The Hatter

I don't think he was quite meant for this world. There was something about the man that looked lost. His twinkling eyes, one a light hazel, the other a vibrant emerald, always stretched too far inside the oversized circles that were his gaping eyes, as if searching for something out of sight.

The Hatter

I was only six when I encountered the man, and was just beginning to make sense of the world that was painted grey. A grey sky, grey walls; grey faces. My window was clouded with December cold, but I saw clearly the man that stood behind it. He was a magician, an air of showmanship surrounded him, and his face seemed to be painted in theatrical colours; reds and purples and greens that encircled his eyes. His hat was tall, the label fluttering in the angry wind. I was sure he was hiding a rabbit inside it, but I knew better than to ask; than to talk to him. At first. He wore one of the yellow stars around his arm, another label attached to him. But his star was the brightest, glowing among the rest that sat dully around narrow arms. It was as if he had polished it, and it shone as brightly as his twinkling teeth. He wasn't like the others, who shuffled along streets with their heads bowed to the ground littered with fallen posters of Jew's that were supposed to look like them; but they were not mirrors. They did not reflect reality. They were just drawings. This man held his head up, his sparkling eyes dipping into every other face he came across, and a constant smile was engraved onto his own luminous face. It was slight, the corners of his vibrant red lips tilting upwards slightly, and his eyebrows raised as if about to announce something so surprising, that he could not find the words. I think the words he was looking for were trapped inside his hat that stretched to the low hanging clouds that drifted through us like a dusty haze. I was fascinated by the appearance of this man, this Jew. He was not as Hitler described. He was a magician; with a magical hat and a trademark of a star. He painted his face for every performance, and I was lucky enough to see him every day walk the same route to his secret stadium, like everyone else walked to the factories.

As the years progressed, and my window became laced with ice once again, most of my naivety had melted. I hadn't seen the magician since I was six; since I assumed he had walked to work for the final time. I had heard the thunderous banging on doors in the middle of the night, and the children that screamed like wailing kittens being torn away from their mothers. I looked to my window, the dazzling headlights of the truck lighting up my face so perfectly, that I appeared just a portrait in a frame watching the yellow stars being packed neatly away and taken. The night time was cleverly borrowed by the Nazis, giving us the illusion that the events that occurred there were just dreams; nightmares. I was beginning to wake up. That was until I saw the magician for the final time.

The sun yawned an orange glow onto the streets of Berlin, and I woke with it, both our eyes peeping over our horizons. The radio hummed a monotone as I wandered over to my window, my eyes not quite open, not quite ready to see the remains of the night.

There he was.

His legs were swinging over the edge of the building across from our block of flats; he was sitting on the roof. I could feel myself smiling, an element of disbelief told me that he might not be real; but the result of my constant, desperate attempts to go over to the window and see his face that contradicted all other faces once again. Mother was asleep, and Father would still be far away, obeying orders, fighting for Germany. I often looked to what he was fighting for, and hoped that he wouldn't see what he had courageously left behind. I wanted to meet the man with the hat that had survived these short, painful years, wearing the trademark that served as a sentence. I opened our door; saw the scratch marks where nails had clawed it. I hesitantly padded down the stairs, ignoring the tiny shoes that littered its steps. I wondered where the feet that once slipped inside those shoes were; if they were cold, if they were splintered. The clock hung like the moon by the door that led to the exit, its hands stretching lazily as it counted another minute that would mark someone's death, someone's life. I started to run, my feet pattering delicately on the ground, scurrying to the place where the man sat watching the sunrise. The two apartment blocks loomed either side of me, covering my eight year old self in a shadow. I looked up, my head tipping all the way back to my neck, and saw the rim of the man's hat, and the broken soles of his shoes. He was still there, waiting. I continued to run, noticing for the first time how beautiful Germany was when no one was in it. Its cracked floor, fallen trees and crumbling buildings meant nothing, for there was no one to tell me why; it was just a beautiful chaos with no reason or explanation and it glowed a vague yellow. I climbed the steps of the building of which the man sat upon and with each step I remembered each day, each week, of his absence for those two years. I grew around a country whose population was being cleansed, washed away like an unholy flood, but I remained on the ark. All because of my blonde hair, my deep blue eyes in which floated big, dark pupils that saw girls my age, with their curly brown hair and big pupils that caught the image of me in the window, as they were placed on the truck. As I remembered, my vision became blurred as quiet tears cascaded down my face, boiling under my angry, fragile skin.