Page 77 of The Watchmaker of Dachau

‘Don’t!’ Friedrich warned him. ‘If you touch them, the mother bird will leave them as you’ll have left your smell on them.’

‘Says who?’ Otto asked.

‘I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true – don’t touch them.’

Otto withdrew his hand, and Friedrich, who had been about to join his friend, slithered down the tree trunk, scraping his palms and legs on the bark.

Otto soon followed and dusted off his hands when he reached the ground. ‘I didn’t touch them. Can’t have the treehouse here anymore – we’ll have to find somewhere else.’

Friedrich looked at the thick long arms of the oak. ‘It’s perfect though – absolutely perfect.’

‘They won’t be there forever, will they?’ Otto mused. ‘If we come back in a week or so, maybe they will have hatched and flown away?’

Friedrich agreed; as soon as the birds had gone, they could begin building their secret hiding place.

The following week the boys returned to find tiny pink chicks in the nest, their mouths wide and screaming for food.

At first, Friedrich recoiled from the sight and moved away from them on the branch. Their naked bodies and black unseeing eyes were not what he had been expecting a baby bird to look like.

‘They are so strange,’ Otto said. ‘Really strange, like they aren’t really birds at all.’

They had left the nest alone, sitting with their backs against another tree, their hands randomly picking up dead leaves and twigs as they spoke.

‘If we wait here long enough, we can see the mother bring them some food.’ Otto looked to the canopy above them and Friedrich did the same.

‘Will you go home in the holidays?’ Friedrich suddenly asked.

‘Probably. I’d say so. Mother wrote and said something about going to Grandmother’s house in the countryside. I’d rather not go there though. She’s always a bit mean and slaps my hands when I try to reach for cakes or sweets.’

‘I’d happily go to your grandmother’s,’ Friedrich said.

‘You not going home then?’

‘I don’t even know where home is at the moment. They’ve moved to a new place – Father got a promotion.’

‘If you could go anywhere, though, anywhere in the world, where would you go?’

Friedrich thought for a moment, ripping a leaf to shreds in his hands, then watched as the breeze took them.

‘I guess I’d be here with you.’ Friedrich grinned at Otto. ‘At least when you’re around we have fun and I have someone to talk to.’

‘Look!’ Otto raised his hand and pointed to the sky where a blackbird had shot past, then landed on the branch with the nest of baby birds. ‘She’s a good mother, flying off to find food then bringing it all the way back for them. That’s a lot to do. I think if I had been born a baby bird and my mother would have had to do all that, she wouldn’t have bothered!’ Otto laughed.

Friedrich joined in, but his laugh was false. He knew that Otto was joking, but he also knew that his own mother certainly wouldn’t have cared for him – she would have left his skinny naked body to cry until it died. He wanted to tell Otto what he thought, but Otto would simply try to make him feel better – say it wasn’t true, and tell him his mother loved him. He didn’t want to hear that; he just wanted to sit for a moment in the dankness of the wood, the earthy smell of mushrooms that grew in clumps at the bases of trees filling his nostrils, his best friend by his side, and listen to the caw of birds in the trees, and the little squeaks from the baby birds as they took the food from their mother.

Friedrich sat in the spare bedroom, looking out into the garden and to the camp beyond. The binoculars were on his lap but he hadn’t used them just yet, his thoughts on the trees that swayed in the breeze, bringing him the memory from the previous year of his friend and the baby birds.

The blossoms had burst from their buds, dotting branches with white, yellow and pink. The bulbs that the gardener had planted in neat rows in the garden before he had stopped coming had begun to push up the dirt, lightening it with their green heads.

The house was busy. His mother had ceased to be a ghost that wandered the hallways, crying and moaning. Instead, she had emerged from her bedroom, her hair pinned back, her eyes no longer glassy and unstaring. She shouted at Friedrich to stay out of her way, then spent hours on the telephone. He kept himself out of sight but he could hear snatches of her conversations as she talked to friends, family, and to a company that she wanted to ship her furniture to another place.

Friedrich had tried to hear where it was being taken to, but her voice had been unusually quiet. He’d heard her talk about a date she needed them by, and then, ‘the address, yes, of course,’ before she tailed off, whispering so that only the company man on the other end could hear.

In the past days she had become a flurry of activity, muttering to herself with a pen and pad of paper in her hands as she walked from painting to painting, table to chair, scribbling something down and then staring blankly out of the window as if the answer to her writings would suddenly appear.

Friedrich desperately wanted to ask what was happening but knew he couldn’t. His father had barely been home – he had meetings, he said, he was needed elsewhere. He was short with not only Friedrich, which was normal, but also with his wife, and instead of falling into a pool of tears when he spoke to her, she would stare at him with narrow eyes and then walk away as if he had never uttered a word.

A light rain spattered against the windowpane and Friedrich watched each drop as it tracked its way down the glass.