The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Oh no it won’t’ – his tone a balance between humour and annoyance, the closest he would allow. ‘In any case, that’s as maybe, and good old maybe is always unpredictable.’

  Why do I let such idiocies through my head? No one was steadier on his feet, and his health was robust. He seemed forty rather than sixty. ‘And so do you,’ he said when she told him.

  He had climbed more steps and hills than she could remember. Choosing holidays, he opted always for inland, as far from the coast as they could get, somewhere in the Derbyshire hills, the Malverns, or Scotland. He was never happier than when they set out after breakfast from the hotel, walking a path between trees and bushes, into the open of higher land.

  ‘It’s like being in the clouds,’ he said. ‘It’s like flying in an open cockpit.’ Then his talk would stop, and he would go on, locked in for a while until: ‘At least I can feel the wind, and that’s worth a lot. There’s heather in it. Flowers and trees as well. The flowers are over there. Let’s look at them.’ He stroked the stalks, stamens and petals, bending down for a closer look, touching without damage.

  The bed hardly needed making, they slept so deeply in their separate dreams, but she pulled it apart for freshness. The room was large and gloomy, backing against the cliff. She shook the sheets smooth, pulled blankets straight and folded them in, banged both pillows into shape. At least the little iron fireplace when filled and glowing took out the damp of winter, the room a delight to be in then, shadows on the walls at dusk. Howard couldn’t see them, though said he could, at the sparking of the flames, lying in bed with a three-day flu last winter. ‘The first days out of action,’ he said, ‘since the crash.’

  Two people couldn’t be ill in the same house, so no debilitating flu or colds for her. Howard knew this only too well, and swore he would keep fit till his dying day.

  After bumping the Electrolux around the living room she noted its bag was full. Hadn’t emptied it for months, so unclipped the top, lifted out the paper container bulging with dust, and walked through to thump it into the kitchen bin. Fitted with another, the nozzle sucked perfectly, though there was little enough to feed on.

  She cleaned the house while he was out, easier than when weather kept him in, even though he sat in the wireless room, as he called it, listening to his eternal and mysterious morse. She liked him to go out because he was always more cheerful when he got back. He was like a baby to look after, but would die of shame if she told him. Which he might have assumed was why she hadn’t had any, not knowing the reason had been hers more than his.

  She fought against tolerating vain regrets. Regrets poisoned the soul, and the soul seemed frail enough at times, Howard knowing he can’t – she thought – tell me how nice I look, though he was able to at the beginning and did so in such a way as to last me for life. But I always dress for him and look smart, so that people will think the same when I walk out with him. And I dress as well as I can when in the house because it makes me feel good, and there’s always the thought that if there was a sudden miraculous peeling back of his blindness, I would want him to see me at my best.

  It was essential to tidy up so that he would know where everything was. If an ashtray or chair, or one of his three pipes was out of place, his system for getting about without knocking anything over would, he said, go for a burton, so she took care that nothing did. If he asked where something was it would be that even she couldn’t find it. The house was his universe, every object one of the innumerable stars that lit up in his darkness for guidance. As long as he could find the domestic radio, however, and the record player to put on a piece by Elgar or Gustav Holst, all was right in the world.

  She cleared the plates, all shining and stacked. He would be back for coffee, the newspaper under his arm. ‘Read me whatever you think I might find interesting.’ There was usually one item or another, to be marked with a pencil and reserved for tea time or after supper.

  She kept two pencils by the telephone, in case the point of one snapped off while writing a message. Sharpening both, though they had hardly been used, she threw the shavings into the bin. If she went out Howard could just legibly write the number of anyone who called and wanted to hear from her. Sometimes they descended the hill together, but mostly she let him go. He wandered everywhere, and came back happy, though occasionally exhausted. Or so it seemed. He always denied it. When she went with him he became irritated by the smallest thing, such as imagining she resented going slow for him. It galled him, but not her. When they got home he was burning with inadequacy, even after all these years, as if thinking he had failed to lead her to somewhere wonderful, or hadn’t brought her home to a heaven more alluring than the one they had left.

  They talked about it. She never asked, but he volunteered. ‘The secrets of my blasted heart,’ he said, ‘are all I have to give you. I want to be more than your ball and chain of flesh. I want to lead you to I don’t know where. But it’s a yearning, you see, and it gets me at the heart every so often. I can’t think why.’

  ‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought me there already.’ She proved it with a kiss, for it was true enough, had to be, after living so long in stasis, never moving beyond the vivid days of their youth. For his sake there was much loving she had to feel, yet did so with neither thought nor effort.

  On one level they lived beyond hope, but what loss was that? There never had been any after his crash, and being without hope was the unspoken compact, the firmest base there was, reassuring and reinforcing. To live without hope was less of a sin, and less cruel, because the peace it gave was the bedrock of an understanding which made them feel ageless to each other.

  In the small room side on to the house she dusted his heavy black-cased wireless with its curving multicoloured window and thick control wheel for changing stations. The new radio she had sent for from Derbyshire lay by its side, a key pad in front, and the brass morse key which he played from time to time. ‘My therapy,’ he said, ‘for when I want to shift the black dog from my shoulders. The black dog hates the sound of morse. It terrifies him. He runs back to his hidey-hole and leaves me alone.’

  When he sat with the door closed, earphones clamped on, he was in a world which nobody could share, a world in which ears were everything and lack of sight not an issue. Only his rounded back was visible through the glass panel, animally moving as he put what he was hearing onto the heavy sit-up-and-beg old capital-letter typewriter. The electricity of a modern one would, he said, distort the reception, and make it no easier to use.

  Nothing needed to be touched, a stack of paper in its usual position, a silver propelling pencil by its side which he’d kept from his schooldays, maybe as a symbol of hope (no one could be entirely without it) that one day enough sight would come back for him to handwrite what he heard.

  Once when he was out she’d polished the brass parts of his morse key to a brilliant shine, wondering if he would notice. He did: ‘I can see it glowing. Looks wonderful, I’m sure. Thank you, my love.’ But of course, he had picked up the Duraglit smell.

  The ashtray needed emptying, dottle and match sticks overspilling. He often did the job himself, anything to help, but she took it to the sink for a scouring and brought it back. The wastepaper basket was usually full of discarded transcripts, mere formulae to her, ciphers and letter codes she would never ask him to explain, even if he could, but the last few days he had hardly been in his wireless room, a worrying loss of interest, as if no longer drawn by his alternative world, without which he could neither fuel nor sustain his own. Yet after such periods he always went back to it, and she wondered which was more real to him.

  When the wireless didn’t hold him he brooded, though he would use a different word. Lassitude was obvious in every bone. He sat for hours, unable to move and then, not knowing how or why, he got up, took cap and stick, and set off down the steps, to walk for miles along the beach and about the town. When he came cheerfully into the house he said he hadn’t felt at all tired
on his expedition, which at least proved that such lack of energy hadn’t been due to illness. ‘But then, it never would be,’ she said aloud, her palm pressing the grinder whose noise for a moment crushed out her thoughts.

  It was as if a shadow had slid across the window and come into the room. She knew what it was. The heart was as fluctuating as the weather. Only a looking glass fixed its effects on the face, as much as anything could, just as the weather was still, only a moment before altering for better or worse. If you accepted such rhythms, as of course you had to, existence was tolerable, hardly ever unpleasant for long.

  On first hearing the news of his blindness she said she would never look in a mirror again, because Howard could not, but there had to be one in the house otherwise he would wonder why, and she would have to tell him the reason.

  The mirror showed everything she didn’t want to know about herself, so she avoided it as far as possible, only able to look by persuading herself that the image was of somebody else: easy with the small make-up used to treat a glass off-handedly, as if it had no ability to destroy her equanimity, as nothing must be allowed to since recovering from her abortion.

  Her whole past with Howard, their entire life in fact, was connected to an event he was never to know about. The episode, forgotten for months at a time, had lately corroded her with haunting affect, the shadow almost meteorological – to use one of Howard’s words – in its unpleasantness. She didn’t see any justice in it, felt she had paid the price in dealing with the event all those years ago. Sensing the threat now, she let the murky pictures run through her mind so as to get rid of them sooner, though knowing they wouldn’t pass so willingly, having a power greater than her own.

  The sciatic pain was as if a scalpel had gone through the nerves of her lower back. She sat by the Formica-topped table to reinforce herself, to stiffen her body like a box hedge against the wind. The colours were always dark from that time, but the day it happened had been sunny. She had called on him at his large gewgaw-strewn flat on Baker Street, passing while in town to say hello.

  Dear Uncle Charles, she had known him from birth. ‘Let me show you around this rambling old place,’ he said. There was no reason to say no but if she had would it have been different? He had been watching her, and waiting. She was happy, and unknowing. In the bedroom she had no chance. He was a tall lumbering man, and she was too shocked to shout or scream. The bang across the head, and his cry – almost a shriek – that she should be ‘sensible’, made it impossible except to let him do what he wanted.

  He babbled, while holding her in a maniacal grip, that he had needed her (his words) for as long as he could remember. He was incomprehensible. She had loved him as an uncle for his eternal kindness, though not in this way, if this was love, which he swore it was.

  He said afterwards that she had encouraged him. The violence that was done to her was meaningless but meant everything. He had made her, and the blood proved it. Everything must be kept quiet, he said afterwards, a secret between them alone. He paid for the abortion, arranged it all, but only ever touched her that one time, terrified at what he had done. A prostitute would have been cheaper, but it was her he wanted. The operation (hard to say the real word) was so botched that she couldn’t have children even if she had wanted.

  She ran the whole thing through, hoping it would be goodbye, at least for a while. Charles had died of cancer, brought on, she liked to think, by his guilt, and grief which often at the time seemed genuine enough, and reinforced by his suffering which she could hardly bear to watch when her unknowing parents took her to see him in the hospital, though nowadays she burned with shame at having felt such sorrow. How could it have happened so that no one in the family knew? He was so skilled, or frightened, and she so compliant at evading and avoiding all signs of distress. If there had been more than one side to her then, there was only one now.

  She went to church occasionally, hoping to retrieve her faith, but none had come back as yet. Howard thought it was for spiritual comfort due to the isolation of their lives, and to vary her days. They had no secrets above the level at which she chose to live, and at which she had decided he must live. The shame and disgrace would never be told.

  In his will Charles had made over the house for her to live in with Howard after they were married. ‘It’s a fit place for a hero,’ he said, laughing slyly as he sliced the seed cake on the tea tray when he told her. ‘And besides that, you might call it just one more bit for the war effort on my part. After all, I have this flat in town, and nobody needs more than one place.’ He had been in Whitehall throughout the war, so she didn’t see how he could feel guilty about that as well.

  They stood in the rain by his grave side, and heard the panegyrics at the memorial service, Howard squeezing her hand at each remark about the dead man’s generosity and manliness. Even before death Charles had sent money to augment Howard’s pension, and then in his will left an income for them as well.

  Not to accept anything would have led Howard to ask why. He reacted sensibly to their prosperity, and was grateful. ‘We must keep Charles’ photograph always on a table in the living room. He’s been marvellous, and deserves as much.’ And so they did, but she bought an identical frame for the blank side of the picture, a white sheet instead of a face, not wanting to see his staring grey eyes and bushy moustache (sheer black, though it must have been dyed) whenever she turned her head, a reminder too hard to bear. If visitors or any of the family called – rare events – she made sure to replace the real thing, in case comment was made. Not having a frame at all was impossible, because Howard could feel his way to every object in the room.

  They lived just that much better by having the house and what Charles had given but, all the same, she was never free of the feeling that she had sold her soul to the devil by not having told Howard about the abortion before her marriage – there, she had said the word now – though if she had there might have been no Howard, such an event impossible for him to live with.

  The recall passed at its usual slow rate, but her hands shook and she felt unsafe on her legs while flicking the kettle switch and pouring coffee grains into the pot.

  THREE

  Ebony the cat came into the wireless room, attracted as usual by squeals of morse, as if a flight of colourful and unheeding small birds had broken loose from their cage. Howard kept the door a few inches open so that he wouldn’t feel entirely cut off from Laura and the rest of the house. She liked it that way, though with earphones clamped on he was deaf to whatever might happen beyond his aetherised world.

  Sometimes he took the phones off and pulled out the plug, let morse ring from the speaker and ripple through the house, telling the walls he was alive to their constrictions, though hoping such self-indulgent noise didn’t worry Laura.

  He dropped an arm to compensate the disappointed cat, fingers riffling through fur, thinking he could tell the difference in texture while crossing from black to the small white patch near its nose, as the whorls of milk mixing with the coffee might, he imagined, be felt by a slowly stirring spoon. He could trace flowers on the wallpaper and notice where colours changed. No, it was all in the mind, except that sometimes his fingers had eyes.

  She picked up the coffee cup. ‘Anything interesting this morning?’ He touched her hand. ‘I’m just trawling. There’s a liner called the Gracchi, calling Rome International Radio, and getting no reply. Then again there’s a Russian ship leaving England and heading for Lithuania with a hundred used cars on board. Wouldn’t like to say where they came from.’

  She took the cat for company. ‘Come on, Ebony.’

  His wireless room was at the weather end of the house, the wind a fine old comb-and-paper tune today. A slit of the window left open took his pipe smoke away. That’s how the music was made, a howling and forlorn oratorio playing from wall to wall. So much noise gusting would disorientate his senses if he went for a walk, so it was as well to be sheltered.

  Headphones back in place, he
tuned in to the German Numbers Woman, who spoke continuous numbers in a tone suggesting she was the last woman on earth, enunciating from a bunker in the middle of some Eastern European forest, her voice on the edge of breathlessness, as if fearful of an assassin breaking in: ‘SIEBEN – ACHT – EINS – NEUN – DREI – FUNF – VIER – ZWEI – SECHS – ACHT – EINS – SECHS – EINS – NEUN.’

  On and on. She spoke in the ghostly tone of a person who might have a gun by the microphone, and Howard had listened so often to the deliberately mesmerising recitation of figures that he felt he knew much about her. The question was whether anyone else was listening, and taking down her endless numbers, and if so not only who, but what use they were making of them.

  On this earth everything was for a purpose, but what hers was he could never know. Or could he? He could but go on intercepting, though he only did so now and again to check that she was still there, and she always was. She spoke on several frequencies simultaneously (he’d found her on eleven different ones already. Others he hadn’t bothered to log) so her equipment was not simple. She was no pirate of the airwaves prating for the fun of it, though if she had been a classical pirate he could imagine her making people walk the plank, counting them one by one down to the sharks in her deliberate, impersonal, cold-hearted voice.

  And yet, and yet, perhaps she was misjudged. By eternally speaking numbers she was merely doing her job, and not for much money, either. Occasionally the frequencies were closed down, and she was off the air for a time. Then it could be she had caught the bus like any ordinary person, and gone home to feed her children – after shopping on the way to find what treats she could buy for their supper.