The Big Lie (25 page)

Sundays were our day of rest. We washed our underwear and swept the dorm. We walked up and down outside, trying to catch a ray of sun.

In the late afternoon, we did a show for one another, performing poems and stories we knew by heart. Clara would read aloud her letters home to her husband before she sent them – brilliant, sparkling things. She captured our days in a way none of us could ever have managed. The sight of two silvery aeroplanes in the sky sent her musing on how far we’d come as a human race but how far we still had to go.

Nina had a lovely singing voice, all sad and lilty like a bird falling from the sky. She performed old English folk songs about bonny lads and cuckoos, songs that began with someone going a-walking or a-courting. Bells told rude jokes and did impressions, her favourite being a loving rendition of Marlene Dietrich all full of phlegm, warbling out ‘Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht’.
You can’t live without love
. Bells also impersonated the guards, including Boogie. They would often sit in and watch, the guards, laughing the loudest, yet still it felt dangerous. Could there be a Sunday coming when Boogie wouldn’t find it funny any more?

‘What can you do?’ Clara asked one weekend while our show was underway. I always sang along and cheered and cried, but the things that I had memorised as a child had no place in Red Block. I thought once about doing that speech from
Hamlet
, the one where he exclaims to Rosencrantz and Guilderstern,
What a piece of work is a man!
But I was scared that Boogie would report back when she heard me declare,
Man delights not me.

‘I can ice skate,’ I told her.

Clara clapped her hands in delight and was straight up on her feet, up on the bench. ‘Listen, ladies, listen!’

Bells’ sing-along (a dirty version of ‘Es Klopft Mein Herz Bum-Bum’
that involved bending over and slapping her backside) came to a stumbling end.

‘Listen!’ Clara was flapping her bony arms like a hopeful flightless bird. ‘Jessika can ice skate!’

The room fell into a chorus of
oo
s and
ahh
s.

‘You kept that one quiet,’ honked Bells. They had known so much about me when I first arrived, I assumed they knew this too. After being good, wasn’t it my most defining feature?

The women pushed and shoved, manoeuvring me into the middle of the room, onto the circle stage we’d created on the dormitory floor.

I started to laugh. ‘But I can’t do it for you now. Not without boots, not without ice.’

‘Of course you can,’ Clara called. ‘Just pretend, slide about in your socks or something.’

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to do that. That would be silly.

‘What music do you need, Jess?’ Nina asked, hopping from one foot to the other at the prospect of seeing something new. There was a reassurance in watching the ladies repeat the same acts over and over but, yes, we also got bored. ‘Shall we hum, Jess?’ asked Nina. ‘What do we know?’ She began conferring breathlessly with the women beside her on the benches. The idea of music seemed to slice through my reluctance.

‘Do you know Bruckner’s
Fantasie
?’

‘Ummm.’ Nina looked around her. ‘Well …’

‘Yes. We. Do.’ This was Boogie. She placed her hands on her extensive thighs and hoisted herself to standing. With a smug and satisfied grin, she pulled the belt of her skirt up and over her belly, and swaggered off towards the door of the dorm, the chain of her keys clanking against her hip. ‘While I’m gone,’ she called after herself, ‘open up all the windows.’

We looked to Clara to see if we should do as we were told. It was only a degree or two above zero outside. Clara shrugged, and began flinging open the casements.

‘It’ll be freezing,’ someone cried.

‘It’ll be like a fuckin’ ice rink,’ Bells cackled.

As we sat waiting, shivering, for Boogie to return, it started, through the tannoy speakers outside. She’d made us open up the windows so we could hear. Bruckner’s
Fantasie
. Those low notes at the start. Boogie was back in our doorway, looking terribly pleased with herself. All faces turned to me in the middle of the rink. The high, hopeful notes arrived … and I opened like a flower.

I slid and I jumped and I spun. It was stupid and ridiculous, but sort of wonderful all at the same time. The women
ooo
ed and
ahh
ed as I moved in sweeping movements across the floor. They shuffled the benches back and back, widening the rink as I went.

When it was time for the camel spin, I felt the same nerves that I did on the ice. Never a hard move by any measure but the one that always let me down. I got some purchase on the floorboards and flicked my body round for a spin or two, then held myself in position, imagining the rest of the revolutions. I showed them my heart. Then I set off again, skipping backwards in preparatory circles. It was time at last to make Ingrid proud. To show an audience all that she had taught me. I turned forwards, struck the floor with the edge of my foot and I leapt. I’m sure it was only a turn and a half in reality but, oh goodness, it felt as good as a triple. The women were on their feet, throwing gloves and socks, pretending they were flowers.

I stood there in the centre of the rink with my eyes closed, listening to the applauding and cheering and whistling, my muscles burning, not feeling like my own any more. My ankles and knees would never be strong enough to do it again on actual ice. The realisation cut through me like a blade. I hoped I would eventually find some meaning in it all, like Clara had with her silver aeroplanes, because right then I felt so irredeemably sad. I had promised Ingrid that I would always skate. That I would always be free. But that was my last dance.

All those futures that would never be.

I took my bow.

They didn’t come. The men, the women, whoever took my magazine, Clem’s notes.

Mum called up brightly at 6 p.m. that it was time for tea and I crept downstairs, slowly, cautiously, expecting fire and brimstone. Instead I found that my wet and muddy clothes had been washed and hung up, and the only person acting weird was me.

I stayed on my guard, of course I did.

‘Relax, Jessie,’ my father repeated on a loop, thinking I was coiled tight about going away. ‘You’ll do us proud, I know it.’

On the Wednesday, the day before I left, my favourite meal was on the table. Roast chicken. There was a cake too, with the words VIEL GLÜCK! in piped cream and a little plastic figure skating across the icing. I looked into my parents’ eyes, just to check, just to make sure that this wasn’t to be a last supper of a different kind, but they were genuine and smiling and kind. Dad spoke soppily of all the things I’d done as a kid, seeming to forget Fisher’s stiff presence across the table. He talked about the first time I’d put on skates and glided across that rink as if I’d been born with blades for feet. Mum told Dad to stop because he was making her cry, then urged him to tell another story, and another, and another. Lilli was on classic form, arguing pedantically about every vegetable that passed her lips, claiming all the while that she wasn’t hungry, then demanding extra portions of pudding. It was how I’d always imagined it would be when I left. I would miss them so much, all their faults. At that table, I regretted everything I’d ever done to cross my parents, to disappoint them, all the things they knew and all the things they didn’t.

The next morning, Lilli sat on top of my trunk so Mum could close the clasps, while I was forced to have a conversation down the phone to Katrin at athletics camp. (‘Good luck, yeah,’ she said, unbothered. ‘Thanks,’ I replied, with utter nonchalance. We honoured the truth of our relationship). Dad carried my hulking trunk down the stairs and to the end of the driveway. We waited for the coach to come. I was dressed in my BDM best, the knot in my necktie tight and straight, my Party pin shiny and centred on my pocket. I didn’t care one bit that I’d have to make small talk with Dani Hannah all the way there. I was just so thrilled that the day had come. I was blessed, I decided on that warm September day, to have been given a talent so clear and obvious that I could carve a whole life from it. Disappear into it. Forget everything else. I was blessed to have been given a second chance to have that life, after what I did. I would have to steer a whole new path, and once I was away from home I would be able to decide how to do that.

Here it was, a beginning …

The large black car pulled up, and the driver got out to put my trunk in the boot. I was too busy with goodbyes to ask where the coach was, where Dani was. Fisher gave me a stiff peck on the cheek before stepping aside for me to have my last moments with my family. Mum hung a purse of money around my neck and sobbed as she held me tight. Dad kissed my head. Lilli threw her arms up and around my waist and Wolf stood on his hind legs, trying to be part of the hug.

As I was driven away, my father stood very upright and solid-chested on the pavement. He didn’t wave. He had his arm around Mum who had tears spilling down her cheeks and a paper tissue balled up in her hand. Lilli had already made her way onto the front garden of the empty house next door and was picking the last of the summer daisies, Wolf sniffing at her fingers, hoping for food.

‘Ich liebe euch,’ I said to my family as the car took me away from Lincoln Drive, though they wouldn’t have heard me or even seen my lips move through that blacked-out glass.

And I meant it, when I said it. I really did.

Ask me now if I love them. Go on, ask me.

Because despite everything, I’d have to say that I do.

One day, a cat started coming into our kitchen.

It was white with a fat, black tail and splodges of tortoiseshell across its back. For a stray, it was remarkably sturdy, but there are plenty of mice to be had on the farms around here. I could tell it was old, from its fur, from its soft belly hanging low. It had a rolling gait, one paw put right in front of the other as if walking on an invisible tightrope – one that it might fall off any minute.

‘Guten Tag!’ I said as it wound itself through the gap in our door.

Miaow!
it replied, loud and demanding, mimicking the patterns of my speech.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

Mi-miaow!

I went over and lifted up its tail – it was definitely a girl.

It continued to visit every day, so I gave her some ham scraps and a saucer of milk. But she only sniffed and took a quick lick. She seemed interested in the idea of food but not the actuality.

When Jan saw the cat he said he would have to take a spade to it.

‘It can barely walk,’ he said. ‘There’s something wrong with it.’

‘It seems happy enough,’ I said.

‘Happy enough for what?’ he asked.

‘I dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘Life?’

It’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re only talking about a cat.

Jan and I married in March, just when the buds were starting to show on the lilac trees. He’s not so bad, Jan, and I could have done worse. I like him enough (that word again, ‘enough’) and I think I might get to like him more. He’s kind and gentle and not so arrogant that I can’t open my mouth and have an opinion every now and again. Some of the girls at Elmdene got sent off with some real chest-beating bears, let me tell you.

Jan looks exactly like the big, blonde boys in the picture plates of our biology books from school – all chest muscle, pumping arms and strong thighs, striding through the long grass in running shorts with their eyes on the horizon. Angels, gods, paragons of animals. It’s sort of disgusting if you think about it. So I try not to.

I enjoy the touch of him though. I suppose I’ve never really had much of a problem with that.

We sat through hours of brain-bogglingly embarrassing lectures on sex at Elmdene. Women, unlike men, are always capable of intercourse. Women should keep themselves attractive or must hold themselves responsible for the rise in male homosexuality. That kind of thing. It only left me wondering how happy I might have been if I had lived in a world where I could have settled down with GG. Or Clementine.

What a piece of work is a man.

I wore one of the white dresses they kept in the cupboard for the ceremonies. They tried to make it seem sacred and special and mystical. There were flowers, a shrine and pledges to the Fatherland. It reminded me of that day in April when I was ten years old, being sworn into the Jungmädelschaft:

Back then, when I was ten, it had felt like the biggest deal, such a huge responsibility, but the marriage ceremony? Deep down, us girls all knew (or at least I did and really not that deep down at all) that these marriages were just a formality. They weren’t going to let us out of Elmdene unless we did it. So we did.

Now I’m Davina Gunn. They thought it best that I ditch the first name too. Just in case. A proper fresh start. It sounds like a movie star, I think – Davina Gunn. Too much of a name for someone who works a vegetable patch, mucks out chickens and feeds a few pigs.

Babies will be the next job, I guess.

We spent much of our days at Elmdene in the nursery helping bathe the babies, feed them, change their nappies. Once they’d been with us a while and we knew that they were healthy they were handed over to waiting couples. Nice families. When I did my first handover I got a bit upset and was taken into Matron’s office for a talking-to.

I had been thinking about Lilli as I shifted that warm weight in its blanket into the arms of a new mother. The truth finally came and choked me. Lilli had never been ours. I was sure of it. She had arrived fully-formed one day, with her blonde hair and her blues eyes, looking absolutely nothing like Katrin or me. Of course I didn’t tell Matron this.

So many things fell into relief at Elmdene, and at the most unexpected moments. During one of our lengthy evening talks by the fire in the drawing room, Frau Catchpole had us discussing Himmler’s diaries. All of a sudden, I remembered that I had, for years, read and memorised parts of Clementine’s diary whenever I was at her house and she was out of the room. The memory of it came to me so fresh and vivid, yet I’d not let myself recall it until then.

In one entry, back when we were still very young, she’d written about the robot costume Mother had made for me for the Jungmädel summer fancy dress competition. I had a cardboard box on my head and another around my middle, cardboard tubes on my arms and legs. Any exposed skin was sprayed silver. I had won first prize. Of course.

Or rather, her mum won first prize
, Clem had written.
Jess could barely move, couldn’t dance about or enjoy any of the food or drink. She got told off for sweating because it made the paint run. I feel so sorry for Jess and how her parents use her as a weapon in their ugly war.

I burst into tears, right there in the drawing room, in front of everyone.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Frau Catchpole had asked, forcing me to pretend that some passage of Herr Himmler’s memoir was so perfectly phrased that it had sent me emotional.

To Matron, after I had got upset about handing over a baby, I said, ‘It will never happen again.’ I told her that I had got too attached to that particular child – a boy the nurses had called Sebastian – and that was why I had quivered, gone dizzy and refused to let him go. This wasn’t exactly a lie. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how those other girls felt, the valuable girls who were sent to Elmdene because they had got themselves into trouble with valuable boys. If Fisher had had his way that evening in the meeting hall …

They arrived at Elmdene, those girls, all saucer-eyed, and full and fat, only to leave empty-handed, expected to go home and act like none of it had ever happened. Or go back to their correction camp and get back to work, fielding all the ‘Jerry Bag’ name-calling, because they’d dared to sleep with a member of male staff to get an extra bit of bread.

They made me feel lucky. At least I didn’t have to go back anywhere and pretend.

I have a new life.

And it makes me see how my old life was chaotic and noisy, everything jerky and unexpected. The calm isn’t as terrifying as I’d thought. I sit with it – this quiet filled with birdsong and barking and the distant sound of tractors. Sometimes there are the voices of cows and sheep, whatever is let out to roam in the field next to ours. I let that quiet in. I don’t get out-of-body experiences any more. I don’t feel the need to sing or march or recite anything to keep the feelings at bay.

I am Good Jessika and Bad. All of it is in me. But I am whole. And I am here.

Still, I let myself go backwards and forwards in time occasionally and think about what might have been. If I had gone to skate camp, would I be competing for my country now? I find it hard to picture – me doing something so beautiful in the name of the Reich. To pull off a triple you need a strong belief, and without Ingrid there, I’m not sure who I would have been doing it for. Ingrid, I know, will be training some new little six-year-old now who skates like she was born with blades for feet. I think about Fisher and guess that Ruby Heigl probably swerved into his lane as soon as I left. I imagine how our marriage might have been, a lifetime of sideways glances, double-crossing and doubt. I think about Lilli and what story my parents might have told her to explain where I am. I think about what story my parents told themselves.

My story? I run through it in my head all the time. Sometimes I pretend I am in a meeting room much like the one at the grand hotel in Trafalgar Square – carpeted, air-conditioned, air-freshened – except this one is in America. I am being detained, interrogated and counselled. I try to work out what my ideals and beliefs really are. It feels like being thrust into Red Block all over again, that moment of not knowing which version of the truth to tell. What I feel and what I should feel get mixed up. Sometimes I tell my story as if I am back in one of those white-washed rooms at Highpoint with the three faceless men and the tape recorder whirring. I slip into old ways of thinking as easily as I slip into my German tongue. I try desperately to get myself off the hook, only to realise that I have incriminated myself all over again.

But usually I imagine myself telling my story to you. A girl much like me, a woman ready for life to begin – except that you have spent your life reading those magazines of Clementine’s, wearing your trousers too tight and listening to boys sing about love.
It’s all nothing,
I imagine you thinking.
It’s all so easy that I don’t really have to think at all.

When this gets too exhausting, I read. I disappear into other people’s worlds. When we took over the farm, the house was completely derelict. It was our job to bring it back into shape. I found a box of old books in the loft.

‘Maybe some of them are illegal,’ Jan suggested.

‘Maybe,’ I said with a smile. ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’

I’m working my way through
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
at the moment.

Perhaps the real reason I do not complain or kick back about my situation is because I see this time as penance. And there is penance more to do.

And I am happy to do it.

Ready.

Deutschland erwache!

The cat sleeps in the kitchen now. I took an old crate for her, and put a folded towel inside. She snores, because she is fat and because there is almost certainly something wrong with her nasal passages as well as her legs. She grumbles in her dreams in a way that reminds me of Wolf and makes me homesick. He is my weak spot.

The snoring is another thing that makes Jan want to fetch his spade.

‘I like the sound,’ I tell him.

‘She rattles like she’s faulty,’ he says.

‘So what?’

Jan puts his hands on his hips, watching her sleep, twisting his mouth as he tries to work out this puzzle.

‘She might have kittens,’ he says.

‘Won’t that be nice,’ I reply.

The cat is my first victory. Softly, softly catchee monkey.

When I left Red Block, with hugs and kisses and messages for loved ones, Clara had great expectations for me. She liked to use the image of a forest fire. That was how protest and defiance spread – fast, from one tree to the next. Clementine got her idea from Egypt, Clara said, they were all doing it there. Just one person at first, then another, then another. So who in the Greater German Reich, in England, would be next?

I told her, ‘I’m not sure that Clementine did the right thing.’

‘How can you say that?’ Clara gasped.

‘Because what good is she now?’ I said. ‘Locked up … Or worse.’

Clara exhausted all her contacts trying to find out what happened to the Hart family. We never got anything conclusive. Sometimes I am grateful for this. If she’s not certainly dead, then she must always stay alive. Though in the camp I so often thought to myself,
Death must be so much nicer than here.

‘She got her message out, didn’t she?’ Clara snapped back at me. ‘She ruffled some feathers.’

But we both knew there was no revolution back in August. Not really. Only inside of me.

‘The strongest rebellion is to stay alive,’ I told her. ‘That way you can change things, have your say. Outnumber them.’

In our biology textbooks at school, there was this repeated phrase alongside those images of the ‘right’ kind of families and the ‘wrong’ kind:

Deutschland must live, even if we die!

The same went for us, I told Clara, if we ever want to have our voices heard.

After celebrating Christmas in Red Block, singing ‘O Tannenbaum’, though we had no tree with lovely branches to sing it to, I believed they would take me away from the camp to be executed. The inspirational poster on the wall of the factory canteen towards the end read: BEFORE THE EARTH TAKES YOU BACK, HAVE YOU MADE IT FRUITFUL? I hadn’t. For most of my life, I’d been part of the problem, not the solution. On the table, a prisoner who had eaten there long before me had etched into the wood, THEY’LL SHOOT YOU ANYWAY.

So I couldn’t have been more surprised when they dropped me off at Elmdene, a stately rectory in the countryside with large, wood-panelled rooms, crisp white sheets, decent food and flower-filled gardens. I’d been washed clean of my sins, I’d learnt the meaning of hard work and now I was to be taught to be civilised again.

I got proper Faith and Beauty classes after all. Eat your heart out, Angelika Baker. I became an expert in hairstyles and all those lovely dances. Cooking too, weaving, darning, flower-arranging – skills that have been almost completely useless while I’ve been living with Jan.

I spend my days in wellies, in the company of sows, hoping that Nina is back with her piggy family somewhere. I imagine GG in the same get-up as me, wellies and overalls, only in the more glamorous company of horses. Of course I also imagine that she may not have made it to Gloucestershire, that her bus was also replaced by a large black car. But I don’t let myself dwell on that too much because I will never know the answer, just like I don’t let myself stare when Edith Bauer at the cottage down the way chats and laughs with her mother at their front gate. I will never have that either.

In weaker moments, I doubt that the signature on the order to lock me up was genuine, and I believe that my family are still out there waiting for me to return. In stronger moments, when I can be honest with myself, I know it can’t be true. And more than that, I cannot see myself slotting back into my old position.