The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (27 page)

The stand-off lasted all night. As day broke the wolves gave up, trotting off one after another into the forest. Max waited another hour before he climbed down, leaden with exhaustion.

One week later he reached the edge of the taiga. He was sick of the endless forest and was sure that this time he really had reached the wide expanse of the tundra. He cut two eye slits into a sheet of birch bark and bound it like a mask in front of his face.

‘Might not look nice but I can’t risk snow-blindness,’ he said aloud.

For the first day he enjoyed being out in the open space but soon his left hip began to throb and despite the aid of his wooden staff, he started to limp. Within days the sole of his left boot had worn thin and Max felt the toes of his left foot beginning to itch and sting. Whenever he sheltered, he unwrapped the rags around his foot and rubbed it hard. White, red and yellow patches had spread across it and the middle toes had gone numb. Two days later blisters formed over the waxy skin and he couldn’t feel his little toes any more. He knew the blisters would turn purple, then black. He had seen frostbite in the camp – some of his companions had lost fingers and toes that way. That night, as he huddled in a makeshift shelter, chewing on a piece of dry bread, tears stung his eyes. It wouldn’t be painful to lose his numb toes, but he felt sapped by Siberia’s relentless cruelty as never before.

It was late spring before his two blackened toes fell off like dead leaves. By then the cold had loosened its grip and the snow had melted.

In February of the third year, Max followed the banks of the Volga and as March approached, he enjoyed the river’s dramatic awakening – a deep moaning sound before the ice burst apart, like fragments of the earth’s crust, huge pieces of ice gliding over each other, tearing away from the bank. Winter gave way to a volatile spring. A vague memory of a Volga song tickled his brain like a feather, stirring hope and a longing for home. After the first melt, the river gathered momentum, swelling into a raging torrent.

Max kept his distance from the unpredictable bank, but one night under a March full moon, just before dawn, the river breached it. Max gasped and screamed, thrashing about in the icy water, trying desperately to stay afloat as the river swept him along together with branches, leaves and other debris. He had been a fine swimmer once, but as the dark river engulfed him and his soaking clothes dragged him down, thoughts and images rushed through his mind as fast as the river: Erna’s smile on their wedding day; baby Karl, his big blue eyes; the burning ghetto; the camp; the tent of the reindeer people . . .

Something hit his leg and a sharp pain brought him back to his senses. In the twilight he could see a slim tree trunk drifting a few metres away and with a few desperate strokes he reached it and clung to it. Together they floated for miles down the the swollen stream. At daybreak, Max noticed that he had been swept closer to the shore, and with one last push he propelled himself to the edge. He scrambled up the riverbank, swearing and shaking himself like a dog. When he peeled off his clothes and pulled out the prince from his jacket pocket he gasped: the puppet’s papier-mâché head had been squashed and some of the colour had run. It took days for his clothes to dry properly and for Max to carefully mould the puppet’s head back into shape.

Max trekked on day after day, month after month, crossing tundra and taiga, the Siberian plain and countless rivers and lakes, willing his bruised legs and frostbitten feet to carry on, his whole body on fire with pain.

He had to stay vigilant at all times – watching out for danger, alert to any morsel of food. Sometimes, tired to the core of walking, he took a chance and hitched a ride. Once he climbed into a truck after overhearing the driver mention that he was heading towards Bratsk. He rolled into the back of the vehicle and hid underneath a tarpaulin behind a stack of wooden boxes, jumping off unnoticed as the truck pulled into the town eight hours later, but not before taking two tins of salmon from the crates.

Another time he stumbled across a bicycle on a little forest road, leaning against a birch tree. He hesitated briefly but couldn’t resist and for days he enjoyed the different pace of his journey. Any vehicle would get him home quicker than his beaten feet. He even tried his luck with a ragged donkey he found grazing in the middle of a meadow. Pleased to have human company and welcoming the handful of water Max shared with the animal, it let him sit on its broad back for a few hours before dumping him off and bolting away at a brisk gallop.

Once, late at night, Max jumped on to the freight train from Novosibirsk to Omsk. He landed in a wagon of dirt-encrusted vegetables and dug himself a hiding place within a mountain of potatoes in the corner. But what had seemed a good idea at first soon turned into a nightmare as the dirty potatoes collapsed in on him like an avalanche. The next morning, before sunrise, he dug himself out, threw a few handfuls of potatoes off the train and then jumped, collecting the scattered potatoes as the train rumbled off towards its destination.

Besides his aching but faithful body, it was the kindness of strangers that saved him more than once: villagers handing him bread and water, a pot of lard or a swig of home-brewed vodka, giving him some vital directions or a bed for the night. Max’s instinct sharpened the longer his escape lasted and despite some near-misses with armed farmers and Soviet authorities in the form of an kolkhoz official and a train guard, Max remained lucky.

All the way back home Max kept the prince and his cherished postcards from Erna hidden under his shirt. Most days he rambled on to the prince, and in the evenings he placed the puppet on his knees, pondering the route ahead. By now the prince was definitely worse for wear and the puppet’s shiny costume only a distant memory.

Finally, in the spring of 1952, Max returned home. He had been gone nearly thirteen years. The moment he set foot on German soil, crossing the border from Czechoslovakia, he worked out how and when he could get to Nuremberg, then sent a telegram to Erna and Karl. He couldn’t sit still on the last train journey, marching up and down the aisles, occasionally glancing at fellow passengers in their compartments, then out of the window, searching for anything familiar in the landscape.
How did Erna keep her hopes alive
, he wondered,
never knowing whether I’d come back or not? What about all those wives, mothers, children . . . what did they do with their swollen hearts?

When the train finally drew into Nuremberg, Max started to sweat profusely. He opened the top three buttons of his shirt and fumbled with the puppet’s head in his coat pocket. As had become a habit for Max, he shared his agitation with the prince.

‘Oh my God. Is that Erna? And that tall guy, my Karl?’ he whispered as he spotted two figures craning their necks for the long-lost husband and father as the train pulled in.

The moment the train stopped, Max stumbled out of the carriage towards the pair.

‘Erna, Karl!’ he shouted, waving his arms like a windmill. Erna spotted him first.

‘Max,
mein Gott, bist du das wirklich?
’ Her voice sounded shrill and as high as a bell.

‘Erna!’ Max plunged at his wife. They stood in a close embrace for a long time. A faint scent of lily of the valley wafted off her. Max planted a soft kiss on her hair, which was neatly combed, dark brown streaked with grey, then kissed her on the mouth.

‘
Mein Gott!
’ Her face was red and blotchy and she sounded out of breath. She wiped away some tears with the back of her hand. ‘I can’t quite believe it’s really you, Max!’ She patted his chest. Erna peeled herself away from the embrace and reached out for their son. Max turned to the young man, who extended his hand. Max shook it, then folded his other arm around Karl in an awkward embrace.

‘My Karl!’ His first words to his son. Karl had been an eager boy of eleven when they said their bitter farewell. The boy had clung to him, trying hard not to cry. Max had told him he would be back very soon.

‘Welcome, Father.’ The tall young man stood straight and slightly rigid, shifting his weight from one leg to another, glancing at Max, then back at his feet as if he had lost something. The lanky boy with the cheeky smile Max had hugged all those years ago, at the very same railway station in 1939, had vanished. And yet, there, on platform number four, Max decided to give him his present.

‘I brought you something, Karl. Well, more like . . . someone.’ Max stretched out his hand towards Karl, holding the puppet.

‘Oh, thank you, Father, I received the doctor a long time ago.’ Karl’s expression hardly changed. He took the puppet by the head with two fingers and looked at it.

‘Come on, you’ll have enough time later, our train is leaving in a few minutes.’ Erna ushered Max and Karl to a different platform.

‘So we live in Wolkersdorf now?’ Max remembered the name from the first precious postcard he’d received in Siberia.

‘Yes, it’s nice there, you’ll see. I think you’ll like it,’ Erna replied.

Karl said nothing but stuffed the puppet into his trouser pocket and walked behind his parents along the platform.

When they reached the small station in Wolkersdorf, Erna linked arms with Max and Karl and the three made the short walk to their small house along the cobbled streets with their quaint buildings. A large hand-painted WELCOME banner greeted Max as they entered the house.

His first bath was a quick one as Max was eager to join Erna and Karl at the kitchen table, but the next day he didn’t emerge from the bathroom for four hours. As he sat in the steaming bathtub, rubbing away the last dirt until his skin shone raw and bright pink, he was overtaken by violent waves of sobbing. How could he ever soak away the frozen legacy of the tundra? And even if his bones did warm up again, would the icy place inside his heart ever melt? Warsaw, the camp, the brutal journey home . . . Max realised that to soften and soak away those wounds would take more than one morning’s bath. He scrambled out of the tub and wrapped himself in the towels Erna had brought him.

‘Towels . . . white towels . . .’ he murmured, sinking his face into the soft fabric. When he looked up, he froze. As his face slowly appeared in the steamed-up mirror, like a photograph emerging in a darkroom, he shuddered at his reflection: eyes dull and sunken, his skin an ashen grey, lines where he did not remember any and deep furrows between his eyebrows like a constant frown. His hair, so very short and thinning, showed a streak of white on his left temple.

For days, Max touched everything, picking up even the most mundane objects like an explorer, scrutinising them from all sides: a toothbrush, a comb, a porcelain cup, little knick-knacks he didn’t recognise. He tried to ignore the glances Erna and Karl threw at him.

‘Look, Erna.’ He pulled out the little silver spoon he had carried with him for twelve years. ‘Do you still have the sugar bowl?’

Erna looked at him, tears misting her eyes.

‘Max, we lost everything. I don’t think you understand, when the bombs fell, we were lucky to get out alive. Who cares about the sugar bowl?’ Max looked at the spoon.
He
cared about the bowl. He had brought the spoon home, had taken care of it. It belonged together with the bowl.

‘It was 28 November 1944.’ Erna spoke quietly. ‘It was a small air attack, but this time they got us. You never knew whether it would be your time or not. If not, then we probably would have died during that terrible night on 2 January. But why am I telling you this now, you haven’t even been home for long. I’m sorry.’

‘No, don’t be, I want to know,’ Max replied.

‘Not now, Max, there’s plenty of time.’

Despite the welcome, little turned out to be as Max had hoped, or imagined. How often had he dreamed of embracing his wife. He had stroked the postcards with her delicate writing, re-read them on any occasion he could steal himself away – the one postcard that arrived every few months, having to sustain him and keep alive the delicate connection between them.

But when he arrived back in a village he didn’t know with a son he hardly recognised and a wife who was friendly but cool, hope crumbled and all that remained were the brittle bandages of his memories.

Max could not settle. Some days he thought Erna was watching his every move, and whenever he took a short walk through the village he pulled his hat down over his face. And although Karl had stepped into his father’s shoes and become apprenticed as a carpenter after the war, he hardly spoke to his father. The young boy of eleven who had admired his father had disappeared.

Max couldn’t relax at meals and cut up every bit of food into the smallest of morsels, savouring each piece of bread as if it were his last, munching an apple as if it were the only harvest from a tree.

One day, out of the blue, he shouted at Erna.

‘You’re crazy. Throwing out bread!’

‘Don’t be silly, Max, it’s only the crust. What’s the matter with you?’ Erna’s voice was sharp and irritated. Max covered his face and began to cry.

‘Please, Max, don’t cry over a small piece of bread.’ Erna’s voice softened.

‘You don’t understand, Erna. A man can’t live without bread. We’ve got such plenty here I don’t know what to eat. And yet some of my comrades are still rotting in those camps, with nothing to sink their teeth into. Nothing but watery soup and a tiny piece of stale bread.’

Erna didn’t say anything, but he could tell that she was searching his face for the man she had said goodbye to on a platform in Nuremberg all those years ago. Before the war that had changed everything.

Max missed the prince. He had not seen the puppet since he handed it to Karl at the railway station and the place above his heart where he had carried the prince felt empty.

One afternoon, when Erna and Karl were both out, he searched for the prince in Karl’s room.

‘Ah, here you are, I’ve looked for you everywhere.’ Max held the puppet in front of his face and smiled.

‘Had to dig you out from under a pile of Karl’s dirty clothes.’

He sat on the floor, gazing at the puppet with wistful eyes.