Blanchette felt a wish to return, but remembering the stake, the rope, the hedge of the field, she thought that she never could endure that life again and ’twas better to remain where she was.
The horn ceased to sound.
The goat heard behind her the rustling of leaves. She turned and saw in the shadow two short ears, erect, and two eyes shining. It was the wolf.
M. Seguin’s Goat by Alphonse Daudet
Miss Schwartz had been in a concentration camp in Poland during the war. That’s what Virginia Craddock told them, and she knew because her mother was chairman of the PTA. 4P knew a bit about concentration camps. That was where that girl in Holland, Anne Frank, had gone after she had lived in the cupboard. 4P regarded Miss Schwartz with brief interest after Virginia told them about the camp, envisaging life in a cupboard, a breathless waiting day after day, like an endless game of sardines, only this time played for real, its conclusion the thump of jackboots on the stairs, the smash of a gun butt at the door. It made them shudder, but not for long. Nor did it make them kinder. They chattered, they played hangman in her classes without bothering to conceal the paper. They drew the gibbet quite openly, timber by timber, then the rope, then the circle of the little man’s head, then the thin lines that were his body, arms and legs.
‘Try E,’ said Caro, and Kate added another arm. Caro would never guess ‘rhythm’, not in a million years.
Around them, 4P were plodding, one finger in the dictionary, through a tedious old story written by some tedious old man who had lived in a moulin, about Blanchette, the little goat. The warm air, the thyme-scented hills lay concealed behind a thicket of words as impenetrable as dry scrub. Miss Schwartz stood before them, her grey hair wild, her grey suit the exact same day after day, her hands making a curious continuous plucking motion at the folds of the gown that encircled her bony body.
There was a sudden commotion at the door. A deafening banging. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK! 4P were startled, but only for a second. They knew it was just Angela Avery coming back from the toilet. It was a joke: they took it in turns to ask to be excused. One afternoon last week they had managed fourteen exits within a single period. That was today’s challenge: fifteen or better.
‘Mais non!’ said Miss Schwartz, but the girl was desperate, she needed to go, right now, so she shrugged and let her leave. Angela was the fifth so far that morning. The rule was to stay out no longer than three minutes, which, allowing for a two-minute interval between requests, made fifteen a viable objective. 4P had seen Angela’s head pass the window on the return circuit.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK! went her fist at the door. It was a joke. It was not necessary to knock. The oak shook, the latch rattled. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
4P looked up with interest.
Miss Schwartz had frozen where she stood, then in one swift move she dragged her gown about her, over her head, and ducked down behind the desk. 4P went very still, Blanchette abandoned on her hillside, awaiting the wolf. The door opened cautiously. Angela looked around, pink and demure, then tiptoed with elaborate caution to her desk. Miss Schwartz emerged from hiding.
She stood before them, plucking at the fabric of her gown with skinny fingers. The room waited.
‘You do not know …’ she said, and suddenly she had gained inches in height; she possessed the full dignity of fury. ‘You do not know …’ She looked at the girls, plump in their grey serge with warm homes to return to, with a dance on Friday night to look forward to.
‘Pah!’ she said, as if they were not to be taken seriously, as if they were silly little girls lacking any real understanding. Her mouth worked as if there many words, a million words, piled behind trying for a way out but ‘Pah’ was all she could manage. ‘Pah!’ And she shrugged and left the room. 4P sat in silence.
‘Well,’ said Angela. ‘That got Shorty going, didn’t it?’
‘Shut up,’ said Caro. ‘Just shut up!’
And they set to translation, unsupervised. In silence they translated the whole story, right to the end, where Blanchette fights all night with the wolf, hoping only to hold out until dawn. All night she fights bravely, gallant and alone, but when the stars have faded she lies down upon the ground, and permits the wolf to win at last and eat her up.
I was sent to Turkey and then to the Iraqi front … a deeply impressive event for a boy not yet sixteen years old.
I remember every detail of my first encounter with the enemy.
We were still being trained in our duties when the British — New Zealanders and Indians — launched an attack. Our little troop of Germans lay isolated in the vast expanse of desert, amongst the stones and the ruins of once flourishing civilisations … One after another my comrades fell wounded and had I been alone I would certainly have run away … Then suddenly, in my desperation, I noticed our captain who was lying behind a rock with icy calm, as though on a practice range, and returning the enemy’s fire. It dawned on me too that I must start shooting. I let fly and, trembling, saw an Indian plunge forward, fall and move no more … My first dead man!
The spell was broken.
Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess
Kate did know, in fact, and not just from Anne Frank. She had found a book on the shelf behind the sofa at home. Commandant of Auschwitz. It was her turn on dishes and the table remained uncleared, but down here, behind the sofa, she was out of sight. Her mother was away. She had gone for longer this time. There had been a row about money, about her running around town running up debts for a lot of rubbish nobody either wanted or needed. (Kate’s father meant From the Spey to the Kilmog, Volume One, The Stuarts, her mother’s book about the family. She had taken it in to Mr Fujamori, the printer at the two-minute silence, and he had run off a hundred copies for her, all nicely bound in blue cloth. It cost over twenty pounds.)
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ said their father. ‘I can’t afford to pay for that kind of nonsense.’
So one afternoon she left. She took a job at a hospital in Dunedin, working as a cleaner because her training was all out of date, but it was better than nothing. She had rung once, told Kate she was fine, she was earning her own money and was everyone coping?
Kate looked around the sitting room. The cat sat on the washing, licking its paws and wiping behind its ears. Dad had brought home pies for tea and then gone out. Maura was listening to her Beatles record.
‘Yes,’ said Kate. They were coping just fine.
‘Good,’ said her mother from her rented room across the road from the hospital. ‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’
‘No,’ said Kate, because you had to cope and not tell anyone anything about your family. It was nobody else’s business.
Kate sat behind the sofa and took down the new book. It was the usual war book: men in uniforms, baggy and rumpled for the goodies, smart for the Germans, with polished boots and peaked caps. Just another book about the same war they saw sometimes at the Majestic on Saturday nights, with brave airmen flying though they had no legs, or smart Cockneys and posh officers escaping from prison camps by digging tunnels and outwitting the stupid vicious guards. She flicked the pages, looking at the usual pictures of soldiers and suddenly there was a heap of sticks.
She looked more closely.
They were not sticks.
They were arms and legs. And they belonged to a pile of unimaginably thin human beings. And on other pages were more people, herded into bunkrooms, skin shrunken to the skull, chests concave so that every rib was evident. There was barbed wire and grey trains crammed with people and chimneys belching the smoke of burning bodies, a world of such horror that she had to run to the bathroom, where she was sick. A sour sludge fell into the bowl. And then for some reason she had to crawl back behind the sofa and look at them again. She had to turn to the beginning to read it all.
It began gently. It was almost like Heidi. A little boy rode about the hills on his black pony, Hans. He was going to become a priest, but he became a soldier instead. He was promoted to run a camp in Poland called Auschwitz. Some of the soldiers there found machine-gunning people upsetting. They drank heavily afterwards and a few committed suicide. So Hoess came up with a solution that had been effective on rats. He tried the gas out on 900 Russian soldiers and found it efficient: much less traumatic for the executors, though there continued to be some difficulties, especially with Jewish mothers who became uncontrollable if their children were removed from them first.
She read until she could read no longer and had to escape, running out into the sweet twilight air of the garden and the Nelsons’ pigeons circling before settling for the night. That night and for nights after she read, not understanding it all, skipping some bits, while the dishes piled up in the sink and Maura and Paul sang in harmony that although she’d gone away, she loved him still (yeah yeah yeah!). Kate sat behind the sofa and encountered, for the first time, banal, unfathomable hate.