The Other Me (9 page)

Every week we learn to march in lines, like real troops. Sometimes Winkler drills us through the town holding flags. It’s a warning, he says. Important for people to understand that National Socialism destroys everything that stands in its way. The Führer tells everyone that the future of Germany is in the hands of its youth. There is strength in numbers. We have a new and giddy power. Our troop is ordered to disrupt the kids going to Bible study, jostle them and knock books out of their hands. It’s weird at first, being a bully. I don’t like seeing girls cry, so I only push the boys. It’s better when they push back – it’s not right when they cringe and put their arms over their faces. It makes me feel strangely angry with them. I get a kind of ache in my belly.

But fighting comes naturally to us. We’re boys who are familiar with beatings. Not just the back of Meyer’s hand and the strap; Otto and I have always fought, have given each other bruises since I can remember. When Winkler organises brawls amongst us to harden us up, Otto and I are the first to get stuck in. I turn to see Otto smashing his fist into Carl Ohler’s face. Carl is in our class at school. He’s cleverer than Otto; most people are. But Carl likes to boast about his grades. Now his nose is bleeding, his mouth twisted. Otto bending over him screaming, ‘A German boy doesn’t cry!’

Before this our lives hadn’t counted for much. We’d been told often enough that we were unwanted, abandoned on a doorstep. Meyer and his wife took us in. We’ve been given their name, but we never belonged. We sleep over the stables and wait for the family to eat before us. Bettina and Agnes kick their legs against the table, chewing and staring at their plates while we stand behind them, our mouths watering, hoping for scraps.

KLAUDIA

1987, London

We have a small tree. Its unfolding plastic branches have been dusted and draped with coloured lights and dotted with the same collection of decorations that get unpacked from the attic year after year. My mother keeps Christmas cards too. Cards from years back are strung on a piece of string that my father loops above the mantelpiece. The paper is yellowing, the writing inside faded. Any new ones will be propped up in pride of place between the clock and my mother’s large Chinese urn. She keeps her sewing thread, an odd assortment of safety pins and spare stamps inside the bulbous porcelain container.

There are two new cards. One is from the Lewis family. The other, with a snowy scene of Central Park, is from my uncle Ernst. I wonder if he’d enclosed any money. He used to. But my father always gives it away to the church. I examine my uncle’s untidy, scratchy handwriting. He doesn’t write anything, just signs his name. I’ve only met him once. He came to visit when I was six. I’d had no idea that he was coming, and then there he was, in our house. The only relative I’ve ever met.

He was blond and tall like my father. You could tell they were brothers. His German accent wasn’t so pronounced though. He had another shape to his words, a mixing of German and American. Ernst told me he’d picked up that way of speaking because of living in the USA for so long.

At first I’d been nervous of him. Grooves of silver scar tissue puckered the left side of his face. The eye on that side was pale and milky – blind, he said. And he was missing the ends of two fingers on one hand, one on the other. I’d wondered what kind of accident had done that to him, picturing him crawling from mangled, flaming wreckage or falling frozen from a mountain ridge. Ernst brought all kinds of goodies with him: American chocolate, presents for my mother and father and a huge, life-size baby doll for me with slow-closing spiky eyelashes. He was funny. He put jazz records on and asked me to dance. ‘Come on, kid. Don’t let me down. Show me how it’s done.’

But when he left for America he forgot to say goodbye, and he never came back. I asked about it, and my mother said that unfortunately Uncle Ernst wasn’t very reliable, and anyway, she added, raising her chin, no doubt he had a busy life over the ocean. I wasn’t to expect him to visit again, she said. I think the truth is, he argued with my father. My father didn’t like jazz and he thought the presents were overly extravagant. Ernst wasn’t a believer, and I saw the way my father pursed his lips when we set off for chapel, leaving Ernst reading novels on the sofa, listening to Billie Holiday and eating chocolates.

I used to wish for the brothers to make it up so that Ernst could come again. I’ve given up wishing now.

There are no presents under the tree. Mum keeps them hidden away until Christmas Eve. This year I’ve asked for a leotard. The need to make certain of it pricks at me so that I can’t keep still. It’ll only take a quick prod of the packaging to tell me whether or not she’s bought it. This is my only opportunity to snoop. I’m guessing that the presents are stored away in my parents’ bedroom.

I open their door cautiously. The room is hushed and cold. The walls are flocked in seamlessly repeating orange flowers on a green background; dried flowers poke from a basket. Over the dressing-table the words ‘Touch not the cup, it is death to the soul’ are framed in gold. Crocheted scatter cushions, made by my mother, are arranged on the double bed and on the rocking chair in the corner. I can’t remember their room ever looking any different.

I creep past the bed, covered with a blue candlewick spread, neatly tucked in at the corners. I have the feeling that something will shoot out a hand and grab my ankles as I go past, and I stumble quickly to the wardrobe. With a beating heart, I open the doors and hunt past the rows of dresses and suits all swathed in clear plastic, checking behind the shoes. A smell of mothballs rises and clings to me. There are no packages.

I open her top drawer, dipping my hands into lace and nylon. This is where she keeps her underwear: bras with stiff under-wiring and pants with high waists and slimming panels built in. The lace seems to burn my fingers. It is too intimate. I find an ornate perfume bottle. It is empty, lying on its side at the bottom of the drawer. I uncork the glass lid and sniff at the shadow of a scent, heady and faintly stale. I stumble over the name on the label, lips moving as I sound the letters aloud: M.i.t.s.o.u.k.o. I glance over my shoulder, thinking I hear something. A car passes outside with a clash of gears.

Hurrying, I pull open the next drawer down, staring at neatly folded jumpers and cardigans. I slide my hand among them, and then reach right to the back. Something moves under my fingers; I grasp a strange bundle. There’s a clink of metal against metal. A silk scarf has been wrapped around knobbly objects.

I sit on the bed to unwrap the flowery scarf, finding several metal objects that look like old-fashioned pieces of jewellery. With a shock, I understand: they’re military medals.

I hold a stumpy cross in my palm. It hangs from a red, white and black ribbon like a necklace. I run my fingers over a date engraved at the bottom: 1941. There’s a dark shield too with an eagle over the top. The last one is a kind of brooch. It’s silver with a crossed sword and rifle at the centre. Each of them has a swastika engraved on it. They are cold and weighty in my hands.

Heart beating fast, I bundle them back into slippery silk and shove the package where I found it, behind the soft layers of wool.

In my own bedroom, I bury my face in my hands. You don’t get medals for nothing. Three of them! I imagine Hitler pinning them on my father, Hitler’s little moustache wrinkling up over his smile as he thanked him. For what? What did my father do to earn them? I don’t understand. My parents keep the evidence hidden away, so they must be ashamed. But in that case, why didn’t they get rid of them? The swastika on the medals reminds me of the one inked onto my desk and the one Shane Stevens draws on walls. I thought it was the Nazi sign, the one the SS wore on their uniforms.

It has begun to rain. The sky is dark and sullen. Water slaps against my windows in sudden squalls. It doesn’t feel like Christmas. Everything is slimy and sodden and miserable. I shiver.

There is a loud rap on my door, making me jump.

‘Klaudia,’ my father calls, ‘come and lay the table for lunch.’

I keep my eyes down as I take cutlery out of a drawer and place mats and glasses on the kitchen table. He’s wet from his dash from the shed into the house and mercuried drops shine on the wool of his shoulders. He holds a freshly carved crib with a baby Jesus in his large palms. ‘For the nativity scene at chapel,’ he says.

I want to shout and throw all the plates on the floor – see them smash into pieces. I want to knock the crib out of his hands. He is so righteous, but what about the pistol in the portmanteau, the cat buried in our garden, the Nazi medals hidden away?

‘Did you meet Hitler when you were in the war?’ I ask as I position the water jug in the middle of the table. I hear myself speak with a sense of disbelief, head swimming with a mix of rebelliousness and terror.

‘What?’ He pulls his gaze from his carving with a jerk.

My mouth is forming more forbidden words but I’m already losing the ability to speak them. ‘Hitler,’ I manage. ‘Did it make you sick to be in the same room as him?’ My voice cracks.

He crosses the space between us with two strides. His skin mottles, his mouth pushed tight. And he raises his hand, the flat of it slicing the air.

I scrunch my eyes, tensed, waiting for the blow.

‘Otto?’

My lids snap open and I see my mother coming in through the door behind him. My father’s face is still fixed on mine, but his pupils have glazed. He’s scratching his scalp with his long fingers. His other hand curled into a fist at his side.

‘Is everything all right?’ Mum is by my side, touching my arm, her face crumpled, looking from my father to me.

‘Klaudia has been talking of things that do not concern her,’ he says stiffly.

I hear the click of moisture in Mum’s throat as she swallows. She reaches out to pat his arm. ‘She’s only a child,’ she says quietly.

‘I’m not proud of who I was or the things I did.’ His voice is harsh. ‘But I met your mother and I found Jesus. Those two things saved me.’

He leaves, shutting the door behind him. I have a pain inside as if my guts are tied in a knot. He’d wanted to hit me. I’d seen it in his eyes. And a watery sickness fills me, because worse than that, my mother lied to me.

‘Klaudia? Cariad? I told you not to ask him questions about the past,’ she’s saying. ‘I hope he didn’t upset you. But you have to understand how difficult it is for him.’

I can’t look at her. I press my fingers around the cold glass jug, letting ice creep into my bones. I wish I’d never found the medals, wish I’d never asked about the war. Now I can’t un-know it. Christmas is ruined. I don’t want a leotard anymore.

ELIZA

1995, Leeds

December

He’s not Jewish. His grandmother is. Not just Jewish – she’s a Holocaust survivor. Bloody hell! She was a prisoner in an actual camp. I stare at my face in the mirror. It’s a conversation I’ve been having with myself for days, since he told me. It goes round and round. Sometimes I even picture the little row of inked numbers on her arm. Her skin must be wrinkled and worn thin, loose over the bone. The numbers hold their colour. Dark. Inedible.

I’m leaving for Paris today. Cosmo said he’d come with me to the airport. But I don’t want to drag him to London. Heathrow’s a long way from Leeds. So we’ve compromised on the train station. We’re going to do the
Brief Encounter
scene on the platform. It’s a shame there’s no steamy station café selling buns and tea in green china cups. We’ll have to make do with coffee in a paper take-away beaker and a bar of chocolate.

His body is something that I’m compelled to touch, as if searching for pathways, secret avenues further into him. But there’s more to us than a heady rush of chemicals. He listens to me. We discuss things. When tension tightens and a row blows up, he finds a way to make me laugh. His jokes are terrible. But he manages to get me every time; finds the crack, the fissure of weakness, and mines it, opens me out with a belly laugh.

I didn’t know this could happen between two people. It’s as if we meld into a new substance when we’re together, something so much finer than me on my own. I have to be careful not to talk about it too much. I’ll become one of those relationship bores, one of those people who repeat all the little inconsequential sayings of their ‘other half’. One of those people who pepper conversation with the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ in a smug, superior voice. Anyway, I’m superstitious. Fate will hear and take him away from me. The truth is, I feel so damn lucky.

I make it to the phone box on the corner by nine o’clock and dial the number. When the beeps go I push a coin into the slot.

But it’s not Mum’s voice. It’s my father. I swallow, my throat constricting.

‘Hello?’ he’s saying. ‘Hello? Is that you, Klaudia?’

It was my intention to tell Mum about going to Paris. I need to explain that I won’t be able to phone her while I’m away, and reassure her that I’ll be home on Christmas Eve.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s me. Is Mum there?’

‘She’s got a headache.’

‘Oh. Can I speak to her?’

The line crackles. ‘She’s not feeling well, Klaudia. I don’t want to disturb her.’

‘Tell her…’ I pause. Disappointment dulls my voice. ‘Tell her I’m going to be very busy. It’s the end of term and then I’m going to stay with a friend till I come home. So… so I may not be able to phone. Tell her not to worry and I’ll see you both on Christmas Eve.’

‘Very well.’

‘Give her my love.’

The line is dead. I stand with the purring receiver against my ear, frustrated that I couldn’t say goodbye to her. I don’t like to think of her feeling ill. But my father will bring her cups of tea and keep people away until she’s better. He’s always been protective of her.

And now I’m late, and I haven’t packed. Cosmo will be here any minute. I grab toothbrush, cleanser, jar of moisturiser and a handful of cosmetics. Shove them into my wash-bag and force the zip over the jumbled squash. He’s not Jewish, I tell myself again. His grandmother is. As if that makes it all right.