The Big Lie (23 page)

The sirens meant something to me now. They meant get up, get washed, get fed, even before the day had begun. The second siren meant go and stand in the ‘playground’, be inspected, be counted.

Roll call could go on for hours. If anyone got dizzy and keeled over, Clara picked them up and smacked their cheeks, but only after being given the nod by our Frau Aufseherin – our boulder-like prison officer that Clara alone, not Bells, got away with calling by the unexplained nickname ‘Boogie’. It was usually Nellie that crumpled to her knees. She was the oldest woman in Red Block – eighty-seven, toothless and bent as a spoon. She refused all offers to be propped up once she was conscious again. One of these mornings, I knew we’d be carrying her lifeless body to roll call and have them strike her off the list.

In my first line-up I spotted the woman with the chins who had made me sign away my things. I thought she had been staff but, no, she was a prisoner like me. Although not exactly like me. She was standing in the green triangle section – the criminals. (‘The hard bastards,’ according to Bells. ‘They make the best kapos. They get a kick from ruling over their own.’) The woman with the chins was wearing a lovely striped scarf. My lovely striped scarf. It took all I had not to yell across and unmask her as a thief, but Bells had warned me never to mess with a Green, not if I was at all attached to my pretty face.

Line-up done, we walked the two miles of country lanes to the factory, men honking and jeering as they passed in their trucks, driving fast through the puddles and soaking us to our underwear. We sewed all day until our fingers bled, and our eyes refused to focus, breaking only for a lunch of watery soup and a hunk of bread.

I sat next to Clara. I was her trophy – a sign that the cause was living strong.

‘The Reich’s favourite daughter!’ she’d exclaim – quietly, of course – between slurps of the diarrhoea soup, shaking her head, smiling her smile. ‘The Reich’s favourite daughter! And here she is!’

‘How do you know I was called that?’

There was no television in the place, no radio, no magazines.

‘Oh, we get all the information we need,’ she said with a wink.

The Reds’ letters were usually edited, literally, with sections snipped out. The ladies would hold them up in the dorm, cry ‘for fuck’s sake!’ then stick their tongues through the holes. They got parcels too – photos and chocolates, gloves and socks, nice-smelling toiletries, a jar of jam. The Reds were the best fed and the best dressed in the playground. The criminal Greens, and the girls from the whore block had nothing on us, even if one of them had pinched my lovely scarf. The only other women who measured up were the small proud group on the far side of the tarmac. Good skin. Nice coats. None of them had lost their hair. Sonderhäftlinge, was what Bells called them.
Special prisoners
.

‘Special how?’ I’d asked. But she’d shrugged, embarrassed, and told me she didn’t know.

‘You’ll start getting parcels soon, don’t you worry,’ Bells said one lunchtime at the factory. She’d finished organising the Table Girls who distributed the bread. She cocked a leg over the bench opposite and sat down. ‘They’ve probably been holding back all the stuff you were sent in solitary,’ Bells went on, talking with her mouth full. ‘It’ll be like Christmas Eve when …’ She trailed off – because Clara was widening her eyes and shaking her head. They exchanged a look of understanding. Bells dropped her gaze into her empty bowl.

Silence. Zwischenraum.

‘Where’s my stuff?’ I asked, politely first.

Thieves, they were all thieves!

‘Well,’ said Clara, speaking like an adult would to a difficult child, ‘firstly, we don’t like to think of it like that, as “my stuff”. We share. You got a scraping of marmalade from Gitta’s jar. All of us took a chocolate brazil from that tray of Emma’s. The shampoo is always pooled and …’

‘Where are my letters?’ I cut in. I felt hot – nothing to do with the soup, because that had arrived at the table barely lukewarm.

‘Calm down,’ hissed Clara. ‘Don’t attract attention.’

‘I want my letters,’ I hissed back.

Clara and Bells exchanged guilty glances.

‘What have you done with them?’

I wanted a picture of my family to pin on the wall like the others. I wanted to know what Ruby and Angelika and stupid Frau Gross were doing. I wanted Mum to send a tin of her lemon biscuits – experience the comforting taste again. Did Clara and Bells think I wouldn’t have shared? Was Daniel Keller’s daughter not to be trusted? At home, or here, would I never be trusted?

‘There aren’t any,’ said Clara.

‘What?’ I said.

‘No one has sent you anything.’

‘Oh, come on!’ I didn’t want to cry. The cotton dust made our cheeks sore and our throats dry. Salty tears would only make it worse.

‘I checked.’ Her voice was soft. She took my hand under the table and squeezed. ‘The first night you were here. I do it for all the girls. I go to Boogie and I chase up their things … But there was nothing, Jess. I’m sorry.’

‘The trunk of stuff I came with …’

‘Gone.’

‘But …’

‘You lose your things. That’s how it goes.’ She took a breath of decision. ‘Unless you’re classified as a Sonderhäftling; then you live like a queen.’

‘Special how?’

Bells was squirming now, hearing this question for the second time.

‘Well, you might be considered a special inmate,’ explained Clara, ‘if, for example, you have a high-ranking relative.’

‘But I have a …’

Clara was shaking her head. I was so upset I started speaking German. ‘
Aber ich habe einen …’

‘No, you don’t …’ She gripped my hand a little tighter. ‘Not any more.’

‘We’ve been with the horses,’ GG told Fräulein Eberhardt, her eyes stretched wide with panic. ‘We were muddy and smelly and thought we’d come here to change our clothes.’ Her voice was trying to keep pace with her pulse, tripping over itself in the rush.

Fräulein Eberhardt looked us up and down – GG’s ruffled hair and naked body, me with my messy bun, wearing only my underwear.

‘And the typewriter?’ All eyes went to the pieces of it on the floor.

‘We were messing about,’ I said. We had to confess to something or Fräulein Eberhardt would have sniffed out the truth. ‘We’re really sorry,’ I told her.

‘Yes,’ said GG. ‘It’s just that I’m going away this week and it’s making us all feel a bit …’

‘Giddy?’ offered Fräulein Eberhardt. A word that was preferable to so many others.

In the days that followed, I waited for the explosion. I waited for Mother to lecture me while we did the washing-up. I braced myself for another trip to Dr Hardy. I expected Father to throw something hard against something breakable. It would get back to them eventually, somehow. Fisher could mention the keys to Dad (I had shoved his set back through the boarding hall letterbox folded up in a piece of paper with his name on. I had no nerve left to hand them back in person) or Frau Gross would be at our door, brimming over with a wicked little story that she’d heard. I’d told Fräulein Eberhardt that the bunch of keys had come from Frau Gross, you see, not wanting to lead her back to Fisher. But that was a foolish thing to do, opening up that well-greased channel for rumours to slip back to our house.

Or Fräulein Eberhardt could have simply come and told my parents herself, knocked on our door and asked for money to replace the broken typewriter. But would she? Would she actually dare?

I slid my typed poster between the pages of a copy of
Das Deutche Mädel
on my bookcase and I waited to see if I still had the guts for the next important step.

It may have been our last goodbye but that wasn’t the last time I saw GG. The morning she was to leave for the West Country she turned up at the ice rink to watch me skate. She must have sneaked in by the fire exit and found her place high up in the stands. Ingrid spotted her straight away, always very aware of who might be watching or listening in. But when she made to yell up at GG, ask her what she was doing there, I grabbed her sleeve and shook my head. I mouthed the words,
It’s okay
, and reluctantly, Ingrid agreed to carry on.

We were to attempt the triple axel that morning – without the pole harness.

We – even though it would be me all alone when it came to leaping from the ice.

Of course, it had all been for Ingrid. It was important to her that I executed the jump successfully, just once, before I left for skate camp. That way, she could tell everyone she had taught me all I knew. Who she would tell, I really didn’t know, maybe just herself, but even so, I wanted that for her. It would be my parting gift.

Ingrid set the music running, Bruckner’s
Fantasie
, and I skated figures of eight waiting for the section that demanded the jump. The piano became louder, more earnest, and I picked up the routine, Ingrid shouting last-minute nervous instructions through the mist of the ice. ‘Remember, you need to stay lower than you think, get a good grip on take-off.’ And I felt strangely cool and detached from it all as I skated backwards, made that twist forwards, struck, and – one, two, three – landed. As if it was nothing.

Ingrid exploded with excitement. I glanced up at GG, thinking she would be the same but there was no reaction from the stands. Perhaps she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, or perhaps to the inexpert eye, it was just a jump like any other.

‘You did it!’ Ingrid shrieked, skating over, joyfully clattering into me. ‘You did it! You did it!’ She grabbed my hand, waving it around as if I was the victor of a fight. ‘You are going to do such great things!’ She was crying tears of real happiness. ‘This is just the start for you, Fräulein Keller!’

I felt so warm in her excited presence, triumphant as she hugged me.

But it was time to leave Ingrid. I loved her for her rebel’s heart but I didn’t want to begin to hate her for being scared to act upon it. I told her that I really couldn’t have done it without her, any of it, and I promised, solemnly, to do everything I could in the future to make her proud. Because that was the truth and because I had learnt that it was important to say things to people while they were still there in front of you, not regret the unsaid later when they were gone.

When I finished my session, GG wasn’t there. I walked round the banks of lockers – the guards on my skates making my stride long and loping – thinking I might find her. But her bus would have been leaving early. The day at the meeting hall really had been our goodbye.

I was alone now.

I pushed my key into the slot of my locker, feeling very grown-up all of a sudden, the realisation that I was on the cusp of something settling firmly on my shoulders – and then I froze.

NESTBESCHMUTZER.

On the locker door, in front of my nose, scrawled in big, black marker pen was the word NESTBESCHMUTZER. It hadn’t been there when I’d put in my things, I was sure of it. How would I have missed it? I looked around. No one. I could hear voices echoing back from the rink – Dani and her coach. GG would never have written a thing like that, nor Ingrid. And anyway Ingrid had been with me the whole time. To suspect Dani was too far-fetched. We were rivals, but in a quiet way, our weapon of choice being total indifference, even if she had got word that I’d beat her to pulling off a triple.

NESTBESCHMUTZER.

I was scared to open my locker door, in case I found something else inside, something deserving of a Nestbeschmutzer – somebody who dirties their own nest, somebody who shits on their own people. I swung back the door with my eyes closed and when I opened them again – nothing. Or rather, my things – exactly as I had left them, utterly terrifying in their ordinariness.

I’d been cut loose and I was drifting. Who was I, who would I be, without them? I remembered Dad taking the stabilisers off my bike for the first time when I was seven and pushing me off, down the wide, empty tarmac of Lincoln Drive, my mind squealing on a loop:
now what now what now what …

I searched for the good.

Morning line-ups became an opportunity to see a beautiful sunrise; evening line-ups a chance to watch the Suffolk trees turn to silhouettes against the pink. Those exhausting walks to the textile factory could be transformed by a glimpse of a woodpecker or the tune of a Singvogel. In the dusk, deer might leap across our path, making us stop and gasp. We saved lumps of inedible gristle in the pouches of our cheeks at lunchtime and spat them into the hems of the SS uniforms before sewing them up.

I got a new family.

One rainy evening a girl called Ute killed herself. She’d smuggled a pair of fabric scissors out of the factory in the lining of her smock and used them to cut her own throat. We mourned her, of course, with a small, quiet ceremony in the dorm. Candles and tears and illicit prayers. But also we tried to be thankful. We were thankful that Ute had found some peace, that she had carried out her awful act in the shower block where it was easy for us to clean up – because that was our job, just like it was our job to pull actual lumps of shit from the drains when the sewers backed up. We were thankful for Ute’s things, which Clara shared out amongst us, gifting me with my first pair of gloves. And I was also thankful for the space Ute left in one of the dorm’s ‘families’. Her grieving ‘Schwester’ Nina chose me to be her new sister.

Nina – with her long, shaggy hair the colour of sand, her eyebrows as big as slugs. Like many of the women she was in there for some petty remark. A neighbour had reported her for naming her pigs after the Führer and two of our Reich Ministers.

‘It was meant to be affectionate. I fucking love those pigs.’

Now she was locked up, all her affection gone. For our leaders, that is. She still talked longingly for the pigs, more than her human family.

Our ‘Mutti’, Kika, slept in the bunk above us with Ann, an aunt of sorts. We checked each other’s hair for lice, like a concentrated bunch of baboons; we protected each others’ stash of bread and bed socks; we kept each other warm. Because it did get cold. I thought about how I had stamped my feet on the pavement during the rounds for last year’s Winterhilfswerk. That had been nothing compared to the razor-sharp coldness of sleeping in that dorm.

We spooned one another in bed, Nina and me.

‘I might kill myself too one of these days,’ she’d say after lights-out, her voice clicky and nasal in the dark. ‘I’m going to run at that fence. I’ll die in a shower of sparks.’

‘Amazing.’

‘It’ll be electric!’

We sniggered. This wasn’t a gloomy conversation. The idea that there could be an end to things, an end that might somehow be in our control, was soothing.

‘Or I might steal a pair of scissors too but I’d use them to cut strips from a blanket.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’d make a noose. I’d swing, of course!’

We were quiet. Sharing the silent image of Nina peacefully swaying a metre above the ground.

‘Where do you think you go?’ I asked Nina. ‘Afterwards.’

‘Oh, they put you in one of those incinerators round the back of the toilet block,’ she said. ‘Then they post you back to your family in a little cardboard box.’ She wriggled further under the covers, taking me with her.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean, where do you go, the thing inside your body.’

‘What thing?’ She buried her face in my hair. ‘There is no thing.’

‘A soul?’ It sounded like a polite request. ‘Don’t you think that something must live on?’

I could feel her shaking her head, her chin rubbing against the base of my skull. ‘No, this is it, Jess.’ She tightened her arms and legs around me and squeezed. ‘You have to do it all here, right now. It’s the only chance you get.’