Times of War Collection

  “What?” I asked.

  But she would not say any more.

  On the way to school with Karli that day, I heard the sudden throbbing drone of planes overhead. I felt a warm shiver of fear crawling up my back. Then Karli was leaping up and down, and waving wildly.

  “They’re ours!” he cried. “They’re ours!” And they were too. This time.”

  T SEEMED TO ME, AS I WAS LISTENING TO LIZZIE, that she was living every moment of the story again in her head, even as she was telling it. But the effort had been too much, and had clearly left her feeling exhausted. She laid her head back on her pillow, and was silent for a while.

  “Maybe that’s enough for now, Lizzie,” I told her, getting up to go, and encouraging Karl to do the same. “You can tell us the rest another time, tomorrow maybe. Come along, Karl.” I could see Karl was not at all pleased with me. He didn’t argue as such, but darted me one of his darkest looks.

  “Stay,” she whispered, holding out her hand. “Please let him stay. You want to know what Mutti’s secret was, don’t you, Karli? And now is the right moment to tell you. It is better today because tomorrow will be too late. Tomorrow it will not be the thirteenth of February any more. That is why I must tell you what happened now. It is the anniversary, you see. There is a time for these things. And besides,” she went on, looking at me a little mischievously, and meaningfully too, “besides, as you know, for someone my age, tomorrow may never come. Sooner or later we all run out of tomorrows. This is true, I think. No?”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said, knowing full well I was beaten. “You’ve got plenty of tomorrows left. Now, are you quite sure you’re not too tired?”

  “I will be tired when my story is finished, dear, and not before,” she replied.

  “All right then,” I told her. “We’ll stay, but only if you drink some more water for me. Is it a deal?” I was only half joking, and she knew it.

  “Your mother, Karli,” Lizzie said, with a smile, “she is a most excellent nurse, and I am sure she is an excellent mother too, but she can be rather bossy sometimes. Am I right?”

  “Yep,” Karl replied, nodding vigorously, and grinning triumphantly all over his face.

  “It is a deal,” Lizzie said. And she drank a few more delicate sips, before dabbing her lips with her sheet, and settling back on to her pillows.

  “It is strange,” she began…

  “We were so preoccupied, I think, by the ordinary things in life, that after a while I did not give much thought to Mutti’s mysterious idea. I did ask her about it once or twice, and she said she was ‘working on it’. I certainly did not forget her warnings about the bombers that might soon be coming, nor about the armies closing in on us from all sides. How could I? I just tried my very hardest not to think about it.

  Looking back, it is hard to believe now, that I was not terrified all the time. But I was not. Life went on as normal. Karli and I went to school, as normal – when there was enough coal to heat the place, that is. There was homework to do, and tests. People walked and talked in the streets, as usual. The trams rattled by, as usual. I could not forget the war – of course not, none of us could – but I suppose we all just had to put it to the back of our minds, and get on with living each day, getting through as best we could. Maybe that was the only way of keeping our hopes alive, by looking beyond all we were seeing around us, and the shadow of disaster that hung over us. I hoped so hard that Mutti was right, prayed every night that all would be well, that in a few days the war would be over, that the bombers would not come, that I would look down the street one morning and see Papi come walking home, and I would run to him and he would hold me in his arms again. And when the spring came, we would all go to see Uncle Manfred and Auntie Lotti down on the farm, and we would be friends as we were before, and Karli and I would sleep in the tree house and watch the moon riding through the clouds, and everything would be just as I remembered it, just as it should be.

  The snow came, as it has today, and of course little Karli loved that. He was the only one at school who could juggle snowballs! We went sledging in the park, built a snowman in the garden, threw snowballs at one another on the way to and from school. And the whole city seemed to be sleeping silently under its blanket of snow. The pipes froze. We froze. It was the coldest winter I had ever known. Very soon the snow was not so much fun any more. It just made life more wretched for everyone, particularly for the refugees in the streets. Every day now I would see them in their hundreds, outside the soup kitchens, lining up in the snow, or huddled together against the cold in doorways, the children crying. And the war dragged on, miserably, interminably.

  My sixteenth birthday was on the ninth of February nineteen forty-five, a day I shall never forget, and not because I had lots of presents, or lots of friends to the house for a party. There was no money for that, and besides, no one was in the mood to celebrate anything. Mutti and Karli had made me a birthday card, and gave it to me at breakfast. I remember it was a kind of collage, full of cut-out pictures of circus life, with clowns and acrobats and jugglers and horses, and elephants, of course, lots of elephants. I put it up on the mantelpiece behind Papi’s photograph before we went off to school that morning.

  When we got home in the evening, Mutti was not there. This did not surprise us. We had got used to her being late home these days. But on this particular evening she was even later than usual. I was beginning to get a little worried, when I heard the garden gate squeaking open. Then Mutti was calling to us from the garden. She was coming in through the back way. I thought it was a bit strange, but did not think anything more about it. I was just relieved she was home. She came in the back door, stamping the snow off her boots. She was carrying a sack over her shoulder.

  “Potatoes,” she said, dumping the sack on the floor, and sitting herself down heavily at the kitchen table. She was breathless and glowing from the cold, and happy too, as happy as I had seen her in a long time. “I shall make a potato soup for your birthday, Elizabeth, with a little ham – I have a little ham left. I shall make you the best potato soup a mother ever made for a daughter. And…and, I have a present for you, a surprise.”

  “A surprise ?” I said.

  “Of course,” she laughed. “You can hardly have a birthday without a surprise, can you? And I promise you it’ll be the biggest surprise you ever had too! It is outside in the garden. I think it is maybe a little bit too big to bring inside.”

  Karli got to the window before I did, which irritated me, because to my mind this was my birthday – my surprise, not his. I pushed him out of the way. I could see it was still snowing outside, but at first I could see very little else. By now Karli had rushed to the back door and opened it. “There is an elephant in the garden, Mutti!” he cried. “Why is there an elephant in our garden?”

  Then I saw her too, a huge shadow that moved and became an elephant, as it came towards me into the light from the window. Mutti had her arms around me and was kissing the top of my head.

  “My secret, remember?” she whispered. “Happy birthday, Elizabeth.”

  “It is Marlene!” cried Karli, leaping up and down in delight.

  “Is that really her?” I said. I was still not sure whether my eyes were deceiving me or not.

  “It took a while to persuade the Herr Direktor, but in the end I managed it,” Mutti told me. “I told him the truth, that if anything happened to her, it would break Karli’s heart. And I also convinced him that Marlene needed me night and day now, that without her mother she might well just pine away and die of sadness. I had to be there with her all the time. And that is true, quite true. I’m sure of it. Even better, I got him to promise me that Marlene will be spared if the other animals have to be shot, if the bombers come. She might be big, I told him, but she is still only young, gentle as a kitten and no danger to anyone. He was not at all easy to persuade, but as you know, I can be very insistent. From now on, Marlene will be coming home with me from the zoo every evening, and
I shall take her back to the zoo in the morning. We shall not let her out of our sight. She lives with us, like one of the family. So, for your birthday, Elizabeth, you have a new little sister. Well, a big sister, I suppose.”

  “And she is my sister too!” cried Karli, beside himself with excitement. I remember the exact words he used then. “Wunderbar! Ausgezeichnet!” Wonderful! Excellent!

  I had no words. I think I was still too amazed to think of any.

  “Tonight,” Mutti went on, “we will all have potatoes. Marlene loves to eat potatoes. She loves to be hand-fed, doesn’t she, Karli? Remember? And now we can all do that, can’t we? She eats a lot of potatoes, but the good thing is that she doesn’t seem to mind eating the half-bad potatoes, the ones people won’t eat.”

  As we ate our steaming potato soup that night, Marlene eyed us through the window, the end of her trunk exploring the glass. Afterwards, we went outside in the snow, and Karli reached up, took her by the trunk and led her into the woodshed, which was half empty, so there was plenty of room for her to shelter inside from the snow. He stood beside her stroking her ear and feeding her potatoes as if he’d been doing it all his life, talking to her all the while. And Marlene talked back too, in her own way. No, she did, she really did, groaning and grunting and rumbling – she had a whole language of her own!

  I held the lamp for Mutti as she shook out some straw around Marlene’s feet. But I did keep my distance from Marlene. Maybe it was because she was just so huge to be near to – she seemed much bigger somehow in our woodshed than she had back in the zoo. But I think I was nervous also because she had a way of looking at me that I found quite uncomfortable, at first. She was not looking at me, so much as right into me. So I knew she must be able to see the lingering jealousy I was still feeling about her and Karli. But then I began to understand that she wasn’t judging me. No one had ever gazed into my eyes quite like this before. I can only describe it as a look full of curiosity, kindness and love. Any lingering resentment I might have still been harbouring against Marlene vanished during that first night in the woodshed.

  When we heard the wolves howling from the zoo in the distance, and she began to look unsettled and anxious, I reached out and stroked her trunk, to comfort her, and to show her that whatever she felt about me, I felt the same. I remember Karli looking up at me in the shed, and saying, “Now I have two sisters, one with a long nose and one with a shorter one – well, only a little shorter!”

  I will not tell you what I said to him, but it was not polite!

  Neither Karli nor I slept much that night at all. We knelt side by side by the window looking out at the woodshed. All we could see of Marlene was the dark bulk of her inside the shed. And then, just occasionally, her trunk would reach out into the snowy night.

  “She is catching snowflakes, isn’t she?” Karli said.

  We were the kind of family who generally kept ourselves to ourselves. We liked it that way, and as Papi had often said, in those times it was safer that way too – always best not to draw attention to ourselves. So until now, our neighbours down the street had taken very little notice of us. But the next morning, all that changed. There was a startled face at almost every window in the street as we walked out of the back gate and into the park, Mutti leading the elephant by the trunk on their way to the zoo, and Karli and I, satchels on our backs, tramping along behind them through the snow, taking the short cut to school. Some of our schoolfriends who saw us, now joined us in the park, dozens of them, until there was a whole cavalcade following along behind, all of them full of questions, and high with excitement.

  When we came to the parting of the ways, we all stood and watched Mutti and Marlene walking away through the trees in the direction of the zoo, before running off down the hill to the school. That day at school no one talked about the Red Army or about the war. We all of us had something else to talk about. Marlene, we soon discovered, had made Karli and me famous overnight. I remember how important it made me feel to be surrounded by a crowd of admirers. It wasn’t a feeling I had experienced that much before, and I liked it. And I could see, in playtime, that Karli was also enjoying the limelight just as much as I was. What with his juggling, and all his other fancy tricks, he was more used to being the centre of attention than I was. No one called him ‘Pegleg’ any more, I noticed. He was ‘Elephant Boy’ now, and that was fine by him. That evening we threw snowballs at one another, and larked about and laughed all the way home.

  RATHER WORRIED-LOOKING POLICEMAN DID COME to the house later that same evening to question Mutti about the elephant we were keeping in our garden. But Mutti was expecting just such a visit from the authorities, and had thought of everything. She read him out a letter from the Herr Direktor of the zoo, giving his permission, and declaring that the elephant was a young one, only four years old, recently orphaned and so needed special care and attention, that she was an unusually calm elephant, and quite safe to be left under the supervision of Mutti overnight; that he had inspected the garden himself, and there was no danger whatsoever to the public. The policeman wanted to read the letter himself, and even then he still wanted to check that the garden where Marlene was being kept was secure. So we took him out there to show him, Karli leading the way.

  Marlene was sheltering in her shed. The policeman didn’t want to get too close, I could see that. He walked across the garden and rattled the gate to satisfy himself that it was safely shut. But he said we should chain it up, just to be sure. When he turned around he found Marlene was right there in front of him. She had come to introduce herself. She did this by reaching out her trunk to touch his face. He looked very alarmed at this, but when a few moments later Marlene’s trunk happened to knock off his cap, and we all laughed, he had to laugh too.

  After that, he went away happy, leaving us happy too, and relieved that Marlene was now officially allowed to stay. And Karli, in particular, could not stop giggling about the policeman’s hat being knocked off. Later, it became one of those family stories we all went on telling, but Karli told it best – mimicking the shock on the policeman’s face wonderfully well.

  After that first day, with Mutti bringing Marlene home every evening, everyone wanted to come and have a look at the orphan elephant in the garden. And all our friends suddenly wanted to come to see us – some of them were friends that until then we never knew we even had. Inquisitive faces were for ever peering through the bars of the garden gate. Marlene loved all this adoration, and Karli did too – he was always out there in the garden with her, making quite sure everyone knew that Marlene was his own personal elephant. Marlene loved it when people offered her titbits. She’d take anything: stale breadcrusts, cabbage leaves, even an apple or a bun sometimes, but I think she was always hoping for potatoes – as Mutti said, they were her real passion. So whenever anyone appeared at the gate, Marlene would always wander over with Karli and accept their offerings only too willingly.

  There was a problem with all this, quite a big problem actually – apart from the fact that we seemed to be open house now to the whole neighbourhood – and that was that very soon huge piles of elephant dung began to appear in the snow all over the garden, like giant molehills they were.

  “Wonderful for the vegetable garden,” Mutti said. We carted it away in barrowloads to a pile in the corner of the garden. Karli seemed to love doing this – anything to do with Marlene, he loved – but I hated it. You cannot imagine how much there was of it, nor how smelly it was. It was hard, I discovered, to push a wheelbarrow and hold your nose at the same time!

  It was a few days before I plucked up enough courage to go out into the garden to see Marlene on my own. She came out to meet me from her woodshed, wandering slowly towards me, snuffling at the snow with her trunk as she came. She rumbled at me contentedly from somewhere deep and echoing inside her, and then explored my hair and face with the tip of her trunk – her way of saying hello. When I reached up to stroke her ear, I think she hoped I had brought her a potato. I would
have done so too, if I had thought of it. But she did not seem too disappointed. We let our eyes do most of the talking, I remember. We stood there with the snow coming down around us, each of us knowing, I was sure of it, that we were making a friend for life. I did sense in her eyes the depth of the grief she was still suffering after the loss of her mother. And without my ever saying anything, I knew she understood all my own fears, about Papi, about the bombers that might come any day now, about the war.

  Marlene was always so accepting and so patient. I never once saw her irritated or angry, until the day the dog came that is. It was a big dog, a loud dog – an Alsatian, I think, but I can’t be sure. This dog would appear suddenly at the garden gate, and bark at her, his whole body shaking with fury. He kept coming back again and again, and every time Marlene would run at him across the garden, trumpeting, tossing her ears, flapping them, but that only infuriated the dog even more. We all tried to drive him off, rattling a stick at him through the bars of the gate, and shouting at him to go away – Karli hurled some dung at him once – but none of it was any use. Sooner or later that wretched dog always came back.

  Then one evening the dog’s owner was there with him at the gate, the dog barking his head off as usual. We could hear that Marlene was becoming frantic again, and Karli was out there, shouting at him to clear off. So Mutti went running out into the garden, and I followed her. She told the man that enough was enough, that his dog was out of control and frightening the elephant. They had a heated row through the bars of the gate, and the man went away swearing and shaking his fist, shouting at us that the park was a public place, that his dog had every right to bark, and that elephants belonged in zoos anyway.