Women at War

by Jan Casey

  The marketplace was a sorry sight – there were a few chickens running around to choose from, but they looked as if they were being offered for sale only because their laying days were over. One had a bald patch on the side of her scrawny body, another a sore, swollen eye. Annie stood and watched as the poor thing tried to relieve the itching by rubbing its face in the dirt. No, she thought, even if there was enough meat on either of them to eat, she would not be able to force it down her throat.

  She moved on through the jostling crowd, all probably looking for the same things she had on the list Frau Wilhelm had given her to try to procure. The baby carriage certainly helped in forging a way through, but twice her toes were trodden on, once she bumped her knee on the edge of a wooden table, then she took an elbow to her ribs and a fist landed on her hip. Or was it the flat of a hand as it felt more like an intrusion than an accidental dig? She stopped and stood on her toes, trying to see over the crowds to who might have touched her in such an intimate way, but there were only the usual housewives, Wehrmacht soldiers, diesel factory workers and it could have been any one of those. Or, she shrugged, none of them. But as she worked her way through the stalls, the place above her bottom burned with the heat of unwanted attention.

  Irrational pride swelled in her when she handed over rations for three eggs, powdered milk and a small tin of soap flakes – Frau Wilhelm would be so pleased. Beetroot was on the list, too and she presumed her mother-in-law wanted to make Herr Doctor’s beloved Borscht but had used all that had been grown in their gardens. Then tucked away in the far corner, she noticed an elderly woman wearing a headscarf and frayed gloves who had a handful of wilting beets left on a trestle table. My life has come to this, she thought, as excitement surged through her when she laid her hands on the purple roots and claimed them for her own.

  ‘A baby!’ the woman cried. ‘May I see?’

  Annie nodded and the woman left her station to peer into the pram. ‘Boy or girl?’ the woman asked.

  ‘A boy,’ she said. ‘Walti.’

  The woman explained that her daughter-in-law in Berlin had recently had a baby girl and she hoped to be able to see her soon. They both gazed at the baby for some minutes before Annie made a move to readjust the pram cover so she could move on. Then she was distracted by a leaflet or brochure caught under the wheel, a torn corner flapping against the spokes. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t think how at first.

  ‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Those have been all over the market since last Monday.’ She pointed to a neighbouring stall. ‘Herr Muller says it’s filthy British propaganda. Here, let me…’ She reached down to grab the piece of paper from the wheel.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Annie said, beating her to it. ‘I’ll get it.’ Without glancing at the writing, she crumbled the leaflet and put it in her pocket as if it meant nothing to her. ‘British propaganda?’ she said. ‘But how did it get here?’

  ‘They drop them, those nasty RAF pilots, on the way back from bombing raids. I hope they rot in hell.’

  Handing over her rations, Annie shook her head in what could have been interpreted as a show of unity and returned the woman’s Heil Hitler.

  Hunching her shoulders and ploughing ahead with the pram, Annie could feel her heart beating against her ribs and the pulse in her neck ticking like a time bomb. She hoped not to meet anyone else on the way home, friend or foe. Her fingers kept straying to her pocket to check if the crushed leaflet was where she had put it. It was, and she longed to stop, take it out, smooth the page and see if her suspicions were correct. But she knew she must not be foolhardy and sneak behind a tree or around the back of a shop and get the paper out in public; if she was not a mother now she would not have been able to stop herself, but she kept calm by thinking of Walti’s safety.

  Frau Wilhelm met her at the door with endless questions about her walk, who she had met and what they had said to each other, if Walti had cried, the produce or lack of it on the market, which routes she had taken there and back. Annie replied with all the right answers in all the right places, but omitted to mention the unsettling occurrences – the sense of that unwelcome touch and the leaflet. Frau Wilhelm tried to help her off with her coat but, with a smile on her face, Annie said she was perfectly able and hung it on the coat stand. Her mother-in-law’s gratitude for the purchases she’d made would have been touching if Annie wasn’t so anxious to get upstairs and look more closely at what she considered to be the most important find she’d appropriated that day.

  They went into the living room, Frau Wilhelm cuddling Walti and babbling in a sing-song voice about how much she’d missed him. ‘I will get us coffee. Then the baby will need his feed, won’t he? You must be tired. Sit.’ She pointed to the couch.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Annie said, sitting in her place. Then she jumped up as if something was bothering her. Covering her chest with her arms, she said she thought her milk had leaked and she needed to change her vest.

  Frau Wilhelm’s mouth turned down and she looked sorry for Annie. ‘So uncomfortable,’ she said. ‘I remember. Go. We’ll be fine here.’ She dandled Walti on her knee and began to take off some of his many layers.

  In the hall, Annie reached into her coat pocket then bounded up the stairs, closed her bedroom door and made a lot of noise opening drawers on the pretence of taking out fresh undergarments. When at last she unfolded the scrunched leaflet, her hands were shaking. Then her legs gave way and she had to sit on the edge of the bed. She had been right – it was their fifth leaflet. Exactly as they had written it with the addition of an introduction by the Allies saying that it had initially been written and distributed by German citizens in Germany. Join forces with your own resistance! it said. You are not alone!

  She clutched it close. To think – their humble leaflet had been to Britain and back again. If only she had some way of letting Fred know that this most unlikely chain of events had happened. She looked out of the window, beyond the garden, across the fields, towards the horizon. The wide world was out there, working to bring the atrocities of this war to an end. Her spirits bubbled.

  *

  Annie could have legitimately stayed at home and cared for Walti, but she felt she owed it to Fred, Walther, the RAF pilots who dropped the leaflets and of course their fellow resistance fighters who had lost their lives to the cause, not to allow herself to become too comfortable or complacent. So she brought up again the idea of going into Munich and oh, the decisions and arrangements and excuses that had to be made.

  Frau Wilhelm wanted her to wait until the baby was much older and then go by herself, but Annie countered with the argument that Walti was the reason she wanted to see her ex-colleagues in the first place.

  ‘Well,’ Frau Wilhelm said when every option had been pulled apart, ‘there is only one thing for it if you insist on this trip, Annie.’

  ‘Please,’ Annie entreated. ‘I do not insist. I just want to feel like any other new mum in normal times.’

  Frau Wilhelm sighed in much the same way Fred had done at her petitions.

  ‘But we don’t live in normal times. These years are extraordinary.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But… just this once?’

  ‘Alright,’ she acquiesced. ‘I will come with you. I will leave you at the university for an hour or so and visit my sister. That should be a good solution for both of us.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Annie said, barely able to stop herself from skipping and jumping around the living room.

  ‘It is, how do you say in England, killing both birds with just the one rock?’

  ‘Yes.’ Annie laughed. ‘That’s it exactly.’

  Preparations lasted for the best part of a week. Times had to be agreed upon, tickets bought, a bag packed for Walti, warnings given. ‘This is really quite precarious, Annie,’ Frau Wilhelm insisted. ‘The streets in Munich are barely passable and we will be stopped by soldiers at every turn. God knows what they could want with two women and a pram, but they will find some
excuse.’

  Annie nodded and agreed and said they would be vigilant and careful. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Frau Wilhelm, during one or other of her discourses, that Ulm had become dangerous and threatening for her. But every time she almost blurted it out, something stopped her; she didn’t want to worry her mother-in-law or put her under the added pressure of thinking she had to do something to help Annie. At least until she was more sure of what was going on.

  The pat on her hip had not been her imagination. It had happened again whilst she was leaning over Walti’s pram outside the bakery, but that time a hand had brushed her breast. She’d started, unable to believe what she felt. But scanning the crowds and the queues, she could not pinpoint who it might have been. Everyone had looked both innocent and guilty. A few days later, someone had rubbed the small of her back whilst she was carrying Walti into the dry goods store. Whirling around, she was sure she would be able to spot the degenerate and when she did, she was going to give him the full weight of her tongue in a very loud voice. Again, she had been too late or too unobservant or too reluctant to accuse.

  Now she saw shadows moving out of shadows when she left the house; heard rustling and footsteps following her; could sense breathing close to her ear. She took to buying enough food to last two or three days so she wouldn’t have to leave the house, telling Frau Wilhelm she was tired and asking her to take Walti out instead. And she was pleased she wasn’t going to Munich on her own, as she would be terrified if her unwanted pursuer followed her there.

  *

  If Annie thought people in Ulm were beginning to look downtrodden, Münchners had taken on a most unhealthy pallor. There, too, no colour seemed to exist – the bleached grey dominated buildings, clothes, hair, skin, the barks of trees, pavements, birds, dogs. And no one was smiling – not one person in the train or on the streets or in the café where she and Frau Wilhelm bought a dingy cup of coffee and a slice of mouldy cake. Everyone hurried with heads bent, intent on getting wherever they needed to go, except the dreaded Wehrmacht soldiers, SS and anyone in uniform who strolled along, presenting themselves as smart and well-fed, arrogant and entitled.

  It was horrible and Annie found herself walking at the same clipped pace as everyone else, keeping her gaze on her feet or the pram wheels, not smiling or nodding or engaging in any conversation with Frau Wilhelm other than the necessary statements such as: ‘We turn right here’ or ‘Mind your footing there’. Again, in startling contrast, the soldiers laughed too long and talked too loudly amongst themselves as if trying to convince everyone of their courage with shows of bravado. For a second, she lifted her eyes and they faltered on one young Wehrmacht officer standing next to, but apart from, two of his comrades. His gaze cut towards her and there was nothing coming from him – no sense of self-righteousness or pride, no bluster or bluff. He was in the same position as Fred, she thought, before they both blinked their eyes elsewhere. She wondered how many of those young men despised their lot in the same way both he and Fred did. If only they could band together and rise up against the regime. But they, like all of them, must keep their eyes averted and the truth in their hearts hidden.

  At the university gates, Frau Wilhelm asked Annie if she would be alright. She wasn’t sure she would be, but of course she couldn’t say that having dragged both of them all that way.

  ‘Two hours?’ Frau Wilhelm asked, holding up her fingers.

  ‘Is one enough for you?’

  Frau Wilhelm seemed surprised but said, ‘Of course.’

  Annie watched her walk away, then made her way to the department she used to work in. She didn’t recognise anyone and was asked by several people how they could help her. She mentioned a few names but they shook their heads at each one with explanations such as the person had married and moved away or joined the military or was working elsewhere. One girl who she had particularly liked had died when her house exploded because of a gas leak. She had been young enough to still wear her hair in plaits across her head and her arms had been covered in freckles. It was so sad to think that whilst she had been giving birth, that young woman had her life blown out of her. Sadder, though, was the matter-of-fact way the news was divulged.

  Next, she walked through familiar corridors to the dining halls. It was always cold through those dark, chilly passageways but it was more than the draughts that made her shiver. She remembered the times she had walked side by side with Fred or Ilse or Gustav, making their way to share lunch together, deep in thought about the next moves within their resistance group. After so many of their comrades had been imprisoned and executed, she had wondered if their efforts had been worth the outcome. How dare she think that such a paltry gathering of inexperienced young people, with nothing going for them but their idealistic attitudes, could make any difference? But tucked in next to the journal in her underwear drawer was their leaflet, evidence that their attempts at rallying others had reached the hands and minds of those far beyond the immediate vicinity and their most outlandish hopes.

  A few people turned and stared at her, a woman with a baby carriage coming into the dining hall – not a usual sight in a university. Scanning the tables and benches, she quickly ascertained there was no one there she recognised so turned the pram and headed back the way she’d come before any questions could be asked. She felt lost and out of her depth and decided she should admit a foolish defeat. She would wait by the gates for Frau Wilhelm.

  A group of men, gesticulating and talking about something that seemed deep and serious, stepped to one side to let her pass. ‘Thank you,’ she said without looking at them. Then a hand, spotted with irregular brown marks and sprouting wiry hairs, reached out and touched her arm. Reminded of the recent undesirable advances in Ulm, she drew back as if she’d been stung. ‘Fraulein Scholz,’ the man said. ‘Annie?’

  When she gave herself a chance to look, she saw it was one of their old comrades.

  ‘Professor Frans.’ She breathed out, her hand reaching out to meet his.

  He glanced at the pram. ‘I heard you were expecting a baby.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘This is my Walti.’

  He continued to scrutinise her instead of looking at the baby. That was something she wasn’t used to. ‘And I heard that the father, your husband, died in Russia.’

  Again she said, ‘Yes. He was a medic.’

  Professor Frans nodded knowingly and in his narrowed eyes there was such a familiar depth of understanding that Annie thought she would cry without being able to stop.

  ‘Come into my office, Frau…?’

  ‘You can still call me Annie,’ she sniffled.

  ‘Wait one moment.’ She watched him catch up with his colleagues who were waiting for him at the end of the hallway. They exchanged a few words and then he turned back towards her with a rather jaded stride.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This door.’

  He ushered her into a leather chair and manoeuvred the pram to where she could see Walti, breathing in and breathing out; Annie mirrored the rhythm of the baby’s shallow puffing and felt, if not as peaceful as him, at least a bit calmer.

  ‘Would you like a snifter of brandy?’ Professor Frans asked.

  That broke the tension she had been feeling and she snorted in a most unladylike manner. ‘Thank you, but I am meeting my mother-in-law and she will not let me out again on my own if she smells alcohol on my breath.’

  He laughed with her. ‘Well, coffee?’

  She considered, then said. ‘No, I will have that brandy, thank you.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Whilst he rooted around in his filing cabinet and took out two glasses and a bottle, Annie looked at the books piled on his desk and leaning lopsidedly on the shelves. Their dark green, blue and burgundy covers were comforting, reminding her that there had been better times than this and that there would be time, in the future, to concentrate on thoughts and ideas other than how and when this war would finish. Professor Frans put a glass in front of
her and lifted his in a toast. ‘Ahh,’ he said after his first sip and she nodded in agreement.

  Never one to miss a trick, Professor Frans realised she had been surveying his array of books because he swept his hand towards a pile and said, ‘These are not mine.’

  ‘Then whose?’ she asked him. ‘Are you storing them for a colleague?’

  He shook his head and leaned in closer towards her. ‘My books were stolen from me by the…’ His index and middle finger went under his nose and his arm shot out in front of him. When he finished with the salute they all hated, his nostrils flared as if a putrid smell had filled the room. ‘Years ago they marched in, raided my library and burned my books along with many others. Thomas Mann, gone. Erich Maria Remarque, gone. Émile Zola, Jack London, gone, gone, all gone. These,’ he said, spittle gathering in tiny dots on his bottom lip, ‘are what they left in their stead.’

  He thrust a black bound edition of something or other by Werner Beumelburg – who she knew wrote about camaraderie and good times to be had on the front line – towards her. He ran a finger along another pile and held up the dust for her to see. Again he inclined his head. ‘I refuse to read them and when this war is finished I will take them outside and burn each and every one of them.’

  ‘I will join you. If I may.’

  ‘Yes, Annie. You may.’ They each sipped their brandy, then Professor Frans asked her bluntly why she was at the university with Walti.

  She hesitated. Although very unlikely, it was still wise to consider everyone as if they might be in the pay of the SS. But she decided that she didn’t want to be that sort of suspicious person. She drew herself up tall and told him about finding the crumpled leaflet Fred had authored.

  He seemed to turn over the information in his mind and smiled as if he was thinking about an old friend who conjured up happy memories.