The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  But to hear Judy and her friend he wouldn’t have to wait so long. The weather forecast from Voronezh taxed his wits, likewise that from the North Atlantic. Search and rescue messages told which if any sailors were in peril on the sea though not, dear God, that one of them was Judy. A voice in the night, calling her Spanish lover, sweetly through growling static, was as yet unheard. Their recently discovered method of communication galled her when she called to no avail, the aether making difficulties which might in the end do little for their relationship. The maleficent sunspots played bedlam with communication, much, he supposed, to Mercury’s disapproval.

  The cold coffee, sickening but drunk nonetheless, was Laura’s last gesture before giving him up to the airwaves, knowing it was more kindly than scorning his mundane searches, convinced she would never lose him no matter how many light years he travelled.

  Aware of the wavelength on which to find Judy, he even so skated across other stations so as not to come under the influence too soon. But he heard her, anyway, couldn’t resist, as if he had crept helplessly into a listening position close by.

  ‘Miss you a lot’ – clear words came out of mush that sounded like fat bubbling hectically in a frying pan. ‘I’ve just been on shore for a glass of vermouth. Can you still hear me, Carla? Maybe you have a problem with your transmitter.’

  Carla:‘No, it’s all right.’

  Judy:‘I want to see you. Anywhere will do. Can I see you in Izmir?’

  Carla:‘Not possible.’

  Judy:‘Typical! Where are you tonight?’

  Carla:‘Ajaccio. Where you?’

  Judy:‘Naxos, hundreds of miles away.’

  Carla:‘Bloody ’ell!’

  Judy:‘It’s nice to hear your voice. I really miss you. I want to be with you. I want to stay with you always.’

  Carla:‘Me too. I hear you very well tonight, as if you close. I want to kiss you.’

  Judy:‘It’s terrible that we can’t. I was lying on deck today in the sun, thinking about us in Corinth, when you first kissed me. It’s too long ago.’

  Carla:‘Like yesterday for me.’

  Judy:‘I want to find some way of seeing you. There must be some way. The thing is, we might come your way in two weeks. They don’t often tell me where we’re going next, but I sometimes overhear them, or I can work it out.’

  Carla:‘You busy now?’

  Judy:‘Yeah. We have six people on board at the moment, which means a lot of work for me. I have to do everything for them, but it’s my job anyway. Will you stay long with your boat?’

  Carla:‘I suppose.’

  Judy:‘Maybe we’ll run away together. Or perhaps I’ll come and try to get a job on your boat. I have a long list of things I want to do with you. I miss you so much. I want a nice dance with you.’

  Carla:‘I too. But this is our life. I can’t see you in Izmir. Or Naxos. Not my fault.’

  Judy:‘I know, but I love you, you sexy thing. Love you, love you. Can you hear me better now?’

  Carla:‘There’s much electric.’

  Judy:‘That’s atmospherics. There’s been a lot of shooting stars here, all evening. Beautiful. I wish we could see them together.’

  Carla:‘Every guest on board here asleep. We have accountant who wears waistcoat always, even when hot. He’s got a lovely blonde with him.’

  Judy:‘I suppose you can’t keep your eyes off her. How many more women are there?’

  Carla:‘Only two. The men are ugly. Tomorrow we go ashore. We go every day nearly, to buy food, and catch other things.’

  Judy:‘I don’t want to know. Same with us. And I have to look after everybody. I eat so much I’m putting on weight.’

  Carla:‘You can be more for me.’

  Judy:‘I don’t want to. I need more exercise.’

  Carla:(laughing) ‘I give you plenty when we meet.’

  Judy:‘We can do it in the day as well. I can’t say all I want to over the radio, but I love you so much.’

  Carla:‘Don’t say anything. I know what you think. Just remember what I say. You tell me when we meet. Lights are on all over the harbour. A plane is going in to land. Wish you were on it. Another one leaving. Wish I was on that. But I’m happy to talk to you. I dream about you every night, unless very tired. I can talk all night if you want.’

  Judy:‘No problem for me, though we’re very busy these days, going from one island to another, picking things up, seeing things. A lot of telephone calls. No problems, though. I don’t know what the skipper’s up to. I don’t want to know. I just do my job looking after them.’

  Carla:‘I like when you tell me things.’

  Judy:‘Love you, stewardess. You’re my sailor.’

  Carla:‘Love you, too. Wish you were here. Tell me in a letter how you feel. I like your letters.’

  Judy:‘I’ll send you another. Do you want me to buy you anything in Izmir?’

  Carla:‘Maybe you buy nice underwear.’

  Judy:‘The black? I don’t know about Turkey, but I’ll try. It’s so nice speaking to you. You know what I want to do now? I’m shaking. I have to smoke a cigarette.’

  Carla:‘Me too. You sleep now?’

  Judy:‘I don’t want to, but I think I have to.’

  Carla:‘Me too.’

  Judy:‘Alone?’

  Carla:‘No, with girl.’

  Judy:‘I’ll kill you.’

  Carla:‘I love you, OK?’

  Judy:‘Thanks a lot. Get your boss to buy a helicopter, then we can meet anytime.’

  Carla:‘Maybe we meet in Izmir. I know good restaurant there. I want you in my arms.’

  Judy:‘Don’t torment me. We’ll be zig-zagging around here for another two weeks. Talk to the man with the waistcoat and maybe he’ll suggest it. Got to go now.’

  Carla:‘Me too. I don’t want to. I love you too much.’

  Judy:‘Not enough. Love you too, Carla. We’ll talk the day after tomorrow. Make sure you’re there.’

  Carla:‘I listen. Love you.’

  Static, atmospherics, mush, the heavenly code for silence. He was in a different country after they had signed off, on his own, in a stranger’s skin, an altered person, bereft of more than sight, sat without knowing how long, hands by the morse key as if to tap out a message and get Judy and her lover back on the air or, better by far, to talk to Judy alone, though she wouldn’t understand the medium. The call had been taped and he could play it back when he liked, though felt no wish to at the moment, it would make him feel more isolated, more desolate. Despair enriched a darkness he would not be without, painful though it was. But he reached for the key, and tapped away his misery at not being close.

  ‘Dear Judy, I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you were able to hear what I’ve just listened to you would undoubtedly know more about me than I am allowed to know about you, or about myself. Or would you? Forgive the maunderings of a blind man. You are the chosen heroine of my night hours, and I am your unacknowledged swain of a listener, who knows more about you than you can know about me because I can hear you while you can’t hear me, though we’re on the same level in that neither of us can see each other. You don’t even know when I listen to your voice electrically pulsing through the air. I know you have a lover, but I am infatuated by you so intensely that I might call it love as well, besotted hopelessly by your voice and personality coming into focus before my empty eyes. There’s no one I can tell it to, which makes the pain worse, yet for that reason richer and easier to be endured. To confess it to Laura would put her into despair, or she would have me sent quickstep into a lunatic asylum, and who would blame her? To admit it to myself makes me laugh with a cynicism I haven’t known before. There’s a helpless yearning inside me which is new, as if I’m just born, ready to go into the world, a new man filled with hope and inspiration, willing to set out on any journey, however long and difficult, to find you, and see what you look like, though I can’t, so maybe you would fall in love with me, so that I cou
ld touch you, know your shape, feel your kisses …’

  A traffic list from a China coast station couldn’t divert him from the amalgamation of misery and illumination. Nor would the German Numbers Woman have consoled him had it not been her night off. Nothing was able to disperse the miasma of light beyond his barrier of darkness. Some Japanese ships on call completed his dislocation. He was an island of flotsam in the mist, the coastline indistinct as on a part of the ocean not yet properly explored, or seen even by the Flying Dutchman’s ever-searching telescopes, that ragged weevil-rotted and eternally turning craft, privileged or bedevilled in having some of the latest technology to keep it going.

  He twirled the knob, searching for the night frequency of the Moscow HF-DF station. For months he had been hoping to find it, done all kinds of mental calculations to bracket the exact band of the spectrum, but with no success. There obviously was one, because planes in darkness over the vastness of Russia would need even more to know where they were, flying as blind as he was for the most part, and dependent on electrical assistance, just as he was, sitting at the radio trying to track them down. Nor could it be that planes weren’t up at night, no more than he didn’t listen at night. His eternal searching had put him onto Judy, but he still wanted to hear the Russian night planes asking Vanya where they were.

  When the lamp was on he sat in the light though couldn’t see it, reaching for the switch to press it off and cut away even from his little world within the house, stronger around him than if he had been in the deepest prison, and as alien a piece of territory as the fact of his blindness because it prevented him from travelling to Naxos and Izmir.

  His blindness was a cloth pinning him to the ground and stopping all movement, mental or otherwise. With normal sight he could have found her, maybe even spoken the time of the day while passing between the tables of a café on the quayside, close enough to reinforce his imagination and call it sight, yet giving no hint of his love. He would know more what she looked like, or at least decide which of the many pictures that had passed through his mind’s cyclopean eye was closest, an accomplishment sufficient to send him home, having foolishly wasted time, money and effort.

  He was embarrassed, almost ashamed at the juvenile intensity of love that forced him to sit in the darkest dark unable to think of anyone but Judy, not even to move a finger, a still figure that had no will to get out of her thrall and go to bed.

  If I had not been blind, he wondered, would I have left home, work and wife, and set out on a fortnight’s jaunt to look for someone whose voice I’d only heard on shortwave, a voice belonging to a woman who already had a girlfriend but whom I had, like a schoolboy, fallen in love with? Why not? How can you be in love, and prove that you are, if you aren’t prepared to ruin yourself by advancing matters further? Especially if it was the first time you had fallen in love which, coming at any age, was bound to strike you like a thunderbolt into paralysis. Nothing could be done, and it was yours to endure till the overwhelming wave diminished in power and broke itself – if you didn’t break first, succumb to despair at the powerlessness of your life.

  He did not know what got him on the move, but he was halfway to the kitchen before smiling at the fact. The kettle was filled for breakfast so he had only to throw the switch to get water for tea. Cups also were set out, as would be marmalade, cornflakes, plates and cutlery, orange juice glasses. Laura liked as little as possible to do in her somnambulist state before a drink and something to eat in the morning.

  He thought of himself as a man with two lives. One was rooted here, with Laura, while the other was enclosed within a mind which was his alone, the whole reason for his existence, making his blood run faster than it had since the night over Germany had put the full stop on him. If he hadn’t been blinded, and was still the same person, he would have abandoned everything and gone on his mad escapade, a thought which bridged the gap between then and now.

  But when you cannot see, when most of what occurs cannot be seen, you can’t affect the course of action. Neither on the other hand could you see the leaping cycles of the aether, the megahertz and geigerhertz containing speech and pictures, messages and weather maps and morse, the calling of and replying to aeroplanes, police, firemen, ambulances, ships and people, life within that immense span of the planet going on since the genius of Watt, Volta, Ampere, Hertz, Morse and Marconi had set it going. You couldn’t see it, but it was there.

  Laura’s arrangements for breakfast were signs that one day would follow another exactly – items that hadn’t been touched by him before because he had never needed to make tea at such a time. Any change of routine disturbed her, though she always denied that it did. She would wonder what had been in his mind for him to make tea on his own in the middle of the night. Let her wonder. He sat until he was too tired to move, and then moved.

  TWELVE

  ‘You never take me anywhere,’ Amanda said. ‘I like to go out now and again.’

  ‘You go out all the time.’

  ‘With you, I mean.’

  He wanted to belt her one, because her accusation was only too true, but you didn’t do that kind of thing, though he was ashamed to admit that the impulse came often enough. Luckily they were outside, which made the charge easier to take.

  He knew every weed and corner of the garden, but was no gardener, except that he had tied a sickly tree to a pole to stop the wind pushing it down. It didn’t seem to thrive, had no will to grow or even live while fastened up for six months. Ken had advised him to do it, but in spite of such countryman know-how his sensibilities were too elementary to realise that what a tree needed was tender loving care. Noticing the tree from his window one day he went out with his Leatherman knife and cut the cords so that, in the next months, it thrived, easily able to withstand the winds. ‘Let’s go somewhere today, then. We’ll find a nice pub, and have lunch.’

  Surprising how few words made her happy. They only ever went to bed after she had passed her bleak mood onto him, though he knew that to suggest they go there wouldn’t work at all. He could wait, not denying that her own terms usually made the experience a notch or two higher than memorable.

  ‘That’d be lovely,’ she said. ‘I like to see the sea now and again.’

  ‘So do I,’ he smiled, ‘from land,’ making himself happy too. He stood in the frame of the back door, looking across the lawn and hearing the languid hot day whistle of the birds from the belt of trees surrounding the house except where the lane led up to the road. The trees there never had any difficulty, plenty of mutual support, lived and died among each other. But a tree on its own needed special treatment.

  She had always thought the car a good place to ask her questions, so when into the clear of the main road said: ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Richard.’

  No problem in taking Sunday off, because messages didn’t come through on that day, proof that government agencies liked their leisure hours. Nevertheless he had flicked on the radio, idly between getting out of bed and shaving, to hear that the French cops were ready for Pentecostal traffic being dense towards EuroDisney. Whenever she used his first name he knew something was on its way that he wasn’t going to like. ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, you might say I’ve been snooping.’

  He overtook a Mini on a bend, just made it. Mustn’t do that again. Don’t let her think she’s got you concerned about whatever the asking’s going to be. He pushed in the cigarette lighter. ‘How, snooping?’

  ‘I was in your room a few days ago, to see if it wanted cleaning. You’d gone off to do your good deed for the blind man. Your wastepaper basket was full. You always empty it to save me the trouble, I know, but I couldn’t help noticing what was written on the sheets.’

  A queue of traffic stalled them on the way to Rye. ‘Oh, it was just rubbish for putting in the stove.’

  ‘Why burn it, though? They collect waste paper in the village. Every bit counts.’

  ‘Only newspapers. Anyway. I lik
e to burn it, because strictly speaking it’s against the law to write such stuff, even though I only do it out of curiosity. I’ve a passion for poking my nose into other people’s business. The world’s full of shortwave listeners doing the same. It passes the dead hours when I don’t know what to do with myself, between getting work on the boats.’

  She saw little point continuing because, after all that, it was his problem, or business. Even so, he had stopped talking, and somebody had to break the silence now that the air inside the car thickened, and not only from cigarette smoke. She could tell he was worried because, going towards Folkestone, he drove as carefully as if the car had L plates. ‘These transcripts, I found them absolutely fascinating. I’d never known they were like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He sounded irritated, or nervous. He was both, but she went on: ‘All to do with smuggling, from various government stations it looked like, and the police in France, as well as diplomatic traffic. Priceless. But dynamite as well, I should think, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What else do you expect me to take? Weather forecasts get boring after a while.’

  ‘But couldn’t all that information be useful to somebody?’

  ‘It could, I suppose.’ The Merc in front seemed to be slowing, so he flashed and shot out. As he drew level the Merc, with four youths inside, increased speed, and both went nearly a ton along the flat before Richard got in because another car was heading towards them. Then he noticed the Merc behind trying the same trick on somebody else. No use slowing down, and starting a fight with four of them.

  ‘I’m hoping to get out of this car alive,’ she said. ‘I don’t fancy life as a basket case.’

  ‘You can’t blame me for that.’ He picked up the new mobile phone and punched in 999. ‘Police? There’s a Mercedes’ – he gave the number – ‘with four lads inside on the A259 east from Rye, playing murder games when people try to overtake.’ He put it down. ‘You saw what they did.’