John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

His old life in Berlin seemed like a very distant memory now and he could hardly even remember what Karl, Daniel or Martin looked like, except for the fact that one of them was a ginger.

For several weeks after this Bruno continued to leave the house when Herr Liszt had gone home for the day and Mother was having one of her afternoon naps, and made the long trek along the fence to meet Shmuel, who almost every afternoon was waiting there for him, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring at the dust beneath him.

One afternoon Shmuel had a black eye, and when Bruno asked him about it he just shook his head and said that he didn’t want to talk about it. Bruno assumed that there were bullies all over the world, not just in schools in Berlin, and that one of them had done this to Shmuel. He felt an urge to help his friend but he couldn’t think of anything he could do to make it better, and he could tell that Shmuel wanted to pretend it had never happened.

Every day Bruno asked Shmuel whether he would be allowed to crawl underneath the wire so that they could play together on the other side of the fence, but every day Shmuel said no, it wasn’t a good idea.

‘I don’t know why you’re so anxious to come across here anyway,’ said Shmuel. ‘It’s not very nice.’

‘You haven’t tried living in my house,’ said Bruno. ‘For one thing it doesn’t have five floors, only three. How can anyone live in so small a space as that?’ He’d forgotten Shmuel’s story about the eleven people all living in the same room together before they had come to Out-With, including the boy Luka who kept hitting him even when he did nothing wrong.

One day Bruno asked why Shmuel and all the other people on that side of the fence wore the same striped pyjamas and cloth caps.

‘That’s what they gave us when we got here,’ explained Shmuel. ‘They took away our other clothes.’

‘But don’t you ever wake up in the morning and feel like wearing something different? There must be something else in your wardrobe.’

Shmuel blinked and opened his mouth to say something but then thought better of it.

‘I don’t even like stripes,’ said Bruno, although this wasn’t actually true. In fact he did like stripes and he felt increasingly fed up that he had to wear trousers and shirts and ties and shoes that were too tight for him when Shmuel and his friends got to wear striped pyjamas all day long.

A few days later Bruno woke up and for the first time in weeks it was raining heavily. It had started at some point during the night and Bruno even thought that it might have woken him up, but it was hard to tell because once he was awake there was no way of knowing how that had happened. As he ate his breakfast that morning, the rain continued. Through all the morning classes with Herr Liszt, the rain continued. While he ate his lunch, the rain continued. And while they finished another session of history and geography in the afternoon, the rain continued. This was bad news for it meant that he wouldn’t be able to leave the house and meet Shmuel.

That afternoon Bruno lay on his bed with a book but found it hard to concentrate, and just then the Hopeless Case came in to see him. She didn’t often come to Bruno’s room, preferring to arrange and rearrange her collection of dolls constantly during her free time. However, something about the wet weather had put her off her game and she couldn’t face playing it again just yet.

‘What do you want?’ asked Bruno.

‘That’s a nice welcome,’ said Gretel.

‘I’m reading,’ said Bruno.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked him, and rather than answer he simply turned the cover towards her so she could see for herself.

She made a raspberry sound through her lips and some of her spit landed on Bruno’s face. ‘Boring,’ she said in a sing-song voice.

‘It’s not boring at all,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s an adventure. It’s better than dolls, that’s for sure.’

Gretel didn’t rise to the bait on that one. ‘What are you doing?’ she repeated, irritating Bruno even further.

I told you, I’m trying to read,’ he said in a grumpy voice. ‘If some people would just let me.’

‘I’ve got nothing to do,’ she replied. ‘I hate the rain.’

Bruno found this hard to understand. It wasn’t as if she ever did anything anyway, unlike him, who had adventures and explored places and had made a friend. She very rarely left the house at all. It was as if she had decided to be bored simply because on this occasion she didn’t have a choice about staying inside. But still, there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

‘I hate the rain too,’ he said. ‘I should be with Shmuel by now. He’ll think I’ve forgotten him.’

The words were out of his mouth quicker than he could stop them and he felt a pain in his stomach and grew furious with himself for saying that.

‘You should be with who?’ asked Gretel.

‘What’s that?’ asked Bruno, blinking back at her. ‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she asked again.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bruno, trying to think quickly. ‘I didn’t quite hear you. Could you say that again?’

‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she shouted, leaning forward so there could be no mistake this time.

‘I never said I should be with anyone,’ he said.

‘Yes, you did. You said that someone will think you’ve forgotten them.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Bruno!’ she said in a threatening voice.

‘Are you mad?’ he asked, trying to make her think that she had entirely made it up, only he wasn’t very convincing for he wasn’t a natural actor like Grandmother, and Gretel shook her head and pointed a finger at him.

‘What did you say, Bruno?’ she insisted. ‘You said there was someone you should be with. Who was it? Tell me! There’s no one around here to play with, is there?’

Bruno considered the dilemma he was in. On the one hand his sister and he had one crucial thing in common: they weren’t grown-ups. And although he had never bothered to ask her, there was every chance that she was just as lonely as he was at Out-With. After all, back in Berlin she had had Hilda and

Isobel and Louise to play with; they may have been annoying girls but at least they were her friends. Here she had no one at all except her collection of lifeless dolls. Who knew how mad Gretel was after all? Perhaps she thought the dolls were talking to her.

But at the same time there was the undeniable fact that Shmuel was his friend and not hers and he didn’t want to share him. There was only one thing for it and that was to lie.

‘I have a new friend,’ he began. ‘A new friend that I go to see every day. And he’ll be waiting for me now. But you can’t tell anyone.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s an imaginary friend,’ said Bruno, trying his best to look embarrassed, just like Lieutenant Kotler had when he had become trapped in his story about his father in Switzerland. ‘We play together every day.’

Gretel opened her mouth and stared at him before breaking into a laugh. ‘An imaginary friend!’ she cried. ‘Aren’t you a little old for an imaginary friend?’

Bruno tried to look ashamed and embarrassed in order to make his story more convincing. He squirmed on the bed and didn’t look her in the eye, which worked a treat and made him think that perhaps he wasn’t such a bad actor after all. He wished that he could make himself go red, but it was difficult to do that so he thought of embarrassing things that had happened to him over the years and wondered whether these would do the trick.