John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

‘I’m not allowed to say what I feel?’ he repeated, incredulous.

‘No,’ she insisted, her voice becoming grating now as she appealed to him. ‘Just keep quiet about it, Bruno. Don’t you know how much trouble you could cause? For all of us?’

Bruno stared at her. There was something in her eyes, a sort of frenzied worry, that he had never seen there before and that unsettled him. ‘Well,’ he muttered, standing up now and heading over towards the door, suddenly anxious to be away from her, ‘I was only saying I didn’t like it here, that’s all. I was just making conversation while you put the clothes away. It’s not like I’m planning on running away or anything. Although if I did I don’t think anyone could criticize me for it.’

‘And worry your mother and father half to death?’ asked Maria. ‘Bruno, if you have any sense at all, you will stay quiet and concentrate on your school work and do whatever your father tells you. We must all just keep ourselves safe until this is all over. That’s what I intend to do anyway. What more can we do than that after all? It’s not up to us to change things.’

Suddenly, and for no reason that he could think of, Bruno felt an overwhelming urge to cry. It surprised even him and he blinked a few times very quickly so that Maria wouldn’t see how he felt. Although when he caught her eye again he thought that perhaps there must be something strange in the air that day because her eyes looked as if they were filling with tears too. All in all, he began to feel very awkward, so he turned his back on her and made his way to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Maria.

‘Outside,’ said Bruno angrily. ‘If it’s any of your business.’

He had walked slowly but once he left the room he went more quickly towards the stairs and then ran down them at a great pace, suddenly feeling that if he didn’t get out of the house soon he was going to faint away. And within a few seconds he was outside and he started to run up and down the driveway, eager to do something active, anything that would tire him out. In the distance he could see the gate that led to the road that led to the train station that led home, but the idea of going there, the idea of running away and being left on his own without anyone at all, was even more unpleasant to him than the idea of staying.

Several weeks after Bruno arrived at Out-With with his family and with no prospect of a visit on the horizon from either Karl or Daniel or Martin, he decided that he’d better start to find some way to entertain himself or he would slowly go mad.

Bruno had only known one person whom he considered to be mad and that was Herr Roller, a man of about the same age as Father, who lived round the corner from him back at the old house in Berlin. He was often seen walking up and down the street at all hours of the day or night, having terrible arguments with himself. Sometimes, in the middle of these arguments, the dispute would get out of hand and he would try to punch the shadow he was throwing up against the wall. From time to time he fought so hard that he banged his fists against the brickwork and they bled and then he would fall onto his knees and start crying loudly and slapping his hands against his head. On a few occasions Bruno had heard him using those words that he wasn’t allowed to use, and when he did this Bruno had to stop himself from giggling.

‘You shouldn’t laugh at poor Herr Roller,’ Mother had told him one afternoon when he had related the story of his latest escapade. ‘You have no idea what he’s been through in his life.’

‘He’s crazy,’ Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. ‘He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea.’

‘What did the cat say?’ asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen.

‘Nothing,’ explained Bruno. ‘It was a cat.’

‘I mean it,’ Mother insisted. ‘Franz was a very lovely young man-I knew him when I was a little girl. He was kind and thoughtful and could make his way around a dance floor like Fred Astaire. But he suffered a terrible injury during the Great War, an injury to his head, and that’s why he behaves as he does now. It’s nothing to laugh at. You have no idea of what the young men went through back then. Their suffering.’

Bruno had only been six years old at the time and wasn’t quite sure what Mother was referring to. ‘It was many years ago,’ she explained when he asked her about it. ‘Before you were born. Franz was one of the young men who fought for us in the trenches. Your father knew him very well back then; I believe they served together.’

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Bruno.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mother. ‘War is not a fit subject for conversation. I’m afraid we’ll be spending too much time talking about it soon.’

That had been just over three years before they all arrived at Out-With and Bruno hadn’t spent much time thinking about Herr Roller in the meantime, but he suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wandering around the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.

To keep himself entertained Bruno spent a long Saturday morning and afternoon creating a new diversion for himself. At some distance from the house-on Gretel’s side and impossible to see from his own bedroom window-there was a large oak tree, one with a very wide trunk. A tall tree with hefty branches, strong enough to support a small boy. It looked so old that Bruno decided it must have been planted at some point in the late Middle Ages, a period he had recently been studying and was finding very interesting-particularly those parts about knights who went off on adventures to foreign lands and discovered something interesting while they were there.

There were only two things that Bruno needed to create his new entertainment: some rope and a tyre. The rope was easy enough to find as there were bales of it in the basement of the house and it didn’t take long to do something extremely dangerous and find a sharp knife and cut as many lengths of it as he thought he might need. He took these to the oak tree and left them on the ground for future use. The tyre was another matter.

On this particular morning neither Mother nor Father was at home. Mother had rushed out of the house early and taken a train to a nearby city for the day for a change of air, while Father had last been seen heading in the direction of the huts and the people in the distance outside Bruno’s window. But as usual there were many soldiers’ trucks and jeeps parked near the house, and while he knew it would be impossible to steal a tyre off any of them, there was always the possibility that he could find a spare one somewhere.

As he stepped outside he saw Gretel speaking with Lieutenant Kotler and, without much enthusiasm, decided that he would be the sensible person to ask. Lieutenant Kotler was the young officer whom Bruno had seen on his very first day at Out-With, the soldier who had appeared upstairs in their house and looked at him for a moment before nodding his head and continuing on his way. Bruno had seen him on many occasions since-he came in and out of the house as if he owned the place and Father’s office was clearly not out of bounds to him at all-but they hadn’t spoken very often. Bruno wasn’t entirely sure why, but he knew that he didn’t like Lieutenant Kotler. There was an atmosphere around him that made Bruno feel very cold and want to put a jumper on. Still, there was no one else to ask so he marched over with as much confidence as he could muster to say hello.