Back to back, Ella ordered, and they turned their backs to each other again. It was up to Thomas to ask a question now.
What did Käthe eat, did she just eat beetles too?
On Sundays she went down to the farmyard. No one must see her. They were all at church. There was bread, a can of milk, some vegetables, and sometimes a few potatoes left ready for her on the table outside the house. Ella sniffed: mmm, it was good bread, the farmer’s wife had baked it herself from stoneground rye and there were little linseeds in it, it smelled delicious. I always got the first bit of crust. To stop me crying.
Didn’t Father sometimes send the farmer money?
Of course, the farmer didn’t like strangers and people hiding from the authorities. He didn’t mind whether she was Jewish or a communist, she had no papers and no marriage certificate. He didn’t ask to see her papers, but he got money. When she came to fetch the milk and the bread, Käthe sometimes left pictures on the table for him, pictures of our hut and the fir trees — that was all she had to give. After the war she found a potter’s wheel that no one was using any more down in the village, and dragged it up to the hut. She knew how to make pottery, she sold the dishes and jugs in the market.
Do you remember the spiced biscuits? The first time she took us to school, and afterwards she sent us to the marketplace and the woman in the blue-and-white apron gave us a spiced biscuit each?
Ella nodded. One for the little girlie, one for the little boy, they said in chorus; it was their shared memory. How often, over the last few years, they had reminded each other of the woman in the huge, blue-and-white apron? To them, she was the quintessence of rustic kindness.
I remember about the hare — Ella’s eyes sparkled — I remember how one day she brought a hare. .
Thomas put both hands over his ears, ready to shut out all sound entirely if the story turned out as badly as Ella’s chirping voice suggested.
. . put the skin out to dry in the sun. . cooked with thyme. . with bacon. . pepper. The roast smelled so delicious I waited by the stove to be the first to get a bit. Well, she told me as she took the roast out of the oven, because you’re so greedy we’ll put it out on the balcony in front of the door, and wait until tomorrow, tomorrow is Sunday, we’ll have a Sunday roast! Ella turned indignantly. She was asking for Thomas’s sympathy.
Yes? His hands flapped, there was a scared look in his eyes.
What’s the matter, don’t you want to hear the story?
Yes, yes, I do, begged Thomas, but he was afraid.
Well, next morning I went outside the moment I woke up. And there was the hare, all eaten except for its bones, and the dried roast meat that still had a shine where it stuck to the paws.
Thomas screamed.
Don’t be silly. Ella nudged his back. Guess what, I was crying when I went upstairs to where Käthe and Eduard were comfortably lying in bed under the roof, and she told me, laughing, that it had been the fox!
The fox?
Yes, the fox. So then every evening I thought of the fox coming up our steps after dark, or jumping up from the meadow outside and polishing off our roast with his sharp teeth.
You really believed her? Thomas raised his eyebrows; he had to laugh.
Ella nodded, rapt in her thoughts. Or if not the roast, polishing me off, she whispered quietly. Only now did she seem to be thinking it over. Why ask?
Well, surely the fox didn’t sit at the table, gnaw the roast neatly off the bones and leave the bones lying there! Thomas was in a fit of giggles as if someone were tickling him.
Don’t laugh in that stupid way. Who else would it have been?
Who do you think?
Ella bit her lip. Not the fox? she wondered in a quiet voice. That was mean of them. They just ate it up on the sly, all by themselves. While we were in bed asleep.
We?
The fox was later, after you’d been born. So there. Her voice was brusque; perhaps her feelings were hurt by his doubts.
Come on, Ella, tell me more. Thomas was afraid he had annoyed Ella, and she wouldn’t want to go on with her story. Remember when Father arrived. Käthe had a big belly and I was going to be born.
Yes, but you weren’t there yet. I was sitting in the meadow by myself, catching beetles and putting them into my mouth. I called to him. I couldn’t stand up yet, maybe I couldn’t even walk.
There was snow still lying in the mountains in February when I was born.
It had already melted outside the house, so there.
And the moment the snow melted the meadow was right underneath it?
If you don’t believe me I’m not going on with the story.
Thomas listened hard, but Ella persisted in her silence. He leaned against her back, wanting to hear more. Go on.
No, I don’t feel like it any more.
Go on, please. And I won’t interrupt. Please.
Hard as Thomas might beg and plead, she stayed silent.
He thought of the other stories she usually told, of how she had nearly choked on the beetle scrabbling inside her mouth; it must have got into her windpipe. But then Papa had arrived, turned her upside down and shaken her. Ella knew just what their father smelled like. Sometimes she caught the smell of him in her nostrils, all of a sudden, unexpectedly, it could happen in the tram, the school playground, the kitchen. She knew he was there. Their father had asked Käthe to stop hitting little Ella with her wet nappy. She was only a child, he said, not a cat. She had only just started to walk. She’ll learn to sit on her potty, he said, like any other child. Ella didn’t remember the wet nappy. But she knew about it from a letter that she had taken out of Käthe’s chest of drawers in secret and shown to Thomas.
Who says he’s dead? Fallen at the front, maybe, but he isn’t dead.
There was something that scared Thomas in Ella’s voice; she shifted the intonation of words in a way that took the sense out of them. At the end of such sentences he tried to think backwards in his memory. She believed her story now, every detail of it. He didn’t know whether she was just pretending to him that she could change the world with nothing but her own ideas and assertions, or whether she believed it herself.
Gypsy children, they called us, do you remember? Stinking gypsy children and bastards. Ella laughed.
Thomas turned to her. She had let her hair fall over her face so that he couldn’t see her eyes. Ella-eyes, sparkling green gypsy eyes. It was a good thing the other children at school hadn’t sniffed out the Jewishness in them. A Christian name for the son, a birth announcement by a priest — the invention of a difficult birth, fever while Käthe was lying in, had helped. At school they had been the only children whose fathers were not farmers or war heroes. Whether dead or alive. And who had no capable farmer’s wife or housewife for a mother. The only children who bore their mother’s surname and had no father at all. Later, the priest had wanted to baptise the small children, but Käthe failed to keep appointment after appointment. She always had a new excuse. That probably told the priest that he was being used; two birth certificates within twelve months. Rumours began spreading. The other children’s fathers were beginning to come back that summer. Other fathers were dead or crippled somewhere abroad, or in prison.
I’d love to be a gypsy child, a real gypsy child, sighed Ella. Perhaps that’s what we are, too? One day a gypsy woman came by, begging — and as soon as she had gone Käthe heard babies crying. And then she found us in the meadow outside the house.
Do you think the twins like it in that children’s home?
Abandoned. In her hunger and her hour of need our gypsy mother simply abandoned us outside Käthe’s house.