Thomas clambered out of the boat. He held it firmly, close enough to the stones for Ella to get out of the boat and over the parapet, rolling rather than climbing. She couldn’t bend her fingers; in her woollen gloves her fingers looked like a doll’s, stiff and lifeless. Ella crawled on her knees, on her stomach; using the strength in her elbows and supporting herself on both hands, she hauled herself up on the landing stage. She could hardly walk, her feet were two lumps of ice, numb, she couldn’t even feel her knee joints. She came down on one elbow, her left hip struck stone, one shoe fell off. She caught herself with her stiff hand, tipped over, and found herself sitting on the stones.
Thomas hurried over to her. Are you all right? With difficulty, he got her gloves off, took her hands, rubbed them between his own, and together they rubbed Ella’s knees; she raised her legs to cycle in the air. Thomas leaned down a little closer to Ella and massaged her calves. She groaned and gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. Her body dropped back with a thud; she could hardly feel one shoulder.
Ella! Thomas shook her. Ella! He was bending over her, breathing the warm vapours of his breath into her face, but by the time it reached her it had cooled off again. What’s the matter? Ella, say something! Ella didn’t move, she was lying still, as still as she could. Before long Thomas, her little brother, would be shedding tears of desperation. He rubbed and pummelled her stomach, her chest, he bent down to her nostrils, about to try artificial respiration. His voice was full of fear. Ella.
Her limbs really did threaten to freeze. All of a sudden Ella was afraid that any moment now the act she was putting on for him might turn real. She ought to laugh, so that he’d know she had been joking. But her mouth wouldn’t obey her. Ella loved to scare her brother. She must laugh, she must, and she did laugh, a gurgle emerging from deep down inside her.
Ella! His relief and happiness to find that she hadn’t died was so great that Thomas couldn’t feel cross with her. He gave her a hug.
Help me. Ella couldn’t raise her voice, it was a croak. Please warm me up.
Thomas went on rubbing her as hard and as fast as he could. The effort warmed him up too. He told her, smiling: your lips are made of ice, they look as if they have hoar frost sticking to them.
Ella cautiously moved her cold lips against each other; the skin on them was cracked and rough, but that was all. When she looked over Thomas’s shoulder, she saw the beams of two flashlights probing the gaps in the mist, sweeping on over the water as if searching it.
They’re looking for us!
No. Thomas had looked over his shoulder only briefly and then went on rubbing. It’s the first fishermen going out to the fish-traps.
Hold on to me, I want to get up. Ella supported herself on Thomas.
In the wood, they could hardly see their hands in front of their faces, there were cracking sounds underfoot, they had to take care not to stumble. Once they stopped when they heard a rustling, a grunting, and then the trampling of several hooves. Wild boar might attack, better not get too close to them. Only when they reached the nursery garden could they make out shadowy shapes, the clearing with the young fir trees, the rows of bushes, and over to one side the unadorned framework of the glasshouses. Going past them, they reached Käthe’s garden by going through the orchard. Ducking down low under the branches, they took care not to lose their footing; the mouldering leaves and withered autumn grasses were slippery under their coating of frost. The house was dark. They climbed the steps to the veranda; luckily the door wasn’t locked. A brief bark from Agotto — then he came to welcome the two housebreakers, wagging his tail, and lay down in his place under the bench again. All was still in the house, not a sound but the ticking of the white grandfather clock. Thomas and Ella slipped into the kitchen to make some tea. Ella found a note on the table, in Käthe’s familiar handwriting: Don’t forget the bottles on the back stairs!
They made the tea and poured it into a Thermos flask. The hot drink was to help them get through the early hours of the morning. They fetched their hot-water bottles from their bedroom. Making sure that all the doors were left just as they had found them, they removed all traces of their surreptitious presence. They even wrapped the soft, used tea leaves in newspaper, to be thrown away later on the wooded bank of the lake. There must be nothing to give them away. They left the house down the back stairs. It was still dark. In the yard, they quietly opened the door of the shed, where a gas canister lay on a shelf. They would be able to make some soup in the woods or on the boat, never mind just where — they would stay away all day. By afternoon at the latest Käthe was sure to notice that they were missing, and then she would wonder when she had last seen Ella and Thomas. They would be back at the boat again before dawn, before anyone saw them, and they would stay out until someone did notice that they were missing.
Climbing
It’s strange, such silence on a Sunday. Do you remember what it was like? Thomas thought of all the noisy scolding, the bellowing, the shouting. The standard lamp broken and stamped on, broken china.
Ella nodded, and stretched out full length on the floor of the tree house. I’m glad he’s gone at last.
Thomas put three nails between his lips, holding them there so that he could make a loop in the cord better. The silence was astonishing; only the elm leaves rustled in the late-summer wind. That morning Ella and Thomas had gone swimming in the lake. Ella’s hair was still damp. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed, carefully brushing it away from her face; it fell on the wooden floor, a wreath round her head, and the wind lifted only a few strands into the air. Ella looked like a black sunflower.
Thomas made a second loop, took a nail out of his mouth and picked up the hammer. He hit the nail, but it dropped to the floor.
Ow! Ella sat up, covering her eyes with her hands and groaning: I’ve gone blind, Thomas, I can’t see.
Thomas shook his head; he guessed that Ella was pretending, he knew her. Putting the hammer down, he tightened his lips round the remaining nails, with one hand he touched both of hers — whereupon she lowered them to her lap and laughed at him. You fell for it, you fell for it! She lay down on the wooden floor again and watched with amusement as Thomas searched for the nail he had lost.
Had it fallen right down into the grass? Thomas groped around on the wood, changed to a crouching position, looked under the soles of his bare feet; the nail was nowhere to be seen. Carefully, he took a second nail out of his mouth, held the loop in place and picked up the hammer. Why on earth had Käthe married that man? Perhaps she had wanted to neutralise the disgrace of having children born out of wedlock, get rid of the stigma of her unmarried status? She often spoke of racial defilement, once she had told him and Ella: Your existence was the proof of racial defilement. The term clung to her. An idea like that didn’t just go away after the war. But then she could marry anyone she liked. And who was left? In the year after the end of the war Käthe had come down from her mountain to satisfy her curiosity, and went to the election for the local district association. Anyone who didn’t want to give the impression of having been in favour of the war was tentatively on the lookout for communists. That was where she had first seen Eduard. Later, he had taken her to area headquarters in Freiburg and given her a ticket to travel to the assembly. She first went to a communist meeting after the war; it was some three years later that she and Eduard had got to know each other more intimately after an assembly. Käthe said it had been in Freiburg, just before Christmas when the temperatures were below freezing. It must all have happened very fast. The tiny twin babies who had to fight for survival were born near Berlin a year later. She expected her parents to help out; she herself had neither money nor anyone to look after Ella and Thomas. Although they called it getting engaged, Eduard and Käthe could only clasp hands and promise to meet again before she left, because he still had a wife and family. Did she feel attracted to those who suffered? Did she consider Eduard’s grief as deep as hers? Both attracted and repelled; the strange lustre of his mind lying fallow had probably intrigued her. A man who had once had to endure a mountain of corpses lying above his body? Swept up, stacked like rubbish. The guards had run for it, leaving the place as it was, the liberators were trying to tidy things up and bury the dead. He couldn’t breathe or cry out. Wasn’t it just by chance that someone had noticed him at the last minute? There’s something moving! He remembered that cry, he had told Thomas about it, just once, after a noisy quarrel with Käthe. There’s something moving, he repeated bitterly to himself, using those words as a way of saying where they came from, where he came from, who he was. Thomas had felt sorry for him. Nothing but his arm had been sticking out, and he tried to move it with all his might, squashed as he was by the weight of human bodies, the masses of them in which he was being turned over, the bony, fleshy stink of decomposition all around him. The vehicle sweeping them up stopped, the engine was throttled back just before it reached the edge of the pit. They had to separate the corpses, throwing bundles of bones individually into the mass grave, until he was freed, dazzled by the light, and two arms took hold of him and carried him away from the pit. He couldn’t speak for months afterwards. A man who had fought in Spain and ended up in Dachau, that had impressed Käthe. He was an unusually poor sort of hero. There he sat for months on end, incapable of working, and perhaps he hoped that some day Käthe would find time for a kiss, hold his hand, look into his eyes. Thomas didn’t know anyone who could be as persistently silent as Eduard, for hours on end, days on end, his silence always lasted until the next occasion for a quarrel. There was only one person to whom Eduard sometimes talked in whispers, and that was Ella, if she had not walked past his silent form but steered a course his way and sat down beside him. Then she would smile and dance attendance on him until he patted his knee, and she was quick to comply with the request for her to climb on his lap: Ride-a-cock horse! But after a year or so Ella didn’t like his lap so much, she stopped sitting on it of her own free will, no longer leaned back at her ease purring like a cat. She avoided him, got out of the way of his arms reaching out to her.