The Overpaid Maid
Some days later Bruno was lying on the bed in his room, staring at the ceiling above his head. The white paint was cracked and peeling away from itself in a most unpleasant manner, unlike the paintwork in the house in Berlin, which was never chipped and received an annual top-up every summer when Mother brought the decorators in. On this particular afternoon he lay there and stared at the spidery cracks, narrowing his eyes to consider what might lie behind them. He imagined that there were insects living in the spaces between the paint and the ceiling itself which were pushing it out, cracking it wide, opening it up, trying to create a gap so that they could squeeze through and look for a window where they might make their escape. Nothing, thought Bruno, not even the insects, would ever choose to stay at Out-With.
‘Everything here is horrible,’ he said out loud, even though there was no one present to hear him, but somehow it made him feel better to hear the words stated anyway. ‘I hate this house, I hate my room and I even hate the paintwork. I hate it all. Absolutely everything.’
Just as he finished speaking Maria came through the door carrying an armful of his washed, dried and ironed clothes. She hesitated for a moment when she saw him lying there but then bowed her head a little and walked silently over towards the wardrobe.
‘Hello,’ said Bruno, for although talking to a maid wasn’t quite the same thing as having some friends to talk to, there was no one else around to have a conversation with and it made much more sense than talking to himself. Gretel was nowhere to be found and he had begun to worry that he would go mad with boredom.
‘Master Bruno,’ said Maria quietly, separating his vests from his trousers and his underwear and putting them in different drawers and on different shelves.
‘I expect you’re as unhappy about this new arrangement as I am,’ said Bruno, and she turned to look at him with an expression that suggested she didn’t understand what he meant. ‘This,’ he explained, sitting up and looking around. ‘Everything here. It’s awful, isn’t it? Don’t you hate it too?’
Maria opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again just as quickly. She seemed to be considering her response carefully, selecting the right words, preparing to say them, and then thinking better of it and discarding them altogether. Bruno had known her for almost all his life – she had come to work for them when he was only three years old – and they had always got along quite well for the most part, but she had never showed any particular signs of life before. She just got on with her job, polishing the furniture, washing the clothes, helping with the shopping and the cooking, sometimes taking him to school and collecting him again, although that had been more common when Bruno was eight; when he turned nine he decided he was old enough to make his way there and home alone.
‘Don’t you like it here then?’ she said finally.
‘Like it?’ replied Bruno with a slight laugh. ‘Like it?’ he repeated, but louder this time. ‘Of course I don’t like it! It’s awful. There’s nothing to do, there’s no one to talk to, nobody to play with. You can’t tell me that you’re happy we’ve moved here, surely?’
‘I always enjoyed the garden at the house in Berlin,’ said Maria, answering an entirely different question. ‘Sometimes, when it was a warm afternoon, I liked to sit out there in the sunshine and eat my lunch underneath the ivy tree by the pond. The flowers were very beautiful there. The scents. The way the bees hovered around them and never bothered you if you just left them alone.’
‘So you don’t like it here then?’ asked Bruno. ‘You think it’s as bad as I do?’
Maria frowned. ‘It’s not important,’ she said.
‘What isn’t?’
‘What I think.’
‘Well, of course it’s important,’ said Bruno irritably, as if she was just being deliberately difficult. ‘You’re part of the family, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not sure whether your father would agree with that,’ said Maria, allowing herself a smile because she was touched by what he had just said.