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

(I always had to suppress a laugh when people spoke of this) to make the judgement. One could, however, trust a spore print. To make a spore print one need only cut off the mushroom’s cap, set it on a white piece of paper with the gill side down and wait a few hours. The mushroom will obligingly drop its spores during this time, which you can then examine under the microscope. The dropped spores, incidentally, also make a lovely pattern on the paper, hence the term “spore print.” But this aspect is irrelevant, although it does give you the spore colour, which can be important. Once viewed under the microscope, the spores tell their story with clarity and precision — eat me or do not eat me! It is that simple, but the large majority of people do not know this. Consequently, Boletus luridifromis and other mushrooms with worrisome doppelgangers became an important part of our diet in the summer of 1947.

Similar to the mushroom story is the story of the Traubenkirschen (very closely related to the chokecherries so abundant on the Canadian prairies), which were commonly believed to be poisonous. Here the majority of people were again mistaken. To be fair, when eaten alone they are exceedingly tart, even astringent, and thus not very inviting, but as I mentioned before, the ration system was at times peculiarly generous with sugar. Right through the summer very few other rations were available, but we continued to receive our half kilo per head per month allotment of sugar. Traubenkirschen made a marvellous juice when cooked with sugar. This juice was full of vitamins, so although it felt very much like a treat, it helped our health tremendously. This was Mama and Theodor’s department. They collected large baskets full of these small black berries in July. Theodor also found a large cache of old beer bottles behind the brewery, so these were washed and stoppered with rags to store our bounty.

In this manner, with mushrooms and chokecherry juice on top of the other fruit beginning to ripen and the occasional pleasant surprise from the ration card, we managed to survive. None of us put on weight, but none of us lost weight either. Unspoken was the fear of winter as the first signs of autumn began to appear. By late August the birds were already changing their behaviour.

At some point in the late summer a startling letter arrived from Papa. It was a change in tone, and it was also the first in a long while that had been censored at all.

Dear Luise,

I have been here two years now and it is not clear yet when I will be released. I hear that there are about 100,000 of us still in prison and more than ten times that number barred from public office because of our past activities. We do leave the camp at times, sometimes, as I mentioned, to clean up rubble but sometimes also for an educational purpose. I didn’t mention it before, but I want to tell you now that in the early days our first such trip was to see the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp southeast of here. I’m sure that you know of this and similar camps now too, so I don’t need to describe it. You can imagine my emotions given my position in the Party. Some of my fellow prisoners think the camps are fake, but I have come to understand that they are not, and I don’t just write this because I know my letter will be read by the censor.

I see how terribly broken this country is. There is a painful irony in having believed one is doing the very best for one’s country and then discovering that in fact one has been doing the opposite. I still think there was good in the beginning, but it all went too far, too extreme and we were swept along in a mass hysteria. I have learned to beware when everyone in a group starts to say the same thing and I have, thanks to the diligence and good sense of my captors, relearned the wisdom of aurea mediocritas.

Your Wilhelm

“Aurea mediocritas?” I asked Theodor.

“The golden mean. It’s a Greek idea that it is best to be moderate in all things, not only politics but food and wine and so on, and to avoid extremes.”

“That makes sense.”

“But he still doesn’t accept personal responsibility. Not really anyway. Not in an honest emotional sense. He mentions the concentration camp and the ‘broken country’ like abstract lessons he is learning to pass a test.”

I did not reply to this. It occurred to me that perhaps pride had something to do with the way Papa wrote things, but I did not have the right words at the time to express this. Also Theodor did not look interested in discussing it further as he had put the letter down and was busying himself with sorting raspberries. I asked myself, If I had done something really wrong, would I fully bare my soul to other people about it? Or would I hold some of that back, especially if my self-image was that of a good person (which it was) and a smart person (which it also was)? I hoped I would not hold back. I hoped I would put reason and morality and contrition before pride. Beneath these hopes was a deeper quieter answer, like a small ripple on a dark pond, that I chose not to pay attention to.

Immediately after this and for the first time in over a year, the image of Frau Doctor Burkhard appeared in my mind’s eye. Sometimes my subconscious was a mischievous card dealer. Where was the Frau Doctor? Was she even still alive? Did Papa write to her too? And if he did, did he write the same things, or was he more candid? Or perhaps less? This was an abstract and ultimately pointless line of thought and I was hungry. I