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

poor ordinary people, to which Mama replied that perhaps she was a poor ordinary person at heart and that perhaps she was sometimes too weak and ignorant to suppress that.

I remember this lunch not so much because it was my favourite dish, but because Theodor asked Papa questions about the war. Normally we were discouraged from talking at lunch, but Theodor had learned that if he asked important-seeming questions, rather than prattling idly, Papa would be more likely to tolerate it.

“Papa, we will soon beat Poland, won’t we?” he asked.

Papa looked neither pleased nor displeased to be asked this question as he carefully poured the tomato sauce onto his cube of casserole and then adjusted his white linen napkin.

“Of course we will. I told you that already.” He speared a few noodles with his fork with a notable absence of enthusiasm.

Theodor tried again. “Why were they so foolish to attack us?”

This question interested Papa more. He set his fork down and looked directly at Theodor when he spoke. “It is clear that there were two reasons. The first reason is that they hate Germans. We know this from how they have treated our compatriots who found themselves suddenly inside Poland after our territory was given away in 1919. The second is that they think that by attacking us they will force England and France to come to their aid because they have a treaty with them. They are confident that this is how they will win.”

He paused and Theodor jumped in, “But they are wrong, aren’t they, Papa?”

“Yes, they are wrong. England and France are too weak, and they are too cowardly.”

“I’m sure they regret attacking us now!”

“Alea iacta est.” It was not unusual for Papa to slip into Latin or even Greek.

Theodor nodded solemnly, either having understood or having thought it best to pretend to understand.

I needed to ask, “What does that mean, Papa?”

He turned to me and smiled. “Those, Ludwig, are the words of the great Julius Caesar as he crossed the Rubicon River in the year 49 BC and thus made the decision to defy the Roman Senate and fight Pompey.”

I gave a small nod and waited for him to take a sip of his mineral water and dab the corners of his mouth with his napkin.

He smiled again. “It means ‘the die is cast.’ An important irreversible decision has been made upon which the lives of many depend. Poland will fall. War is rarely something to wish for, but at least we will get our territory back and perhaps we will get our pride back.”

Mama was focused on helping Clara and Johann eat and it did not look like she was listening, but she quietly said, “Ah yes, our pride. That is important of course.” Papa flushed red and looked ready to say something to her but obviously thought better of it. He instead told Theodor that that was more than enough talking and that we should focus on our food while he went to his armchair to have a cigarette and wait for dessert to be served. Canned pears that day, I believe.

The other boys would usually meet up after school to play games in the street corner parks, but I hated these games. These games were always competitive, and I was always the smallest and the weakest, and as such I was always the designated loser. Sometimes I enjoyed being around boys in high spirits, but it did not take long for me to tire of their mostly inane games. In any case, the forest was much more interesting.

Fall is a busy time in the forest as the squirrels and the birds prepare for winter. You would think the war would distract me from this, but the excitement I felt when it started quickly went away. This was not because I developed an opinion about the war. Even though I was a very precocious child, I will not claim to have had sophisticated thoughts about war and peace. No, the excitement went away because it was not exciting. After the first few weeks there were no more columns of tanks in the city and far fewer warplanes overhead. It was all abstract and distant, while the forest was real and here. I suppose I heard about the Soviet Union joining in to carve up Poland and the fact that, as Papa predicted, England and France did nothing, but I do not remember any of that. What I do remember from the first couple years of the war — before the war came to us — was my growing fascination with small birds, the sparrows and the wrens.

There are certainly more majestic birds, like eagles, and smarter birds, like crows; prettier birds, like buntings, and birds with a more beautiful song, like warblers; but I developed a soft spot for the small, less showy guys. I have heard that birdwatchers here call them LBJs, meaning “little brown jobs.” I was especially fascinated by how hard they worked. When I first learned to understand the language of the birds it was the drama that caught my attention. You will recall that I called them my opera stars. I still loved to listen to and watch the more exciting interactions, but one day, perhaps in the fall of 1939 but possibly sometime in 1940 already, I was sitting under Old Greybark when I saw something very small out of the corner of my eye. It was a tiny wren and what caught my attention was that it was creeping along the ground like a little mouse. It was so funny! And then it would take a few quick hops, cock its head to the side and flit up to a fencepost from a long-since-collapsed fence. There it fluffed itself up and sang loudly, much louder than I expected such a small bird to. The other birds appeared to ignore it. Then the wren hopped back down and grabbed something off the forest floor, a bug