The Survivors

by Kate Furnivall

  She sang one of the nuns’ hymns to herself and it calmed the fluttering inside her head. Mama had pushed a blanket in with her for warmth and she wriggled it tighter around her. She also had an apple and a slice of bread. She took a bite of the apple and started counting in her head.

  By the time she got to 11,864, Rafal’s face appeared at the end of the pipe.

  ‘You took so long.’

  ‘There were too many soldiers around,’ Rafal whispered. ‘They are still searching for you.’

  His voice echoed oddly in the pipe.

  ‘Rafal?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do it quickly.’

  He was stretched out on his stomach in the dirt outside, peering down into the pipe, but his face was in shadow and so she couldn’t see his bright brown eyes.

  ‘Are you all right, Alicja?’

  She nodded.

  Rafal pushed his arm into the pipe and her hand gripped his. She held on tight.

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ he promised.

  ‘You’d better be.’

  ‘When you smell smoke, it’ll be safe to run.’

  ‘Rafal.’ She didn’t let go his fingers.

  ‘What.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He squeezed her hand and laughed, the sound of it rippling through her grey world.

  ‘Give me the sack,’ she said.

  He pushed a sack through the opening. ‘Take care,’ he urged.

  ‘Go now.’

  He was as good as his word. It wasn’t long before Alicja could smell the smoke as it swirled through the camp. She wasn’t sure what Rafal had set on fire, but whatever it was, it must be big.

  She heard voices. Shouts.

  ‘Thank you, Rafal.’ She laughed with relief, but clapped a hand over her mouth so that it wouldn’t float out for the world to hear.

  As fast as an eel she wriggled backwards out of the pipe into the fields on the far side of the wall. The guards would be too busy running around with buckets of water and sparks in their hair.

  She dragged great waves of clean air into her lungs and slung the sack over her shoulder. With a secret little whoop under her breath, she took off across the boggy soil as if the hounds were at her heels.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  If it hadn’t been so appalling, I’d have laughed. We must have looked comical. Me and my soldier, yoked together like twins. Trudging along the trails through the forest, calling out my daughter’s name in an echo of each other.

  I made walking hard for him. Turning this way and that, darting in the opposite direction to chase a shadow. I wanted him to be sick of me.

  The going grew tougher. Not because the Deister Hills were particularly steep or high, they weren’t. The land here was so pancake flat that even this small range of low-forested hills stood out as a relief to the eye. It was only a few kilometres from Graufeld Camp and – more to the point – only a few kilometres from the village of Hagendorf where Axel Fleischer had lived as a boy. It was the mud that slowed us down. From last night’s rain. We slipped and slithered, yanking each other’s wrist, as we followed the main hillside trails under the trees. The lance-corporal had parked at Wennigsen and we had continued on foot.

  We shouted till we were hoarse.

  How Alicja would have liked it here. I worried about her inside the pipe. Above our heads arched a glorious golden canopy of autumn beech leaves, with splashes of rich russet-browns and smooth silver-grey trunks. Beechnuts peppered the mud like brittle marbles under our feet.

  But what good were beech trees to me now? I needed undergrowth. I needed bushes. I needed a tangle of brambles or a clump of elder. The beech canopy was so dense that it blocked out the sky in the summer and nothing grew on the forest floor. The lack of ground-level vegetation allowed us easy vision between the trees, making this a place where it would be no problem to keep someone in sight, to track their movements as they flitted from tree to tree.

  ‘You all right?’

  My lance-corporal was regarding me with mild concern. He was a big-boned soldier who was clearly enjoying being out in the woods for a change. Even if it meant running round attached to a deranged woman.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not all right.’

  My soldier may be fit. He may be strong. But he was young. He didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘What’s the problem? If it’s your daughter that you’re—’

  ‘I need to go to the toilet.’

  I watched the colour flush up his cheeks.

  ‘Can you wait?’ he muttered.

  ‘No.’

  I craned my neck around a nearby tree and pointed. ‘That looks like a clearing over there. It might be better.’

  He didn’t argue. We struck off the trail towards an area where the flat grey sky was visible and the sentinel trunks dwindled. It had been coppiced. Trees had been chopped down and allowed to start to regrow, filling the forest floor with light and bushes. Thick abundant bushes.

  Perfect.

  I turned to face the lance-corporal. ‘You’ll have to unlock me.’ I held up my wrist.

  He frowned and shook his head.

  ‘Why would I run?’ I asked him. ‘I have nowhere to run to. I have to find my daughter. It will only take me a minute. I’ll be behind those bushes over there.’ I smiled. ‘Don’t worry.’

  An older man would have said no. An older man would not have been so acutely embarrassed by female bodily functions. He’d have left the handcuffs on and looked the other way. But my soldier was young. He unlocked the handcuffs.

  I ran. I ran for my life.

  That is the truth. The literal truth.

  If I am caught, I will be shot. Not by my soldier. Not by Colonel Whitmore. But by the Soviets when I am handed back. My soldier might as well put his own Lee-Enfield rifle to my head and pull the trigger.

  I ran the way a deer runs. Jinking back and forth. Diving into undergrowth. Ducking behind broad oaks. Leaping ditches. Scrambling over rocks.

  I lost him. My soldier.

  Twice he came close. But not close enough. I led him away from where I wanted to be, his crashing and cursing always within earshot. And just when he thought he had me cornered near the top of the ridge, I slid down a steep gully and vanished.

  Farewell, soldier.

  I doubled back. Tore through the forest. Skimming the mud and barrelling down slopes. Finding my bearings. My heart was thumping wildly but I am good at direction. I can put a map in my brain, the way a bird can navigate across continents. And I had Irmgard Köhler’s sketch of the forest nestling in my pocket.

  I wove my way to the main trail that I was looking for and set out on my search for the oak tree, the one Axel Fleischer had named Der Mörder. The Killer.

  I heard something. A noise, a rustling. I stopped. It stopped.

  Was it in my head?

  Was the laboured breathing mine? Or someone else’s. Or was it the wind teasing me? Stirring up the leaf litter that lay like a path of gold under my feet?

  I shook my head. Emptied such fanciful notions out of it and hurried onward. With every step I thought of Alicja jammed in the culvert at the back of the laundry and I feared for her. Stuck there alone, but safely hidden from Scholz. Yet a part of her was here with me, I was convinced. She was up in the very top branches of the trees, watching me, urging me on. Her young voice was in the whisper of the wind and in the fine drops of rain that had started to fall on my skin. My daughter was here. I could feel her. Yes, it was nonsense, I know, but it was also true. Where I went, Alicja came too.

  I moved faster, the trees denser here. Not just beech, but a rich mix of oak and spruce and tall elegant birch, their greens and golds blending and overlapping in ever-shifting waves of colour. I found the path where I must turn to the left, indicated by a stone marker, just as Irmgard had told me. I dragged my feet out of the mud on to the new stonier pathway and a kick of excitement caught me unawares. I uttered a sound. Inarticulate but full of the thrill that was sen
ding shivers through me. A soft sound. Nothing more.

  A sound came back to me.

  The hairs on my neck rose. I spun in a circle. Eyes fighting the greens. To search out a figure tight against a tree trunk or a shadow that moved where no shadow should be. Another sound. Nearer now. My heart leaped into my throat.

  I stepped off the path and tucked myself behind a tired old chestnut tree. I didn’t breathe. The undergrowth was thick and tangled with a hundred dark places to hide.

  Was it my soldier? Had he tracked me somehow?

  I bent, picked up a pebble and tossed it into the centre of a bed of bracken that reached almost to head height. Instantly I heard the cracking of stems and saw the ferns waving wildly. A dark shape lunged at me out of the shadows.

  It was a wild boar. A mammoth bristling brute with massive grey shoulders and sharp white tusks that could rip open a person’s legs, leaving them in shreds. I leaped backwards. Groped for the tree behind me and slid my body to the other side of it, but my eyes never left the small malicious eyes of the boar. It was three metres from me but I could smell it, rank and earthy. It grunted and huffed. A moist skin-crawling sound. And swung its heavy snout from side to side, wet nostrils twitching obscenely. One foot scraped at the mud.

  Panic plucked at the edges of my mind.

  Was the creature uncertain? Impatient? I didn’t know and I didn’t intend to hang around to find out. We had boars back in Poland, huge black-backed forest dwellers. I’d heard they had poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell. I bent slowly and chose a hefty stick from the debris at my feet.

  Retreat? Or attack?

  I chose the former. Silently and slowly I crept backwards, with the tree always blocking the animal’s view of me. Past one tree, then another. I heard a loud grunt of frustration and a growl deep in the cavern of its chest. I froze. I raised my stick, ready to strike. If it came.

  But a pair of wood pigeons chose that moment to come clattering down into a nearby tree, rowdy and argumentative. They must have distracted my aggressor because the animal abruptly turned with a flick of its tail and charged back into the bracken.

  It was over.

  My breathing eased up. I slunk away.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  I was jumpy now. I looked over my shoulder at every flutter of a leaf. I listened to every sound that whispered among the trees. A hundred times my heart turned over.

  I heard voices. I saw faces that were not there. As the rain grew heavier, I peered through its veil and could smell the damp breath of pursuers. The gaunt women, who robbed me of my two diamonds with such violence in a forest, came into my mind and I couldn’t drive them out.

  Forests cut you loose from reality.

  All the best stories are set in forests. Stories that scare. That make children hide under the blanket. That sink claws into your mind. All the worst things that we see only in our nightmares hide in the black and secretive corners of a forest. They come to unfasten the nuts and bolts of our mind. To steal our soul.

  That is the power that forests possess. So when I stood in front of the most colossal oak tree I had ever set eyes upon, I understood. Its massive branches seemed to spread out as far as the sky, dwarfing those around it. Defying gravity. Twisting and turning as if in pain. I could believe the delicate tips of its fingers were trying to draw the life of those around it into itself.

  I understood why Axel Fleischer called it The Killer.

  First I circled the tree, assessing it. The way you circle an enemy. Or a new friend. I admired its massive girth and its ancient boughs, the lower ones so heavy that they had sunk to the ground, providing an easy route up. Then I looked for its secrets.

  I narrowed my eyes against the spitting rain and inspected each of the long rugged branches. Some parts were so old they were blacker than the backside of that boar I had words with earlier. I inspected the trunk. A rough blackish brown and with deep fissures marking its bark, but it offered no clues. I wiped the rain from my eyes. The longer I looked, the less I could see. There was only one way to do this.

  I took hold of one of the tree’s limbs that had dipped right down to the forest floor and started to climb. The bark was wet. Slick underfoot. But I made easy progress, scampering up to the trunk and then clinging to the next branch and swinging myself up. I kept that going. Climbing and swinging. So that I got to see all around the trunk, peering up and down it at each level, sticking my fingers into knotholes or mossy crevices where insects lurked.

  I found nothing.

  But I was only halfway up. I had been so focused on the tree itself that I had forgotten to look down. I did so now and for a moment my world spun around me. It took flight in a swirl of green and gold. The black earth and the steel-grey sky seemed to swap places. I lurched.

  How high was I?

  Twenty metres? Thirty metres? More?

  My stomach flipped.

  I pictured Irmgard Köhler as a child. Eyes wide with fear, perched on one of these branches all those years ago. Her brother laughing. Goading her. Driving her to lose her grip. A scream. A crash. A crumpled figure on the ground, down there, curled up and clutching her eye. What did Axel feel?

  Quickly I started climbing again. I searched every inch of that massive trunk, cursing it now. As angry at it as if it had pushed Irmgard itself. I glanced up. The sky loomed huge just above me, so close I could have reached out and taken a piece of it if I’d wished. When I glanced down, the world looked tiny. The other trees had shrunk. A deer, no bigger than a mouse, dodged into a clearing.

  I scanned the forest. I could see no one.

  Yet a pulse in my throat kept throbbing. I climbed higher. Slower now, breath tight. Leaves like golden wings spread around my head. My hand reached to the next branch and as I hauled myself up, impatient now, I saw it.

  A hole.

  Just where the branch joined the trunk. A hole the size of a man’s head. A squirrel’s drey? Or the den of an owl or a pine marten, I would guess. Cautiously I inserted a hand. I felt nothing at first, but pushed my fingers deeper. No fur or feathers. No sharp teeth. A scattering of nuts, acorns and beechnuts, a winter hoard. Then my knuckle caught on something hard. Something metallic.

  I didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But a heat started up inside me despite the chill of the rain and spread to the tips of my fingers. I tapped a nail on the hard surface in the hole and heard it ring.

  I had dreamed of this moment. Conjured it up a thousand times in a thousand different ways, and wondered what it would be like. Now I knew. I gripped the metal box that was in the hole, wriggled it out and slithered down the tree.

  The Killer tree did not kill me, Axel.

  You do not get your revenge.

  I was safe on the ground, the box in my hand. My mind already out of control, racing ahead of me. To thatched cottages. To roses around the door. To a world where I could at last work again and Alicja could go to a proper English school in a neat school uniform. And Davide would be there, laughing with a dog at his heels and we would run on a beach and—

  I stifled the images.

  I sat down heavily on one of the oak tree’s roots that writhed up out of the soil like a serpent. My knees were shaking and when I looked at my legs I was unnerved. They were covered in blood and mud and scratches, the legs of something feral. Something you would not allow in the house. My hands and arms were the same.

  What had happened to me?

  My fingers were clamped on the box, so rigid I had to prise them off. The box was a large gunmetal grey cash box, its surface embedded with animal dirt and dead insects. I should have found it unpleasant to hold. I should have wiped it first with my filthy skirt. But I did neither.

  I shook the box hard but it didn’t rattle the way I’d expected it to, just a muffled bump inside. I tried to force the lid open but it wouldn’t budge. I’d come prepared and pulled a knife from a sheath that hung from a thong around my waist under my skirt. It wasn’t hard. Half a dozen jabs and the lock spra
ng open.

  I could feel my teeth welded together as I started to raise the lid. What if it contained photographs of his mother? A lock of hair of his first love? His pet dog’s collar? What if—?

  I threw back the lid and almost wept with relief. Inside the box lay a roll of black velvet material, the kind jewellers use to show off their wares. Gently I unravelled one end. A diamond winked up at me. My hands worked faster. Faster. More and more diamonds, throwing luminous sparkles and dazzling dreams in my eyes. Despite the grey drizzle, they burned with an inner fire. Hundreds of them.

  Laughing softly, I lifted out a handful and let them trickle through my fingers back into the box. But instead of sparkle. Instead of glitter. What I saw was blood dripping from the diamonds. It was gone in a heartbeat. Their iridescence shone through, but it was too late.

  I threw the rest of them back in the box with distaste and told myself it was a reflection of the russet leaves above me. Or even of the crimson streaks of blood on my hand. But I slammed the lid shut.

  ‘Hand over the box,’ a voice said behind me.

  The barrel of a gun bit hard into the back of my neck.

  ‘Did you think I would let you go, Klara? Did you honestly think it was the end?’

  Oskar Scholz stood before me in his mud-spattered clothes, the cash box cradled in one hand, a Mauser pistol alert in the other. I blinked hard, unconvinced by my eyes.

  How could this Scholz be real? How could he be here?

  ‘Oskar, do you know what Axel Fleischer called this tree?’

  He was startled by my question.

  ‘He called it Der Mörder,’ I continued. ‘The Killer.’

  He reacted with a burst of laughter. ‘A good name for it. It will be the death of you.’

  ‘Or you.’

  ‘Don’t delude yourself, Klara. As long as you did not have these beauties,’ he shook the box, making the diamonds chatter, ‘in your possession, you were safe. But now,’ he shrugged, ‘I have no further use for you.’