The Big Lie (20 page)

In came a female warden, all jaded round the eyes and gnarly at the edges. Rough, basically, despite her starched collar and scraped-back hair. I was given a pile of grey things – a smock, a large pair of pants, some rubber clogs – and told to dress. The warden stood and watched, her head tipped to one side as if calculating the marks she might give me for technical merit and presentation.

‘If you are good,’ she said, while I buttoned up the front of the smock, ‘you will earn yourself a bra.’

She handcuffed her wrist to mine and we left the room. We walked along a white hospital corridor and through a series of locked gates, stopping outside a flat, steel door with a sliding shutter.

I was expecting the worst, so it came as no surprise – the metal bed, the bucket toilet, the cold. The window had bars and frosted glass that let in milky light but offered no view.

But I didn’t care about that now. I didn’t need to work out where I was. I had decided to absolutely refuse to believe that this place existed. This place was nothing but a concept and an idle threat. I wasn’t here. Soon they would see that I was good – and then I’d be set free. I’d go back to my family. We would forget that all of this had ever happened.

I was left with a white cloth rectangle printed with the same number from the sign they had hung round my neck. 23674. I’d been instructed to sew it onto the front of my smock. Along with a black cloth triangle.
Vagrants, beggars, idiots, workshys, the diseased, the damaged, the dissolute, alcoholics, prostitutes, pacifists …
I pulled my smock up and over my head, baring my chest to the cold, ready for the sewing. I would show them exactly who they were dealing with via the beauty of my invisible stitching. But I didn’t get the chance. The gnarly warden returned after just five minutes, demanding I hand back the needle and thread.

‘Come on! Come on!’ she barked, forcing me to switch to big, lazy loops to get the work done fast. The untidiness of it made me want to cry.

After that, with nothing to do, I spent my time on my back, on the lumpy straw mattress. I picked at the edges of the white rectangle and the black triangle on my chest, making the stitching even worse. I listened to the distant hum of the motorway, to the birds, to the wind in the trees and the sirens that went off all hours of the day but didn’t seem to have any relevance to me. I heard orders carried across the breeze, the trudge of feet, sometimes metal against stone, the squeak of a wheelbarrow. At night, I heard the conversations of owls, the whistling of bats, the screams of foxes – nature doing what it had always done for years and years and years.

I would wait this moment out. I took my inspiration from Ingrid. Wasn’t that how she was treating her whole life – as one long wait? Keep your head down, keep safe, allow time to move on. I just needed to remain still until things changed around me. This went entirely against everything I had ever been taught though. You must do! You must work! You are nothing but your actions! I had never been still. Never been allowed to. Even when I was sick.

But this stillness became strangely, weirdly, sort of … nice.

Every so often I had to move, of course, or I would be overwhelmed by the cold. I did bursts of star jumps and squat thrusts to help keep the blood flowing. When I did this, I pretended I could hear Fisher’s voice shouting out the order. I imagined Fräulein Eberhardt crouching beside me, hissing insults into my ear because I wasn’t doing the leg thrusts right. I made myself feel Dirk’s boot on my neck, the smell of grass and mud up my nose. This was also strangely, weirdly, sort of nice. I was wishing for normal, I suppose. Because I knew what to do with that.

The day after the screening of the television interview the men came with their flatbed truck. A team of efficient-looking women in housekeeping smocks pulled up in a small red car.

Up until then the Harts’ house next door had been a dark, looming question waiting for an answer. Or rather, a question waiting to be asked – a question even Frau Gross wouldn’t have dared put to my mother. When the truck and the red car turned up, Frau Gross was straight away in her front garden, gloves on, trowel in hand, pulling up non-existent weeds.

The men did the heavy lifting and packing, while the women sorted and cleaned. I watched what I could from my bedroom window, my arms resting on the flat top of the trophy I had won at the Reich’s sports day for the BDM the year before. Later I watched from a deckchair in our back garden while I pretended to read a magazine, enjoying the benefit of Dad’s shorter fences. An image came to me as I sat there: me, looking down on Dad through the gap in my bedroom curtains, his sleeves rolled-up, his brow all sweaty in the moonlight, as he took a chainsaw to the heads of the Harts’ new leylandii. I couldn’t understand where it had been hiding, this memory. What door had I opened to let it out?

Frau Gross would have given anything to have this front row seat on proceedings at the Hart residence. I would have given anything for it not to have been happening at all. I should have been down at the tree swing by the river, watching my friend glide through sunlight, collecting leaves in her hair and dirt on her heels, as she talked me through the seduction of a banana split.

The clearance team didn’t build a bonfire in the garden, or throw everything on the back of their truck for landfill as I expected. Each item was handled very carefully and methodically. Two women went into the back garden to make the most of the last September sun and laid out the Harts’ clothing on the picnic table, holding up each piece for inspection – Herr Hart’s black v-neck jumpers and grey trousers, Frau Hart’s billowing shirts and skirts, Clementine’s uniform and that striking bikini – folding the ones that passed their test, placing them in sacks like the ones we used when distributing clothes during the Winterhilfswerk. As they worked they chatted about their families, and people they’d seen on the high street the day before. Snatches of their conversation cut through the birdsong.

She’s looking tired, don’t you think?

But their son has always been good like that.

If you just add a bit of warm water to the mixture it turns out fine.

It was all so horribly ordinary. Did they not have any idea whose things they were touching?

I saw them box up crockery and bed linen, watched them throw the living room rug over the washing line for a beating before rolling it up and taking it back inside. Frau Hart had some nice pieces of silver jewellery. The sight of them suddenly came to me, sharp and clear in my head – lovely delicate stud earrings with falling flowers rocking on a chain link as she moved. I wondered who would be getting those.

The following day, the Sunday, I overheard Dad talking to Lilli in the garage as he fixed her bike. The chain kept slipping, making her heels strike off the pedals. She had red scrapes up the insides of both legs. Mum had sent me from the kitchen with glasses of orange juice – ‘for the workers!’ – and I was carrying a bag of biscuits in my teeth.

I was just about to turn the corner, round the wall, out of the side passage and onto the front driveway, when I heard him.

‘Good news, Lilli, we have new neighbours moving in soon.’

I stopped dead, hidden by the wall.

‘Oh?’ I heard Lilli say. She sounded bored. She wasn’t interested in helping, she just wanted the bike fixed. I listened. There was the
ting
of something metal hitting the concrete floor of the garage, then the
tick-tick-tick-tick
of the bike wheel being spun.
Ask him
, I thought, my teeth gritted tightly against the paper bag of biscuits.
Ask him
. She did.

‘Where’s Clementine gone then?’ Her voice was all high and innocent. Casual, because she didn’t realise she needed to act it. I held my breath.

A pause, then …

‘To music college,’ Dad said.

All the air went from me, all the blood, all the bone.

For a moment, I became my little sister; I let myself believe him. Because I wanted to. I wanted Clementine to be there, in a light and dusty classroom, banging out something passionate on a beautiful grand piano, her hair falling with the movement, learning to love a bit of Wagner after all. Because if it was true I could write her a letter, exchange news – my preparations for skate camp, her new life at college, who I’d seen on the high street, who was looking tired, whose son was being good, the everyday and the ordinary. But I knew I mustn’t trick myself. It was so easy, so comforting, but I mustn’t.

I returned to my own body, my own mind.

I willed another thought out to my sister on the other side of that wall. To ask about Clementine’s parents. My tears dripped onto the bag of biscuits, soaking into the paper.

Lilli didn’t say it though. I doubt if Herr und Frau Hart, being grown-ups just like any others, had ever registered as real people to my little sister. Dad carried on.

‘This new family,’ he said, ‘they have a little girl exactly the same age as you.’

And, oh, the whole world joined up in a perfect circle.

‘Yeah?’ said Lilli, sounding interested now.

I tipped sideways. I slid down the brick, sandpapering my arm. I set the orange juice on the floor very carefully, the biscuits too. I crouched there, crying as quietly as I could, fat, hot tears rolling down my chin and arms. Someone had lifted the corner of the grass, like it was only a carpet, and revealed beneath the clockwork mechanics. I was much happier when I believed it all to be natural, magic even.

I stayed on the floor until the tears stopped and my breath was my own again. I wiped my face and the wet streaks from the paper bag of biscuits. Then I lifted my father’s glass of juice close to my mouth, hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and I spat.

The sessions began. Three of them each day. They would happen at any point, even during the night. I think they were trying to surprise me by switching the times around, but the sessions were the only thing I was ever expecting, so as surprises went, it was pretty useless. I felt sorry for them, if that was the best they could manage.

A female warden would collect me and walk me down a series of windowless corridors to the chosen room. Every movement around the building was done with handcuffs, which only ended up making me believe I was terribly important or terribly dangerous, or possibly both. The opposite of what they wanted to achieve, I’m sure. I began to feel really exceptionally sorry for them.

Once inside, the warden would instruct me to sit on the hard chair, opposite a man in uniform at a desk. She’d free herself of me, then turn on her black, ugly heels and leave the room.

‘So, Fräulein Keller,’ the man would say – big, patronising smile, a pair of fat fingers pushing down the red dot and the arrow on the tape player at the same time. ‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’

The first time, I cried, told my interrogator that I had already done this with the fat man, Herr Hoffmann, and with Fisher (I was told off for not calling him
Herr
Fisher – you can’t win). ‘And do you
know
who my father is?’ I wailed.

‘Yes,’ said the uniformed man. He slid a sheet of official paper across his desk so I could see the ink. ‘This is his signature on the order that brought you here.’

I think it was then that I stopped feeling sorry for everyone else, and concentrated on feeling sorry for myself.

Three men took it in turns to question me, though their faces began to blur into one. There was hardly any natural light in the place. I kept falling asleep in fits. They gave me coffee in the mornings that tasted suspicious and not nearly enough food to keep my head straight – stale bread, thin soup.

‘What you did was a sin,’ said the uniformed man – whichever one it was. It didn’t matter. They were the same person really, the same machine, saying exactly the same things, over and over. They pushed me back through time, to where they thought it had all started, then they pulled me forwards, making me relive it in words. Then we’d go back again, forwards again. I was a dirty piece of clothing going up and down the washboard and maybe soon I’d be spotless.

A week or so into the sessions, I was given a stack of books and told to read them –
Das Buch Isidor, The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, a collection of Hölderlin’s poetry,
Mein Kampf
. All of the compulsory books from school. The books that everyone else had pretended to read, books I actually had read, because I was a good girl and did exactly as I was told. I read them again. I gobbled them up, actually. I was so grateful to have something to do. And it was more educational the second time round, with my new eyes, the eyelashes properly grown back.

The sketches in
Das Buch Isidor
didn’t seem funny any more and the romantic imagery in Hölderlin no longer filled me up.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
was a big slog, just like it had been the first time, but
Mein Kampf
, that was useful.

People who are good don’t lie, I knew that.

But this was new – people who are good don’t lie, except when they do.

I lied all the time. Of course I did. It was in me because I had been trained well. Subterfuge, denial, dishonesty … I excelled at them all. So when the uniformed man said to me at our next session, ‘What you did was a sin,’ I replied, ‘Yes.’

There was joy beneath the surly mask of his face. I was sure there had been a wager on who would get me to admit to it first.

‘It’s not something that is in you,’ he went on.

‘No,’ I said.

I wanted to know what this something was. What was this stuff that could not be rinsed out? What was it woven in there since I was very little, or maybe even before?

‘These people are cunning and wily,’ said my interrogator, offering me a way out.

‘Yes,’ I said, taking it, not knowing who ‘these people’ were he was referring to.

‘They lead you astray.’

‘Yes.’

‘So tell me, Fräulein Keller, of your duty …’

‘To be faithful, to be pure, to be German.’

‘Good girl.’

At the end of that session, I earned myself something – a bra, and one of the things from my confiscated belongings.

What I really wanted … Clementine’s essay notes. I could see the edge of them, inside a clear plastic letter file, beneath the other documents on the desk between me and my interrogator, the loops and smudges of her passionate handwriting. I could still remember every word. I’d always had a good brain for that – lines in plays, shopping lists. I pictured how the words were laid out on the page and the picture stuck. That was why I always did well in the BDM task where we had to read instructions, eat the paper, then carry out the order.

But still I wanted to see those notes again. Touch them. They would have given me something – strength. Comfort, maybe.

But of course, I couldn’t ask for that. I chose a warm sweater instead.