The Big Lie (21 page)

He told me that he lived in the Party-owned boarding halls on the road that climbed north from the high street. He’d said this when we were out on a date at the cinema.

One evening during the week of the press interviews, he had turned up unexpectedly on our doorstep telling my mother that he had tickets for a film and would Jessika care to join him. I thought that after the concert he might leave me alone. That he would be embarrassed by his conduct in that interview room, or that he would now view me as dangerous. But no.

‘I’m too tired,’ I said. It was true. Wearing a hero’s mask had been exhausting. But my mother pushed me to go.

‘It’s just what you need right now,’ said my father, joining the conversation in the hallway and having the final word.

I suspected Fisher had been instructed to take me, to draw me out further on how Clementine had come to do what she did. But if that was Fisher’s mission, he made a poor job of it. He spent the entire film (another war movie where we pummel the Americans and the guy gets the girl) working his hand slowly up from my knee to a just-acceptable section of my thigh. His touch made me feel hot and eager yet repulsed all at the same time. As we stepped into the sharp outside air, I felt queasy from spending ninety minutes on the edge of something. That was when he gestured up the road, showing me where his halls were located. There was the suggestion that we could go there, continue the movement of his hand up my thigh. I told him it was getting late and he walked me home instead, just like Herr und Frau Keller would expect him to.

Heading to the halls in broad daylight, I was anxious about who might see me. But I realised as I crossed the high street in front of the Party building, it was silly to fuss about that. Everyone would notice me. EVERYONE. I was no longer just my father’s daughter, I was the Reich’s favourite daughter. There was nothing I could do about it, only exploit the benefits.

I prepared myself as I walked, built up my character, what I was going to say. It could all slip away so easily if I was made to wander through the corridors asking all those military men which room to go to. They’d know exactly what I was there for. Or they’d think they knew.

The stars were on my side though. There was a bank of named buzzers, nestling between the branches of the wisteria that climbed, all blousy and purple and out-of-place, up the front wall. I found his name next to Dirk’s. An electric fizz sounded through the building as I pressed. I straightened my hair, positioned myself, chin up, in the lens of the small camera beneath the buttons. I didn’t get a greeting though. There was just a loud click and another electric fizz with a different tone. I pushed my way in.

The hallway had a red patterned carpet and a white painted staircase. There was a telephone table and dark wooden pigeon holes for post. It was silent and soulless. It stank of disinfectant and boys.

‘Hello?’ I called.

‘Jess?’

The voice came from above. There he was, leaning over the banister, wearing a tight white T-shirt and baggy grey trackpants, his hair falling forward, all shaggy and wild, not combed down neat like usual. You could almost smell the sleep, the bedclothes …

I made myself think of Herr Hoffman, and how he had so easily turned Fisher into a puppy dog.

‘You should have answered the door in person,’ I barked.

I snapped my head back, faced the blank space in front of me where I expected him to be. ‘Did you not see me, on the camera? Did you not see who it was calling?’ I had been too meek at the cinema, too submissive. I was in charge. I was the Reich’s favourite daughter.

But Fisher wasn’t rolling over yet. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’ His voice was playful, teasing. ‘Come on up!’

I stayed staring forwards.

I had never seen him without his uniform before, never seen his bare feet – which were pushing through the gaps in the banister, firm and brown and sinewy.

‘Come on up!’ he called again. I glanced his way. He beckoned me with an arm – an arm covered in that fine blonde hair. Then his voice dropped, in line with what he was thinking. ‘I want to show you something.’

I was thinking it too, of course. There was something in me, really in me, that liked it, that wanted it. It was a craving – for a touch that would send a charge through my brain. It got the better of me, made me forget what I was doing, who people really were. It stopped me being faithful and pure and German. It scared me. No one else is like you, I told myself.
Only men obey commands of the blood. Men and animals.

‘My father has sent me,’ I announced, cutting through the possibilities with a knife.

‘Oh.’

I heard his footsteps creak across the landing, then the quick
dum-de-dum
as he skipped down the stairs. He was in front of me then, smelling just like I thought he would.

‘My father has asked me to collect the keys for the meeting hall,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ The shine of his eyes levelled into that metallic, drilled stare he used at the HJ and BDM meetings. He put his arms behind his back, stood a little straighter. Off-duty Fisher was slowly morphing into on-duty Fisher. He waited for me to say why I needed the keys. He expected the rest of my orders to include him.

‘Well, aren’t you going to get them then, Herr Fisher?’

Herr Fisher.
The address made him curl his lip into the beginnings of a smile, his eyes flashed. He thought it was a joke, a come-on. He studied my face for a moment.
Wait until my father hears about this!
I said, over and over in my head, hoping the words came out in the tiny movements of my face. His smile disappeared. He stepped backwards and without another word, jogged upstairs. Moments later he was in front of me again, holding out the bunch of keys. I felt a surge of relief, a jolt of victory. I reached for them, and he snatched them away.

‘Frau Gross has a set,’ he said. ‘For the Frauenschaft meetings. She only lives across the street from you.’

I held his stare. I could have told him that she’d lost her set, or that she was away on holiday right now, but they were small lies. They would have unravelled as easy as a badly stitched hem the moment Fisher bumped into the old goat on the high street.

He was smiling again.

‘There is to be a meeting,’ I said, in a whisper.

The smile cracked.

‘A secret, off-radar meeting.’ I made him hear quote marks around ‘off-radar’. These were not my words.

The smile faded completely.

‘It is to be between my father and a representative of the American judiciary regarding the arrest of Amanda Levy …’ I spoke fast and urgently so he had to lean in. I left gaps in the story for him to fill. That’s how you do it. The other person must always join up the circle.

‘No one,’ I said – pause for emphasis – ‘is to know about this, or to jeopardise its security. Which is why this obscure location has been chosen.’

He was nodding now, his mouth a little open.

This is your moment
, I told him, and myself, without having to say it at all,
the moment you’ve been waiting for all your life – a great big crisis that you can stand on top of, hands on hips, and demonstrate your brilliance. Don’t fuck it up this time.

‘Okay?’ I said, feeling my head swim with the power.

He nodded, and handed over the keys.

One day the warden who collected me was different. Not old or gnarly or rough, but young, with a warmth and a light glowing from beneath her pale, freckly skin. She had tight brown curls pinned back from her temples like wings. I was thrilled just to be near her. Everything else in that place was so ugly.

We went on a longer route to my session, one that took us outside for a moment – OUTSIDE! – through a covered walkway between two of the site’s buildings. The shock of the light hurt my eyes, even though it was nothing more than overcast. The blast of wind whistling through the gap in the buildings was amazing – delicious! I promised never to take the weather for granted ever again. I would dance in the rain, write poems about lightning.

And that wasn’t even the best bit.

As we travelled between those two doors I saw other girls – OTHER WOMEN! – in grey smocks and rubber clogs just like mine, standing in pairs and threes, talking to each other –
actually
talking!
– not handcuffed. Some were upright and smoking, others bow-backed and coughing. There was a whine coming from a tinny speaker at the top of the fence. Music, I think.

Some of these women looked my way as I passed through the walkway, making me all of a sudden realise that I still existed. Because I had begun to wonder. I drank in gulps of the cold, fresh air like it was a beaker of milk.

‘What day is it?’ I asked the warden as we pushed back through the double-doors, forgetting the hierarchy of things in my excitement and speaking before I was spoken to.

‘Sunday,’ she answered, not
Shut up, bitch
or
Watch your mouth.
This, teamed with my first, exhilarating footsteps in fresh air, made me believe this warden was kind, that the journey outside was her idea, because she wanted me to see that I wasn’t alone, that I was working hard and soon I would be free. Or at least, freer. She was a good person. She had recognised the same in me. I decided to talk to her some more.

‘Gosh, the wind travels sideways round here, doesn’t it?’ I exclaimed.

She said nothing. She had a hard little mouth, despite the freckles and the angel wings.

Then I said, ‘You’re very clever,’ because I thought that a piece of kindness deserved a little bit of kindness in return. (Or a bit of flattery, depending on how you wanted to look at things.) ‘You’re clever to know your way around, I mean. Because everything here looks the same to me.’

Nothing again. I needed to ask a direct question if I wanted a response.

‘So,’ I leant my head towards her, nudging her shoulder with mine, just slightly, to show that we were friends now. ‘How long have you been working here?’

She stopped walking then. She took the hand that was handcuffed to mine, her strong one, not the free one, so I had to be involved in the movement too, whether I liked it or not, and she struck me hard across the cheek.

‘Shut up!’ she said.

My yelp echoed against the white walls and the white floors.

This was one person who understood the element of surprise.

‘You disgust me,’ the freckly warden muttered, shuddering a little, shaking my words off her shoulders. ‘You really do.’

She made us continue our walking. I clutched my face but the pain was nothing compared to what I felt inside. I’d failed some kind of test, just when it seemed like I was getting somewhere. I had been stupid. But that’s what desperation does to you, I think.

Once at the room, the freckly warden told the man in uniform what had happened, except it sounded like something that had happened between two other people. Two other people on some other planet. I didn’t get my say.

I had doomed myself to go back to the beginning – again – and this time I was even less sure what I was being punished for. The something that they kept saying was inside me, or not inside me … It could have been anything. One of so many things.

I truly wondered though if it was my power to disgust.

You disgust me
.

It was a terrifying thing for her to say, considering all the other things that went on in that place.

I made straight for the meeting hall, taking the shortcut back through the graveyard, crossing over the high street, then up towards the old cricket club.

I took the path carefully mown flat in the field, looking over my shoulder now and again to make sure no one had followed. All was quiet – only the sound of my feet on the grass, the rasp of stray barley stalks against my shoes. Everyone was at work, or had gone back to school. There were only a few of us who were still in this limbo, waiting to head off. I would be gone in ten days’ time.

Mum was slowly filling my trunk. It sat open-jawed on the floor of my bedroom. Each day she’d sneak in when I wasn’t there to leave another new thing on my bed. Then she’d wait in the kitchen for me to run downstairs and gush my thanks. She wanted the reaction. Occasionally she’d come into my room while I was there, her face all serious, bowing down on one knee, her skirt and apron spilling, and she’d lay the next new object ceremoniously before me. A warm sweater for training, bed socks, a set of Berlin Girl Mystery Romances, new bright yellow guards for my skates. She would crack her serious face only when I laughed at this solemn act of hers. It distracted her from the fact that I was going away, I think, these offerings from the gods. Lilli would then provide even more distraction by throwing a momentous tantrum over every present – because she hadn’t been given anything lately and it JUST WASN’T FAIR.

Mum couldn’t afford to be getting everything brand new. We had more money than most, but not so much to place ourselves too far above the workers; that would have been vulgar. It had never bothered me in the past, getting stuff second-hand. Angelika Baker had always been a snob about it, never quite understanding that extravagance was an ugly vanity while frugality showed a dedication to the future of the Fatherland. But these second-hand things bothered me now. I spread the warm sweater out across my bed. Cashmere, the label said. I leant over to sniff it – nice, but ‘other’. It made me uneasy. Where had it come from? Who had it come from? Where was the girl who’d once owned it?

I let myself into the meeting hall and flicked the switches that made the fluorescents clink and flicker awake. I crossed the room repeating a small, comforting lie to myself (well, a big one, perhaps) that I really wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t trespassing. This had been my territory for the last eleven years – sewing and singing and hammering and reciting. Why shouldn’t I come here when I needed the place most? I’d be back here tonight with the few others who were left. I’d give a wink to Fisher at the right moment, just to keep the story going.

The meetings weren’t about us older girls any more. We were only there to pass on what we knew to the little ones who’d moved up into our time slot. They looked young in a way I don’t think we ever did. They seemed silly and soft. I didn’t care about them. It was a terrible thing to admit, but it was true. We had been taught to defend our own Mädelschaft to the death. We’d been filed as sharp as we could ever get on that, and I WOULD have defended them to the death – even Ruby Heigl and Angelika Baker. But the small ones …? They didn’t seem like my sisters. I remember the outgoing girls who spoke down to us last year, they felt it too. You could tell. Indifference. There were some limits to our unity.

But there I was, in the silence of the hall that afternoon, doing exactly what they’d trained me to – defend one of my sisters to the death. They only had themselves to blame.

I picked through Fisher’s keys looking for the one that opened the cupboard. Then once inside, I pulled out my favourite machine – the pale blue manual with the least temperamental ribbon. I set it down on one of the tables that was pushed up against the side of the room, lifted a chair off the stack. I’d brought my own paper in my bag and threaded a sheet into the roller.

I sat there, looking at the empty page for the longest time, scared to start. Above me hung that week’s inspirational poster.
IT
IS
NOT
MERELY
ENOUGH
TO
SAY
:
I
BELIEVE
.
RATHER
ONE
MUST
SWEAR
:
I
WILL
FIGHT
.

I pushed down shift-lock, took a deep breath.

THIS IS CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART

I bashed those keys like I was clattering through a Beethoven piano sonata at the Royal Albert Hall. I threw the carriage back, hit the line-spacer several times to create the right amount of room. I took the photograph from the front pocket of my bag and held it against the paper, checking that the gap I’d left was sufficient.

There she was.

My friend.

She looked neater and more composed than she ever did in real life. We had traded ID pictures last year, snipping off the bottom image from our strips. She was wearing her BDM uniform – because the photos were for new membership cards. That was why she was giving that face to the camera – half-snarling, certainly defiant.

And then it hit me, like a cannonball to the gut – she was gone. She was gone. How had I let Herr Hoffman separate me from her, let the news crews twist history? How had I carried on skating, eating, sleeping, going to the BDM meetings? How could I have celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the garden with my family wearing a stupid paper hat when she was gone? I’d been in a dream, a self-induced coma. I felt a shame that I had never felt before.

The only consolation – she was so alive in my head now I could barely contain her. I could still see her that last day in the garden, the way the sunlight made her look like a goddess. Immortal.
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
I put her picture down, wiped away my tears.

THIS IS THE GIRL WHO SET HERSELF ON FIRE AT THE JAY ACKER CONCERT IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.

I typed.

THE AMANDA LEVY STORY IS A BIG LIE.

CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART IS A
GERMAN CITIZEN
BRITISH CITIZEN, WHO BELIEVES IN FREEDOM.

The crossing-out was wrong. I was sure that the place Clementine had come from before was Berlin, her father’s hometown. Her German language was always so much slicker than mine – that head-start she’d had when she was little, the immersion. But Clementine would have liked the crossing-out, the ambiguity of it. It didn’t matter who we were, where we were from, we were all prisoners.

THEY TOOK AWAY HER PLACE AT MUSIC COLLEGE. THEY TOOK AWAY HER MOTHER’S JOB. THEY TOOK AWAY HER FATHER. THEY WERE GOING TO CUT HER OPEN AND STOP HER HAVING CHILDREN.

CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART DID WHAT SHE DID BECAUSE SHE WAS DESPERATE.

AND BECAUSE SHE WANTS YOU TO BE FREE.

There were gaps in the story. People would add in their own knowledge, their own suspicions, all of the secrets and shame that they kept squirrelled away. Just like I had. That was what would really start this revolution – getting people to think for themselves. I hit the line space lever.

DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!

Her words. I hit the line space lever some more. Then:

FOR MURDER, THOUGH IT HAVE NO TONGUE, WILL SPEAK WITH MOST MIRACULOUS ORGAN.

Hamlet
. My words.

I sat back in the chair.

I had done something that I believed in. Not something I had been instructed to do, something that came from within me. It felt good. It felt like being good.

Then came a voice: ‘What are you doing here?’