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Catherine Chidgey has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

About the Author

Catherine Chidgey was born in 1970. She has degrees in creative writing, psychology and German literature and lived in Berlin for three years. Her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church (‘Warm, subtle and evocative’ Louis de Bernières), won the South East Asia and Pacific Region Prize in the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Betty Trask Prize and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Golden Deeds, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, followed by The Transformation (‘As beautiful as it is terrifying’ Sunday Express) in 2006. Chidgey lives in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand.

About the Book

Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Siggi lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words (‘promise’, ‘love’, ‘mercy’). Erich is an only child living a lush rural life, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions.

Drawn together as Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theatre amidst the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days Siggi and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.

Watching over Siggi and Erich is the wish child, the mysterious narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the wreckage of a nation’s dream.

To Tracey Slaughter

… everything created

Deserves to be annihilated;

Better, then, if nothing began.

Mephistopheles, Part I Scene III, Faust, Goethe

Let me say that I was not in the world long enough to understand it well, so can give you only impressions, like the shapes left in rock by long-decayed leaves, or the pencil rubbings of doves and skulls that are but flimsy memories of stone. Just these little smudges, these traces of light and shadow, these breaths in and out. They feel like mine.

Sieglinde is shuffling and turning the pieces of paper, releasing the scent of old typewriter ribbons and pencil sharpenings, rubber stamps and vinyl chairs, ink pads, carbon paper. There are shelves of destroyed documents, rooms of them, ripped apart in the last frantic days of the GDR and crammed into sacks. Some are simple to reconstruct, torn only in two or four, and you can read whole sentences, even paragraphs – but others are in pieces no bigger than postage stamps and bear mere fragments of words. There is no telling what will emerge from the sacks; no way of predicting whose life she will pull out in tatters. One day it’s a university student who told a joke about Honecker; the next it’s a housewife whose parcels sent from friends in the West betrayed clear capitalist leanings: aluminium foil, instant pudding. There’s a train driver who refused to let a camera be pointed from his apartment towards his neighbour’s, and so was monitored for years himself. A mother who let her son grow his hair long and wear jeans to school. A teenager who covered her bedroom walls with pictures of Michael Jackson. The intercepted letters are the easiest to put back together, the phrases well-worn, expected: I miss you. I love you. I wish I could see you. Sieglinde spends a week reconstructing a drawing of someone’s apartment – it’s a detailed floor plan, viewed as if from above, as if the roof has been cut away to let you see into every room at once. It shows all the furniture down to the last footstool, and all the electrical fittings, and the measurements of every wall. There is even a newspaper on a coffee table and a cat asleep on an armchair; everything is there but the people. She finds photographs in the sacks, too: Polaroids of rumpled sheets, books in a bookcase, dishes left to soak in a kitchen sink – a record of the ordinary, so that after a search it could all be put back in the right place and nobody would notice a thing. Sometimes she pauses over these small domestic scenes, tracing with a finger the crinkles in lace curtains tied into bunches, the eddy of an unmade bed.

She has developed her own system, as all the puzzlers have. She lifts the scraps from the bags as gently as possible to preserve the original strata, sorting them according to size, paper colour, texture, weight, as well as typeface or handwriting, before fitting ragged edge to ragged edge to restore the destroyed file. It can take days to complete a single page, and always there are pieces she cannot home, holes she cannot fill. Sixteen thousand sacks, six hundred million scraps of paper – it will take centuries to finish – but she trains herself to focus only on the snippets in front of her, to find the patterns, the matches. She knows she is running out of time; soon she will retire, and she will return to her old life in Berlin, give notice to the student who is subletting her apartment. She pushes herself to work as quickly as possible, restoring the stories of ordinary people, watching the puzzles decipher themselves beneath her hands. And always, in the back of her mind, the puzzle that has never left her: Erich Kröning. She searches for him in every file, her heart turning over when she thinks she sees his name – though it is never the right Erich, never her Erich; of course not. I’m not telling that sort of story; I can’t put everything back together.

I don’t know whether the little bones,

Rinsed by the sea, will tangle together,

Or whether, wrapped in clouds,

They will reach for music and .

I know that without fragrance,

Like fingers stiff in the joints,

Offer no magic

For which the living call in sleep.

The Krönings rose earlier than usual, though everything was already in order: the pathways were swept, flowers cut and arranged, windows polished until the glass all but disappeared. In the fields the wheat grew straight and golden and in the orchard the bees were waking in their hives. The living-room curtains shifted a little of their own accord – was a window loose? Was there a draught? Emilie and her husband Christoph sat in each chair in turn and pretended to be guests, looking at their home through outside eyes. The sun was not yet up, the rooster only just beginning to crow, but they suspected it would be a stifling day. It was sensible to be prepared for the visit, to allow themselves time to check that nothing was out of place. Perhaps they had not noticed that the fringe of a carpet was tangled, or that the blessing hung askew; perhaps a clock needed winding or a cushion punching back into shape – but no, all was correct: flowers in the vases, wheat in the fields, bees in the hives and Mein Kampf on the shelf.

When they were satisfied with the house, the Krönings began to prepare themselves. Emilie sat at her mirror and parted and braided her pale blond hair, pinning it into place so it would not move. She could feel her scalp and the fine skin at her temples pulling, but the sensation was quite bearable. She was proud of her hair; it hung to the small of her back when she brushed it out, and the strands of her braids were as thick as thumbs.

‘I’ll give you my skin if you give me your hair,’ her sister Uschi used to say when they shared a bedroom.

She pinched a little blood into her cheeks now and smoothed her church dress over her slim hips. You really could not tell she was a mother. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said to her reflection. ‘Thank you for considering our case.’ You-you, you, the turtle dove called from the forest. You-you, you. The sound drifted to Emilie’s window and seemed to float there in the indistinct early morning. The day had not yet decided what it would become.

She watched Christoph splash his razor in the water. He paused to wipe steam from the mirror – he kept disappearing – and then he held taut the skin of his throat. He was a tall, sinewy man; he had to crouch to see himself. He frowned away a lock of sandy hair that fell forward into his eyes, giving Emilie a small smile when he noticed her looking at him. The sound of the blade against his flesh called to Emilie’s mind the first rasp of fire burning off a spent crop. In a way she regretted those blazes – a certain melancholy rose in her as she watched the remains of a harvest begin to crumple and vanish – but unless you cleared away waste matter there could be no new growth, and any small sentiment always passed once the flames had burst and spread. Christoph smoothed his hair down with water, flattening the curls at his brow. The little scar above his eye was pale in the early light, almost invisible, though as summer wore on and his skin turned browner it would show itself more. His father had been teaching him how to use the scythe and Christoph had stepped too close. His mother still fussed over it: if it had been half a centimetre lower … Sometimes Emilie touched it with her long, cool fingers and said the same thing.

At breakfast the Krönings sliced open their rolls and spread them with butter and jam while their wedding clock tutted at them from the far wall. Today the little woman had swung out from the clock’s insides to tell them that rain was on the way, but it didn’t feel like it. The oilcloth table-cover caught the pale light from the window to the north and lay cool beneath their wrists. They took measured bites, neither hurrying nor dawdling. The guest was not getting into Leipzig until after ten. There was plenty of time.

‘The apricot is very good too,’ said Christoph. ‘Though I prefer the cherry.’

The guest arrives just as the wedding clock strikes eleven: a tall, well-groomed man with dark hair and a calm voice. He looks like the kind of man who always knows what to say. He looks like the kind of man who would take your hand if you were lost and make sure you got home safely. He wears an expensive black suit instead of a uniform, but his Party badge glitters on his lapel. Christoph conducts him to the chair they have deemed the most suitable and Emilie lifts the cover from the bee-sting cake.

‘I’m afraid I have very little time,’ the guest begins, but Emilie is already reaching for the knife.

‘It’s made with our own honey,’ she says. ‘My husband will show you the hives later. His father carved them himself – they’re the traditional kind, in the shape of people.’ She hands him a plate and an embroidered serviette. ‘And you must see our copse of larches – Christoph planted them in 1933, to celebrate the election. In autumn they’re quite something.’

They pause to eat their slices of cake, and for a moment it seems the guest might choke on a sliver of almond – but he gives a little cough and everything is fine.

‘We can, of course, show you the nursery,’ says Emilie. ‘If you think it would help.’

‘We’d like the matter dealt with swiftly,’ says Christoph. ‘To prevent further suffering.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ says Emilie as they see him off. ‘Thank you for considering our case.’

Yes, he is kind and fair; after he has gone, the Krönings agree that this is so. And then they return to their work.

But this is where I’ll start: some weeks later, when the absurd man with the absurd moustache calls off the Peace Rally so he can send his troops into Poland.

The war begins punctually and according to plan. Sieglinde Heilmann, six years of age, sits with her parents and brothers and listens as the voice from the radio crackles through their Berlin apartment, a fire taking hold of its fuel.

I see her father Gottlieb pinching the antenna between his thumb and forefinger and hunting the signal: reception can be poor in their living room, which seems unjust, he says, given that they are in Charlottenburg, which is a respectable part of town, and on the uppermost storey, what’s more – but no matter, no matter, one mustn’t make a fuss. When he thinks he catches the broadcast he freezes, though he looks so uncomfortable, his narrow frame all angles and corners, even his long face motionless. Sieglinde’s mother Brigitte points to the right, but he moves too far over and loses the signal again.

‘Back a bit, Vati!’ Sieglinde tells him, and with a little perseverance he manages to tune in, moving the wire through the air until the Führer reaches them undistorted.

Jürgen, who is almost five, is building houses with his wooden blocks. Before they can fall he knocks them down and they clatter against the parquet – ‘On the carpet, Jürgen! The neighbours!’ – and Kurt, who is just a baby, murmurs in his cradle.

Above the sofa the Führer stares out from his portrait, frowning a little, straining to make sense of himself. Vati repositions a leg.

My whole life has been nothing but one long struggle for my people, says the radio. Just as I myself stand ever ready to lay down my liver for my people and for Germany – anyone can take it from me – so I demand the same of everyone else …

‘His life,’ hisses Vati, who has heard the speech earlier that day, on the loudspeakers at work.

‘That must be it. Life. It did sound like liver, though. But why would the Führer want us to lay down our livers?’

Jürgen builds and destroys another house, and another, and Sieglinde comes away from the window and settles back on the sofa with Mutti, and the baby sighs and sleeps, and Vati stands motionless, thin hands raised like a holy man, fingers alive with blessings, and I watch them, these ordinary people, the Führer’s face above them and his voice off to one side, quite the ventriloquist, and if I could have spoken I suspect they would have heard only static, rain, tumbling blocks, the sound of blank air. And when there is an air-raid alarm that same evening they file down to their cellar, though nobody really knows why: there are no planes to be seen or heard. When they emerge, everything is just as it was.

She is right, though, the little girl: if Germany is at war with Poland, where are the Polish? And then, where are the French and the English? Not on the trams or buses, not reclining in wicker beach chairs at the Müggelsee, not in the cinemas or the vaudeville halls. Day after day Berliners watch the sky and wait for the war to show itself, and night after night they observe the blackout rules. Even the famous neon signs are snuffed out: the fizzing glass of Deinhard Sekt; the Sarotti chocolate Moor in his little turban. And yet – people go sailing on the Wannsee, and picnic in the Tiergarten, and sunbathe on the lawns at Friedrichshain. Trains run, and clocks strike, and dogs cock their legs. Men drink beer and women try on gloves and children visit the zoo and hear the monkeys screeching, and watch the elephants plucking up hay with their trunks, and pet the lion cubs and feed the bear cubs, who drink milk from bottles, just like proper babies, and the orangutan reaches his arms through his cage, wanting something, and looks for all the world like the drawings of greedy men in the children’s schoolbooks. And yes, the schools open again, and the children learn to sit, be silent, obey; they learn to copy and repeat, to divide and subtract, to calculate solutions. There is nothing to fear. The sandbags stacked against the cellar windows are just a precaution. The sky is quite empty.

‘All is well,’ Vati tells Sieglinde, pointing to the newspaper headlines that turn the fingertips black, every day a plague of good news. ‘You see? We are happy and secure. There is plenty of food. We cannot be bombed.’

A crow watches from the window ledge as Sieglinde helps Mutti put the kitchen to rights. She does not like its black stare, the way it runs its eye up and down the glass as if searching for a way in. She opens the window and the bird vanishes into the courtyard; the dark, empty space at the heart of their building and every building like it in Berlin. She does not linger at the ledge. There is a house rule – Sieglinde knows it is recorded in the caretaker’s register, along with the rules about swearing and spitting, and the conducting of loud conversations in the stairwell – that forbids anybody from staring into anybody else’s apartment. Everyone pretends that everyone else’s business – and therefore their own – is private.

Sometimes, as a treat, Vati takes Sieglinde out on her own for cake. (Is this a father? Is this, is this? I know nothing of such things.) They go to Café Kranzler on the Ku’damm, where they sit beneath the striped awning and watch the ladies pass by in their smart hats, or to Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz, with its silver palm fronds in the ballroom and its thunderstorms that strike on the hour. Vati lets her try his coffee and she takes a sip as if she were a grown-up, even though she does not like the taste and has to make it go away with a big bite of Sachertorte. Vati smiles at her then from behind his little round spectacles, and his grey eyes make her feel quiet inside. He is kinder than any of her friends’ fathers, and has fine brown hair that is never untidy, unlike her own, and clever hands that can cut from paper any shape you can imagine. As they make their way home he points out interesting things to her: the Prometheus fountain on Hardenbergstrasse; the Palace balcony – which is looking rather shabby – where the Kaiser said Today we are all German brothers, and only German brothers. When they come to their building in Kantstrasse he holds the street door open for her like a gentleman, and then he takes her arm and leads her back into their courtyard, and no matter how fine the day it is always a cave, a well, a place of shadows too deep for the sun, where in winter the snow does not melt. Her good shoes click against the chill flagstones, and banks of unlit windows rise up around her. They pass the screens that hide the dustbins, and the rails where carpets are hung and beaten, and the sandpit with its falling castles. Last spring Sieglinde planted marigolds in the marshy soil by the entrance to their wing, but they never took.

The Heilmanns are lucky, says Vati, to live up on the fourth floor, where there is plenty of air and light, and nobody above to disturb their quiet household. It is true that the marble stairs stop at the first floor, giving way to wood, and it is true that the building has no elevator, but the Heilmanns value their distance from the pushy street, from the stubbed-out cigarettes and the jangling bicycles and the news vendors who yell as you walk by, the spiky umbrellas and the little dogs underfoot, the boys selling badges you must be seen to wear, the amputees from the last war with their pinned-up trouser legs and their empty sleeves. And the marching! says Mutti. One group or another is always trooping past, which rattles her nerves: the National Socialist League of German Switchboard Operators; the Reich Association of German Rabbit Breeders. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your job, says Vati, but he does agree they are fortunate to be living well above eye level. They must refrain from remarking on their good fortune to their neighbours, however – it would be a sign of very poor breeding – and they must be mindful of the family one storey beneath them, taking care to wear their house-shoes and to tread softly, to lift their dining chairs rather than dragging them, which is better for the parquet and the carpets, after all, and never to be so thoughtless as to drop a knife, a jar of peas, a weighty book – the Bible; Mein Kampf. A cautious life, says Vati: that is the thing.

I see them visiting the Schuttmanns (second floor, front building) one Sunday afternoon. The Heilmanns have become friendly with them over recent months; Herr Schuttmann is also a Party member and wields some local influence, it is believed.

And so they are. They have three young children and are expecting a fourth; they make a point of using the proper German greeting rather than a lazy good day; and they even took the same cruise to Madeira and Italy the previous year. Sieglinde wishes she could have gone – she and Jürgen stayed behind with their aunt – but Mutti sent her postcards, and Vati brought her back a bracelet with the name of the ship spelled out in naval flags, and a little swastika one at the end.

‘How pleasant it would have been had we known you better then,’ says Frau Schuttmann. ‘We could have shared a table, and played quoits.’

‘We did see you on board, of course,’ says Vati, ‘but one doesn’t like to intrude.’

‘No, quite right,’ says Herr Schuttmann. ‘We saw you too, but as you point out …’

There is a pause in the conversation, and above them the ceiling lamp trembles. The Schuttmanns do not seem to register the movement, nor the sound of footsteps overhead, but Mutti stares up at the swaying globe for a good long minute – thinking of their cruise, perhaps; of the motion of the ship as they sailed through the English Channel. She told Sieglinde that it flickered by night with luminous dust, as if all the stars had fallen.

‘Anyway, all that is over – the cruise liners are to be hospital ships,’ says Herr Schuttmann. ‘Which is just as it should be, given that we are at war,’ he adds, in case anyone should take his comment and make it into something else.

‘Yes of course,’ says Mutti, but when they return home and Sieglinde asks her if it’s true, that the cruise liners are to be used for sick people, she says that Herr Schuttmann must be mistaken. Their ship, she says, their beautiful ship, surrendered to the wounded and the diseased? She remembers stepping on board in Hamburg beneath all the banners strung up as if for a party, and there was a band playing marching songs, the trumpets and trombones flashing in the sun, and the passengers were calling and waving to their friends and family on the dock. When they were about to set sail they threw streamers that spiralled through the air, reaching all the way to the people left behind, and for a moment that was all that held the ship to the land, these flimsy strips of paper. A hospital ship? She had danced on its decks in her green silk as the lifeboats hung high above, and Vati had held a handkerchief in his right hand so as not to spoil her dress; she had bathed in the swimming pool beneath the mural of Neptune in his chariot, and on the dining tables the starched serviettes sailed across the dinner plates, ships of cloth on a clean white sea, and she had eaten black swordfish with fried bananas when they stopped in Madeira, and it did not matter that after a bite or two she decided to wait for the evening meal back on board, which was rissoles with mashed potatoes; the fact remained that she had tried black swordfish in Madeira.

Mutti had never been on an ocean liner before, and it took her some time to adjust to the motion. It was a strange feeling – the sense that the ground was not stable beneath her, that she needed to correct her gait in order to retain her footing when the waves were high. To begin with she wondered whether she had made a mistake, whether she would ever adapt to this new way of moving, in which she had to take so much care not to harm herself. She did not mention it to Vati – the cruise had been his idea, his surprise – but there were moments out on the deck, she tells Sieglinde, when she could see no land in any direction and knew that they were nowhere, that she feared where they were going and where they would end up. She remembers the gulls crying and crying, circling the ship. Some of the passengers fed them, throwing crusts of bread and morsels of cake, even scraps of meat, but Vati said such creatures should not be encouraged, and feeding them upset the natural order of things – before you knew it they would take over, clawing food from the plates, from the very mouths of the passengers – and this was sensible advice, and he was a sensible man, and she trusted that soon they would see land. And she looked about her at the other couples laughing and enjoying themselves, taking photographs of each other smiling so they could remember that they were happy, and she watched them drinking coffee and eating cake in the sun, and filling their mouths with great fresh gusts of air, and bathing in the pool beneath the Neptune mural, and applauding the fireworks that spun and burst and fell into the sea, and she thought: I can do that. I can be like that.

Each morning began with the trumpet call and the flag ceremony, and then there were so many programmed activities that there was no time for idleness or uncertainty. She and Vati rose early for calisthenics on the sports deck, and attended concerts and talks, and listened to a German author reading from her novel – He had never been able to stand the chosen sons of Israel. He hardly knew why; it must have lain in his blood – and at German folk music evenings they sang Praise the Rhine, the proud river resting in the lap of vines, and they sang There stands a man, a man as steadfast as an oak, and they sang Be always true and honest till you’re in your cold grave.

And when they disembarked at Naples and the beggars thrust out their hands, they said to each other how lucky they were to live in Germany, where everyone was equal, and where everyone had a job, and a home, and the right to a subsidised cruise to places where you could try black swordfish with fried bananas, even if you preferred proper German food. Mutti says she would have liked to dock in England, to see Buckingham Palace and to hear Big Ben telling a different time, to drink tea with a slice of lemon and to marvel at the wax people who looked so real they might begin to speak, but England would not permit their ship entry because then the English would see how well Germany treated her workers. They would hear the enthusiastic German songs, and smell the rissoles, and see the Germans busy with their leisure on the large and sunny decks, and they would realise how poorly off they were to live in a country where people queued without question and you could not buy proper bread.

And if she is not mistaken, she says – no, she is not mistaken – Kurt was made at sea, their little sailor, their stowaway; conjured up in their narrow cabin with its fitted cupboards and its tiny wash-basin, its built-in sofa and its tethered beds, everything just so, everything in its proper place, not a centimetre squandered, and the porthole a blue sun above them.

Every few weeks Sieglinde’s class visited a factory to learn about all the clever and marvellous things Germany made. The children looked forward to these outings; no sooner had they returned from one than they were asking Fräulein Althaus about the next, but she never told them where it would be.

‘It’s a surprise, children,’ she would say, smiling as she stood in front of the blackboard, the perfect alphabet suspended above her, too high to smudge.

Perhaps they would visit a toy factory, the children said to one another, and they would see boxes of eyes and hands and hair, and stacks of unstuffed skins, and stringless yoyos yet to whirl until they knotted and choked, and puzzles before they were cut apart, and unpainted soldiers missing their medals and their faces. Or maybe they would visit the factory where the special badges and buckles and daggers were made, all the glinting rewards they could earn one day when they were big enough, and they would be allowed to touch them and hold them and maybe even try them on, and pretend they were older children, so long as they gave them back before they returned to school, because things went very badly indeed for liars and thieves. Or perhaps they would visit a stamp factory, where giant sheets of gum-backed paper waited to receive the image of the Führer repeated countless times over, and then a machine full of needles would punch all the holes in between the countless Führers so they could be torn off and stuck to letters. Some of the children thought this would not be a very interesting outing, to see all the Führers printed and punctured, but they did not say so, because everybody knew you did not say such things, not even when you were quite alone.

Their own school was a factory of sorts, too: every day they picked mulberry leaves for the silkworms that filled the classrooms, stripping the bushes bare to feed the white larvae stacked in their shallow trays beneath the windows. The creatures were ravenous, never satisfied, fattening overnight, it seemed, their chewing a rainstorm that accompanied each lesson. When the caterpillars began spinning their white cocoons, the children knew it would not be long before they were taken away and made into parachutes. The teachers told them how important it was to care for the silkworms, making sure that their trays were clean and that they had plenty to eat. This might save a pilot’s life, the teachers said.

‘Can we visit a parachute factory?’ Sieglinde asked Fräulein Althaus, but Fräulein Althaus said such places were not for children, and that they were going to visit a biscuit factory instead, which was a lovely surprise indeed, because biscuits were in short supply these days, and how wonderful to think of a whole factory full of them.

It was just a short ride on the U-Bahn, and they didn’t even have to change trains, but when they emerged into daylight again none of the children recognised where they were. It was a different neighbourhood, not their own; a new and different part of town where people made biscuits and toys and daggers. They walked from the station two by two, listening to Fräulein Althaus as they marched along.

‘Our biscuits contain only the purest ingredients, children,’ she said. ‘They are free from any trace of inferior cinnamon or low-grade sugar. Who can tell me what inferior means? Yes, Gisela, that’s quite correct, thank you. Now everybody remember the word inferior, because it is a useful word. The butter for our biscuits comes from healthy German cows, tended by healthy German farmers. The English eat biscuits made from flour and water, children. Flour and water!

‘Here we are. Do you see the factory behind the tall gates, with its tall chimneys? This is where the biscuits are made. Here is Frau Miller to let us in, we cannot glimpse more than her face because the people who make the biscuits must cover themselves up, all except their faces. They cannot allow so much as a single hair to fall into the mixture, a single hair is not very big but imagine if you found one in a biscuit, that would be very disgusting and unacceptable. Perhaps such a thing would be acceptable to the English. Frau Miller is shutting the gates behind us, because not everybody is allowed to come and look at the biscuit factory, that would not be sanitary, so let us say thank you. Thank you, madam, Heil Hitler and good morning, and yes, please do count us as we file past. Now wait here, children, because we must listen to the rules before we can go into the main part of the factory, where the biscuits come from. Do we all hear and understand what is being said? We must put on our special white hats, and the special covers for our shoes that make us look as if we are walking on little clouds. Now we are all alike. We must not touch anything. We must not eat anything. If we need to use the lavatory we must do so now, although we must remove our special hats and our special shoe-covers to do so. Under no circumstances are we to leave the group to explore on our own. I heard someone cough. There is to be no coughing. And I heard someone sneeze. There is to be no sneezing. No touching, no eating, no leaving, no coughing and no sneezing. Heil Hitler!

‘Come through, come through. Now I will have to shout, children, because we are in the main part of the factory, where the biscuits come from, and it is very noisy. Normally a woman would not shout. A man who shouts is not a handsome sight, but a shouting woman is even worse. Her voice grows shrill, and she starts to claw at people, or stab at them with hairpins – but this is different. This is an exception. Can you all hear me? It may be wise to hold the hand of a friend, for safety reasons. There are many pieces of machinery and equipment, as you can see – vats of flour and sugar, mixing bowls as big as bathtubs, blades that cut the butter, iron arms that hook and scrape – and I imagine it would be quite easy for a child to become caught up in this machinery and turned into biscuits. Therefore we must remember the rules. A stray braid, a flapping cardigan, a finger snatching a taste – you can appreciate where all this leads. Look at the workers in their clean white uniforms. They make thousands of biscuits per day here, children, isn’t that wonderful? We are standing in one of the world’s foremost biscuit factories. What does foremost mean? Foremost? Well done, Hannes, thank you, yes. We must learn the word foremost because it is an important word. We can be very proud of our biscuits, children, all our biscuit makers are the same and so are all the biscuits, each one just as it should be, except for the broken ones that cannot be sold, because even if they taste like the others, they are defective. It is said that the Führer enjoys a Butterkeks with his evening cup of tea – the Führer does not take any alcohol – and so every year, on his birthday, the factory sends him a one-kilo assortment, which he enjoys very much, and finds most fortifying, and in this way our biscuits are helping us to defeat the English, who have never produced a biscuit of note.’

Erich Kröning was a quiet child, hiding behind his mother if strangers came to the farm trying to buy fruit or eggs or honey, and hiding from her sometimes, too: she would find him under his bed, drawing shapes in the dust and talking to himself in his own language, or out in the stable, murmuring to their horse Ronja. If she asked whether he was hungry, he would nod or shake his head; if she asked whether he was tired, he would simply continue playing, or lie down on the sofa and close his eyes. He was as pretty as a doll, with a cloud of downy yellow hair, and when Emilie took him into the village in the wagon he watched the sky passing above him, his blue eyes moving over its blueness as if searching for something.

At the market other mothers stopped to admire him. ‘Is he your first?’ they asked. ‘The first is always special.’ They gave him plump cherries and slices of cheese to eat, stroked his cheeks and his hair as he shied from their touch.

When his grandmother visited on Sundays after church, though, he was a different boy. My heart is clear and pure, she told him. I sing and cannot cry. Oma Kröning was a small, soft woman who dressed in black and wore her dove-grey hair in a knot at the nape of her neck. She gathered him onto her lap and taught him old songs about mermen who took human brides, and roses that fell from the sky like snow and wine that fell like rain, and nightingales and crows that spoke as clearly as you or I, and wanderers far from home. At first he tried to sing along with his wrong words, but soon he learned the proper ones, and if Oma Kröning stopped in the middle of a line and looked at him, her eyebrows raised, he would complete it, putting birds in their trees and fish in their streams, roses in their valleys and wanderers in their forests.

‘He is a perfect child,’ she said. ‘Just perfect. Will there be, one day, perhaps, a second, or …?’

On his birthday, Emilie woke Erich at seven o’clock. His face was still dull with sleep as she lifted him from his bed, and he stared at her as if he knew neither her name nor his own. She caught the odour of urine rising from the boy and found herself wishing – as she wished every day – that time would quicken, that soon he would be able to control himself overnight. Still, she reminded herself, it could be worse. It could be far, far worse. You-you, you, called the dove from the forest.

Erich was turning five – the age when colours and sensations, aromas and tastes and sounds begin to knot into permanent memories: the sour fur of a chewed and eyeless toy, or the patter from a watering can on fusty soil, or the hardness of a little wooden stool in a white and clattering room. And who can tell why certain episodes take hold while others are lost to the sky as smoke? And why some are retained only in part; fragmentary joys, half-formed horrors?

‘Slowly, Schatz,’ said Emilie over breakfast – Erich always bolted his food, which was dreadful for the digestion.

He pushed his new wooden snake across the table, its joints clicking as it curled its way about the milk jug.

After breakfast Emilie washed Erich’s face and combed his hair flat with water. He was her summer boy, as blond as wheat, sky-eyed. You couldn’t deny that the race was getting better looking; you had only to look at the children. He slipped his little warm hand into hers, and with the other he trailed the wooden snake across the floor. Click. Click.

He was tired by mid-afternoon, and when Tante Uschi and Oma Kröning arrived he would not stop crying. He kicked his feet, knocked over his milk. They wondered if he ever would settle; he gazed at them as if he saw monsters.

‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ said her sister, who was not married and had no children and could not know. ‘They cry from time to time, and sometimes for no good reason. It’s quite normal.’

‘You’re right,’ Emilie agreed, and they pulled faces at him, and shook a bear at him, and spoke made-up words that had no meaning. Look, she said, look at Mama, trying to distract him from his sorrow the way that mothers do, changing her voice so that it was no longer her own, making spiders and wolves of her hands. Bumpety bump, rider, she sang as he struggled on her lap. If he falls, he cries out. She gave him one of her Leipzig larks to eat, which were not birds but little bird-sized cakes filled with jam to suggest plump hearts. Then, after she had mopped up the milk and wiped clean the gift from Tante Uschi – a book of animals – she hugged him close and whispered, ‘You are the gift. You, you.’ But those who whisper tell lies.

I watch Erich with his new book, each page cut into three. He makes a bear with a lion’s body and the legs of a dog; he joins an elephant’s head to a duck with goat’s hooves. It seems there are endless combinations, a whole menagerie of the fake, all those turned away from the ark and left to face the flood. It is troubling to me, this severing and grafting. I do not blame the boy because he does not understand that the creatures are impossible, and that even if such a specimen were to be produced it could not survive; it would be too deformed, too far from normal. The adults, though, watch him turning the pages with his little fingers, and they watch him smiling because they smile, and laughing because they laugh, and nobody finds the book – nor even the idea of the book – in the least bit troublesome.

Later Emilie takes Erich to his bedroom and tucks him in, perhaps a little too tightly; he struggles, but she strokes his head and tells him to sleep, and pulls up the green satin quilt that is cool to the touch and swishes like Christoph’s scythe cutting the wheat. She repeats his name to him – Erich, Erich – and his blue eyes watch and watch her, and do not close. She switches on the lamp beside his bed; its transparent shade is patterned with birds, and after a moment, when the bulb is hot, it starts to turn.

I watch the shadow birds stealing around the walls, wavy when they pass over the curtains, bent in two at the corners of the room.

‘Shh,’ says Emilie, ‘shhhhh,’ her voice as soft as the wind in the pines.

At the theatre there is standing room only for the Führer’s speech. The women hand over their furs to the coat-check girl, who cannot, it seems, trouble herself to smile, and may not even be German. They find their seats, which are ten rows back from the stage and afford an acceptable view of the lectern, until a vast individual with blond braids piled high on her head takes her place in front of them. It is difficult to see past the bulging hair, which the women agree must be false. Such persons need to acquaint themselves with mirrors, they remark, but they refuse to let her ruin their evening. Through their opera glasses they take in the one-man show, the feverish aria tumbling from the stage: swords and blood, blood and earth, betrayal and sacrifice, disguise, salvation: all the traditional and tragic themes. And how the women applaud! How they cheer.

When I was still a child I took up the lyre –

For early I forgot my childhood games;

I only in the silent land of the ,

from the raucous throng of sisters.

And even if my song clanged shrill and off-key

As a that had split in two,

Thudding dully, sounding its discordant chime:

Still I knew what of meant.

Time spins blue and gold, blue and green; it is spring and autumn; it is morning and dusk; it is then and it is now and it happens over and again and all at once.

We are elephants, we are aardvarks, we are glass-eyed flies. Our hands we clasp, our heads we sink, and of Adolf Hitler we think.

At night her mask waits at the foot of her bed, and she listens for the siren and thinks of a golden comb slipping through lengths of golden hair. The poem comes to her as she lies listening – but it is not a poem, Fräulein Althaus has told them, it is a folk song, a traditional old German song written by nobody. Still, the children do not sing it, this old siren song, but recite the lines in unison, and at night they come to Sieglinde as she waits for the bombs to flash above her, jewels glimpsed from a little boat at the river’s deadly bend. O, dark water.

‘As soon as we hear the siren, we must wake up straight away,’ says Vati. ‘We must jump from our beds and grab our masks and our suitcases and hurry – calmly hurry – to the cellar.’

I cannot determine the reason that I am so sad at heart. They do jump from their beds. They do grab their masks, and their little cases that stand packed and ready as if for a holiday, and they do hurry down to the cellar. On the second floor the Metzgers are just emerging from their apartment, Herr Metzger in his thick black coat that smells of camphor, and his wife in all her furs, sable, chinchilla, mink, three pelts thick about her shoulders. Jewels adorn her wrists and fingers, earlobes and throat – does she sleep in them? Do they dig into her dreams? Herr Metzger helps her descend the stairs, slowing everybody down, and Herr Schneck, the caretaker and house warden, shouts, ‘Quickly, please! This is not a drill! Masks on! One two, zackzack!’

Down they go, down and down, and it is even colder than in their cold apartments. Beneath the earth they feel the bombs: a monster in the distance, stamping its feet.

Schneck turns to her. ‘I have to talk in order to tell everyone else not to talk,’ he says.

‘I am merely trying to explain, Herr Schneck,’ he whispers, ‘that your reprimand was unfounded, as I was not talking but whispering.’

‘Whispering still depletes the shelter of oxygen. We all have an allotted amount, and you are taking more than your share.’

‘So now the air’s rationed,’ someone says, and laughter glances off the cellar walls.

‘And speaking of not talking,’ says Schneck, ‘I must ask you to refrain from scaring your children with stories about bombs. There is simply no need for such stories.’

FRAU MILLER:	Look at his words – they’re caught in the lights; they’re falling like rain.
FRAU MÜLLER:	If we were further forward they’d be falling on us.
FRAU MILLER:	I secured the best seats I could, Frau Müller. We’re lucky to be here at all. You didn’t see the queue.
FRAU MÜLLER:	Still, if you’d gone a little earlier …
FRAU MILLER:	As I have explained, Gabi was sitting for her portrait that morning. You cannot dance at two weddings, you know.
FRAU MÜLLER:	Of course not, of course not. How did it come out?
FRAU MILLER:	As a portrait, it’s excellent – you can make out every whisker, and she’s holding her tail just so – but unfortunately he couldn’t capture her saluting.
FRAU MÜLLER:	Oh that is a shame. And after all your training …
FRAU MILLER:	I know. I kept saying Heil Hitler, and he kept clicking, but every time she raised her paw it was either too early or too late.

Contents

About the Author

About the Book

Puzzles

Strength Through Joy

Führer Weather