Читать книгу The Flight - Bryan Malessa - Страница 6

Chapter 2

That autumn, each Thursday after lunch, Karl, Peter and Leyna waited on the hill outside the village beside the road that led to Fischhausen. From there they could see nearly two kilometres down the long straight road as they looked for the postman, trying to guess when he would appear. The younger two had to rely on their brother’s word because he wouldn’t let them see the watch their grandfather had given him.

Once they were certain the postman was on his way, they sprinted into the woods, along the path and down the hill, across a glade and back up the opposite hill to the church. When they reached the cemetery they stopped to catch their breath, then ran down into the square just before the truck arrived.

They wanted to be ready in case their father had sent them a parcel. They were the only children in Germau who received sweets in the post each month, but they waited for the postman each week in case he had sent an extra one. Ida made them open it at home – otherwise, she knew, they’d eat it all at once. Each evening, after they had done their piano practice, she would give them a little until everything had been eaten. The children took their daily ration outside to where the others waited.

When a picture appeared in the newspaper of soldiers marching along the Champs Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe, Karl cut it out and, in the field beside the church, showed it to the other village children, saying that his father was among the soldiers at the rear. Peter supported him although both knew that Paul hadn’t marched into the city with the troops. Karl refused to share his sweets with two boys who didn’t believe him. ‘Who else would have sent us chocolate from Paris?’ Karl asked.

The boys considered this and agreed it must have been his father. He rewarded them with a nibble that seemed more delicious than anything German.

‘Maybe my father will go to Italy,’ one said, ‘and send us something even better.’

‘Italy’s already on our side, stupid. They’ll probably send him to Africa where they don’t have sweets.’

By now they’d eaten what Ida had given them.

‘See if your mother will give you more,’ one boy said.

‘She won’t. She said it’s almost gone.’

‘Let’s go and look for the secret tunnel, then.’

Immediately the children forgot about Paris and ran off. Mr Wolff had once told Karl about a tunnel that, long ago, monks had dug beneath the church. It opened somewhere in the woods and offered a last means of escape to those besieged in the building. It had rarely been used, however, since the time of the Teutonic Knights who had trained with arms and studied military strategy with the same devotion they showed to the Virgin Mary. Mr Wolff, the local coffin maker, enjoyed sharing his knowledge of their home with the children. ‘Everyone should know their history,’ he would say.

One afternoon when Karl and Peter had stood near the doorway to his shop, listening to his stories, Mr Wolff had pulled a stone from his coat pocket. Karl had recognised it as amber – Bernstein. ‘The church was once used as the headquarters where amber disputes were settled,’ Mr Wolff told them. ‘Most of the world’s amber comes from around here.’

‘Then why aren’t we rich?’ Karl asked.

‘You’re richer than many people. You need not worry about what others think of you.’

‘What do you mean?’ Karl asked.

Mr Wolff ignored his question. Instead he told the boys that long before the church had been designated the Amber Palace, a Jewish trader had been the second person in recorded history to mention the Prussian tribe living on the Baltic coast. Ibrâhim ibn-Ya’qub had travelled to the region from Spain and recorded his findings in Arabic.

With the baker, Mr Schultze, whose shop stood opposite the butcher’s, Mr Wolff was the only other Jewish person remaining in the village. Of the two, only Mr Schultze had married – a Protestant woman from the capital. In the years after Hitler had been elected to power, the four other Jewish families in Germau had followed the example of those in Königsberg and fled to safer countries. Karl had once overheard his father asking Mr Wolff whether it was wise for him to remain in Germany.

‘This is home. Where else would I go?’ Mr Wolff had replied.

The villagers came to him occasionally as the arbiter in their never-ending disputes over obscure historical events. Since leaving home in his early twenties, Mr Wolff had distanced himself from his religion and focused on the study of history, convinced that intellectual and spiritual pursuits led to a similar end: self-knowledge and inner peace. In his early thirties he had reconsidered his rejection of formal religion after studying the Reformation. Instead of returning to Judaism, though, he had become interested in Protestantism. He didn’t formally convert, but he attended services occasionally and had even led Christians in prayer – for the first time when a family had requested he deliver a coffin to their farm. When he arrived, the widow asked if he would say a few words for her deceased husband, before helping them bury him in the family plot. He had been honoured by her request.

On the afternoon that Paul had asked him whether it was wise to remain in Germany, he had also asked Mr Wolff who he expected would help him if trouble came. The coffin maker had frowned and made no answer. As time passed, he noticed that the villagers who had once expressed independent views now accepted each new policy without question. It had begun back in 1934 with the banning of Jewish holidays from German calendars. In 1935 Mr Wolff had been excluded from the Armed Forces and forbidden to fly the German flag – which had hurt: he had always been among the first in Germau to raise it on national holidays. Then his citizenship was revoked, in line with the Nuremberg Laws, and in 1936 his assets were taxed an additional twenty-five per cent – all because of his religious heritage.

The villagers’ acceptance of each new law through the years was unsettling enough, but then, in the months following Paul’s blunt and unsettling question, Mr Wolff had noticed that friends with whom he had always been on good terms slowly began to distance themselves. The days Mr Wolff had once spent busy with work and the evenings once occupied visiting friends were soon replaced by long idle hours alone, the social life he had once cherished slowly withering away to nothing. Although Mr Wolff enjoyed spending time alone during the weekdays working and at weekends studying, he found the prospect of forced solitude disquieting. As he searched deeper and deeper within himself, his forced introspection eventually led back to memories of his childhood. With those memories came the prayers his parents had taught him and images of the temple in which his family had worshipped. As he meditated day after day, he felt himself being pulled towards the very subject for which he was being ostracised, pulled for the first time since leaving his parents’ home back to the sanctity of Judaism.