But Peter was not giving up on him, not for one moment. He stopped only to put his ear to Karli’s chest to listen for his breathing. “Come on, Karli!” he shouted. “Come on!” And then on he went, pumping, pumping.
I turned to Mutti and buried my head in her shoulder, both of us weeping uncontrollably. That was when we both heard the sound of spluttering. I looked, and saw Karli’s eyes opening, and then he was coughing and choking, the water was spurting up out of his mouth onto the kitchen floor. It kept coming and coming, until at last it was all out and he lay there breathing hard, a great smile coming over his face as he recognized us.
Peter sat back on his haunches, his hands over his face. I wanted to hug him there and then, hug him tight and never let him go. Mutti was on her knees, cradling Karli in her arms and kissing him all over his face, and Karli was strong enough already to try to push her away—he was never that fond of being kissed, by Mutti, or by me, or by anyone else, come to that. I knelt down in front of Peter then, and took his hands away from his face. I could see he had been crying too. I knew then in that moment as our eyes met, that he felt for me what I was feeling for him.
“Thank you,” I said, still holding his hands in mine. “Thank you, thank you.” At the time, I think this was almost all the English I knew. Tears soon gave way to laughter though as Mutti berated Karli. She was back to being an exasperated mother.
“Why? What were you doing out there on the ice, Karli?” she cried. “What were you thinking of?”
“I was only trying to get to the island,” Karli said, “to see the tree house Papi built for us. I was nearly there, and then the ice broke. It was not my fault. It was the ice’s fault. It was too thin.”
Uncle Manfred’s clothes were a little on the small side for Peter, we discovered, and the trousers hung loose around his waist, but they were dry, and that was all that mattered. He was soon sitting by the stove, with Karli still wrapped up in a blanket beside him, and Karli was telling him all about our tree house on the island, and how the two of us used to play pirates over there, pirates from Treasure Island—Papi’s favorite book when he was a boy—and how Karli was always Long John Silver because he was better at limping than I was, and because he was better at being bloodthirsty than I was too.
All this time Mutti was at the stove busying herself making potato soup. She had gone quite silent, I noticed. She seemed deep in thought. She had not said a word to Peter since Karli’s rescue, not even when he came downstairs dressed in Uncle Manfred’s clothes and clogs. Karli and I had laughed and laughed, but Mutti still looked stony-faced. There was a change though. She was no longer telling us not to speak to him, and the pitchfork was nowhere to be seen. We were sitting down at the table, enjoying the warmth of our soup, and Karli was still playing at being Long John Silver. It was “Yo ho ho!” after every sip of soup, accompanied by his squawky parrot noises.
Peter and I looked at one another over our soup, and smiled. We were not only smiling at Karli’s antics, we were smiling into each other’s eyes.
I knew at once that it was the police at the door, the moment I heard the knocking. I saw the alarm in Peter’s eyes. No one knocks on a door like the police.
Three
“May we come in?”
It wasn’t a request. It was a demand. There were three of them, and they were soldiers, not policemen. With their rifles, helmets and greatcoats they seemed to fill the room.
“You live here?” the soldier asked. One of them did the talking, while the others walked around the room as if they were searching for something, or someone.
“My sister does,” Mutti said, “with her husband. But they have gone away. We’re living here now, me, my daughter and my two sons. My husband is away fighting the Russians.”
“We are looking for a parachutist. There were reports of a parachute coming down not far from here. An enemy bomber was shot down, a Lancaster. British. It crashed only a few kilometers away. We found the wreckage. One of the bastards is here somewhere. So we are searching every house, every farm. Have you seen anyone?”
“No one,” Mutti replied. “We are alone here. We only came yesterday, from Dresden. We escaped from the city.”
“There is no city anymore,” said the soldier. “There is no Dresden. There are so many dead. It is impossible to know how many. Bastards. Bastards. I tell you if we find this one, a prison camp is too good for him. We will shoot him first and ask questions later.”
Someone was shouting from outside. “Sergeant, Sergeant! You must come, come quickly!” Another soldier, this one much younger, appeared at the door, breathless with excitement. “You are not going to believe this, Sergeant. But there is an elephant, out there, in the barn.”
“An elephant?”
“Yes, Sergeant. We were searching the outbuildings like you said, and we went into the barn, and there he was.”
“She is a she,” said Mutti. “She is named Marlene. I work in the zoo, with the elephants, in Dresden. She was the only animal we managed to save. The rest had to be shot because of the bombing. I have brought her here to the family farm. I knew of nowhere else to go.”
The youngest of the soldiers was told to stay with us and guard us, while the others went out. Karli was about to say something, but Mutti frowned at him quickly and put a finger to her lips. The clock on the wall ticked loudly in the silence. I could not bear the tension. I felt for Peter’s hand under the table, and found it. We heard them coming back across the yard, their voices loud with excitement. Then they were back in the kitchen.
“This elephant, she is not dangerous?” the sergeant asked.
Mutti shook her head. “I will look after her,” she told them. “I have known this elephant ever since she was born. She is as gentle as a kitten, I promise you.”
“And you have seen no airman, no parachutist?” he went on.
“No,” Mutti said. She spoke very coolly. “If I saw one, after all they have done in Dresden, I would shoot him myself.”
“Your papers?” he demanded. “I want to see your papers.”
“I’m sorry. We haven’t got them. They are all in Dresden, in our house,” said Mutti, shrugging her shoulders. “We were outside, out in the park, when we heard the air-raid sirens, and then the bombers. We just ran.”
“Names, then,” said the sergeant, taking out his notebook. “I must have your names.”
Mutti gave our names, all of us, Peter’s last of all.
“And how old are you?” the sergeant asked Peter. I sensed suspicion in his look. I could hear it in his voice.
“Twenty-one,” Peter told him.
“So why are you not in uniform, in the army?”
Peter hesitated. It was Karli who spoke up for him. “He gets asthma like me,” he said. “When he gets out of breath, he gets asthma. Everyone at school says that when I grow up, I can’t be a soldier, and I want to be a—”
“That’s right,” Mutti interrupted. “My son has been excused military service, on medical grounds—asthma.”
I was not at all sure the sergeant believed what he was hearing. I felt certain that there would be more questions. But, amazingly, there were not.
When the sergeant saluted, I remember Karli gave him the Hitlergruss, the stiff-arm Hitler salute we had all been taught at school, and said, “Heil Hitler,” with great enthusiasm and conviction. He was playing his part perfectly. And then the soldiers were gone. I could feel my heart pounding in my neck as I listened to the last of their voices and their laughter drifting away outside. All they were chatting about as they left was the elephant in the barn, and the zoo in Dresden. One of them had been for a ride on an elephant in that zoo when he was little, he was saying. And then nothing more.
Mutti went to the window to make sure. “It is all right, they have gone,” she whispered.
She came over and sat down at the table with us, her face drained of all color. For several moments Peter and Mutti did not speak, but sat there just looking at one
another across the kitchen.
Mutti took a long breath and said, “You didn’t finish your soup, Peter. It will be getting cold. Eat, eat.” Then she fished in her pocket, took out the compass, and pushed it across the table towards him. “Yours, I think.”
“Thank you,” Peter said, as he took it. “And for what you did just then, thank you.”
“You and I, Peter, we must come to an understanding,” Mutti went on. “From now on, no more sorrys, and no more thank-yous. What is done is done. The past is behind us. You are family now, one of us. And I have been thinking. You were right when you told Elizabeth we should stick together and help one another. We do all want to go west, away from the Russians, away from the bombing. So we shall go together, and across country, as you said. It will be safer for all of us. Can that compass thing really guide us to the Americans?”
Peter smiled. “Yes, all the way, if we can keep going, if we get lucky. But I have been thinking too, and I am not so sure now that it is such a good idea to stick together. I was not thinking straight when I said it. If they discover who I am…I mean, we got away with it once, we may not be so lucky next time. They will shoot you if they ever find out who I am. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Who is going to tell them?” Mutti replied. “I’m not going to tell them, am I? Nor will Elizabeth, nor will Karli. Like I said, we are family. You speak good German, and you even look quite German in Uncle Manfred’s clothes. We fooled them once, with a little help from Karli, didn’t we? We can fool them again.”
“Maybe you are right. I hope so. But—and I did not want to have to say this—I think there is another problem. The elephant, your Marlene.” I could see Peter was reluctant to go on. “Listen, if we take her with us, we are bound to attract attention to ourselves. It will be more dangerous. I think we should leave her here. There is plenty of hay in the barn, we could fill up buckets of water…”
“Where we go Marlene goes,” Mutti said firmly. “She is part of the family too. What does it say in that book—The Three Musketeers, wasn’t it?—‘All for one and one for all.’”
I remember Mutti made us all join hands ’round the table then, for another family moment, as we had so often done back home. Even Karli knew better than to interrupt this family ritual. Maybe he was praying as hard as I was. I was praying for Papi to come home, for us all to find the Americans, for us all to survive—and for Peter to go on holding my hand as tight as he was, and never let go. But in the end it was Karli, of course, who eventually decided this family moment had gone on quite long enough, and broke the silence.
“When are we going?” he asked. “How far is it? I want to ride up on Marlene all the way. I can, can’t I, Mutti? How long will it take until we get there?”
We spent all the rest of that day poring over Peter’s map, making plans, working out how far we could hope to travel each night. Peter thought we could do about eight to ten kilometers a night, depending on the weather, and if we kept up that pace, and the Americans kept advancing at their present rate. Then he calculated we had a good chance of meeting up with them in four or five weeks or so. We packed up all the food we could find, all we could carry, and put on all the warm clothes we needed. We all had full rucksacks, and a rolled-up blanket strapped on top of each of them. We had a last meal, the rest of the potato soup, and some cheese, left a note, which we all signed, to Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, thanking them, and telling them where we were going.
Then we stepped out into the moonlit farmyard to fetch Marlene from the barn, the snow crisp and crunching under our feet. Marlene had to be enticed away from her hay—and that was not easy—but Karli managed it with a few tempting potatoes. Then once outside the barn, Peter hoisted Karli up onto her back, and we set off into the night, westwards, Mutti leading Marlene by the ear, Karli clicking at Marlene all the while, telling her to gee up. Peter and I walked on ahead together, Peter with compass in hand. We were on our way.
Part Four
Ring of Bells
One
Lizzie paused for a few moments then, and raised her hand. “Listen,” she said, gazing out of the window. “Bells, do you hear them?” I hadn’t, not until that moment. “I love the sound of church bells ringing,” she went on. “Every time I hear a ring of bells, it makes me think the same thing, that there is hope, that life goes on. Did you know that in Dresden every year on the anniversary of the day the bombers came, they ring all the church bells in the city? I have been back a few times now. It is not the old city, of course, but it is wonderful to see how they have built it up again, out of the ashes; and when the bells ring out over the new city, they are a lot louder than this one, I promise you. But this one is beautiful. This is a gentle bell.”
She turned to us then. “I am sorry my story has taken so long. It is getting dark outside already. I do go on, I know. Maybe you were right after all, maybe I should tell you the rest another day. It is good of you to have listened this long.”
“Listening, it’s what friends are for, remember?” I said.
“Did you escape?” Karl asked. “Did Peter get caught? What happened? I want to know what happened.”
“You see?” I said, with a smile. “We’re not going anywhere till you tell us the rest of the story. We’re staying right where we are, aren’t we, Karl?”
Lizzie patted my hand. “You are both very kind,” she said. “I will not keep you long now, I promise.” She stroked the glass face of the compass with the tips of her fingers, contemplated it for a while, and then went on with her story.
Without this compass, and without Peter, I think we would never have made it. He was so right to keep us away from the roads. We were to learn that it was not the cold and the hunger that were the greatest threat to us, it was people, people who might be suspicious of us, who would ask questions, who would report us. Out in the countryside there were not many people. And if we had joined the thousands of people cramming the roads there would have been even greater dangers to face—the planes, the fighters. They told us all about it, some of the refugees we came across later, how the planes would come flying in low over the roads, bombing and strafing.
So many died that way, soldiers and refugees, side by side.
Peter and his compass kept us away from all that.
But I am sure it was also because we traveled always by night that we survived. I remember, Mutti was forever worrying that we were moving too slowly, that the Russians were closing in behind us. It was true that we could often hear the distant rumble of their guns. We saw them lighting up the night sky all along the eastern horizon, and they did seem to be coming much closer all the time. After trekking through the night, Mutti must have been as exhausted as we all were, but she was reluctant to stop each morning. She always felt we could keep going a little while longer.
Thankfully, by the first glimmer of every dawn Peter had usually managed to find somewhere for us to hide up for the day, somewhere we could at least be dry and warm, and even light a fire if we were lucky. It might be some remote barn or shepherd’s hut or forester’s shack—it didn’t matter. All the time we stayed away from any towns and villages, and kept as far as possible to the valleys and woods where we would be less likely to be seen. We soon discovered we were not the only ones tramping through the countryside on that long trek westwards, nor the only ones who had chosen to avoid the dangers of the roads.
So there were days, like it or not, when we would find ourselves having to share a barn or shed with other refugees, mostly families like us. But once or twice there were soldiers with us too, whole units of them. Those meetings were awkward at first. No one trusted anyone in those days, you see. You never could, not to begin with. It was having Marlene with us that helped break the ice, helped dispel suspicion. They would only have to see Marlene, and Mutti would only have to tell our story about the zoo, and how we had looked after Marlene at home in the garden, and soon they would be telling their own stories, of how they had escaped the bombing an
d the firestorm. All of us knew we were lucky to be alive. Strange to say, considering what we were all living through, there was often more laughter than tears, though I do remember there were many refugees who just sat there staring into nothing, rocking back and forth, and murmuring in their misery.
If there were other children there, then Karli loved it all the more. Not only did he have an audience for his juggling and all his party tricks, but he had Marlene to show off with as well. Somehow he had taught Marlene to kneel down and to lift her trunk at his command, and the children loved this. In front of them he always claimed absolute ownership of Marlene. He referred to her as “my elephant” or “my Marlene.” He just loved playacting, and he was good at it too.
He had slipped easily into the part of being a younger brother to Peter—mostly, I think, because he genuinely liked having an older brother of his own, a proper pal. He would tell everyone proudly that he was the only one who could handle the elephant, that his older brother could not manage her at all, and certainly not his sister. He played the clown wonderfully, and people laughed. I found that once we had laughed together for a while, we all began to feel there was a kind of refugee solidarity among us, a camaraderie, sometimes so much so that we did not just swap stories, but food and drink as well.
But on Mutti’s advice, Peter kept himself to himself, and did not talk too much when there were other people about, and that was just as well. The more we got to know him, the more we noticed that he did have a noticeable accent. Canadian or Swiss, it did not matter. All that mattered was that he spoke differently enough for other people to notice it, and if we noticed it, then they might too.
Time and again people would ask Mutti why her son was not in uniform like all the other young men. Mutti stuck always to the asthma story Karli had first made up in front of the policeman that day. It was a good cover story because, of course, she knew all the symptoms rather well. We all did, except for Peter himself that is, but at Mutti’s suggestion, Karli had made sure that Peter knew exactly what it felt like to suffer from asthma. He even taught Peter how to cough and wheeze the right way. Nonetheless, it still made me very nervous every time the subject came up. I was fearful too because, after living through the horror of the bombing of Dresden, everyone we came across was full of anger and bitterness against the Americans and the British. Until now, much of this hatred had been reserved more for the Russians. Not now, not anymore. So Peter, if he was to be discovered, would be in real danger. And so would we.