The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

always work. I disagreed with her, to which she gently countered that whether that was the case or not did not ultimately matter anyway as the method she taught was the approved method. This seemed irrational and arbitrary to me, and I was about to say so, but Frau Krämer asked me to sit down as the lesson had to proceed on schedule. On the way back to my desk I caught the glances of the boys in the back row. They were not friendly glances, but I did not think too much of it.

On the way home that day, at the corner of Mathildenstrasse and Brandstrasse, they caught up to me. There were three of them and I was by myself. Theodor was going to a friend’s house, so he had gone a different way.

“Hey! Schott!” one of them shouted.

I ignored him and kept walking, staring straight ahead. This was a mistake, but then I suppose that there really was no right way to address this situation.

“Hey, Schott!” Closer now. “Do you think you’re better than us? First you show off in class and now you ignore us?”

I felt a sharp tug on my backpack. Before I knew it, I was on the ground like a beetle flipped on his back, and three faces were looking down at me, laughing.

“Fall down, Schott? Clumsy? Here, let us help you.” One of the boys — one with close-cropped hair and pudgy cheeks, Ulrich, I think his name was — reached down and pulled me up. They made a big show of dusting me off with really hard slaps that had me reeling from side to side and then the other two yanked my backpack off my shoulders.

“Since you’re so smart you won’t be needing any of your schoolwork, will you, Schott? It just makes your backpack heavy and that seems to make you fall down.” They began dumping the notebooks out of my pack and kicking them onto the street.

“No! Stop! Please!” I must have sounded pathetic. They finished with a flourish by tossing my now empty backpack into a tree. It took a couple tries, but they managed to get it snagged on a branch about two and a half metres up.

“This is to encourage you to grow, you dwarf! The army will need men, not dwarves!” They laughed and laughed and then sprinted off when a couple of adults approached from around the corner. The man got my backpack down for me while the lady gathered up my soiled notebooks. I was so embarrassed. I could not look these people in the eye when they asked me how I was. I just mumbled thank you for their help and that I was fine. The mix of shame and rage inside me felt like that child’s volcano experiment where you mix vinegar and baking soda. The pressure inside me felt physical, but I was determined to exercise self-control and suppress it. But I knew I could not go home the way I looked and the way I felt. I did not want my parents or siblings to know what had happened. Instead, I turned left at the next street and went down to the forest, to the banks of the Pleisse where I washed my hands and face.

I watched the little wren zip back and forth over the river to some inscrutable purpose and I watched a pair of sparrows flit about in the high branches above me in what appeared to be an entirely pointless manner. Somewhere a crow cawed twice and somewhere else a warbler briefly trilled. Then the forest was quiet, and the sounds of the city began to seep in from behind me. The birds were not speaking to me today. They were just wild things going about their wild business and I was just a young boy trembling beneath an old linden tree.

Eventually I began to calm down a little, but I still did not feel right. I stood up and left. The forest would still be there when I felt better, which I knew I would. Emotion is like the weather, whereas personality is like the climate. My climate was mostly sunny and calm, but storms can occur anywhere.

When I got home, Mama looked at me with concern. “Theodor told me some boys roughed you up. Are you okay?”

“How did he know?” I felt the shame and rage bubbling together inside me again.

“The boys who were mean to you happened to run into him as he was going to Uwe’s house. They said you were clumsy but the way they laughed Theodor had a pretty good idea what happened.”

“Yes, Mama, I am okay.” I am sure I was beet red in the face.

She looked at me closely. “They ripped part of your backpack! That’s not a cheap backpack!”

Worse was to come. Theodor told Papa too. Whether Theodor was genuinely trying to help or just trying to make my life difficult seemed clear to me at the time — definitely the latter — but now, all these years later, I am not as sure.

“Ludwig, Theodor told me you were attacked.” Papa was sitting in his favourite dark brown leather chair and had just stubbed out a cigarette. He motioned me to sit across the coffee table from him on the couch.

“‘Attacked’ is an exaggeration, Papa. They pushed me over.”

“And threw your backpack into a tree.”

“Yes.” I was looking at the floor.

“Ego amissus pugna sed vici bellum.”

I stared at him blankly. He stared back at me, brow furrowed. Then after a long moment he said, “I lost the battle, but I won the war. Or I should say ‘et vincere bello,’ ‘will win the war.’”

“Yes, Papa.” I was not sure what else to say as this did not make much sense to me.

“It’s unfortunate that you are still too young for the DJV. Theodor is learning how to defend himself there.”

The DJV was short for the Deutsches Jungvolk in der Hitler Jugend. I suppose this translates