MARTIN’S CHRISTMAS WISH
It was nearly eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. The official weather forecast was for heavy snowfalls all over Central Europe. And now the sky was proving that the official weather forecast was very well informed, because it was indeed snowing in the whole of Central Europe.
Which meant that it was snowing in Hermsdorf. Mr. Hermann Thaler was standing at the living room window. The room was dark, because artificial light costs money, and the Thalers had to scrimp and save.
“I haven’t seen such heavy snow as this for years,” he said.
Mrs. Thaler was sitting on the sofa. She just nodded, and her husband wasn’t expecting any answer. He was talking only to keep it from being too quiet in their apartment.
“The Neumanns are already giving their presents,” he said. “Oh, and the Mildes are just lighting the candles! They have a lovely big tree. Ah, well, he’s earning better again now.”
Mr. Thaler looked down the street. The number of windows showing bright light grew by the minute, and the snowflakes whirled through the air like butterflies.
Mrs. Thaler moved. The old, soft sofa creaked. “I wonder what he’s doing now?” she said. “In that huge school building. It must feel strange when it’s so empty.”
Her husband secretly sighed. “You’re making things too hard for yourself,” he said. “First, Jonathan Trotz is there. He seems to like Jonathan. And then there’s that aristocratic little boy who broke his leg, the one with von in his surname. I’m sure they’re both sitting by his bedside, having a wonderful time.”
“You don’t believe that yourself,” said his wife. “You know as well as I do that our son isn’t having a wonderful time at this moment. He’s probably crept away into a corner somewhere to cry his eyes out.”
“I’m sure he hasn’t,” Mr. Thaler replied. “He promised not to cry, and a boy like that keeps his promises.” Mr. Thaler wasn’t quite so sure of it as he made out. But what else was he to say?
“Promised! Promised!” said Martin’s mother. “I promised him not to cry myself, but all the same I was crying even while I wrote to him.”
Mr. Thaler turned his back to the window. The bright lights on their neighbors’ Christmas trees were getting on his nerves. He looked at the darkness in their own living room and said, “Come along, let’s have some light.”
His wife rose and lit the lamp. Her eyes were red-rimmed with crying.
A very, very small fir tree stood on the round table. Mrs. Riedel, a widow who sold Christmas trees in the marketplace at this time of year, had given it to them. “For your boy Martin,” she had said. So now the Thalers had a Christmas tree—but their boy, Martin, wasn’t at home.
Mr. Thaler went into the kitchen, searched around for a long time, and finally came back with a little box. “Here are last year’s candles,” he said. “We burned them only halfway down.” Then he wedged twelve halves of Christmas tree candles among the branches of the little fir. It looked really pretty at last, but that made Martin’s parents only sadder than ever.
They sat side by side on the sofa, and Mrs. Thaler read Martin’s letter aloud for the fifth time. She stopped at certain places and passed her hand over her eyes. When she had finished reading the letter, her husband took out his handkerchief and blew his nose hard. “To think that fate lets such things happen,” he said. “A little fellow like our Martin has to find out how bad life is when you don’t have any money. I hope he doesn’t bear his parents a grudge for being so incompetent and poor.”
“Don’t talk such nonsense!” said his wife. “How can you think such a thing? Martin may still be a child, but he knows very well that being competent and being rich are very different things.”
Then she fetched the picture of the blue coach drawn by six horses from her sewing table, and carefully put it under the little Christmas tree.
“I don’t know anything about art,” said Martin’s father, “but I really like that picture. Maybe Martin will be a famous painter some day! Then we really could travel to Italy with him. Or would Spain be better?”
“Just so long as he stays healthy,” said Martin’s mother.
“And look at the moustache he’s painted underneath his nose!”
Martin’s parents exchanged melancholy smiles.
“I’m glad he didn’t paint us in some showy motor car,” said his mother. “The blue coach drawn by six horses is much more poetic.”
“And look at those oranges!” said his father. “Oranges are never really that size. They must weigh at least four pounds each!”
“See how cleverly he cracks his whip, too,” said Martin’s mother. Then they fell silent again, still looking at the picture called In Ten Years’ Time, and thinking of the little painter.
Martin’s father coughed. “In ten years’ time! Well, a lot can happen by then.” He took some matches out of his pocket, lit the twelve candles, and put out the lamp. There was still a Christmassy glow in the Thalers’ living room.
“You’re a good, faithful woman,” said Martin’s father to his wife. “We can’t afford presents for ourselves this Christmas, but we can give each other plenty of good wishes.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Happy Christmas!”
“Happy Christmas!” she, too, said. Then she burst into tears, and it sounded as if she would never be able to stop crying again.
Who knows how long they would have sat on the soft old sofa like that? The candles were burning down and down. Someone was singing “Silent night, holy night” in the next-door apartment. And snowflakes were still whirling through the air outside the window.
Suddenly the doorbell rang!
Neither of them moved. They didn’t want their unhappiness to be disturbed.
But then it rang again, loudly and impatiently.
Mrs. Thaler stood up and went slowly into the corridor. People wouldn’t leave you in peace even on Christmas Eve!
She opened the front door, and stood there for a few seconds as if frozen rigid. Then she cried, “Martin!” The name echoed through the stairway outside.
Martin? What did she mean? Martin’s father started with surprise. He went out into the corridor, and couldn’t believe his eyes!
His wife had dropped to her knees in the doorway and was hugging Martin, with both her arms around him.
Then even Mr. Thaler’s eyes risked shedding a tear each. He secretly wiped the two tears away, picked up the case lying forgotten on the floor and said, “My boy, for heaven’s sake, how did you get here?”
It was quite a long time before they all found their way back into the living room. Martin and his mother were laughing and crying both at once, and his father stammered at least ten times, “Well, what a surprise!” Then he hurried back to the front door, because in all the excitement of course they had forgotten to close it.
The first thing Martin managed to say was, “And I have the money for the return fare, too.”
At last the three of them had calmed down enough for Martin to tell his parents how he came to be here instead of in Kirchberg. “I really did pull myself together,” he told them, “and I didn’t cry. At least, I did cry, but by then it was too late anyway. Dr. Bökh, our housemaster, noticed that something was wrong all the same. And then he gave me twenty marks. Down in the grounds, near the bowling alley. It was a present, and I’m to wish you a happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas to you, too, Dr. Bökh!” said Martin’s parents in chorus.
“And I was even able to buy some presents,” said Martin proudly. Then he gave his father the cigars with the band around them and the leaf of Havana tobacco on top. And he handed his mother the knitted slippers. They were very, very pleased. “And did you like our presents?” his mother asked.
“I haven’t looked at them yet,” Martin admitted. So now he opened the parcel that they had sent to Kirchberg for him. He found some splendid things in it: a new nightshirt that his mother had made him herself; two pairs of woolen socks; a packet of gingerbread with chocolate icing; an exciting book about the South Seas; a drawing block and, nicest of all, a box of the best colored pencils.
Martin was delighted, and kissed both his parents.
All things considered, it was the best imaginable Christmas Eve. The candles on the tiny Christmas tree soon burned down, but then they lit the lamp. Martin’s mother made coffee. His father smoked one of the Christmas cigars. Then they ate the gingerbread, and they felt happier than all the billionaires in the world put together, living and dead. Martin’s mother had to try on her new slippers, and she said she had never in her life had such a wonderful pair of slippers before.
Later, Martin took a plain postcard that he had bought at the station out of his pocket, and began drawing on it. With his new colored pencils, of course.
His parents looked at each other, smiling, and then they looked at him. He drew a young man with two large angels’ wings growing out of the back of his jacket. This strange man was flying down from the clouds. And below him, on the ground, stood a little boy with huge tears falling from his eyes. The man with the wings had a thick wallet in his hands and was holding it out to the boy.
Martin leaned back, narrowed his eyes in an expert way, thought for a while, and then drew some more things on the postcard: mainly a great many snowflakes, and in the background a railway train with a decorated Christmas tree growing out of the engine of the locomotive. The stationmaster was standing beside the train, raising his arm in the signal for the train to leave. Under the picture, Martin wrote in capital letters, “A Christmas Angel Called Dr. Bökh.”
His parents wrote a few lines on the back of the postcard.
“Dear Dr. Bökh,” wrote Mrs. Thaler. “Our son is quite right to call you an angel. I can’t draw, I can only thank you in words. Many, many thanks for the live Christmas present you have given us. You are a good man, and you deserve for all your students to grow up to be good men! With best wishes from your ever-grateful Margarete Thaler.”
Martin’s father growled, “You haven’t left any room for me.” And sure enough, he couldn’t fit in much more than his name. Finally Martin wrote the address.
Then they put on their coats and went to the station together, to post the card in the overnight postbox, so that Justus would get it first thing in the morning on Christmas Day. Then they walked home again, with the boy between them, arm in arm with both his parents.
It was a wonderful walk. The sky was glittering like a never-ending jeweler’s shop. It had stopped snowing, and Christmas tree lights were shining in the windows of all the buildings.
Martin stopped, and pointed to the sky. “The starlight that we see now,” he said, ‘is many, many thousands of years old. It takes the rays of light all that time to reach our eyes. Maybe most of these stars died out even before the birth of Christ. But their light is still traveling. So for us they still shine, although in reality they have been cold and dead for ages.”
“Goodness me,” said his father. His mother was astonished too. They walked on with the snow squeaking under the soles of their feet. Martin held his mother’s arm and his father’s arm close. He was happy.
When they were standing outside their apartment building, and his father unlocked its front door, Martin looked up at the sky once more. And at that very moment a shooting star came away from the darkness of the night, gliding silently across the sky and down to the horizon.
You can make a wish if you see a shooting star, thought the boy. And as he followed the flight of the shooting star with his eyes, he thought: then I wish my mother and father, Justus and No-Smoking, Johnny and Matz and Uli and Sebastian, too, lots and lots of happiness in their lives. And I wish the same for myself.
That was rather a long wish, but all the same he had good reason to hope that it would come true. Because all the time the shooting star was falling, Martin hadn’t said a word.
And as everyone knows, that’s what matters when you wish on a shooting star.
1933