The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  She walked down the stairs, into the dormitory. Some of the women were sitting on the lower bunks, or squatting on the floor. Others had climbed on their beds and peered up through the light well. No one spoke. Too frightened to walk through the open door.

  Dora held up the bottle. ‘Pour la libération,’ she said.

  There were fifteen women.

  ‘Bring your tins.’

  She poured the brandy. The women’s hands were shaking and Dora had to hold the cups to steady them. The smell of the alcohol wafted up, pure and clean, making her eyes water. Her father had had a bottle of cognac that he’d brought out on special occasions, Martell 1877.

  Dora began to cry, sobs of relief, and joy, of remembrance and sadness. Think of the happy times. The others cried too, put the brandy to their lips, sipped it on their empty, starving stomachs. Sometimes, Doralein, we gave them brandy in Verdun. There was nothing more to be done.

  They wept, a phalanx of emaciated, ululating women, hiccupping.

  La guerre est terminée. The war was over.

  Dora went into a corner of the dormitory and sat with her brandy. She had dreamed of this day, how she’d dance in the street, throw balls in the air, sing and scream and jump. She’d imagined running around, hugging and kissing everyone she met, in a joyous frenzy of relief. Now that day was here, she felt weary and uncertain. She wanted to be alone. She looked over at the other women. They would be sent back to France, to their villages and families. She could hear them talking about it now, Forget this war, get back to normal, the brandy slurring their words. Let them get drunk. She thought of Uncle Otto. The last she’d heard, he had been interned, an enemy alien. She had no idea if he was still in prison. He could be dead. She would have no one. Were her aunts still alive in Germany?

  Where would she go? Where was her home? She had no papers. Was there a record of them in London? Was she still a refugee? She had to find out what had happened to List. The Germans would know where he was. She’d find him. He’d said he’d take her away. Did he say he’d keep her safe? She couldn’t remember. He’d look after her. He’d said she’d be his mistress, at another time.

  And Geoffrey? She couldn’t imagine that she had once loved him too. It was so long ago. She was a different woman then. If he had survived, she could never tell him about her war. Or anyone. How she had sex with the officers as if she were a whore, nursed the enemy soldiers as if they were her own. Never put up a moment’s resistance. Too cowardly to stand up to them. She had looked forward to Maximilian List’s visits. Her earlier love for Geoffrey seemed from another time. List was the man who loomed in her imagination, her memory. Geoffrey was a good man, despite his youthful indiscretions. If he was alive, it was best she never met him again. Best he forget her.

  Her old life was over. She knew that, then. La vie est terminée.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JOE

  Jersey: June 1985

  What Joe couldn’t tell Geoffrey was how Trude still ate at his heart. There were many ways to sin, many ways to break a spirit. He had believed Trude. Believed in her. Two souls lost in the moil of war. He squeezed his fingers into his eyes.

  ‘Will you bid me goodnight?’ he said. He was fatigued, a weariness that chiselled at bones and sinews, made it hard to put one step in front of another, one thought ahead of another. He felt those moments in his body as he relived them in his memory. He’d never revealed these sins, not in forty years. Oh, he’d told Geoffrey bits in the early days. Ernst. The lice. The hunger that reduced them all to animals scratching for life, thinking of nothing else. Once or twice he’d talked of cruelty, but not the sins. Geoffrey knew all about that too, had the same stories to tell.

  A time came when there was nothing left to say and neither spoke of the war again. The memories were stashed away to gather dust, untouched, unvisited.

  ‘Can you put yourself to bed this evening?’

  ‘Turn on the light before you go.’ Geoffrey’s voice was weak.

  Joe pushed himself up, flicked on the switch. The fluorescent strip flashed before it filled the room with a harsh white light. Geoffrey was gripping the armrest, grey bone through faded skin, knuckles now a range of frailty. His handkerchief was on his lap.

  ‘That was a shocking story, Joe,’ he said, softly.

  He looked as if he had aged a decade in the last hour, his muscles sagging and his neck scrawny. Joe could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall, the whiskers on his neck white and sharp. He’d have to shave him properly tomorrow. Joe could see he wanted to talk. He couldn’t bid him goodnight, not right now.

  ‘And you had it wrapped up tight inside you, all this time.’

  ‘Like you bottled Dora’s story inside of you,’ Joe said. Geoffrey shook his head, tut-tut, dabbed at his eyes and wiped drool from his nose and mouth. Joe stared into the distance, at the damson light outside. Two old men, he thought, weighed down by the stones of guilt.

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Joe said, after a while. He meant, it played on my mind. The nightmares. He walked back to the chair. Geoffrey looked alone, in pain.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill the cook,’ he said, lowering himself into the seat, elbows on the armrest. ‘But no man has the right to judge who lives or dies. We were all starving. We knew the pain of that. The obsession. To deny a man food, that is a terrible crime.’

  Geoffrey nodded.

  Joe added, ‘But I don’t need to tell you this.’ He had read about the trials in Hamburg after the war, the evils done in Neuengamme. Geoffrey hadn’t wanted to stand witness, to stand out, as he said, but he’d followed them in the papers and on the wireless, day in, day out. I knew him. Yes, that happened. ‘What had that old man ever done?’ Standing with his bowl, so meek. ‘I meant to teach the cook a lesson. I didn’t mean him harm. No, Geoffrey, that wasn’t my sin.’

  Talking gave Joe energy again. He should stay, keep Geoffrey company. Geoffrey was upset. This was the longest conversation Joe could remember them having, a real heart-to-heart. There was a drop of Jameson left in the bottle. Joe reached for his glass, topped it up, showed the bottle to Geoffrey. He shook his head.

  ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Denying the dead a proper funeral,’ Joe went on. ‘Not giving the poor souls back to the ground so their bodies could rise again. That was a sin.’

  He took a sip of the whiskey. He hadn’t drunk like this for forty years, could feel his brain swell and shrink beneath his skull, hammer for mercy.

  ‘But it wasn’t my sin,’ Joe went on, ‘and there was nothing I could do, except say a prayer.’

  Geoffrey nodded.

  It’s past his bedtime, Joe thought. ‘Will I help you upstairs?’ he said.

  ‘Presently. Go on.’

  ‘The sin I committed was in believing there was a God in heaven on the first day of hell on earth. So I said the prayers, a requiem in my head, every night, in the Latin too.’

  ‘How can that be a sin?’ Geoffrey said.

  Joe shrugged. ‘It was a blasphemy, all the same. You see, I had stopped believing in a God. It was all a pretence. Lying, that I was a priest. I was no more a priest than you or Ernst.’

  ‘If it gave them succour,’ Geoffrey said, ‘was that so bad?’

  ‘They were dead,’ Joe said. ‘I couldn’t help the living, only the dead.’ He tipped the last of the whiskey into his glass, the liquid forming rainbows as it swirled and settled. The clock in the hall worked itself up, chimed once.

  ‘Trude, now,’ Geoffrey said after a while. ‘You got her into trouble, trying to save Dora and myself. Do you count that as one of your sins?’

  ‘Trude,’ Joe said. He put down his glass and put a hand under Geoffrey’s elbow, pulling him to his feet. When Geoffrey leaned on him now, his body was light as a bird. He’d lost flesh, his skin translucent, his veins blue rivers. Joe could feel the bones beneath, see the liver spots on his face and hands. When had Geoffrey got so old?

  ‘You’ve been go
od to me, Joe,’ Geoffrey said. ‘And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘You tell me that every night,’ Joe said. He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but he loved Geoffrey. Joe had wanted a wife at one time. He wasn’t much to look at it, no more than a penny titch of a man with little moral fibre, but he was a grafter and that counted for a lot in a husband. But women were fickle, untrustworthy. He had never found another one to his liking and he’d grown content over the years, he and Geoffrey.

  ‘Trude,’ Geoffrey said.

  It was a while before Joe answered.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there’s the thing. I was green. An innocent. The cruelty of it. The cruelty of them.’ Added, ‘No, she was not my sin. I have no guilt for her. Not now.’

  And it wasn’t just Trude. Survival was a strange beast, seeing the man behind the uniform, we’re all in this together.

  Alderney: February – July 1944

  Joe saw the steel on the toecaps, the blacking on the boots, and looked up. Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List. The Kommandant. Trude’s killer. Joe had seen him in the camp and on the fortifications. Knew he had orders to kill them all if the British invaded. Round them up in the tunnel that led from the camp to his house and shoot. Rat-a-tat-tat. He’d never been this close to him, one on one, not since that interrogation with Knackfuss. He wanted to swing his shovel, smash his head in, bury him with the cook. Joe was breathing hard, could hear his lungs creak with the strain. He gripped his shovel, poised to lift it. He didn’t have the strength, not to swing it like a caber and floor the bastard. He flung it on the ground.

  ‘I hear you killed a man last night.’ List’s English was excellent.

  Joe breathed in again hard, stared out to sea. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, not looking at him.

  ‘Intention does not come into it. That man was in my charge.’

  Joe’s intestines churned, an empty stomach that burned bile. He wanted to spit it out, but that would get him a beating. He was in enough trouble as it was. He looked at the ground, at the lugworm casts in the sand. The little dunlins and sandpipers would have a feast if they came now.

  ‘I heard you were a boxing champion,’ List said.

  Joe nodded.

  ‘A runt like you, beat the Wehrmacht champion.’

  How did List know? Joe had told no one, not on Alderney. Pierre had been right. Let him win. He had humiliated the Germans. They took their time, but they took their revenge. He knew then. Sylt was his punishment.

  ‘I have a job for you,’ List said. ‘My men. They’re bored in these long winter nights. You will teach them how to box.’

  Joe looked at the Kommandant. Was that sarcasm playing on his lips? Was he being set up? Again? Fail my men, and there will be consequences. Joe could see Ernst run a finger across his throat. What choice did he have? He wasn’t fit, wasn’t fed like a boxer. When were they going to hang him? He could feel List’s eyes bearing down, the presence of the man, too close.

  ‘In the meantime, report to the kitchen. You are the new cook. The new Kapo.’

  He nodded at the corpses waiting to be buried in the sand and Joe lifted his spade, ready to shovel again, List’s clear grey eyes boring into him.

  There it was. Kruk-kruk-kruk. Joe couldn’t help himself. Looked up. Gannets. Not one solitary bird, but several.

  ‘Do you know these birds?’ List was training his binoculars on them as they flew over the waves.

  ‘Gannets,’ Joe said, despite himself. He didn’t want to talk to this man, this murderer.

  ‘Northern gannets. Morus bassanus,’ List said. ‘They have a colony on Les Etacs. That little rock, over there. Here is too noisy for them, with all the booming and the banging. Nobody fishes the water now, so food is plentiful, and that rock is safe.’ He turned to Joe. ‘There are benefits to war. We Germans love nature.’

  There was life, in all of this, life.

  ‘I like birds,’ List went on. ‘There are not so many in Alderney. We have disturbed their habitats. But Jersey now, there’s a place for birds. Sea birds, especially. Puffins. Do you know about puffins?’

  Joe said nothing.

  ‘Answer me,’ List said.

  ‘They’re a comical little bird.’ His teeth were clenched, and Joe spat the words. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘My girlfriend and I watch them all the time,’ List said. ‘Trude thinks they have a face like a clown. Would you agree?’

  Trude. Joe heard no more. Trude was dead. Could this be a different Trude? It was a common name, surely, like Mary, or Joan.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ List said. ‘She’s a nurse, you know.’

  This man spoke of her as if she was alive, when he had killed her. Mocking her memory. He wanted to fly at List, strangle him so his eyes bulged from their sockets and his voice snapped in two.

  ‘You murdered her.’ He didn’t watch his language. He had nothing to lose. ‘Before my eyes.’

  ‘You saw her die?’ List said, calm as a glider.

  That pistol crack, that thump as she fell. He’d heard for sure. They’d murdered her, her face too frightened to look up at Joe. He hadn’t saved her. Couldn’t save her. But no, he hadn’t seen her die, except in his mind’s eye.

  ‘It was a game.’ List was laughing. ‘For our amusement.’

  ‘Game?’ Joe’s voice broke like a boy’s. He couldn’t think. What kind of game was that? Trude? He loved her, thought she loved him. He would have told her he loved her, would have asked her, Do you love me? had they had more time. Had it all been a game with her? Was he her plaything? Had she toyed with him? He gave up everything for her. Would have married her.

  ‘Would you like to look through my binoculars?’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘Report to the kitchen when you’ve done this,’ List said.

  He turned, his heel scouring the sand. Joe watched him walk towards the dunes. Despite the jacket, Joe shivered and slumped to the ground, bones of marrow, the soft putty of his skeleton. List disappeared from view. He shuddered, the hairs on his arms standing up as if his grave had been dug and trampled over. An animal scurried in the sandy undergrowth, made him jump. Flashed. Gone. A dormouse? A field mouse? Perhaps a vole. A mole. There were molehills beyond the dunes, soft hillocks of chewed earth. Did moles chew? Or scratch? Worms chewed. He could hear them, a soft percussion in the silence, as the ocean breathed in and out.

  The sun sat crooked in the sky. His sin. His original sin. He had believed Trude. Put his trust in her. All along, she was untrue. Why? Why him? He’d led her to the dell. Betrayed Geoffrey and the nurse. Were they still alive? The two labourers, they were dead. Four people, and the cook made five. Five people condemned because he had been too vain to resist. For what? She had promised him heaven but gave him hell. He was a murderer. A coward. A liar. He’d lived a lie as a priest and this was his punishment.

  The cold muzzle pressed into his cheek.

  ‘Aufstehen!’

  Joe breathed in sharp, looked up at the guard holding the gun, his body foreshortened, silhouetted against the sun.

  ‘Shoot me,’ Joe said.

  The guard kicked his thigh. ‘Aufstehen.’

  Joe pushed himself onto his feet. He could make a run for it, head for the sea, force the guard to shoot him, kill him outright. Joe looked at the beach. He was too scared to run, too feeble to decide. Stumbled back along the path with the Mauser pressing into his back.

  A collaborator. A Kapo.

  A cuckold.

  Why couldn’t he stay in the shelter of the marram grass, live on berries and fungus, sleep in the moss with the breeze of the sea?

  Cook. His turn to field the suspicious, starving eyes of the inmates, the accusations. You do all right for yourselves, you cooks. Bastard Kapos.

  Ernst had put his arm on Joe’s shoulder. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘You’re not guilty for what you did. You’re the victim.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the cook,’ Joe said. ‘There
was so much more. So many more.’ Where could he begin? All his life. A lie.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ Ernst said, shaking his head, wagging his finger. ‘Think to the future. You and me, we’re history’s witnesses. Be strong, comrade. The past will look different in a few years.’

  Joe lay on his bunk as the men moaned in their sleep. This was his cross. Guilt. Solid and heavy, boxing him in and shackling him tight. What was doubt now? Nothing but a flimsy cross made of palm fronds.

  If he was to live, then he’d make amends.

  Cabbage. Potatoes. Once or twice a sausage. Joe learned how to bake bread out of rough wheat, chalk and rye. He caught a rabbit once. Made a catapult and brought it down, but what was a rabbit among so many hungry men? He couldn’t perform miracles. The thing was, there wasn’t enough food, so the other Kapos and the guards turned a blind eye when the prisoners went foraging. Joe put his treasures in the stews, most of the time. Found a stash of wood ears growing from a dead elder tree. They called it Jew’s ear in Ireland, but he wouldn’t do that now. There was stinking onion and wild garlic, if you knew where to look. Rock samphire and nettles in the spring. He’d spotted wild carrots too. A little extra goodness, some flavour in the soup. Leftovers he smuggled back to the hut and handed round. Most of the time. A bite for Joe, first.

  The SS had pigs and a cow. Joe wasn’t the son of a butcher for nothing. He’d snatch a piglet if he could. Have it slaughtered, stripped and stewed before you could say SS-Totenkopfverbände, pickle the belly, salt the back. And when the cow had done her time, he’d graze her well and make her happy and lead her into her stall with a manger full of hay and a salt lick the size of Derry. She wouldn’t smell the singe of death or listen to its bellows. ‘For that would spoil the meat,’ his daidí used to say. ‘Sweet and tender like butter itself. Not some old ox with rubber muscles.’ Though now, Joe thought, any old ox would do. Even a leather strap.