The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey

Author:Catherine Chidgey [Chidgey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK, Vintage Publishing
Published: 2017-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

August 1944

Near Leipzig

Mama spent weeks thinking about the blanket, sketching different designs like a girl trying out a married name, spreading the square of cloth on the floor and considering it from every position. She counted the rows in its weave with the tip of a needle, murmuring figures under her breath and marking off sections with blue chalk, her mouth full of pins. Each evening she practised her stitches until they were as tiny as possible; little red seeds, little black seeds.

‘What’s it going to be?’ said Erich.

‘A present,’ said Mama.

‘What sort of present?’

‘A special one.’

Slowly her design took shape. She unpicked her work if it was not perfect; some mornings I saw her uprooting every stitch from the previous day and starting again. She passed the crinkled lengths of thread to Erich and he dipped them in water and wound them around his hand. Up close it was difficult to make out the pattern; the red and black dashes were stalks of grass, rain on a lake, endless and repeating so that the eye became quite lost, but if you stood back and looked, truly looked, they resolved into Mama’s angular intention: a swastika that stretched the length and width of the piece. And then, after a time, you noticed that this held smaller swastikas, and that they held smaller ones still, all locked together as tightly as honeycomb. Even Mama did not know how many it contained.

‘Is it for Papa?’ said Erich, and she said, ‘Papa? For Papa?’ and he knew that he had asked a foolish question. Where would they send the blanket? To the snow? To the mud? They had not heard from Papa for months.

‘It’s for the Führer,’ she said, ‘to show him we love him.’ Erich thought then that he might start to cry, because how many boys could say they had helped their mama make a special blanket for the Führer? The traitors’ bomb did not kill him; the Führer could not die. A matter of hours after the explosion he had spoken on the radio, and Erich had closed his eyes and pictured him right there in the room: It is the duty of every German without exception to ruthlessly oppose these elements, and either to arrest them immediately or, if they should resist arrest, to shoot them without further ado. Erich imagined presenting the blanket to him in person, the Führer smiling and shaking his hand as the cameras flashed. Boy in Saxony Presents Adolf Hitler with Magnificent Blanket. He swallowed the lump in his throat. As Mama kept reminding him, he was the man of the house now.

Word came the following week: Papa was missing.

‘What does that mean?’ Erich asked, and Mama said, ‘They don’t know where he is. They have lost him.’

Like a single mitten? Like a favourite book? Erich had lost his favourite Winnetou book for quite some time, and only found it when Lina moved his shelves away from the wall to clean behind them. Had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.