The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  Nurse Hoffmann went on leave the next day and did not return.

  ‘Gone.’ Agnes clicked her fingers as she walked past Dora at the morning Appell. ‘Like that. Seems you failed her with your dead baby. Tot. One word–’ she ran her finger across her throat. ‘That’s all it takes. But you,’ she pointed at Dora, laughed at her with black, crooked teeth, ‘are sitting pretty. Aren’t you the lucky one?’

  Agnes would betray Dora as soon as look at her, but this could only mean that List had come true on his promise. She could feel her heart quicken and pulse, hard with hope.

  ‘He’s one for the ladies, so I hear.’ Agnes stopped, faced Dora.

  ‘Who?’ A spasm tightened in Dora’s stomach.

  ‘Baron Aufsess,’ Agnes said. ‘Their number two. They say he’s taking over. Knackfuss has got the chop. Seems Aufsess has taken a personal interest in unser kleines arisches Mädchen.’ She chewed at a hair in her mouth, spitting it out on her tongue.

  A ball of bile clutched Dora’s throat and she began to retch, felt Agnes’s hand clamp over her arm as she dragged her free of the line.

  ‘List has gone too,’ Agnes said. ‘So no more special favours.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dora feigned indifference, but her tone was too eager. ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Hah,’ Agnes laughed, nodded. I know your secret. ‘Back to Germany. To answer questions. Seems he let a whole lot of Jews escape last year.’

  Dora shivered. Did that mean her? Had he known all along? Had protected her? Was facing a court martial because of her?

  ‘Your day orders,’ Agnes went on, ‘are to stay in the Revier, Kapo. But at night, Cinderella, you dance.’

  ‘Stop,’ Dora said. She was breathless, faint. Her knees began to buckle. He had spared her the brothel for a time, but he could safeguard her no longer. Dora could see the bedroom again with its thick flock wallpaper and velvet drapes, feel the thrusts of the men, the weight of their bodies. She could hear the bray of the bedsprings and the cries as they disgorged themselves in her. She was nothing to them but loin and skirt, flank and belly.

  ‘You need to get yourself another protector. Come.’ Agnes put her arm round Dora, an unexpected support. Led her into the kitchen, carried her bowl and cup into the dormitory, sat her down on a bunk.

  ‘Who is the nurse in the Revier?’ Dora said. ‘If Hoffmann’s gone?’

  ‘Seems you’re in charge.’

  Dora looked at Agnes, but her face showed nothing.

  ‘Let them find their own nurses,’ Dora said. ‘I won’t be party to it.’

  They could do what they liked with her. Send her to the laundry by day like the other women, or have her mending uniforms, webbing. She wasn’t going to be their nurse, sorting out their poxy soldiers.

  ‘Believe me,’ Agnes said, tearing her bread in two and placing half in Dora’s bowl. ‘Baron von Aufsess won’t let you get away with it.’

  ‘Let him shoot me,’ Dora said.

  ‘He has more imagination than that,’ Agnes said. ‘Why waste ammunition?’

  Dora picked at the bread Agnes had given her, grateful for the little extra. The Germans had no scruples and Dora wasn’t sure she was brave enough to step into the unknown. Was nursing a sick soldier by day so very wrong? Or comforting a lonely man at night?

  There had been no word from List. No word about him, either. The officers did not speak about him. Why should they? He was SS, they were Wehrmacht. He had nothing to do with them, wasn’t even based in Jersey. Even the SS officers on leave from France never spoke of him.

  The seasons drifted free of winter, into spring and summer. She was used to the routine, punch-drunk and battle-hardened. A gown for the evening, sitting on a stool at the bar, waiting, inured. She hoped for a protector. Someone to shield her. She’d look at each man, Are you the one? She couldn’t think of Vati, or Uncle Otto, List or even Geoffrey, any of the men she knew and loved, as she lay with her legs open and some pink Nazi with yellow bristles thrusting and thrashing, the smell of their must cloying in her nostrils. She thought of London then, walked herself up and down Fitzjohn’s Avenue, or recited the tube stations, Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park. Or the U-Bahn. Friedrichstrasse, Hackescher Markt, Alexanderplatz. The Beethoven symphonies. ‘Eroica’. ‘Pastoral’. ‘Choral’. Mahler. La-la-ing the themes in her head. Mahler. Mendelssohn. Jewish. Degenerate. She never wanted to go with another man in her life, knew the damage that was being done, the infections that would make her sterile. Void. Voided. Who would want her now? Used and abused. List wouldn’t touch her.

  She was no woman. She had no face, no features, nothing that spoke of her. Just cut and thrust. Mahler’s symphonies couldn’t help now, nor the streets and stations of home. She was a vacant, hollow frame lost in a no man’s land.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Agnes said.

  Dora had shrugged. With emptiness inside, what was there left to say?

  There were two of them that night, SS, visiting, from Belgium. Drunk. Dora was nothing, skittles in an alley. The Mauser, cold in her groin, the hard steel inside her. Russian roulette. She wished there’d been a bullet. She could take no more. Her desire for death was sudden, overwhelming.

  She’d have to be quick. Into the Revier. Her body was shuddering, uncontrollable motions that jerked through to her nerves and sinews. Hoffmann’s office, the key from the drawer, the medicine chest on the wall.

  Diamorphine. In case. In case the British invaded and they had to treat the wounded, though nobody admitted that. There was Salvarsan, but arsenic was a slow death. It had to be fast. Two vials. Three, to be sure. The syringes were in another cupboard. She fetched the largest, and a new needle. It must be sharp. She took out the plunger, placed it on the desk with the barrel, reached for the pipette, a bottle of distilled water. Keep calm. Professional. She was light-headed, fizzy with relief. It would all be over. She laid out the tourniquet. Taut around the left arm so her right hand was free, when it was time.

  She uncorked the first vial, staring at the white, odourless powder. Three vials. The solution would be strong. She filled the pipette from the bottle, picked up the barrel of the syringe. Intravenous. Would she have time to inject the whole lot before she fell asleep? Her hand trembled as she lifted the powder to pour into the barrel, small clinking tremolos, fine glass on fine glass, shaking.

  Her elbow was pushed and the vial flew across the desk, the powder spiralling as it went. Agnes pulled her away, spun her round so she faced her, grabbing the barrel of the syringe that was still in Dora’s hand. She was breathing hard, bellows of fury.

  ‘They’d torture you first. Or send you to Germany. It amounts to the same thing,’ she said. ‘I’ve had my eye on you.’

  Dora lunged across the desk, tried to grab the opened bottle. But Agnes was strong, pushed her away from it. ‘Those goons tonight,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stop them.’ She reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette butt and put it in her mouth. ‘Sadists.’

  There were some matches on the counter and she marched over to them. She went back to Dora, handed her the lit cigarette.

  ‘For you,’ said Agnes. ‘Have it.’

  Agnes never shared her cigarette hoard, Dora knew. She took a long drag. The smoke was hot and bitter. She started to cough, violent spasms as the smoke burned through to her lungs.

  ‘That’s your life, fighting back,’ Agnes said. Dora’s eyes had watered and Agnes’s face was a blur. ‘Still going to take it?’

  The spasm subsided, and Dora took another puff of the cigarette. She wasn’t a smoker, not really, not in the way that Agnes was. The smoke went to her head, made her dizzy.

  ‘Better?’ Agnes said.

  Ash fell off the cigarette onto the desk.

  ‘I know you lot all hate me,’ she went on. ‘But I have my reasons, and I do my best.’ She took the cigarette, now no more than a glowing stub, pulled at it long and hard so the ash flared bright, then she pinched it dead between her fingers as the smoke ble
w from her nostrils like a dragon’s snort. ‘Now,’ Agnes said. ‘Help me get this lot back so they don’t count a missing vial.’ She cupped her hand, scooped the ash along with the powder into a neat pile.

  ‘That’s–’

  Agnes looked up at Dora with a lopsided grin. ‘We all do our bit for the war effort,’ she said. Tilted her head back and laughed. This was the first time she had heard Agnes laugh. Dora opened her mouth, howled along, racking sobs and hiccups of grief and mirth.

  ‘The war will be over soon,’ Agnes said. ‘Hold on.’ She reached for a piece of paper, made a crude funnel, scooped the ash and diamorphine into it. ‘This place is full of shit,’ she went on, emptying the funnel into the vial. She replaced the stopper. ‘Rage against them. Not yourself. Someone has to talk, when it’s over, spill the beans. If they listen to a woman, that is.’

  She hooked one hand under Dora’s elbow and squeezed it. Tender, warm, human. Dora hadn’t had Agnes down as a kind person, or a generous one, but she leant her head against Agnes’s shoulder and Agnes didn’t push her away. It was enough. The urge to live was as sudden as her desire for death had been.

  The Hotel Maison Victor Hugo shuddered. They were in the courtyard, being counted. The planes were British, American. So close. She could smell the cordite, see the thick, black smoke and hear the blasting. Normandy. Over the water. It was just after dawn and the sky above was red and stormy. Bombing. Bombing. Wave after wave. She knew the year. She could keep hold of those dates. 1944. It was summer. Was it June? Aeroplanes bellowing overhead. The German guns pounded back, their recoil jarring the earth around. Still the planes flew. Dora smiled, almost laughed. Looked at the other women who were smiling. And Agnes. Looking up at the sky as if she had been beatified. It would be over soon.

  Another room was commandeered, turned into a ward. Soldiers with pneumonia and dysentery had been evacuated from the hospital to make way for the wounded from France. They were running out of medicines. Salvarsan. Prontosil. Saline. No supplies were coming in. The British had cut them off. Dora couldn’t understand. Why would they do that?

  Sick men with short tempers. Damp flannels on a fevered brow, cool water from a feeder. The kitchen was making the soup thinner, had cut the meals from four to three. Dora had twice the number of patients to look after, as well as having to clean the ward and make the beds, wash the bandages and boil up the instruments. She was inspected twice a day by whichever officer was on duty in the hotel. She had no special privileges now. Agnes was right.

  The women’s meals were cut from three to two, then two to one. Their soup was made even thinner. Dora could see the bones of her feet with the veins pumping proud. By night, Cinderella, you dance. Dora looked with envy at the soldiers’ food, hoping they’d leave something in the bowl for her. She’d risk the dysentery for a full stomach. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to the way hunger gnawed, the way it hurt and hurtled through her.

  The bombing went on through the sticky, stormy nights of July when the airless cellar steamed like a bath and the women sweated what little moisture they had. Through August when the nights grew shorter and the cruel pinch of autumn stalked the room. Dora could see the smoke on the Normandy coast form low, bulbous clouds, the sparks and fires burnishing them orange and green, blotting out the stars at night. Her head thundered from the noise, the constant boom-boom-boom of the guns, from the hunger that tightened round her temples, from the fear and the fury she saw in the soldiers’ eyes. Fear made them impotent, angry. Your fault, not mine. Impotence made them cruel. There were twenty-one women left. Most had been sent back to France before the blockade, though Dora couldn’t understand why. The last woman to arrive before the British cut them off was number three hundred and ninety-five.

  The officers were listening to the BBC, openly tuning in on the wireless in the mess. They didn’t notice Dora sitting in the corner. Jonah in the leviathan. Germany was in retreat, she learned. France was lost to the Allies. They couldn’t win this war, not now. It would only be a matter of time before it was over. Hold on, she told herself. That’s what Agnes had said. Hold on.

  But it didn’t end. The fallen leaves were dry and brittle beneath Dora’s feet, the dawn a distant promise. Every morning dragging herself up and out into the courtyard to stand in rags while they counted them. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear this. Knowing the war must end soon made the now unbearable. Hope, she thought, is the cruellest virtue. The damp November mornings gave way to the frosts of December.

  They’d put a Christmas tree up in the hallway. 1944. Dora wondered how many fires could be made from its trunk and branches, how many people would have a moment’s warmth, a cooked meal. She touched the soap in her pocket, hoping that List was safe. Perhaps he was as cut off as they were, as starving as she. Perhaps he hadn’t gone back to Germany. Perhaps he was still in Alderney. Perhaps they had surrendered, had rowed across when the sea was calm, with a white sheet blowing behind. Spare us, spare us. He’d tell the British, there is a Swedish woman. Please rescue her.

  January rimed the door handles and the soldiers’ bayonets. The fuel ran out and the Revier grew cold. Dora pulled extra blankets from the store, heaped them on the patients’ beds, wrapped one round herself so the cold didn’t nip her legs beneath the flimsy frock. Still she shivered in the night, swaddling the paltry blanket tight around her in a skein of rough wool. The soldiers grew depressed with the cold and the blockade, took to staying in their barracks rather than venturing out. Many nights, the women had nothing to do.

  The rations grew smaller and smaller, and they ran out of medicines. The general hospital was running out of space, so they’d commandeered the Revier. She looked through the names of the sick or wounded, at their faces, in case one was List, rescued and transported to Jersey. Oh, she’d nurse him back to health.

  Her father had taken charge. Brought in the wounded French to the German field hospital in Verdun, treated them as if they were no different. Was this the same? Would he be proud of her now? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure, anymore, what was right and what was not. Did war do that? Blur the boundaries? Or just this one? She had been in the brothel eighteen months now. Her body had been pimped and polluted, her spirit crippled and abused. She stood crooked now, the world lopsided around her. She had been a nurse, once, her father a doctor. He’d won the Iron Cross. Jewish. She pulled the coarse army-issue blanket around her shoulders. Did that make her a liar and a coward?

  Agnes took to hanging round the Revier. Sat in the ward playing cards with the soldiers, making dirty jokes, turning the place into a bawdy house.

  ‘There are thirty-two patients here,’ Dora said.

  ‘Men.’

  ‘This is a hospital,’ Dora said. ‘Not a brothel.’

  ‘Cheers them up,’ she said.

  ‘They are the enemy.’

  ‘You take care of their flesh,’ Agnes said. ‘Leave their spirits to me.’ Sitting on a soldier’s bed, smirking, mouthing Kapo. Doing the Germans’ dirty business.

  ‘We’re two of a kind,’ Agnes said. ‘You and me.’

  Perhaps we are, Dora thought. Perhaps.

  Time crawled through the final weeks of that war, listless and aimless, made a nonsense of the days and hours. March limped along. April. Trees turned green and daffodils nodded on the front lawn of the hotel gardens. The officers hung around the mess while the soldiers kicked stones across the yard. They talked openly now. Mussolini dead. Hitler dead. And still it dragged on. The women carried out their duties, sluggish and ramshackle in their movements. The reprimands lost their sting, even though the beatings were harsher than ever. They have to take it out on someone, Dora thought. Women in the line of fire. The orders still came from the Feldkommandantur, but no one rushed anymore.

  Only Aufsess kept his appetite for war, his loyalties to the dead Führer. He had no support, not if the talk among the officers was right. It was as if the beast was devouring itself. They waited for the Briti
sh, but the British did not come.

  She wanted to go home, to be in the apartment in Charlottenburg, to eat cake, drink coffee. Real coffee. The Saturday ritual with her aunts in Berlin, their words bouncing off the cornices in the tall white ceilings of their apartment as they nibbled chocolate and sipped at bone-china cups while Dora handed round the fluted silver sugar dish, with tiny tongs. She loved to listen to their German, yearned to talk it again. She wanted to be snuggled up in bed beneath the fluffy Federbett, while her father read her stories. She was homesick. A pining as powerful as a lightning surge.

  It was May, the leaves on the trees in the gardens freshly minted, the peonies in the hotel gardens about to bloom, voluminous and gaudy. Vulgar plants, Dora thought, but she was glad to see them, for it meant the winter was finally over now and it couldn’t be long. Germany was in chaos, if what the officers said was right, no one was in charge. Berlin was in ruins, the Russians were at the gates.

  And then the bells began to ring and ring and ring. They carried on through the day, into the evening. Dora couldn’t think, wasn’t sure she’d remember this day. The news had come through, relief among the German squaddies thick and tangible, drunk on happiness and home-made schnapps. Dora heard someone say that Aufsess and some of the senior officers were refusing to surrender. She wondered if he’d kill them all first. And List. Had he surrendered? She looked out of the window, saw British soldiers surrounding the hotel, knew the German game was up, as the bells pealed and the changes rang.

  There was a half-bottle of brandy in the back of the medicine cabinet. She climbed onto a chair, fished on the top shelf and pulled the bottle out. Cradled it like a baby in the crook of her arm, walked away from the Revier. Down the stairs, through the hallway where the light from the landing shone through the motes of dust onto the floor, showing up the balls of fluff that had gathered in the corners.

  Dora walked past the mess. The empty glasses were still on the bar, the ashtrays full and unemptied. A game of bridge had been abandoned, the cards faced down in orderly piles on the four sides of the card table. Her roster had been open on the maître d’s lectern. Dora took the page by the corner, ripped it free of the ledger, tore it in half, and half again. Threw the pieces on the floor.