling up until she couldn’t move and it didn’t seem to matter any more if the rain went on forever.

  2

  There was a time when Stefan thought he wouldn’t ever sleep again because his body had turned to light. He was a soldier for the Fatherland. The enemy’s tanks rolled into Germany, but there was no question of defeat and glorious would be the victory in which every citizen of the Reich would have equal honour. The Führer needed everyone to fight.

  When Stefan’s Hitlerjugend troop were given a bottle of orange squash and a paper bag of bread and sausage and put on a school bus to the Front, boys were snivelling and whimpering because it was late at night and they ought to be in bed.

  They woke up when the bus halted and they staggered out, huddling together and staring at blooms of red light low down in the sky. The driver threw their knapsacks in the mud and drove away. The night air was warm as if they had arrived in a resort, and after a while two soldiers came and shone a torch in their sleepy faces one by one.

  ‘The Führer sends his greetings to you, boys.’ The voice was kind and cultured, although it sounded glum. ‘He commends your courage and your loyalty.’

  ‘Jesus! Look at them. They’re just kids,’ said the other. ‘Smarten up!’ he barked. They were too tired to notice which way they were going.

  After that, if they forgot to double-tie their laces or tuck in their shirts, it didn’t matter because muddles in the dark with ammunition and equipment were worse. They killed each other sometimes by mistake.

  At first the terror curdled in their guts. Stefan’s lungs would fill in gulps because his heart was kicking his ribs like a rabbit in a sack, but after a while the fear wore itself out and Death seemed almost beautiful if he didn’t turn away.

  The diagrams on the blackboard at school hadn’t shown the multitude of membranes, cords and liquids that make up a dying thing, nor did the drawings in a text book illustrate the intensity of colours or the possibilities of pain. Every creature was astonishing when the flesh and brains and organs were opened up, although one corpse looked much like any other; a dismantled soldier had innards like a pony, which were also like the giblets of a girl, or a dog, or a piglet, or a baby. Size and quantity were the only differences. Flesh had different textures if one paid attention. Burned black, it was all the same.

  One night, he collided blindly with a piece of twisted iron and his throat was holed. He swallowed down the blood then couldn’t swallow anything. So his death would be starvation, an ending to his life he hadn’t thought of.

  Soon after, a grinning Yank relieved him of his rifle and his ammunition, patted him on the head and told him to run home to his mother. They wouldn’t even take him prisoner. Stefan was saved the humiliation of his angry tears because he fainted. He was taken to a field hospital, stitched up and fed with a bottle like a baby, then they told him to go home.

  His home had turned into a mound of rubble in a rubble street. Freckled Gerda Seffert sat on an armchair in the road twitching like a rat, with scabs around her mouth and sores on both her filthy knees. ‘You look a mess,’ she told him, flicking her plaits. ‘If you need a place to stay, there’re lots of us from BDM and we’ve got a house in Müllerstrasse. There’s a hole in the roof but you’re very welcome.’

  ‘Have soldiers been here yet?’

  ‘Oh, yes, they found us all, even
if we hid.’ She flicked her plaits again. ‘Some girls tried to fight but there wasn’t any point and there were ladies who wiped themselves with muck or pretended to be men but that was stupid too. It didn’t work. The soldiers have all gone now.’

  Gerda said her mother died six months ago. Frau Seffert had been knitting with the other Party wives when the siren went. She said she would be along when she finished off her row – it was a pattern with a complicated double-cable and the shelter was only round the corner. Besides, Frau Seffert said, the siren was often a mistake. That time it wasn’t.

  ‘Your Mutti isn’t here either,’ Gerda told him. The muscle working in her jaw warned him not to ask. ‘We have a coal hole for our shelter in Müllerstrasse,’ she said. ‘It’s very safe.’

  ‘The bombs are finished, Gerda.’

  ‘I knew we’d win,’ she said. ‘Heil Hitler.’

  When there couldn’t be defeat, he didn’t sleep; now Germany had lost, he could do nothing else. In the enemy’s bed, under a pink floral eiderdown, sleep shot him through the eyes and knocked him senseless.

  He woke to see the fold of a blanket, the mountain range of his feet against the horizon of a footboard. He stretched away so many miles into the distance his brain could not locate his legs. A bluish light which could be evening or dawn came through the curtains and rain pattered on the window. He heard something else as he climbed up out of sleep – the sound of stones grinding under boots – but the noise turned into his own breath rasping up and down his windpipe.

  He needed to relieve himself and with the thought he sat up. The strangeness of the movement made him dizzy. He waited for the room to right itself, drank down a glass of water from the bedside table and got out of bed.

  He was a tottering old man wearing pyjamas he’d never seen before. The jacket was damp so he put on the clean one which had been left folded on a chair, and then a dressing gown as heavy as a greatcoat. This needed to be organized around him, crossed over at the front and tied with a cord at the waist. These tasks took concentration and endurance.

  He remembered he’d done this before but how many times he didn’t know; he had shuffled along the passageway to the freezing green-tiled lavatory, then retraced his steps, hand over hand along the wall like a mountaineer.

  When he returned this time, his aunt was in the room, standing by the window with a shawl around her shoulders. ‘Hello, Stefan,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought up some supper for you. You must be terribly hungry.’ He got back into bed in the dressing gown, annoyed that she was treating him like a child. She had plumped his pillows and smoothed the sheet. ‘You have a fever, haven’t you? All this sleep should do you good but you must eat,’ she said, sitting down on the bed, on his feet. She jumped up, apologizing on and on as if her weight could hurt him. She sat down again, carefully this time, and fussed with the fringe on her shawl. ‘We’ve met before, you and I, when you were very small. Almost three, I think you were. You spoke some English even then.’

  ‘I do not remember.’

  ‘I met your father too. He loved your mother very much – and you too of course.’

  Stefan had no memory of a time when his father and his mother loved each other. He sweated in the heavy dressing gown. This aunt, Elisabeth, was not young but she was not old either. She was wearing lipstick and scent. He didn’t know what to say.

  Her eyes flickered across his chest, then to a pack of cigarettes and lighter on the bedside table, and she said, ‘All soldiers smoke, I expect.’

  ‘No. Not all. An American gave me the Zippo. It is very good. Useful.’

  ‘I expect you’re practical, Stefan. I’d say you’re the kind of person who doesn’t keep digging over his life looking for the heart of it.’

  He didn’t know what she meant. Anyway, the heart of it was gone. He lit a cigarette. It seemed like weeks since he’d had a smoke.

  ‘When your mother was a little girl she pulled up seedlings to see if they were growing. That was just like her. She was impatient for things to happen.’ Elisabeth lifted her chin and discreetly blew away the smoke. ‘She needed to know if something was going to work – turn out the way she wanted. It doesn’t do any good to rush things, don’t you think? It disturbs life’s possibilities before they’ve taken root.’

  Stefan felt the oddness of this scene, this sudden promotion to adulthood. A woman was sitting on his bed and talking to him like a lover in a cinema film.

  ‘But then how can you know,’ she went on, ‘if something is right until it’s in the past and then it’s too late? Nothing happens the same way twice so we can’t learn by our mistakes – we just go on and on making different ones.’

  He had no idea if she was talking about herself, or him, or the war – or nothing in particular, just words to fill the silence.

  ‘Do you know how you’d like your life to be, Stefan?’ she asked.

  ‘I want to serve my country,’ he said and knew at once he had disappointed her. She was offering him a conversation as equals and he had lost his nerve. He sounded like a kindergarten boy who had rehearsed for a ceremony at his local Jungvolk group, but the words were fixed in his head and this was still the only answer.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘The Fatherland. Glorious Germany.’

  ‘It is not any more.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry, that was unkind of me. You must be angry at being lied to, at being forced to fight.’

  ‘I was not forced.’ He had to stop her asking questions. ‘I have a present for you,’ he said. He got out of bed and went to his trunk – the effort was not so great after a cigarette – and handed her a roll of cloth.

  In the cloth was a tattered piece of canvas. It was a painting of a girl with long copper hair, walking from sunshine into a shady village square. A man sat at a café table under trees watching the girl who was holding down her summer skirt with one hand and her sunhat with the other. A breeze had caught her hair which flickered like a flame against the bright blue sky.

  Elisabeth stared at the painting. ‘It’s me,’ she said at last.

  In the corner were initials and a date, M. R. 1929. Mazamet, Languedoc was written in pencil on the back.

  ‘You must know the place, Mazamet,’ Stefan said.

  ‘No. I’ve never been to France.’

  ‘Then you know the artist, this M. R.?’ She didn’t reply and he wondered if she hadn’t heard him. ‘You know this painter?’

  ‘Michael Ross. It’s Michael,’ she said.

  So she knew the Jew. Stefan let some moments pass. ‘He is a friend?’

  She looked up. ‘A friend?’ She touched the initials with her finger. ‘No.’

  Stefan saw her mind circling round the puzzle of a picture of herself in a place she had never been. ‘It is a good picture, is it not?’ he said.

  Elisabeth didn’t answer. After all her talking, now she had nothing to say.

  • • •

  In the evening, Elisabeth took up a tray of food to Stefan. When she came down again, she sat at the table where they were waiting and poured a glass of water. George passed her a gin and tonic. Her hair was brushed back, she wore a knitted shawl to confound the draughts which marched across the dining room, corduroy trousers that had lost their shape, scarlet lipstick and too much Evening in Paris. She looked as if she meant to put on a dress and then forgot. Christina knew her mother’s mind was on something far away. George tested his chin for stubble.

  Mrs McCrae lifted a lid and released a waft of haddock soup which extinguished Evening in Paris in a single gust, and Elisabeth angled her spoon and dipped. No one moved.

  ‘Where is he?’ Maud asked eventually. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘I left the tray. He’s sleeping.’ Elisabeth fastened off the words so neatly they all understood there would be no loose end of information to discuss. The German boy was still asleep.

  That night, creatures blunder in the dark below Christina’s bedroom window. They must be deer or catt
le but they sound like elephants. They groan as if they are bereaved. They cough deeply from the chest.

  All afternoon she could barely stay awake, now she can’t sleep. Her pillow has a lump and the sides-to-middle seam she’s lying on vexes her. She stretches out her legs which ache from being bent up to her chest for warmth but retracts them swiftly because the far end of the bed is the Arctic Ocean. The room is black and there’s only the silvery ceiling for her eyes to play with. Cracks in the plaster make a map of tributaries and rivers which she examines from one side to the other, and halfway across there’s a spider, not moving, biding its time. Maud is sleeping underneath it.

  Christina’s ears grow huge and they swivel to catch any noise that might be scuttling in the dark. The quiet throbs, then she picks up minuscule noises travelling along the water pipes. An orchestra plays faintly inside the radiator; someone in another room must be listening to a wireless and the music is being broadcast by the plumbing.

  Christina’s ears identify a sound she can only hear if she stays completely still. The sound isn’t directional and whichever way she faces it comes from somewhere else, from under the floorboards, from behind the wardrobe, down through the ceiling. It is someone breathing, but it sounds like a saw against a piece of stone.

  • • •

  The next morning, after breakfast, they stepped outside into the unexpected brightness of a sunny day. Elisabeth put her arm through George’s and they blinked at the clashing colours of the hills. Crocuses had opened up, birds were singing and damselflies bounced above the puddles on the path. There was no wind to disturb the crystal sky. ‘This is a day to be born,’ George said in the way he had of giving poetry to plain words.

  Two sets of footprints tracked down the slope of dewy grass to the lake where Maud squatted on a rock with her hem in the water, examining something in her cupped hands. Christina stood beside her, arms folded, hips at a tilt. She dipped in the toe of her shoe and gazed out across the lake, pushing back her hair, which was the colour Elisabeth’s used to be – always admired by old ladies and never fashionable. George told Christina she was a Titian angel. Christina said she was cursed and orange hair didn’t go with anything except orange clothes.