Times of War Collection (20 page)

I left them, and walked around the back of the farmhouse towards the hay-barn, where Karli and I had played so often, leaping from the top of the stack to the bottom into piles of soft sweet hay. That was what I was thinking of, as I opened the barn door. It was dark inside, so I pushed it wide open to let the light in.

There was a man lying stretched out in the hay, a man in a uniform, an unfamiliar blue uniform. He looked fast asleep, or dead – I was not sure which. Mutti was there beside me suddenly, and Karli too. Marlene came wandering in after them, and wasted no time at all, before reaching up with her trunk, tugging at the hay, and stuffing it into her mouth. The sound of her grinding jaws was loud in the silence. “Who is he?” Karli whispered.

“That is the enemy, Karli,” Mutti said. “An airman. From one of the bombers that has destroyed our city. British. RAF.” She reached for a nearby pitchfork, gripped it tight in two hands, and advanced slowly towards him.”

IZZIE BROKE OFF FROM HER STORY
,
AND TURNED TO LOOK AT
us. “I’m so cross with myself. I meant to bring my photograph album with me,” she said. “But I left it at home in my little apartment when they brought me here. I miss it so much. I used to look at it almost every day, you know. The things I could have shown you. There is a photo of us all down on the farm, when I was a small girl, and Karli was even smaller, just a baby in Papi’s arms – in happier times. I love that photo. We are all outside that same hay-barn, and I am sitting up on Tomi, with Mutti holding him, and I have long plaits and a big gappy smile – my two front teeth are missing. Uncle Manfred must have taken the
picture because he is not in it, and Aunt Lotti is looking very serious as usual. When I look at this photo I can see it all so clearly. I can almost breathe in the air of the countryside. And I have a photo also of Marlene, only one, but mostly it is of her trunk because she was trying to eat the camera! It is enough though. Sometimes I worry that everything that happened might be some kind of a dream, or that maybe I have made the whole thing up. But I only have to look at those photographs to know I did not, that it really did happen. I wish I had brought them with me. I wish I could show you.”

“We could always go and fetch them, if you like,” I said. “If you trust us with your key, that is.”

“Of course I do, dear,” she replied. “After all, I am trusting you with my story, aren’t I? I have never told
anyone else, you know. That would be kind, very kind. I have the key to my apartment here, in my drawer, Karli. You might have to wiggle the key in the lock a bit, but you will manage. You can find it easily enough. Just around the corner from Main Street, on George Avenue, the first house. You go up the steps. Number two.” She was reaching towards her bedside cupboard as she spoke, but hadn’t the strength to pull open the drawer. So Karl did it for her, searching around till he found them. There was an elephant on the keychain.

“To remind me,” she said, smiling. Then she noticed something else in her drawer, and her eyes brightened suddenly. “Ah, now this I never leave behind, Karli. I never go anywhere without it. Can you pass it to me? This is what I wanted to show you.”

I had no notion at first as to what it might be, and from the look of puzzlement on his face as he handed it over to her, neither did Karl. It was a small, round object, made of metal, black in colour. “It’s very heavy, and cold too,” Karl said. “What is it?” By now I was beginning to think I recognised it for what it was.

“A compass?” I said. “Is that what it is?”

Lizzie was cradling it lovingly in her cupped hands, and for several moments seemed too overcome to speak.

“You are quite right, dear,” she replied at last. “This is a compass, to help you find your way. But this is not just any old compass. It is the best compass in the whole wide world, I promise you. Because it has shown me the way all through my life.” She opened the lid, and touched the face of it with her fingertips. “I first saw this compass on that day,” she went on, “the day we found him lying there in the barn…”

“I think sometimes that perhaps I had two beginnings in my life; the moment of my birth, of course, and the moment I set eyes on this man, this airman who I knew had bombed my city, a bomber,
a killer, who had caused so much suffering to so many. As Mutti had said, here was the enemy, close to, in the flesh.

He was not the first I had seen. Several times I had watched columns of prisoners-of-war being marched along the streets in Dresden. To be honest, I had never taken that much notice. They looked much like our soldiers, only dirtier, sadder. Some people would scream obscenities at them, and spit at them, and throw things, so I would look away. It made me feel ashamed. I never thought people could be that angry, that vindictive. I could not imagine what would make them do such things. But for just a moment, looking down at him lying there in the hay in Uncle Manfred’s barn that morning, I understood it completely, and I hated him, and I hoped he was dead. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, and I knew right away that he was no more of a killer than Papi was.

I often wondered afterwards what it must have been like to wake up and see the four of us staring
down at him, Mutti with the pitchfork pointing at his chest, and Marlene towering over us, her trunk reaching down towards him. His eyes were wide with alarm, as he sat up in the hay, and raised his hands in the air.

“English?” Mutti said. Her voice was shaking, from anger, I thought, more than fear.

“No…nein,” he replied. “Canadian. Canada. Canada.”

“Bomber?” Mutti was holding the pitchfork at his throat now. “RAF?”

The man nodded.

“England, America, Canada, it does not matter where you come from. Do you know what you have done? Have you any idea?” Mutti was shouting at him now, and crying too in her fury. “Did you see the fire you made? Are you proud of that? Do you know how many you killed? Do you care? Do you have any idea how beautiful a city Dresden was before you came? Do you? I should kill you, kill you right now.”

Mutti raised the pitchfork. I really thought she was going to do it.

I grabbed her arm, and held it fast. “You cannot do it, Mutti!” I cried. “You must not! How often have I heard you say it? To Papi, to me, to Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti. All killing is wrong, no matter what. It is what you always told us. Remember?”

It was many long moments before Mutti lowered the pitchfork. Then she stepped back, and handed it to me. “Maybe I cannot do it,” she said. “But I wanted to. That is what your bombs do. They make hate. I think at this moment I hate you more than I have ever hated anyone in my whole life.”

“I do not blame you.” To our astonishment, the airman was speaking to Mutti in almost perfect German. “I saw the fire from the plane. I could not believe it. I did not expect it to be like that, that the whole city would burn like that. None of us did.”

“Oh, really?” said Mutti. “So tell me, what did you think it would be like then, some kind of a carnival, a firework display perhaps?”

“We thought it would be like the blitz on London, I suppose, when the
Luftwaffe
came.” The airman replied softly, not responding at all to Mutti’s fury. “I was there. And that was terrible enough. But last night it looked like the fires of hell. That’s what we’re doing in this war, all of us, on your side, on our side: we are making a hell on earth, and we do not seem to be able to know how to stop. I am sorry. I know that is not enough, but it is all I can say.”

No one spoke for some time, until Karli piped up, breaking the silence between us. “Do you really fly a Spitfire?” he asked.

“No, only a Lancaster, I’m afraid. And I didn’t fly it anyway. I’m not a pilot, I’m a navigator.” And when he smiled then, I remember thinking that he looked more like a boy than a man.

“And you navigated your way to Dresden so you could drop your bombs on thousands of innocent people,” said Mutti. “Well, bravo you! How do people like you sleep at nights? That is what I want to know.” Mutti was looking about her, suddenly
nervous. “And the others? Where are the others of your crew? Are you alone?”

“All dead,” the airman replied. “We were hit by flak over the city. Everyone in the plane was killed, except for Jimbo – he was the pilot – and me. Jimbo told me to get out right away, to jump. He said that he would hold the plane as steady as he could, and then follow me. But he never did. I saw the plane blow up as I was parachuting down. He saved my life. And that’s funny, you know, because Jimbo and me, we never got on, not really. Bit of a joker, he was, thought it was all just one big game – the war, I mean. Him and me, we’d have big arguments. He turned out to be a pretty good buddy after all, didn’t he? They were all good buddies, and they’re all gone now.”

“Don’t you dare expect me to feel sorry for them,” Mutti said, not so threatening towards him as she had been, but still angry at him. “Not after what they did, what you did. And how come you speak German anyway?”

“I have a Swiss mother,” the airman told her,
“and a Canadian father. So I grew up speaking German and English.”

Karli was not concerned at all with any of this. He was full of his own questions. Mutti kept trying to stop him from speaking to the airman, but Karli ignored her. He wanted to know the man’s name.

“Peter,” the airman said. “Peter Kamm.”

Karli wanted to know how old he was.

“Twenty-one,” came the reply.

Then Karli took it upon himself to introduce everyone. “I am Karli, and I am nine years old. This elephant is called Marlene, and she is from the zoo in Dresden, and she is four years old, and I am the only one who is allowed to ride on her. And this is Elizabeth. She is sixteen, and is always telling me what to do. And Mutti is…well, she is Mutti. And I am hungry. Are you hungry, Peter?”

Mutti took him by the arm and pulled him away then. But Karli could not stop looking at the young man, and the truth was, neither could I. I think I must have done nothing but stare at him the whole
time. Now that he had a name, I found I was not looking so much at the uniform any more. He was much taller than I expected when he got to his feet.

Pitchfork in hand again, Mutti ushered him out through the barn door. We left Marlene shut in there, helping herself busily to the hay, and rumbling with pleasure.

It was not difficult to break a window and let ourselves into the farmhouse. Mutti said she felt bad about having to do it, but that needs must. We could hardly stand out in the snow and wait, could we? She would explain it all later to Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, when they came home, she said. They would understand. I was not so sure that they would. The stove was out, but it was still warm, so we thought they could not have been gone that long. Things were in a mess too, as if they had left the place in a hurry. The more we looked around the more we were sure that, like so many others, they had left to join the great exodus westwards, taking with them what they could.

Luckily for us, Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti must have left in too much of a rush to take all their food with them. There were some rounds of cheese – Uncle Manfred always made his own – and we found some fruit in jars, and pickles too, and some honey. But best of all, down in the cellar Mutti discovered a whole ham. I got the fire going in the stove. Karli fetched in the wood from the shed. And all the while, the airman sat at the kitchen table, forbidden to move by Mutti, who kept a fearsome eye on him – and she took the pitchfork with her, I noticed, wherever she went around the house.