My Brother's Secret (9 page)

When lunch was finished, I helped Oma in the kitchen for a while, then tried reading a book in the drawing room but I couldn’t settle or concentrate on anything.

‘Is it all right to go outside?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ Oma said. ‘Opa is in the back—’

‘I mean out the front. I thought I’d sit on the doorstep for a bit.’

‘Watch the world go by?’ Oma asked.

‘It’s warm there. It’s right where the sun lands.’

Oma thought for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm. You have permission not to be at school now for another week, so it doesn’t really matter.’

That’s what took me to the front step. I told myself it was because I wanted to sit in the warm rays and watch the cars and the people pass by, but there was another reason why I wanted to go out.

I wanted to see
her
.

I wanted to be sitting there when the dark-haired girl came home from school, so I could wave at her the way she had waved at me.

WOODEN FLOWER

E
scherstrasse was long and straight, and right at the end of it, a white and black blur was coming towards me. That’s all it was – a blur – but as it came closer, I could see it was someone on a bicycle.

Closer still and I knew it was a girl in a white shirt and black skirt.

Then she was just a few metres away, and I lifted my hand and waved.

The girl slowed and came to a stop on the other side of the road. She raised a hand and waved back, and I thought that would be it. I thought she would knock on her front door, disappear inside, and that I’d wave to her again tomorrow morning. It hadn’t been that difficult.

She didn’t knock on her front door, though. She
looked
at it, but then she looked at me again. She climbed off her bicycle and leaned it up against the wall beside her front door.

And then she was coming towards me.

A girl
.

I hardly ever spoke to girls. At school we were separated, and the
Deutsches Jungvolk
was just for boys. The girls had their own groups;
Jungmädel
for girls my age, then the
Bund Deutscher Mädel
for when they were older. We were even told not to mix with girls, so I didn’t know what I would say if—

‘Hello,’ she said.

I must have looked like a simpleton, the way I stared. ‘Uh. Hello.’

‘What happened to you?’ she asked, pointing at my bandages.

‘Oh. I … I fell off my bike.’

‘Not surprised, the way you rushed off like that. What were you doing anyway? If you want to skip school, it’s not a good idea to come and stand by the fence.’

Close up, her hair was even darker than it had seemed from further away. It was plaited into pigtails, just how most girls wore it at school. She had dark eyebrows and dark eyes, too. Her uniform was quite dirty and her socks were ruffled at her ankles, revealing shins that were covered in bruises – old and new. Both her knees were grazed, but not as badly as mine.

She stood on the pavement, with her hands on her hips, and looked down at me with her brow furrowed.
‘What’s your name?’

‘Karl Friedmann.’ I stood up with the step against my heels, stopping me from moving any further back. It felt as if we were very close and I could smell her. It was a mixture of soap and the outdoors.

‘I’m Lisa,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say after that. ‘Umm …’ I thought for a moment. ‘Umm …’ I was stuck for something to say so I said the first stupid thing that popped into my head. ‘Are you a
mischling
?’ I asked.

Lisa’s face darkened as if a storm cloud had passed over it. ‘That’s a bit rude, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t mean to … I just …’

‘No, of course you didn’t mean to. You’re just a silly boy who thinks girls are from another planet and doesn’t know how to talk to them.’

‘I …’ I looked at the pavement, feeling my cheeks flush. They grew hot and I was sure my whole face had turned beetroot.

Lisa sighed. ‘Well, Karl Friedmann, no I am not a
mischling
. Not even second-degree
mischling
, and if you’re going to talk to girls then you need talk to them exactly the same way you talk to boys.’

‘Sorry.’ I made myself look her in the eye.

Lisa waited for a moment, still with her hands on her hips, then the storm cloud vanished as if it had been wiped away. ‘I forgive you, Karl Friedmann.’ She put a hand in her pocket. ‘Do you have any money?’

‘No.’

‘Well, never mind. I’ve got ten
Reichspfennigs
.’ She pulled
out two silvery coins and showed them to me, as if to prove it. ‘Come with me.’ She turned and began walking back along the road, in the direction she had first arrived from. ‘Come on.’

I looked from Lisa to the front door and then back again, wondering what to do. If I was going to go somewhere, perhaps I should let Oma and Opa know.

‘Come
on
,’ she said. ‘We’re just going along here. It’s not far. It’s not as if you’re running away.’

So I jogged to catch up and we walked side by side with the warm afternoon sun on our backs.

‘It’s good to see you’re not wearing that silly uniform for a change,’ she said.

I tried to think of when she might have seen me. Oma and Opa had been so strict about keeping me inside that I’d hardly been out at all over the last few days.

‘I see you at the window sometimes,’ she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. ‘And when you went to the shops with your oma. She
is
your oma isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyway, I like the white shirt better. Your brother sometimes wears a blue one and it looks smart. Maybe you should get a blue one.’

‘What do you know about my brother?’ I asked.

‘He waves to me in the morning which is more than you managed. Until today, that is.’

‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ I said. ‘Oma and Opa are hiding me. Or, they were until the Gestapo man hit me in his car.’

‘The Gestapo man?’ She stopped walking and turned to
look at me. ‘You were knocked off your bike by the man from the Gestapo? Kriminalinspektor Wolff?’

‘Yes.’

Lisa’s face darkened. ‘I hate him,’ she said. ‘He’s a pig.’

I was shocked by her insult, and looked about to see if anyone had overheard, but the street was more or less deserted here.

‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

‘Everyone does. Someone at school said he worked for the baker when he was our age. Delivered bread on his bicycle before he joined the police. Now he’s just a Gestapo pig.’

‘Shh,’ I looked about once more.

‘What did he say to you?’ She lowered her voice.

‘Umm … he was just angry that I damaged his car, and—’

‘So do you have to go to school now? Is he making you go to school?’

‘He said I could stay off for a few days because—’

‘Lucky you.’ She turned and carried on walking.

I watched her for a moment, plaits bouncing on her shoulders, arms swinging, then I trotted to catch up. ‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘Why am I lucky?’

‘School’s boring.’

I’d never heard anybody other than Stefan say that and I looked round again to make sure no one was listening.

‘So why did he say you could stay off school? Is your mama ill? My mama said she looked ill when she arrived and that she hasn’t seen her since. Is she ill?’

‘I suppose. I don’t really know. She’s sad, I think.’

‘Sad?’

‘My papa died,’ I told her. ‘The enemy killed him.’

‘Oh, that’s horrible.’

‘We should be proud of him though,’ I said, remembering the words of my squad leader. ‘He was doing his duty for the Führer.’

Lisa looked at me as if she was giving that some serious thought. ‘Before he went away, my papa said the war was the Führer’s fault.’

‘Well, that’s not true, he’s
winning
it for us.’

‘Hmm. Mama never says it’s his fault, but I think she’s too scared.’

‘Of what?’

‘Well, everything. Sometimes I even think she’s scared of me.’

‘You?’

‘Uh-huh. Scared that I’ll report her. Some children do that, you know.’

I felt a stab of guilt when she said that, and tried not to think about what had happened to Stefan, or the thoughts I’d had about reporting Oma and Opa. We fell into a silence that lasted all the way to Herr Finkel’s shop.

There was a queue of women outside the shop, all of them holding empty baskets. Two of Oma’s friends from further along Escherstrasse were there, Frau Amsel and Frau Vogel, deep in conversation as they waited. The queues seemed to be getting longer every day.

‘You want to see if he’s got any chocolate?’ Lisa asked, joining the queue and pulling the coins from her pocket
once more. ‘I have enough.’

The silver coins looked big in her small hand, and the sun glinted off them, highlighting the eagle holding the swastika.

I looked at Lisa’s dark eyes, which now I thought about it, were almost the colour of chocolate. She had a round face, emphasised by the way her hair was pulled back into those tight, plaited bunches, and a nose that the doctors probably said was a bit too big when they measured it at school. It was a nice nose, though, all the same. Despite being dark-haired, Lisa’s skin was quite pale, and that made her rosy cheeks stand out all the more. She looked pretty – not in the proper German way that we learned about at school, but in a different way. In a more
real
way.

‘You always stare at people?’ she asked.

‘Hmm?’

‘You’re staring.’

‘Oh. Sorry. It’s just, I don’t know, I suppose I was thinking it’s kind that you said you’d share.’

‘Well, that’s what friends do, isn’t it?’

So, just like that, Lisa and I were friends. No oath, no swearing-in ceremony, no rituals or exchange of punches. Just a few words, and that was that. Friends.

I couldn’t help smiling.

‘What?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Friends. It’s … nice.’ I held out my hand for her to shake. I don’t know why. I just felt as if I needed to fix the friendship in some way.

Lisa glanced at my hand, then smiled and looked me in the eye. ‘Really? A handshake?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re
funny, Karl Friedmann.’

The queue moved in front of us as two women left the shop, so we shuffled closer towards the door. One of the women was Frau Oster who lived over the road from Oma and Opa, a few houses down from Lisa. She was younger than Mama, slim and with mousey hair held back from her narrow face. Her husband was fighting in Russia, just like Papa had been, except he was a panzer driver in the SS. Oma said that you’d think he was a general, the way Frau Oster talked about him.

‘It’s not getting any better,’ she complained to her friend as she passed. ‘There’s still not enough to go round. I don’t know how long this can go on.’ She was carrying a folded copy of
Der Stürmer
at the top of her basket.

‘Not much longer, Monika. Hitler will win this war for us soon enough and then …’ The rest of the conversation was lost to me as the women moved along the street.

The man on the radio told us that everything in Britain had been rationed since the beginning of last year. Things were better here, but they were getting worse. There was never quite enough in the shops any more and you had to have the right stamps to buy certain things – white for sugar, blue for meat, green for eggs, yellow for dairy. I didn’t hold out much hope of there being any chocolate in the shop, but didn’t say that to Lisa. She looked so delighted at the prospect, I didn’t want to spoil it. I just enjoyed her excitement and shuffled a little closer to the shop every time someone came out and another went in.

When it was our turn, Lisa opened the door and we entered to the sound of a tinkling bell.

The walls were lined with wooden shelves. Some were empty, but others were heavy with jars and bottles and tins. There were boxes of vegetables on tables, but they were small and few, and most of them could only be bought if you had the right stamps. On the counter, a huge pot of sauerkraut sat beside a set of scales, and next to that was a pile of
Der Stürmer
newspapers.

On the front of the paper, there was a scary cartoon of a dark Jew holding a knife and standing over a blonde German woman who was screaming. At the bottom the words ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune’ were printed in bold letters. I had seen lots of these papers before – they put them on the walls at school so everyone could read them. They were also displayed in special glass-fronted notice boards in the city.

There were a few women inside the shop, passing bags and containers to Herr Finkel, who stood behind the counter. He filled them and weighed them and took stamps and money as he chatted to his customers.

Herr Finkel had sparkling blue eyes and ruddy cheeks speckled with tiny red veins, and his dark-blue apron bulged around his large stomach. He looked older than Opa, with hair that was almost completely white. He showed me a sad smile when he looked down at me from behind the counter. ‘Karl,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you, but I’m so sorry about your papa. He was a good man.’