Times of War Collection (15 page)

I had noticed before that she spoke English in a strange way, pronouncing her words carefully, too
correctly, and in proper sentences. Her name might have been English, but I had always thought she might be Dutch, or Scandinavian, or German perhaps. “It was a hot wind, a scalding wind,” she went on. “I do not believe in hell, nor heaven come to that. But if you can imagine it, it was like a wind from the fires of hell. I thought we would burn alive, all of us.”

“But you said it was in February,” Karl interrupted. I frowned at him, but Lizzie didn’t seem to mind at all. “That’s in wintertime, isn’t it?” Karl went on. “I mean, where were you living? Africa or somewhere?”

“No. It wasn’t in Africa. Didn’t I tell you this before? I think I did.” She was suddenly looking a little unsure of herself. “There was an elephant in the garden, you see. No, honestly there was. And she liked potatoes, lots of potatoes.” I think my wry smile must have betrayed me. “You still do not believe me, do you? Well, I cannot say that I blame you. I expect you and all the other nurses think I am just a dotty old bat, a bit loopy, off my rocker, as you say. It is quite true that my bits and pieces do not work so well any more – which, I suppose, is why I am
in here, isn’t it? My legs will not do what I tell them sometimes, and even my heart does not beat like it should. It skips and flutters. It makes up its own rhythm as it goes along, which makes me feel dizzy, and this is not at all convenient for me. But I can tell you for certain and for sure, that my mind is as sound as a bell, sharp as a razor. So when I say there was an elephant in the garden, there really was. There is nothing wrong with my memory, nothing at all.”

“I don’t think you’re batty at all,” said Karl. “Or loopy.”

“That is very kind of you to say so, Karl. You and I shall be good friends. But I have to admit that when I come to think of it, I cannot remember much about yesterday, nor even what I had for breakfast this morning. But I promise you I can remember just how it was when I was young. I remember the important things, the things that matter. It is as if I wrote them down in my mind, so that I should not forget. So I remember very well – it was on the evening of my sixteenth birthday – that I looked out of the window,
and saw her. At first she just looked like a big dark shadow, but then the shadow moved, and I looked again. There was no doubt about it. She was an elephant, quite definitely an elephant. I did not know it at the time, of course, but this elephant in our garden was going to change my life for ever, change all our lives in my family. And you might say she was going to save all our lives also.”

IZZIE PAUSED FOR A MOMENT OR TWO
,
THEN SMILED ACROSS
at me sympathetically, knowingly. “No, no, you are too busy for this, dear, I can see that,” she said. “You have to get on. You have other patients to look after. I know this. I was a sort of nurse once. Nurses are always busy. But I can talk to Karl. I can tell him my elephant story.”

There was no way I was going to miss her story now. If Karl was going to hear it, then I was too. And the truth was that I had already sensed from the tone in her voice that she was making nothing up, that Karl had been right about her. “You certainly can’t stop now,” I told her. “I’m off duty at twelve, and that’s just about now. So I’m on my own time.”

“And we want to know all about the elephant, don’t we, Mum?” said Karl.

“Then you shall, Karli. I think from now on I shall call you Karli, like my little brother. So it will be as if you are inside the story.” She laid her head back on her pillows. “I have had quite a long life, and quite a lot has happened, so it may take a little while. You are going to have to be patient. I think to begin with you have to know names and places. I was called Elizabeth then, or Lisbeth some people called me – I became Lizzie much later. Mother, we always called Mutti. And I had a little brother, as I have told you, about eight years younger than me, little Karli. He was always full of questions, endless questions, and when we answered, there’d always be another question, about the answer we’d just given. ‘Yes, but why?’ he would ask. ‘How come? What for?’ In the end we would often become impatient with him, and just tell him it was ‘for a blue reason’. He seemed happy with that – I do not know why.

“Karli was born with one leg shorter than the other,
so we had to carry him a lot, but he was always cheerful. In fact he was the clown in the family, kept us all laughing. He loved to juggle – he could do it with his eyes closed too! The elephant loved to watch him. It was as if she was hypnotised. The elephant was called Marlene. Mutti got to name her because she was working with the elephants in the zoo. She named her after a singer she loved, that many people loved in those days. Marlene Dietrich. I wonder if you might have heard of her – no, I don’t suppose you have. She’s been dead a long time now. She was very slim and elegant, and blonde too, not at all like an elephant, but that did not seem to matter to Mutti. She called the elephant Marlene, and that was that.

“We had a gramophone at home, a wind-up one with a big trumpet – you do not see them like this any more, only in antique shops – and so Marlene Dietrich’s voice was always in the house. We grew up with that voice. She had a voice like dark red velvet. When she sang it was as if she was singing only for me. I tried to sing just like her, mostly in the bath,
because my singing sounded better in the bath. I remember Mutti would sometimes hum along with her songs when we were listening to them. It was like a kind of duet.”

“But what about the elephant?” Karl interrupted again, not troubling much to hide his impatience. “I
mean, how come this elephant was in your garden in the first place? Where were you living? I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you are right, dear,” she said. “I was getting ahead of myself, rushing on too quickly.” She thought long and hard, collecting her thoughts, before beginning again.

“It would be better perhaps if I start again, I think. A story should always begin at the beginning. No? My own beginning would be a good start, I suppose…

So, I was born on the ninth of February nineteen twenty-nine, in Dresden, in Germany. We lived in quite a big house, a walled garden at the back, with a sandpit and a swing. And we had a woodshed where there lived the biggest spiders in the whole world, I promise you! There were many high trees, beech trees, where the pigeons cooed in summer, right outside my bedroom window. At the end of the garden was a rusty iron gate with huge
squeaking hinges. This gate led out into a big park. So, in a way, we had two gardens you might say, a little one that was ours, and a big one we had to share with everyone else in Dresden.

Dresden was a wonderful city then, so beautiful, you cannot imagine. I have only to close my eyes and I can see it again, just as it was. Papi – this is what we all called our father – Papi worked in the city art gallery restoring paintings. And he wrote books about paintings too, about Rembrandt in particular. He loved Rembrandt above all other artists. Like Mutti he loved listening to the gramophone, but he preferred Bach to Marlene Dietrich. He loved boating best of all, though, and fishing too, even more than Rembrandt or Bach. At weekends we would often go boating on the lake in the park, and in summer we would take a picnic and the gramophone with us, and we would have a picnic by the shore, a musical picnic! Papi loved musical picnics. Well, we all did.

Every holidays, we would take a bus into the
countryside, to stay with Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti on their farm – Aunt Lotti was Mutti’s sister, you understand. We would feed the animals and have more picnics. Papi built a tree house for us on an island out in the middle of the lake – which was more like a large pond than a lake, when I come to think about it – and it was fringed all around with reeds, I remember, and there were always ducks and moorhens and frogs and tadpoles and little darting fish. We had a small rowing boat to get across to the island, and plenty of trout to fish for in the stream that ran down into the little lake – so Papi was happy.

Sometimes when the harvesting was done, we’d all be out there in the field of stubble long into the evenings, gathering the last grains of golden corn. And whenever we could on summer nights, Karli and I would sleep up in the tree house on the island. We would lie awake listening to the gramophone playing far away in the farmhouse, to the owls calling one another. We would watch
the moon sailing through the clouds.

We loved the animals, of course. Little Karli loved the pigs especially, and Uncle Manfred’s horse – Tomi, he was called. Karli would go riding on Tomi with Uncle Manfred every day out around the farm, and I would go bicycling on my own. I went off for hours on end. I loved freewheeling down a hill, the wind in my face. It was our dreamtime, full of sunshine and laughter. But dreams do not last, do they? And sometimes they turn into nightmares.

I was born before the war, of course. But when I say that, it sounds as if I knew there was going to be a war all the time I was growing up. It was not like that, not at all, not for me. Yes, there was talk of it, and there were many uniforms and flags in the streets, lots of bands marching up and down. Karli loved all that. He loved to march along with them, even if the other boys used to taunt him. He was so small and frail, and suffered greatly from asthma. They’d call him ‘Pegleg’, because of his
limp, and I hated them for that. I would shout at them, whenever I felt brave enough that is. It was not only the mockery in their faces and the cruelty of their words that I hated so much, it was the injustice. It was not Karli’s fault he had been born like that. But Karli did not want me to stand up for him. He used to get quite angry at me for making a fuss. I do not think he minded about them nearly as much as I did.

I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe it is just natural for children to be born like this. Maybe I got it from Mutti. Who knows? Anyway, I always recognised injustice when I saw it, and I felt it deeply. And believe you me, there was plenty of it about in those days. I saw the Jews in the streets, with their yellow stars sewn on to their coats. I saw their shops with the Star of David daubed in paint all over the windows. Several times I saw them beaten up by Nazi stormtroopers, and left to lie in the gutter.

At home, Papi did not like us to talk about any of this, about anything political – he was very strict about that. We all knew about the terrible things the Nazis were doing, but Papi always told me that our home should be an oasis of peace and harmony for us in a troubled world, that it only made Mutti angry or sad or both to talk about it, and that little Karli was far too young anyway to understand about such things. Besides, Papi would
say, you never know who’s listening. But down on the farm on our holidays one summer – the summer of nineteen thirty-eight it was – Mutti and Papi, Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, got into a long and heated argument. It was late at night, and Karli and I were already upstairs in bed. We heard every word of it.

Uncle Manfred was banging the table, and I could hear the tears of anger in his voice. “Germany needs strong leadership,” he was saying. “Without our Führer, without Adolf Hitler, the country will go to the dogs. Like Hitler himself, I fought in the trenches. We were comrades in arms. My only brother was killed in the war, and most of my friends. Is all that sacrifice to be for nothing? I remember the humiliation of defeat, and how people starved in the streets after the war. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Make no mistake, it was the government in Berlin, and the Jews, who betrayed the Fatherland and the army. And now Hitler is restoring our pride, putting things right.”

I had never in my life imagined Uncle Manfred could be this angry. Mutti was furious too, and called him ‘ein dumkopf’ – in English this means a fool, or a fathead. She was saying that Hitler was a madman, that the Nazi regime was the worst thing that had ever happened to Germany, that we had many dear friends who were Jews, and that if Hitler went on the way he was going, he would lead us all into another war.

Uncle Manfred, who was ranting now, and quite beside himself, replied that he hoped there would be a war, so that this time we could show the world that Germany had to be respected. Then, to my utter surprise, mild-mannered Aunt Lotti joined in, calling Mutti ‘nothing but a coward and a lousy Jew-loving pacifist’. Mutti told her in no uncertain terms that she was proud to be a pacifist, that she would be a pacifist till the day she died. Through all this, Papi was doing his best to try to calm things down, and said that we were all entitled to our own opinion, but that we were all family, all German,
and that we should stick together, whatever our views. No one was listening to him.

The argument raged on for most of the night. To be honest, at the time I didn’t understand much of what they were talking about – only enough to know that I was on Mutti’s side. Karli understood even less, but we were both so upset and surprised to hear them being angry with one another, and shouting like that. When I think about it now, I realise I should have been more knowledgeable about what they were saying. But I wasn’t, not then. I was just a teenage girl growing up, I suppose. Yes, I hated all the dreadful things I’d seen the stormtroopers doing in the streets, but the truth is – and I am ashamed of this now – that I was far more interested in boys and bicycles, than in politics – and more in bicycles than boys, I have to say.