“Herbert,” said Christine. “Please make him stop. Make him eat properly.”
“Eat properly,” said Herbert, smiling.
Conscious of so many adult eyes on him, little Bert began to lark about with the ice cream and make a fool of himself, at which everyone except Herbert looked the other way.
There was a plan to save some German cities, those with interesting old monuments. The plan was to put Jews in the attics of all the houses. The Allies would never have dropped a bomb. What a difference it might have made. Later we learned this plan had been sabotaged by the President of the USA. Too bad. It could have saved many famous old statues and quite a few lives.
“Now, little Bert,” said Herbert, trying to clean the child’s sticky face with a handkerchief, “we shall be leaving this train about two minutes from now. Another nice train will then take us to a place called Pegnitz. Pegnitz is a railway junction. This means that from Pegnitz there are any number of trains to take us home.”
Little Bert could not have been listening carefully, for he said, “Are we home now?”
“No, but it is almost like being home, because we know where we’re going.”
“That’s not the same as being home,” said little Bert. He turned swiftly from Herbert and his eyes grew wide and amazed as the pregnant army wife, holding a wall for support, moved past their door. He looked at Christine and opened his mouth, but before he could ask anything loud and embarrassing, their conductor came in with new information: they must not wander too far away from the station during the stopover. They would soon see that they were just a few feet from a barbed-wire frontier, where someone had been shot to death only a week ago. They must pay close attention to signs and warnings concerning hostile police guards, guns, soldiers, dogs, land mines. Although this was good mushroom country, it was not really safe. Someone had been blown up not long ago while reaching for Cantharellus cibarius. The train to Pegnitz would be an unscheduled emergency transport for stranded passengers (theirs was not the only train to have been diverted), and this new transport might turn up at any moment. They were not to worry about their luggage: the conductor would look after everything. The train might arrive at any time, either five minutes or half an hour from now. All danger from the fires was over, the jolly conductor added. His hair was as shiny as leather and he bounded from one foot to the other as he gave the good news.
Herbert took down the woman’s suitcase. She stuffed all her plastic bags and leftover food into the WINES OF GERMANY carryall. I came back to Germany to bury my poor husband and look after his grave. Very rare for me to miss a day at the grave. I had to go and see about some investments. Otherwise I’m at the grave every morning with a watering can.
As they shuffled along the corridor Herbert told Christine that he had folded and sealed his imaginary letter of protest about the train and was mailing it in his head to papers in Frankfurt, Hamburg, West Berlin, Munich, and Bonn; to three picture magazines, a trade journal, an engineering review, a powerful newsweekly and a famous TV commentator — but not to any part of the opposition press. He wanted to throw rocks at official bungling, but the same rocks must not strike the elected government. His letter mentioned high-handedness, lives disrupted without thought or care, blind obedience to obsolete orders, pig-headed officials, buck-passing, locked toilets, shortage of drinking water, absence of someone responsible, danger to health, indifference to others. Among the victims he mentioned a small child, an old woman, a visiting foreigner who would be left with a poor impression, a pregnant American, and a tall girl who wore nothing but size-eleven sandals and a short linen frock, who was travelling almost naked, in fact.
Hand in hand, perhaps wanting to avoid further instructions, Christine and little Bert made for the barbed wire they had been told to avoid. They walked along a sandy road that was strewn with candy wrappers, cigarette butts, bottle caps, and bent straws, like any sightseers’ road anywhere. Little Bert’s hand felt as soft as the sand underfoot and as grubby as the rubbish on it. His natural surroundings were rust, wires, rain-washed warnings, sweet melting foods.
“Your father is getting you something to drink,” she said, though he had not complained of thirst or of anything, and seemed content with promises. She showed him frontier posts looped with rusted wire like birthday ribbons. “You can die of tetanus if you catch your hand on it,” she said. They stood on a height of land from which she could see two little villages flanking a smoking factory and a few scattered farmhouses with their windows boarded up on one side. No one in those houses could lean on the sill and observe little Bert, or Christine, or the barefooted old woman cutting grass for rabbits right to the first strands of rust, or a couple moving along at a crouch because they were hunting for mushrooms. Stern cautions against doing this had been nailed here and there, but people were used to these by now.
Little Bert began to play at hopping off the path. “You may step off one side, but not the other,” she warned him. He no more questioned this than he had the meaning of tetanus. He appeared to have an inborn knowledge of what the frontier was about.
He was bored, however. “What are you looking at?” he said, with a return of his Paris whine. Being small he could not see farther than the first barrier. She counted off for him a fence, a tract of low scrub, fence again, scrub, more fence, deep-ditch trap, fence, trap again probably, fences clean and bright in the sun as they moved farther east. Shading her eyes, she found herself looking at a man in uniform who was looking at her through field glasses. He looked at her and at little Bert, who was tugging her hand and wailing, “Let’s walk.”
The child’s bratty voice made another man turn; he was a civilian with a scarred hairline, strolling along the sandy road too with his hands behind his back. He seemed to measure everything he gazed on — seemed to estimate, memorize, and add to a sum of previous knowledge. He knew about the smoking factory on the other side and about its parasite villages; he remembered when there had been the rumour, years ago, that the factory, with its technicians and engineers, was to be dismantled and moved. No one had told him so: he was too little then to be trusted. He knew something had frightened the adults; he could read their mute predictions. All bicycles had been confiscated, even the children’s. He had walked up the main street to the top of his village, which was shabby and countrylike. You could still find milk and an egg sometimes if you were not an informer. There he saw Marie sitting on a wheelbarrow, with her hair cut like a boy’s (lice were rampant), blond and ragged; she was eating bread — or rather, sucking on a wide crust spread with boiled rhubarb. Bare dirty feet, eyes in the distance, dreamy: he thought later that he had seen clouds on her eyes, like clouds on a clean sky. But perhaps all that her eyes had reflected was stupidity. She swung her feet, which did not reach the ground because of the tilt of the barrow. The geese Marie was there to watch watched Sigi approaching with pure blue eyes outlined in orange that could have been drawn with a wax crayon, so thick was the tracing and the colour so true. The geese looked at him with one eye at a time, the way the Ancient Egyptians looked at people. His mother caught up with him before he could say anything final to Marie, either “I love you” or “Goodbye.” He had been told not to play with Marie and to keep away from that part of the village — he had been told again only this morning. His mother was looking for milk. She hid the canister in a basket, under a napkin camouflaged with the wild sorrel and plantain they ate as vegetables now.