PARADE

We walked either side of my bike, with a handlebar each, lifting the front wheel off the ground. It was so buckled we had to take the weight and let it roll on just the back wheel.

‘She was going to tell us.’ I could hardly contain my frustration. We had been so close to knowing.

‘She was probably scared.’ Lisa was annoyed too; I could hear it in her voice. ‘But at least we know what flower it is.’

‘Except now I’ve got about a million other questions. Like what does it mean? And why did her son have a badge just like it on his jacket? It was almost exactly the same.’ I stopped. ‘And I didn’t like what she said about my brother not trusting me.’

‘She doesn’t know you,’ Lisa said. ‘And last time she saw you, you were all dressed up in your stupid uniform.’ She looked at me for a moment and frowned as she chewed the inside of her lip. ‘Anyway, no one trusts anyone – this whole place makes me want to scream sometimes.’ She shook her head. ‘Come on, Karl Friedmann, let’s go home.’

Lisa knew the way from here, so we headed towards the high street, and as we came closer, I heard the sound of drums in the distance.

‘Marching again.’ Lisa grumbled and her frown deepened. ‘As if today wasn’t bad enough already.’

The noise grew louder and louder as we neared the high street. We could hear trumpets, too, though they weren’t being played very well, and when we turned the final corner, we saw the boys from the Deutsches Jungvolk and the Hitler Youth parading, just like I used to at weekends in the city.

The boys were all in uniform – black trousers, black scarf and brown shirt. Their belt buckles glinted in the sun and their black boots were tromp-tromp-tromping on the road like the beat of an approaching army.

Men in hats and suits, and women in dresses lined the pavements to watch them. There were very young children, too, pushing through for a better look. Some people clapped and cheered, while others were not so excited, as if they were just keeping up appearances.

Most of them were strangers to me, but I recognised some of the faces of people who lived on Escherstrasse – Herr Ackerman, the butcher was there, and Frau Oster was wearing her best hat. She was holding on to her son with one hand and waving her flag with the other. There were a few people whose names I didn’t know but whose faces I had seen passing by the house or waiting in line at the shops. Several of the girls in the crowd waved to Lisa or said ‘hello’, but she ignored them and ploughed on.

‘Don’t stop,’ she muttered to me and put her head down, tightening her fists around the handlebars as the day’s frustration and anger grew in her.

There weren’t as many boys parading here as in my group in the city, but what they lacked in numbers, they tried to make up for in noise.

The first group of nine was marching three abreast, and each of them held a pole with a flag draped from it. Blood-red, with a white circle and a black swastika in the centre of it. There wasn’t much of a wind that day, so the flags just hung there like limp rags.

A second group of boys – another nine marching three abreast – was right behind the flag bearers, but each of these had a drum and was beating it furiously. Behind them, three boys were blowing into trumpets. Their faces were red with effort and their cheeks were puffed out as if they’d been stuffed with bread.

Behind the flag bearers and musicians, another fifty or sixty boys marched, black boots stomping hard on the road. They had been arranged so that the younger boys from the Deutsches Jungvolk were at the front and the older, Hitler Youth boys were at the back.

It was the older ones who started singing first.

‘Hang the Jews! Line the fat cats up against the wall!’

The younger ones started to join in, but they didn’t know the words so they just said the same thing over and over again.

‘Hang the Jews! Line the fat cats up against the wall!’

Not so long ago, marching like this had seemed like the best thing in the world, but now I felt a stab of shame that I had shouted such hateful things.

I glanced at Lisa, seeing that she was glowering at the boys and shaking her head.

‘Stupid parade,’ she said. ‘Stupid Nazis.’

‘Shh.’

As the flag bearers approached, many of the people at the side of the road stood straight and raised their arms in salute, but Lisa and I kept going, struggling with my bike among the bystanders.

Boots crunched, drums banged, trumpets blasted and the boys continued to sing.

‘Hang the Jews! Line the fat cats up against the wall!’

One group of spectators had clustered so tightly together that they blocked the pavement. To get past, we had to bump the wheel down the kerb and make our way along the edge of the road. Lisa tugged harder on the bike than necessary and jostled past two women as we went. When I looked across at her, her jaw was tight, and her expression was like thunder.

‘Stupid Nazis,’ she muttered again, and I willed her not to say it any louder.

I was taking the weight on the right side of the bike – the side that was closest to the approaching parade – and, as the boys came closer and closer, I knew there would be barely enough room for them to get past.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said to Lisa. ‘I’ll bring the bike. You get behind me.’ A great sense of urgency was building in me. There wasn’t much time. A few more seconds and the marching boys would be right here.

‘No. Just keep going.’ Lisa raised her voice and her knuckles whitened as gripped the handlebars harder.

The sound of boots grew louder.

‘There’s not enough room,’ I told her. ‘Please. Just get behind me.’

‘Why should I?’ She scowled at the boys who were now only a few steps away. ‘It’s not their road.’

‘Just—’

‘Get out of the way you idiots!’ shouted the flag bearer closest to us.

‘Who are you calling idiot?’ Lisa snapped back at him.

‘Get off the road, Lisa!’

As soon as I heard the boy call her by name, I realised that Lisa would know him from school. In fact, she would know most of them, but that didn’t change anything. She just pulled a face at the boy and lifted the front of the bike. ‘Keep going,’ she said to me. ‘Come on.’

‘No. Wait.’ I let go of the handlebars and hurried around the front of the bike, going to Lisa’s side. The bicycle was like a barrier between us and the parade. ‘Please,’ I said to her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘It’s our road too.’ There was such a frown on her face now that I thought she might explode as she tugged on the bike, trying to make me go on.

‘Salute!’ one of the boys shouted at us, but we could hardly hear his voice over the sound of the trumpets and drums that were now just a few steps away. Their rhythm pounded in our ears like the heartbeat of an angry beast.

More of the boys had noticed us now. As we wrestled with the bike, most of the drummers turned to glare at us as they passed. Their hands worked like pistons, the drumsticks rising and falling like hammers.

To one side of us, the bystanders stood on the pavement with their arms outstretched in salute. On the other, the boys marched and drummed.

Lisa and I were sandwiched between them, and I felt more and more trapped as the boys paraded past and more faces turned to watch us.

‘Move!’ said one as he jostled past.

‘Out of the way, you idiots!’ said another.

‘Salute!’

The closest drummer glared over his shoulder as he passed, and then the trumpeters were alongside us, each of them with his head facing forward, but his eyes turned to watch us.

Lisa nudged me aside and pulled at the handlebars, lifting the front wheel of the bike. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

‘Just wait.’ I reached across her and put my hand on hers, but she struggled, trying to snatch away, and for a moment, neither of us was holding the bicycle.

The trumpeters trumpeted. The drummers drummed. The marchers marched and sang with their boots thump-thump-thumping on the road.

And the bicycle toppled.

There was nothing I could do. Even though my eyes saw it in slow motion and my mind knew what was going to happen, my body just couldn’t keep up.

I tried to grab it. I stretched out both arms, but Lisa was too close to me, blocking me. The end of the handlebars brushed my fingertips as the bike went down. It fell sideways, towards the parade, just as the fifth row of Deutsches Jungvolk marched past.

The closest boy saw that it was going to collapse right into his path. He was about my age, but smaller, with cropped hair beneath his cap. He had a round face that was mottled with light freckles, and his pale eyes widened as soon as he realised what was happening. He tried to adjust his step, breaking time with the rest of the boys so that he could avoid the falling bicycle. The boy directly behind him hadn’t noticed, though, and he barrelled into Freckles, pushing him hard enough to reach the bicycle at exactly the right time for his foot to come down on top of the front wheel as it collapsed to the road.

His ankle twisted on the spokes and he crumpled like an infantryman cut down on the battlefield. The boy behind couldn’t do anything other than crash into him, falling over his comrade as the next boy stumbled and tripped.

The three of them went down in a bundle of arms and legs, causing the boys in front to turn and wonder at the commotion, while the ones behind toppled over them in a heap.

After that, the parade collapsed into chaos.