Page 6 of The Watchmaker of Dachau

‘It’s hardly new. They’ve been there nearly two years and I’ve never seen it.’

‘Well, it’s new to you! Think of the adventures you can have. Gosh, I hope they’ve got you a garden. We can build a treehouse!’

Friedrich now stood at the slice of a window in his new house in the countryside outside Munich, looking at the grey gravelled drive, the grey stone walls that surrounded it, and the black gates that kept them firmly inside. Was everything grey here? Where was the garden?

He left his room and tried the doorknobs across the hall from him – surely, they would have a view of the garden – but all of them were locked. He tried each of the three doors – once, twice – and even pushed his scrawny eleven-year-old body against the heavy oak as if it would yield to him.

Exasperated, he returned to his room, lay on his single bed, and fell into a fitful sleep, tears silently working their way down his cold cheeks.

The dinner bell woke Friedrich with three gongs that seemed to echo off the empty walls of his room and down the corridor with its locked doors. He sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then opened his valise and took from it a clean light blue shirt and navy trousers.

Once dressed, he descended the staircase, noticing the pictures hanging on the wall – a watercolour of the seaside that his mother said she had painted as a child; a mottled brown photograph of his grandfather and his father as a child, their coal-black eyes seemingly dead and yet staring at him as he passed by.

‘Hurry up!’ his mother’s voice rang out to him, and he took the rest of the stairs with quick steps until he reached the foyer, looking around him to see where the dining room lay.

‘In here. I can see you dawdling, you know.’

Friedrich looked left and there, through the half-open door, he could see the white linen tablecloth, the silverware, and his father.

He went in and took the place that had been set for him near the window, his father at the head of the table, his mother opposite, dressed in a plum taffeta gown that clashed with her white-blonde hair.

‘Sir,’ Friedrich said to his father, as he draped a napkin over his lap.

His father looked up from the stack of papers he was reading. ‘You made it back then.’

‘I did.’

‘No reading at the table, Peter.’ His mother’s voice was high and light. She giggled when his father patted her hand.

‘You are quite right, my dear. Quite. A new dress?’

She smoothed the creases on her lap. ‘It is modelled after a picture of Eva’s dress when she was at the theatre with the Führer. I think it is almost the same!’

‘You look perfect, my dear. Absolutely perfect.’ He patted her hand again.

Friedrich shifted in his seat.

A maid entered the room, dressed in a striped dress of blue and white, her head covered in a piece of cornflower-blue cloth. She did not look at Friedrich as she moved around the table, ladling the soup into their bowls.

When she reached Friedrich, he could smell her – she smelled of the dirt he had played in as a child, of sweat and a stale smell, like the dampness in the cellar, as if she had been hidden away amongst the dusty bottles of wine and boxes of old clothes. Her hand shook a little as she spooned in his soup, and a splash left the bowl and splattered on the tablecloth.

‘Really! Anna!’ his mother exclaimed.

Anna did not look up, did not speak. Her hand shook more, and Friedrich could see the spidery blue veins through the tight white skin of her wrist.

‘Anna, go! Get Greta. Don’t come back in here tonight, I cannot bear you today.’

Friedrich looked to his father, who seemed not to notice the servant woman and was heartily spooning soup into his mouth. Now and again it got caught on his moustache, and he stuck out his tongue like a snake to quickly lick the drops away.

‘You really can’t think this is a good idea, Peter?’ his mother asked when Anna had left. ‘Why can’t we get a local girl like the last time? This is not going to work, it really isn’t.’

His father ignored her and turned his gaze to Friedrich, his eyes so hooded by bushy eyebrows that Friedrich was never sure what exact colour they were.

‘You brought all your books back with you?’ he asked Friedrich.

‘I did, Father.’

‘Good. You’ll have a few weeks before the tutor comes, so I expect you to teach yourself for a while.’