John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

‘Practised?’ asked Bruno, who was unfamiliar with the word. ‘Weren’t you any good then?’

Pavel smiled. ‘I was very good,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to be a doctor, you see. From the time I was a small boy. From the time I was your age.’

‘I want to be an explorer,’ said Bruno quickly.

I wish you luck,’ said Pavel.

‘Thank you.’

‘Have you discovered anything yet?’

‘Back in our house in Berlin there was a lot of exploring to be done,’ recalled Bruno. ‘But then, it was a very big house, bigger than you could possibly imagine, so there were a lot of places to explore. It’s not the same here.’

‘Nothing is the same here,’ agreed Pavel.

‘When did you arrive at Out-With?’ asked Bruno.

Pavel put the carrot and the peeler down for a few moments and thought about it. ‘I think I’ve always been here,’ he said finally in a quiet voice.

‘You grew up here?’

‘No,’ said Pavel, shaking his head. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘But you just said-’

Before he could go on, Mother’s voice could be heard outside. As soon as he heard her, Pavel jumped up quickly from his seat and returned to the sink with the carrots and the peeler and the newspaper full of peelings, and turned his back on Bruno, hanging his head low and not speaking again.

‘What on earth happened to you?’ asked Mother when she appeared in the kitchen, leaning down to examine the plaster which covered Bruno’s cut.

‘I made a swing and then I fell off it,’ explained Bruno. ‘And then the swing hit me on the head and I nearly fainted, but Pavel came out and brought me in and cleaned it all up and put a bandage on me and it stung very badly but I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry once, did I, Pavel?’

Pavel turned his body slightly in their direction but didn’t lift his head. ‘The wound has been cleaned,’ he said quietly, not answering Bruno’s question. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Go to your room, Bruno,’ said Mother, who looked distinctly uncomfortable now.

‘But I- ‘

‘Don’t argue with me-go to your room!’ she insisted, and Bruno stepped off the chair, putting his weight on what he had decided to call his bad leg, and it hurt a little. He turned and left the room but was still able to hear Mother saying thank you to Pavel as he walked towards the stairs, and this made Bruno happy because surely it was obvious to everyone that if it hadn’t been for him, he would have bled to death.

He heard one last thing before going upstairs and that was Mother’s last line to the waiter who claimed to be a doctor.

‘If the Commandant asks, we’ll say that I cleaned Bruno up.’

Which seemed terribly selfish to Bruno and a way for Mother to take credit for something that she hadn’t done.

The two people Bruno missed most of all from home were Grandfather and Grandmother. They lived together in a small flat near the fruit and vegetable stalls, and around the time that Bruno moved to Out-With, Grandfather was almost seventy-three years old which, as far as Bruno was concerned, made him just about the oldest man in the world. One afternoon Bruno had calculated that if he lived his entire life over and over again eight times, he would still be a year younger than Grandfather.

Grandfather had spent his entire life running a restaurant in the centre of town, and one of his employees was the father of Bruno’s friend Martin who worked there as a chef. Although Grandfather no longer cooked or waited on tables in the restaurant himself, he spent most of his days there, sitting at the bar in the afternoon talking to the customers, eating his meals there in the evening and staying until closing time, laughing with his friends.

Grandmother never seemed old in comparison to the other boys’ grandmothers. In fact when Bruno learned just how old she was-sixty-two-he was amazed. She had met Grandfather as a young woman after one of her concerts and somehow he had persuaded her to marry him, despite all his flaws. She had long red hair, surprisingly similar to her daughter-in-law’s, and green eyes, and she claimed that was because somewhere in her family there was Irish blood. Bruno always knew when a family party was getting into full swing because Grandmother would hover by the piano until someone sat down at it and asked her to sing.

‘What’s that?’ she always cried, holding a hand to her chest as if the very idea took her breath away. ‘Is it a song you’re wanting? Why, I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid, young man, my singing days are far behind me.’

‘Sing! Sing!’ everyone at the party would cry, and after a suitable pause-sometimes as long as ten or twelve seconds-she would finally give in and turn to the young man at the piano and say in a quick and humorous voice:

‘La Vie en Rose, E-flat minor. And try to keep up with the changes.’

Parties at Bruno’s house were always dominated by Grandmother’s singing, which for some reason always seemed to coincide with the moment when

Mother moved from the main party area to the kitchen, followed by some of her own friends. Father always stayed to listen and Bruno did too because there was nothing he liked more than hearing Grandmother break into her full voice and soak up the applause of the guests at the end. Plus, La Vie en Rose gave him chills and made the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Grandmother liked to think that Bruno or Gretel would follow her onto the stage, and every Christmas and at every birthday party she would devise a small play for the three of them to perform for Mother, Father and Grandfather. She wrote the plays herself and, to Bruno’s way of thinking, always gave herself the best lines, though he didn’t mind that too much. There was usually a song in there somewhere too-Is it a song you’re wanting? she’d ask first-and an opportunity for Bruno to do a magic trick and for Gretel to dance. The play always ended with Bruno reciting a long poem by one of the Great Poets, words which he found very hard to understand but which somehow started to sound more and more beautiful the more he read them.

But that wasn’t the best part of these little productions. The best part was the fact that Grandmother made costumes for Bruno and Gretel. No matter what the role, no matter how few lines he might have in comparison to his sister or grandmother, Bruno always got to dress up as a prince, or an Arab sheik, or even on one occasion a Roman gladiator. There were crowns, and when there weren’t crowns there were spears. And when there weren’t spears there were whips or turbans. No one ever knew what Grandmother would come up with next, but a week before Christmas Bruno and Gretel would be summoned to her home on a daily basis for rehearsals.

Of course the last play they performed had ended in disaster and Bruno still remembered it with sadness, although he wasn’t quite sure what had happened to cause the argument.

A week or so before, there had been great excitement in the house and it had something to do with the fact that Father was now to be addressed as ‘Commandant’ by Maria, Cook and Lars the butler, as well as by all the soldiers who came in and out of there and used the place-as far as Bruno could see-as if it were their own and not his. There had been nothing but excitement for weeks. First the Fury and the beautiful blonde woman had come to dinner, which had brought the whole house to a standstill, and then it was this new business of calling Father ‘Commandant’. Mother had told Bruno to congratulate Father and he had done so, although if he was honest with himself (which he always tried to be) he wasn’t entirely sure what he was congratulating him for.