The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  It was Pierre who suggested the boxing match. He had a pal, he said, who could set it up. Joe remembered the Troubles in the twenties. Brother against brother. Bitterness as sharp as a sword. Would they have battled so hard if they had played a bit more? Fought it out on the hurling pitch, then gone for a jar in the pub? What harm would a boxing match do? Ireland was not at war, so he wouldn’t be a traitor. Nor a collaborator. A friendly match. There was good and bad on either side, after all. The more Joe thought about it, the better the idea sounded. This could smooth over hostilities, be a bridge to the enemy. Like the Christmas truce.

  Christmas. Let it happen at Christmas. Peace on earth to all men. He’d have time to train.

  The match was scheduled for Wednesday 9 December 1942 in the assembly hall of the Maison St Louis Observatory. It was advertised on the front page of the Deutsche Inselzeitung and at the bottom of the classified ads on the back page in the Evening Post.

  Joe was to fight Wilhelm Weber, the bantamweight champion of Silesia, 1937, and the Wehrmacht, 1939. Weber was younger than Joe. Joe couldn’t think why he had agreed to do this. It was over ten years since he’d fought and though he was fit, and practised every day in the club, he wasn’t at his prime, not against a younger man. He’d had no one to spar against, not at his level, not even one of the bigger boys. Smashing a punching bag was no substitute for ring practice.

  Nor was he as well fed as the German. He ate enough vegetables, and drank plenty of water, but he lacked protein, for the rationing hit hard. Joe knew those things made a difference. He’d make a fool of himself, but he couldn’t back out now.

  They weighed in, like professionals. Weber met Joe’s eyes, a steady stare.

  You can’t spook me, Wilhelm.

  Strapped up, gloves on. Weber was left-handed. A southpaw. Get the measure of that. Don’t trade blows, he told himself. Don’t let him wrong-foot you. Tactics came flooding back. Counter that left hand.

  Joe heard the audience as they settled down, loud, rowdy. The door opened. More squaddies, by the look of them. The room was full of cigarette smoke, and Joe could smell beer. German soldiers in their grey army uniforms. There were no civilians that Joe could see.

  Weber threaded his way through the crowd as they roared their support. Joe followed in his dressing gown. No Jersey men present to cheer him on. This was how the Christians must have felt, he thought, going to the lions. You needed nerves for the fight. Good nerves that fired muscles into steel and tendons into springs. The crowd were chanting, ‘Weber, Weber’. He’d need some support, otherwise they’d bay only for Wilhelm. It was human nature, after all, to stick to your own.

  Ignore them. Don’t get distracted.

  There’d be three rounds. Point winners, unless one was knocked out. Joe was glad. He wasn’t sure he’d have the strength or the stamina for a full bout.

  Pierre was in his corner for him with a towel and water bottle. Joe clambered into the ring, could feel the adrenalin rise and pump through his body, taste its metal in his mouth. Weber was taller than Joe, with spidery legs and a haunted, bitter face. He’s not hungry, Joe thought. He’s angry. Boxing’s not a sport for angry men.

  The referee, a German sergeant, called them over to the centre of the ring. Held their hands up, glove to glove.

  ‘Sauber kämpfen, Jungs,’ he said. ‘Play clean, boys.’

  Joe took off his dressing gown. The bell went.

  Watch his left ran through Joe’s brain like a mantra. Get your foot on the outside. Dancing, jabbing, left cross, right hook, Weber slammed into Joe’s chest between the ribs so Joe lost his breath and staggered to the ropes gasping for air, arms close to his body as Weber rained down the punches on Joe’s head and shoulders. Joe threw his right and left hand at Weber’s body as many ways as he could until he hit him in the liver and then between the ribs. Joe watched as the spindly man bent double and fell.

  A hefty jeer went up from the crowd and they began to chant, ‘Weber, Weber!’

  Joe went back to the corner, spitting and washing. His eye had been cut and was swelling fast. Pierre wet the towel with the water, dabbed at the cut. Joe winced.

  ‘Weber! Weber!’

  ‘Get the referee to shut them up,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not fair.’

  Joe’d been pushed against the ropes, made to look a fool, a bumbling novice. But Joe had learned too that Wilhelm Weber had no technique, only the advantage of his left hand. He was a low fellow with an easy fist. Joe had met his type in Dublin. He had to wear him out. Rattle him. Go in for the slam.

  The bell rang.

  Joe had his foot on the outside now, keep it there, jabbed and punched with both of his hands, crosses, hooks, before Weber slipped around and they danced, sparring, jabbing. Footwork. Position. Joe backed him onto the ropes with a forearm crush, covered his head to soften Weber’s overarm, right hook to Weber’s head, square on the nose which exploded in blood, ducking and weaving round his left while Joe hammered him with his right until the referee pulled them apart and they began to dance again in the centre.

  Blood was running from Joe’s nose too and his left eye was beginning to close, but Weber’s face was swelling, eyes bloody and blackening, a livid red mark on his cheekbone, and the look of fury. Joe was hot, slippery with sweat, but not tired, too fired for that. Joe had to win. He lunged with a fast one-two, pulled back his head to slip Weber’s cross counter, then slammed into him again with his right hand. Weber staggered back as the bell went and the crowd stopped baying.

  ‘If I were you,’ Pierre said, mopping Joe’s bloodied face with the towel, ‘I’d let the bastard win.’

  ‘Never,’ Joe said, spitting blood into the bucket at Pierre’s feet. ‘Not now.’

  Gumshield in, Joe danced to the centre. He looked round as the bell rang again, and Weber charged towards him. Joe made sure of his foot position, used both hands to lay into Weber, who was throwing his left cross, his right hand in front of his head. Go for the temple. Joe aimed a right hook, slammed into the side of Weber’s head, watched him crumple and fall while the referee counted out the seconds.

  The crowd fell silent. Joe panted in the centre of the ring, raised his arm above his head. A nurse was standing to the side with a man in a white coat. Then the jeers began, the whistles. Weber struggled to his feet and the audience cheered, stamped their feet, hammered on the chairs.

  The nurse and doctor climbed into the ring, went over to Weber, helped him into a chair in his corner.

  ‘I hope the fuck he’s all right,’ Pierre said. ‘Because God help you otherwise.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Joe said. ‘I won it fair and square.’

  It was the Feldkommandant himself, Colonel Knackfuss, who held out his hand to Joe. ‘My congratulations,’ he said. ‘To the winner.’ He paused. ‘A man to watch.’ He beckoned to the nurse. ‘Perhaps this man needs some medical care too.’ He smiled, a stiff stretch of his lips, without warmth or conviction. ‘We treat all opponents fairly.’

  ‘A clean-up,’ she said. ‘At the least.’ She leaned over Joe, so the crisp of her uniform brushed his chest, and he smelled its starch. ‘Congratulations to the winner,’ she said, her voice cold and formal as she dabbed at his cut with disinfectant.

  Knackfuss nodded, walked away.

  The nurse smiled. ‘Well done,’ she whispered.

  Joe felt as large as a giant. For wasn’t he Jack Dempsey himself? Or Jimmy Slattery?

  When he went to the clubhouse on Minden Street the next evening, there was a swastika daubed across the notice and a large V had been painted on the door. British Victory is Certain had been chalked beneath it.

  No boys turned up that Friday. It would be the run-up to Christmas, Joe thought. Carol singing. Nativity plays. Advent services.

  None turned up the following Tuesday. Joe waited until eight o’clock, penned a notice, Boxing Club closed for the season. Will re-open in January. Pinned it to the door as Pierre arrived.

  ‘Word is, they
don’t see it as a friendly. They see it as fraternisation. What’s worse,’ he added, ‘nor do the Germans. They see it as humiliation.’ Pierre lit a cigarette, handed it to Joe. ‘Your face is a treat,’ he said. ‘Every colour in the rainbow.’ He slapped Joe on the back.

  Joe opened the club again in the new year but still no one turned up. He’d enjoyed the club, the company of the boys, at least. He handed the keys of the hut back to Pierre, took the gloves and skipping ropes and a punching bag back with him to his room, rigged up a hook on the door frame and hung the bag from it. At least he could keep in training. He rammed his right fist into the belly of the bag. It was such a paltry thing to have done, for the best of motives. Pounded with his left. It wasn’t even his war. Right, left. Who here stood up to Jerry? Who’d been counted? Left, left, right.

  Pierre openly consorted with the Germans. He paused, steadied the bag. People grumbled at Pierre’s prices, but they bought from him, even so. No one was so high and mighty that they didn’t do what they could to survive. Filled in the registration cards like lambs. Right, right. Penalised the Jews without a second thought. Shed a tear for the British when they’d been deported. Left. Well, Joe thought, steadying the bag again, and lifting it off its hook, the Irish have lived with centuries of occupation. As many connived with the British as resisted. That’s the way an occupation worked. So why pick on him? Let he who is without sin.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DORA

  London: April 1985

  Dora firmed up the soil round the white-currant bush. It’d take a year or so before it matured and she could gorge herself on its fruity pearls. Their housekeeper, Anni, used to sugar the currants into a rich, sweet compote. Along with afternoon coffee and bitter chocolate, that compote had been the taste of home that Dora missed most. You couldn’t get white currants in England, any more than you could get Bramleys in Germany.

  It had been years since she’d thought of Anni, squat and square with her short grey hair and floral apron. Anni had lived across the courtyard, in the back building in Charlottenburg. Dora could see it now. The long windows of the art nouveau apartments that lined the inner square, dressed with venetian blinds and demi-nets. She could smell the meatballs and sausages cooking in the kitchens, hear the clatter of the families as they ate. The courtyard was in the shade and Anni’s apartment was always cool. Anni had packed her bags the day she and Vati had to tell her they weren’t Aryans.

  ‘How could you do this to me?’ Anni had said. ‘After all this time? You never told me.’ Anni never spoke to them again.

  This was the first time in all the forty years Dora had been gardening that she’d seen white-currant bushes for sale in the garden centre. She’d bought one straightaway, planting it in a sunny corner in the vegetable patch. A sycamore had self-seeded nearby. She’d need to dig that up before it grew into a monster and strangled the bush. Dora reached for her fork.

  Anni’s cousin lived in the countryside near Ravensbrück and gave Anni currants. Dora could remember her coming home with punnets filled to the brim. It was over fifty years since Dora had left Berlin, or thought about that. She’d been in mourning for her father, her late mother’s jewellery sewn into the hem of her coat.

  Did that happen in old age? Thinking more and more about the past? She’d have to ask at the bridge club. Do you all reminisce too? She was doing a lot of it these days. But apart from Charles, who else could she remember with? And even then, what could she say? Do you remember sleeping in a bed with white sheets again? He wouldn’t know what she was talking about.

  She straightened up, studied the bush, looked towards the house as if expecting Uncle Otto to be waving at her from the window. He never asked her what happened in the war.

  ‘You’ll tell me,’ he’d said. ‘In your own time.’

  Dora had never told him. She hadn’t the words. She hadn’t a story, and couldn’t borrow one either. There was nothing in the Bible, or Dante, nothing in Dostoevsky, or Goethe that she could point to, it was like this. Who wrote about what happened to women in war, apart from Berthold Brecht? She was no Mother Courage, and what had happened to Dora was not part of that version of war either.

  She hadn’t slept in those early days when she’d first come back. She startled at every sound. Lay rigid in fear until she thought her head would crack with the weight and pain of it. Every creak and groan of the house was a footstep closing in, a soldier-in-waiting. To sleep, perchance to dream. She daren’t dream. She put off the moment of sleeping, made sure she had everything around her, counted her books each night, her shoes and stockings. She made sure her underwear was in order, felt in the drawer that nothing was missing, that the soap in its wrapping paper was still tucked in her box at the bottom of her wardrobe. That was her talisman. She had to lock the front door, and check it twice before she went to bed, make sure the windows were shut and fastened, even though the summer air was hot and stifling. Uncle Otto put a bolt on her bedroom door.

  ‘No one can get in now, Doralein. You can sleep securely.’

  He prescribed her barbiturates.

  Night terrors. She wanted to build a wall between day and night, between what happened before 1943 and what happened after, to keep the barbarians at the gate. She tried to put that baby out of her mind, too, but it crowded in sometimes, the soft smell of it, the touch of the slippery skin. It hadn’t even cried.

  Dora had sat listless and silent in the chair in her bedroom while Uncle Otto saw to his patients in the room below. Once her hair had grown, Uncle Otto organised a stylist from John Barnes in the Finchley Road to come to the house. He used his clothing rations and bought her some frocks and a pair of shoes. He bought her powder and lipstick, Yardley’s Natural Rose. Even then, she didn’t feel she had a woman’s face, not yet.

  ‘You should get out, Doralein. It’s not good to brood like this.’

  She’d forgotten how to go to a shop, buy cigarettes, soap.

  They sat in the sitting room in the evenings, she, curled like a baby, while he held her hand and stroked her fingers and they listened to a play or a concert on the wireless.

  ‘A funny thing happened today,’ he’d say. He couldn’t tell a story, but he loved a joke. ‘You’d have laughed, if you’d been there.’

  You have to laugh. But inside. You laugh inside.

  He’d tell her how he came to London and had to live off charity, renting the basement flat and taking his medical exams again even though he had been a practising doctor for fifteen years.

  ‘People were generous.’ His voice had a catch in it. ‘But British bureaucracy was icy. Unforgiving. They made life hard for us. Refugees? You’d think we were criminals. Beggars and idlers. Here to live off public assistance…’

  She’d heard his story many times. Uncle Otto needed to talk, to get it off his chest. Now, Dora wondered whether he wasn’t trying to get her to do the same. Would it have made a difference?

  ‘I was the lucky one. The Board of Deputies guaranteed me. Did you know you needed a sponsor? Who had that kind of money?’

  And now look at me.

  He’d tell her how he bought the house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, only he called it ‘FitzJews Avenue’. ‘The whole house, with a sitting tenant on every floor.’

  He’d been too old to fight when they released him from the internment camp, and doctors were needed in London. Some other poor refugee was now living in the basement with the curling linoleum and mouldy bathroom.

  ‘Enough of this,’ he’d say. ‘We are alive. Gott sei dank.’

  Dora listened, absorbing his story so it became her own too. She was a refugee. Dispossessed and disconnected. What more need she say? The things that had happened, those things, were best not spoken about. Last heard of in 1943. That’s what that Hummel woman said. She positioned the fork and pressed it into the soil, levering out the roots of the sycamore. Gott sei dank.

  How long had it taken her to leave the house when she’d come back from the war? Several mo
nths, for sure.

  He told her he had a friend called Anna who’d invited them for coffee.

  ‘What could I say, Dora? Of course we must go.’

  She lived round the corner, in Maresfield Gardens. He’d shown Dora a map.

  ‘One hundred metres, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Give or take.’

  Dora had slipped her hand under Uncle Otto’s arm and he’d gripped it tight, patting it as they’d walked from their home to hers, you are safe, Doralein. I won’t let go. Dora, with her strawberry-blonde curls, Utility courts and Natural Rose lipstick, and he in his tweed jacket and Royal College tie, more English than the English. She was sure people were looking at her, would recognise her. She kept her eyes to the ground, but their gaze seemed to bore into her, There she goes. That’s her.

  It was a warm day and she hadn’t needed a coat, but the leaves on the plane trees were turning orange. Was it September? October, perhaps?

  Anna took her out into her garden and Dora was too scared to resist. She gave her a pair of secateurs and taught her how to deadhead the roses.

  ‘So the plant thinks it must flower again.’ She spoke English with a stronger accent than Dora. ‘To compensate. To renew. The body does that too.’ She added, ‘And the mind. Compensates. Genius is a form of renewal, did you know that? It often comes from suffering.’

  They snipped the dead roses and the dahlias and asters and the red-hot pokers and the Japanese anemones.

  ‘It’s a defence,’ Anna said. ‘A way of coping with trauma.’

  She wasn’t sure what Anna was talking about but found the rhythm of the flowers and the precision of their cuts soothing.

  ‘I’m a city girl,’ Anna went on. ‘Like you. But when I come out here at the end of the day, I am restored. Look.’ She pointed to a moss-drenched birdbath that stood in the middle of the lawn. A great tit was splashing in the water. ‘The bird knows no stress. Has no memories, no anxieties. Only instincts. Lucky him.’