Scarred

Prologue

Werner is dead.

He really is; he knows that now.

He needed to stand beside the small, rectangular grave before he could grasp it. Properly take it in. He had to see the coffin first, see the mourners. Their dark clothes, their dark eyes.

Werner is gone.

For ever.

Fluffy snowflakes fall to the ground around him; some are caught in a never-ending, whirling spiral. The snow makes his eyes water, but he doesn’t mind. It makes it look as if he is crying.

He turns to his mother. There are cold trails down her cheeks. She continues to stare at the glossy, brown coffin. And beside her his father, who could barely tie his own tie this morning because his hands were shaking so badly. Who needed help shaving. Who ran outside last week in only a T-shirt and underpants though it was the middle of the day and big, white snowflakes were falling. Who screamed while he clawed through the snow like a maniac. Who pulled Werner out of the heavy whiteness.

But Werner’s lips had already turned blue.

They’d done it before, Werner and him, built caves inside the snowdrifts and dug tunnels connecting them. They would crawl through them though they knew they could collapse at any moment. And later – the thrill of emerging out into the light, still in one piece. They would dice with death and win.

Until that day.

Everyone is here. All of Werner’s classmates. Even some of his teachers have come to the funeral. There are people here he has never seen before. Family friends. Friends of friends. Everyone is sad. Or maybe they’re just pretending, like him.

They lower his brother into the black void. They sing with voices that can barely be heard. But he doesn’t want to sing. Or talk to anyone. Later, people gather in his house. He has something to eat and drink. He’s the only member of his family who does.

In the afternoon he sneaks up to his room, plays a cassette tape and flops down on his bed. Music usually makes him feel good, but not today. It takes him a while before he realises why.

Something in the room has changed.

He gets up from the bed and wanders up and down while he tries to work out what it is. And then he sees the photograph on the wall, a picture of Werner staring down at him, a picture that wasn’t there before, but hangs there now. His knees almost buckle.

He hasn’t told anyone how he watched the roof cave in on his brother. How he didn’t lift a finger, not for a long time, but relished the sensation surging through him. He was master of life and death. He was the only one who could save Werner.

The apple of their father’s eye.

He knows who put up the photograph, obviously; he remembers his father’s screams when the doctors said there was nothing more they could do. You can’t give up, he begged them, please, please don’t give up! And the look on his face when they came home from the hospital later that day, when they sat around the dinner table in the time that followed and no one said a word. There was no mistaking it. Was it because he wasn’t crying?

No.

It was because he hadn’t said sorry.

It had been his idea. His game. And he knows taking the picture down won’t help. His father will keep putting it back up, again and again. Making it impossible for him to forget.

Werner always used to smile when he had his picture taken, but he doesn’t on this one. He just looks straight at the camera. His hair is combed to one side and almost covers his eyes, but not enough to extinguish the light in them. The muffled screams he let out under those white, lethal masses come back. Like an echo.

By the time he sits down on his bed again, it has grown dark outside. It stopped snowing a long time ago, but the snow could have swept right through the room without him noticing anything but the light in his brother’s eyes. The light that can’t be snuffed out.

Werner isn’t dead.

He isn’t really; he knows that now.

But next time, he thinks. Next time will be different.