Once by Morris Gleitzman

“he could have three wishes. About anything. Including parents and cakes.”
    Barney knocks on another door. A big door at the front of a big building.
     
    “This one will be different,” he says to me. “But you’ll be fine.”
    “I hope so,” I say.
    My feet blisters are hurting and I’m a bit worried by the Nazi flag flapping over our heads.
    Barney puts his hand on my shoulder.
    “You did a really good job back there,” he says. “Poor Mr. Grecki was in a lot of pain, but your story helped him get through it. Well done.”
    I feel myself glowing, which I haven’t done for years, not since the last time I helped Mum and Dad dust the bookshelves and straighten up the folded-down corners of pages.
    It’s true—Mr. Grecki was very grateful. He and his family looked very sad when I asked them if they’d seen Mum and Dad and they said they hadn’t.
    The door opens.
    I nearly faint.
    Glaring at us is a Nazi soldier.
    Barney says something to him in Nazi language and points to our dentist bag. The soldier nods and we follow him in. As we climb some stairs, Barney whispers to me.
    “This patient is German. Tell him a nice story about Germany.”
    Suddenly I feel very nervous. I don’t know much about Germany. I think I read somewhere that it’s completely flat and has a lot of windmills, but I could be wrong.
    “I don’t speak German,” I mutter to Barney.
    “Doesn’t matter,” says Barney. “Say it in Polish and I’ll translate.”
    The soldier leads us into an upstairs room and I feel even more nervous.
    The patient is a Nazi officer. Not the one who did the shooting when we arrived in the city, but he could be a friend of that one. He’s sprawled in an armchair holding his face, and when he sees us he scowls and looks like he’s blaming us for his toothache.
    Barney sets up the drill. He doesn’t ask for salt water. I think this is because the Nazi officer is swigging from a bottle. Whatever he’s drinking smells very strong. He’s doing a lot of rinsing but no spitting.
    I don’t understand. Why is Barney drilling a Nazi’s teeth? And why doesn’t the German Nazi army use its own dentists? Perhaps the officers don’t like them because they’re too rough and they use bayonets instead of drills.
    Barney picks up a lamp and looks inside the Nazi officer’s mouth.
    That’s amazing. I’ve never seen that before. The lamp is connected to a wire. It must be electric.
    “Go on, Felix,” says Barney.
    He wants me to start. My imagination goes blank. What story can I tell to a Nazi officer in a bad mood? I want to tell a story about how burning books and shooting innocent people makes a toothache worse, but I’d better not risk that.
    The soldier comes back in with a bulging cloth bag. Poking out the top is a loaf of bread with hardly any mold on it and some turnips and a cabbage.
    “Thank you,” says Barney as he starts the drill.
    I understand. This is why we’re giving this Nazi dental treatment when we could be giving it to a poor Jewish person.
    To earn food.
    I think of the kids back in the cellar. I didn’t tell them a story before, but I can tell one for them now.
    “Once,” I say to the Nazi officer, “two brave German booksellers, I mean soldiers, were hacking their way through the African jungle. Their mission was to reach a remote African village and help mend a, um, windmill.”
    Barney translates.
    I start making up the most exciting and thrilling story I can, with lots of vicious wild animals and poisonous insects who say nice things about Adolf Hitler.
    The Nazi officer seems to be interested. Well, he’s not shooting anybody. But he could at any moment.
    I try hard to stop my voice wobbling with fear.
    I want to do a good job so this patient will be as grateful as the last one was. So that afterward, when the drilling and the story are over, he’ll feel warm and generous toward me.
    That’s when I’ll ask him if he knows where Mum and Dad are.

 
      a dentist