Ella pushed Thomas with both arms, making him bump into the tree trunk. Don’t be stupid — she was furious — you know perfectly well what he did.
Thomas lowered his eyes. He did know. It was just that Ella hadn’t told him. He could still see old Eduard sitting in his big armchair, plucking at Ella’s arm as she was walking past to get her to sit on his lap. Ella’s giggling, his giggling. Thomas saw Eduard’s hands on Ella’s hips, on Ella’s legs, he remembered Eduard, grinning mysteriously, whispering something in her ear. Only later did Ella tell him what it was. Thomas hadn’t liked the way the pair of them sat together, he hadn’t liked the look on Ella’s face as she sat on Eduard’s lap. Come and play, he had asked Ella at such moments to get her off that lap. Once Eduard had told Thomas: You’re Käthe’s darling, Ella is mine.
He’s a poor bastard. Thomas laid an arm on Ella’s shoulder. Let’s forget him.
Poor bastard? Poor? So what are we, then? You’re just saying that because you didn’t come to my rescue!
Rescue? For a moment Thomas didn’t know what she meant.
Didn’t protect me. Ella sniffed. Her eyes were reddened and running with tears.
Thomas put the hammer down and took Ella in his arms. Her crying was infectious, he felt her tears on his cheeks, her heavy breathing against his chest; if she cried it would start him crying as well. And wasn’t she right? Shouldn’t he have protected her, couldn’t he have kept Eduard from whispering those things in her ear, from touching her and looking at her as if she were the buoy to which he could cling and so save himself?
You mustn’t tell anyone. Ever. Ella rubbed her face against Thomas’s throat. Understand? she whispered.
Thomas nodded. She had often made him promise that before. But what he did to you –
Quick as a flash, Ella put a finger over Thomas’s mouth, her eyes were flashing. You know perfectly well what he did, stop asking questions.
Thomas wanted to go on asking questions, he wanted to know more, because what he did know was by no means all. But he sensed Ella’s anxiety and obeyed her without reservations. Her tears made his throat tighten.
Come on, let’s enjoy being nice and quiet here. Ella leaned against him.
He nodded. We’ll sit back to back and you can tell me about our father.
Thomas knew that Ella loved telling stories about their father, stories that she sometimes invented because she didn’t have enough memories. She had been just two when he died, Thomas was only one year old.
They sat back to back in the tree house. Ella closed her eyes. I see him coming out of the fir trees, climbing up the mountain in his black suit, with a hat on his head, it’s a top hat, his dark hair is falling over his forehead, he has a rucksack on his back and his easel over his shoulder. He’s handsome, only I can’t see his legs, they’re blurred. I can see his face, his eyebrows, he didn’t have a beard then. He had to shave it off for the war.
Did he have a gun?
Severely, Ella leaned back and whistled dismissively. You and your gun. No, our father didn’t have a gun. He did sometimes carry his easel over his shoulder. After all, he was a painter.
What did he paint?
He liked painting rocks and olive trees best. Funny, he never painted the sea. I think he didn’t like Caspar David Friedrich. When he and Käthe were living on Sicily he must have kept turning away from the sea.
What’s he supposed to have painted in the war? Battles?
No, he was too nice for that. Our father was a sensitive man. A fine gentleman with fine brushes. She took a strand of her hair and tickled Thomas’s face with it until he turned away. He painted the soldiers. For their mothers. He painted pictures for the soldiers that they could send home. If they had sweethearts they sometimes needed two pictures, one for their mother and one for their sweetheart.
Did he paint murder and death?
Ella turned round and pinched Thomas’s arm. What makes you think of that?
If he painted soldiers at the front they were all either murderers or dead. Thomas had to laugh with the shock of it when it suddenly occurred to him that this version of their father could have seen his models as heroes.
Ready to kill, perhaps. But I think he painted the death out of their faces. Ella assumed a blissful expression. I saw a few of his last drawings in Käthe’s studio, and none of them looked like a murderer or a hero. It’s quite an art to do that in the middle of the war, don’t you think?
I don’t know. Maybe he was a coward. The idea was painful, but it could hardly be avoided.
Our father? A coward? Now Ella punched him with her fist. It hurt, and Thomas raised his arm.
It was enough to satisfy him to see Ella duck away. It would have been brave of their father to paint the soldiers as murderers. It would also have been brave to stay with Käthe in defiance of his call-up papers, to go against everyone’s expectations. What was he supposed to do at the front? What did he want to do there?
Get killed, maybe? Ella whispered thoughtfully. Have you seen those drawings? Perhaps he was doing them on a production line. Photographs and chemicals to develop them are expensive and sensitive, his charcoal could show everything, his pencil too, soldier after soldier. If it hadn’t been for the uniform they’d have been nice brothers and nice sons and nice husbands.
What do you mean, nice husbands? Thomas would have liked to understand what Ella really did mean. Perhaps he could be a nice man some day, the kind of man his father was, perhaps. But Thomas didn’t even know if that was a good thing.
You know what I mean. Men who didn’t want the war.
You’re crazy, Ella. Everyone wanted the war.
Not our father, he was made to go. He hid away in Italy with his beard for too long. They went looking for him, his parents wanted him to give himself up and go to fight.
So then he joined up. . How important to their father had his parents’ opinion been, the opinion of the mindless society to which he had returned from his romantic Italian refuge? It was idiotic, thought Thomas, but he didn’t say anything. He knew that Ella would defend their father, would find reasons for what he did. She loved their dead father, and he was easy to love. Odd that you could go on leave from the front, isn’t it? Someone stands there shooting, or painting people, and then he looks at his watch and says: time to knock off work, I’m going on leave for three weeks.
That was before you were born. I was sitting outside the house in the meadow, catching beetles.
Now Thomas leaned harder against Ella; that was part of their ritual, a gesture of humility in case of doubt. You were only one then, Ella, how could you know about that? It was only a game when Thomas asked her that, he liked this story and had already heard it hundreds of times. It was always the same story, so it must be true, even if Ella had been only a year old when he was born.
I caught the beetles and ate them. Honestly. There was a tickly feeling in my mouth when he appeared among the firs. I called out to him.
How?
Pa-pa! Ella relished the sound of the two syllables, Papa, Papa! She repeated it at length, longingly, just as she must have called to him at the time. Her voice was a little girl’s voice, there were tears of joy in her eyes, of happiness at seeing him again. Thomas looked over his shoulder; Ella had turned her own head that way, and he could see her, little Ella who had known all this, just as she was. What a wonderful father it must have been who came striding up the mountain. Thomas saw Ella’s love, he wanted to believe in it and suddenly find himself sharing it.
Did you know who he was at once?
Of course. Ella’s eyes were sparkling with emotion, she was carried away by her story, by what she called memory; after all, no one else came up that mountain for months on end. The only person we were waiting for was Father. Thomas picked a small leaf off the elm tree and dried Ella’s tears.