Don’t Tell Lies
H
e cannot concentrate on schoolwork or simple conversations or Frau Elena’s chores. Every time
he
shuts his eyes, some vision of the school at Schulpforta overmasters him: vermilion flags,
muscular horses, gleaming laboratories. The best boys in Germany.
At certain moments he sees
himself as an emblem of possibility to which all eyes have turned. Though at other moments,
flickering in front of him, he sees the big kid from the entrance exams: his face gone bloodless atop
the platform high above the dance hall. How he fell. How no one moved to help him.
Why can’t Jutta be happy for him? Why, even
at the moment of his escape, must some
inexplicable warning murmur in a distant region of his mind?
Martin Sachse says, “Tell us again about the hand grenades!”
Siegfried Fischer says, “And the falconries!”
Three times he readies his argument and three times Jutta turns on a heel and strides away. Hour
after hour she helps Frau Elena with the smaller children or walks
to the market or finds some
other excuse to be helpful, to be busy, to be out.
“She won’t listen,” Werner tells Frau Elena.
“Keep trying.”
Before he knows it, there’s only one day before his departure. He wakes before dawn and finds
Jutta asleep in her cot in the girls’ dormitory. Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool
blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress
and wall—even in sleep, a tableau of friction. Above her bed are papered her fantastical pencil
drawings of Frau Elena’s village, of Paris with a thousand white towers beneath whirling flocks of
birds.
He says her name.
She twines herself tighter into her blanket.
“Will you walk with me?”
To his surprise, she sits up. They step outside before anyone else is awake. He leads her without
speaking. They climb one fence, then another. Jutta’s untied shoelaces trail behind her. Thistles bite
their knees. The rising sun makes a pinhole on the horizon.
They stop at the edge of an irrigation canal. In winters past, Werner
used to tow her in their
wagon to this very spot, and they would watch skaters race along the frozen canal, farmers with
blades fixed to their feet and frost caked in their beards, five or six rushing by all at once, tightly
packed, in the midst of an eight- or nine-mile race between towns. The look in the skaters’ eyes
was of horses who have run a long way, and it was always exciting for Werner to see them, to feel
the air disturbed by their speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then fading—a sensation as if
his soul might tear free of his body and go sparking off with them. But as soon as they’d continued
around the bend and left behind only the white etchings of their skates in the ice, the thrill would
fade, and he’d tow Jutta back to Children’s House feeling lonely and forsaken and more trapped in
his life than before.
He says, “No skaters came last winter.”
His sister gazes into the ditch. Her eyes are mauve. Her hair is snarled and untamable and
perhaps even whiter than his.
Schnee.
She says, “None’ll come this year either.”
The mine complex is a smoldering black mountain range behind her. Even now Werner can hear
a mechanical drumbeat thudding in the distance, first shift going down in the elevators as the owl
shift comes up—all those boys with tired eyes and soot-stained faces
rising in the elevators to
meet the sun—and for a moment he apprehends a huge and terrible presence looming just beyond
the morning.
“I know you’re angry—”
“You’ll become just like Hans and Herribert.”
“I won’t.”
“Spend enough time with boys like that and you will.”
“So you want me to stay? Go down in the mines?”
They watch a bicyclist far down the path. Jutta clamps her hands in her armpits. “You know
what I used to listen to? On our radio? Before you ruined it?”
“Hush, Jutta. Please.”
“Broadcasts from Paris. They’d say the opposite of everything Deutschlandsender says. They’d
say we were devils. That we were committing
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