Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  With our energy at a low ebb and so many other people either passing through the house or living there, it was proving hard to sustain our campaign of propaganda. We had to be more circumspect than ever. Claude still spent hours listening to the BBC, and the news was heartening—the siege of Leningrad, the Allied bombing of Leipzig and Berlin—but perhaps the most hard-hitting leaflet we produced that winter was something we dreamed up ourselves. While walking through St. Helier, we had noticed that all the German soldiers we saw were either very young or middle-aged. The contrast with the troops who had arrived at the beginning of the occupation could not have been more marked. On a sheet of unlined writing paper I drew a baby in a cot and an old man leaning on a stick. Above my drawing, we printed the following words in big block capitals:

  NEW RECRUITS TO THE GERMAN ARMY

  (EVERYBODY ELSE IS DEAD)

  One morning in December 1943, I opened the front door to let Kid out and saw Jean, my brother, standing on the lawn. He was looking this way and that, as if highly entertained by his surroundings. As if the garden—or the world—was somehow ludicrous. He was in uniform, but his feet were bare. His heels were blistered, mauve against the snow. His mouth leaked smoke, like a gun that had just been fired. I remembered how every letter he had written from the trenches had begun with the words I’m fine.

  “Where are your boots?” I asked.

  He laughed, as though I had said something typically naive.

  His foolish sister.

  I asked if he would like to come inside and warm himself. Perhaps I could light a fire. Make some tea. He looked up at the house, his hands searching his pockets. He found a cigarette and struck a match. A flare of orange in the milky air. He bent his head into the flame. Straightening again, he shook the match and dropped it on the ground.

  “There was a man with half his head blown off,” he said. “He screamed all night—just screamed and screamed. Then, at four in the morning, the screaming stopped.

  “He wasn’t dead, not quite. I bent close to him, my ear near his mouth. He was whispering the same words, over and over. Nice watercress, tuppence a bunch…Nice watercress, tuppence a bunch…”

  “Is there nothing I can offer you?” I said.

  He was fiddling with the button on his jacket, which was still loose. “You never understood what we went through,” he said. “You never stopped to think. The rats, the mud, the gas, the lice, the rain—”

  “Jean,” I said, “why don’t you come inside? I could sew that button on for you.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I should be going.”

  I moved towards him, but he began to cough. A stream of blood spilled from between his lips. Red all down the front of his uniform, red that quickly blackened. Red holes in the snow.

  The cigarette still burning between his fingers.

  Winter eased. Claude and I were sitting on the terrace one afternoon, our faces tilted to catch the last rays of the sun, when a low whistle came from the east side of the garden, where the shade was deepest. The postman’s son stepped out from the cover of the bushes. He looked furtive and tense, his head drawn down between his shoulders. Behind him was a scrawny man in clothes that were too small for him, his wrists protruding from his sleeves, his trousers stopping halfway down his calves. There were scratches on his face and hands. The postman’s son told us the man’s name was Pyotr—Peter—and that he had escaped from a slave-labor camp. He and his parents had been sheltering Peter for the last few weeks, he said, but Peter had been spotted by the neighbors, and it had become too risky.

  “We’d be happy to look after him,” I said.

  Claude was nodding. “Of course.”

  Thanking us, the postman’s son shook the Russian’s hand and slipped back into the shadows.

  We took Peter into the kitchen and gave him a cup of my ersatz coffee and some potato flavored with salt. He ate slowly, but cleaned his plate. He spoke a few words of French and English, and filled in the gaps with sign language.

  I offered to wash his clothes. He seemed alarmed. What would he wear instead?

  “We’ll give you new clothes,” Claude said.

  He looked at me, and then at Claude. “Women’s clothes?”

  Claude shook her head. “Men’s clothes. We wear men’s clothes.”

  “You wear men’s clothes?”

  “Yes.” Claude paused. “Why? Would you prefer women’s clothes?”

  “No, no.” He held up his hands, palms facing out, as if to ward something off. “Men’s clothes good. Very good.” We all began to laugh.

  “A man borrowing clothes from a woman who just happens to wear men’s clothes,” Claude said later. “It’s like something out of Shakespeare.”

  While Peter was with us, we asked him about the camp where he had been interned. It was in the northwest of the island, he said. He didn’t know its name. The prisoners were expected to work for twelve to fourteen hours a day, summer and winter, with almost nothing to eat. They hauled bags of cement. They dug tunnels. They moved earth and stones. If they stopped working for even a moment, they were beaten. The coffee they were given in the morning was like gray water. Lunch was soup. More water, with bits of turnip floating in it. The same in the evening. In desperation, some prisoners ate wild berries. They died of poisoning. Others prized limpets off the rocks and ate them raw. When they lay down at night, they fell asleep in seconds. It was the sleep of the dead. Every other Sunday they had a day off, but there was no food at all. If you didn’t work, the Germans said, you didn’t eat. But he had heard that conditions were far worse on Alderney. Terrible things were happening there. Really terrible.

  Peter’s pronunciation of “Alderney” was so unusual that we thought he must be referring to a work camp on the mainland—or even, perhaps, in Russia—but after questioning him further we realized he was talking about a neighboring island, no more than a mile or two away.

  He had met a man from Kiev, he said. The Ukrainian had been a circus strongman before the war, and also, ironically, a prison guard, but he had trembled as he told Peter about Sylt, the camp on Alderney where he had been held for seven months. When they arrived, the Ukrainian said, they were told that none of them would leave the camp alive. His clothes were made from discarded cement sacks. Shirt, trousers—even shoes. He used a cement sack as a blanket too. He slept in cement dust—it was softer than the wooden planks—but his skin blistered and turned raw. The filthy rags he wore were crawling with vermin. He could have scooped handfuls of lice from under his armpits or from his groin. Rats ran over his body while he slept. They ate the lips, ears, and noses of men who didn’t last the night. When men died, the Ukrainian said, they were dumped in the sea. No funeral, no burial. Not even any prayers. Just thrown away, like rubbish. Sometimes they washed up on the beach a few days later. Prisoners were ordered to carry them up onto the cliff and toss them back into the waves. The bodies often came apart in their hands. One man was crucified for eating an apple. As dusk fell, the guards nailed him to a gate and hurled buckets of cold water at him. It was December. He died before morning.

  I thought of the drowned woman I had brought back to the shore, and of all the other women whose bodies had not been recovered, and I imagined how the bones of a Russian prisoner of war might even now be knocking against those of a French prostitute—a sad, surreal union on the seabed…

  Claude spoke to Peter. “This is true?”

  “He swore it was true.” Peter struck his chest with the side of his right fist. “All of it.”

  His broken French and English only added to the vividness and horror. Perhaps, in any case, when asked to describe the things he had either witnessed or been told about, normal language was found wanting. In the face of such atrocities, words simply fell apart, like the bodies of the dead.

  It was in the spring of 1944 that rumors began to circulate. We heard that German soldiers w
ere not only deserting but committing suicide, and there was a sense, possibly for the first time, that Germany might not win the war. We weren’t out of danger, though. Not yet. In March, Claude received a letter from the Nazi high command, demanding that she report to Silvertide. I told her it was almost certainly routine, but all kinds of sinister scenarios whirled through my head.

  When the day came, Claude wore the outfit she had devised for the assassination of the Kommandant. She rubbed face powder into her hair to make it gray and put on an austere black dress and a black hat with a veil, completing the look with a walking stick and a pair of spectacles. If she appeared as an old woman in poor health, she reasoned, the Germans would be less likely to treat her as suspicious.

  “I want you to stay here,” she said. “We can’t have them suspecting you as well.

  She wouldn’t listen to any of my arguments.

  By the time the taxi arrived, she was in character, her back hunched, her hands gripping the curved handle of her cane.

  I wished her luck, then sat on a deck chair with a blanket over my knees, trying not to think. A rotten smell hung in the air. The deep trench between the wall at the end of our garden and the wall the Germans had built was clogged with seaweed, dead leaves, and stagnant water. In a month or two there would be mosquitoes.

  The sun came out. Went in again. Seagulls circled overhead.

  Once in a while, I stood up and stretched my legs.

  Three hours later, a car pulled up outside, and I hurried out to the road. Claude emerged, blinking, as if she had just been released from a dark room. I asked her what had happened.

  “Not here,” she said.

  When we were inside, she told me she had been questioned by the head of the Geheime Feldpolizei.

  “Wolf of the Gestapo?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “His name was Bode.”

  Bode was a stocky middle-aged man with a thick neck and thick lips. The expression on his face was stern, as if he sensed insubordination or impertinence. There had been another officer in the room, a corporal with hideous ears. His name was Erich.

  “Hideous ears?” I said.

  She nodded. “They were fleshy and—I don’t know—convoluted. I imagined his own ears had been removed and replaced with ears taken from an animal—a pig, say, or a baby elephant.”

  “How repulsive.”

  “Oddly enough, he was quite intelligent,” she said. “He asked me about the island’s history.”

  She was beginning to tell Erich about the passage graves, which dated from Neolithic times, when Bode interrupted. They weren’t there to talk about the Neolithic times, he snapped. They had more pressing business. His priority, it seemed—and the reason for the summons—was to establish whether or not she was a Jew. She elaborated on the story she had told Wolf of the Gestapo the last time she was in the building. She said the name Schwob originated in southern Germany in the Middle Ages, and that it had been given to people who came from Swabia.

  “What’s this?” Bode said. “Another history lesson?”

  Adopting the naive approach I had employed on previous occasions, she asked why he wanted to know if she was Jewish. He told her he was following guidelines that came from higher up. Much higher up. Perhaps she had failed to notice, he said, but a series of orders had been issued in the Evening Post, restricting the activities of any Jews who lived on the island. All Jewish identity cards were now stamped with a red J, he went on, and businesses that were Jewish were marked as such. Furthermore, Jews were forbidden from entering shops except in the afternoons, between the hours of three and four. They were also banned from public buildings such as theaters, cinemas, and libraries. This was an attempt, he said, to legislate against contamination. At times, it was almost as if he had intuited her heritage and her beliefs, and was trying to provoke her, trying to elicit an incriminating reaction or response. As a result of the measures he had introduced, he said, several Jews had taken their own lives. He smiled and sat back.

  “Well,” Claude said, “I suppose it saves you the trouble.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” Bode’s smile lasted, but his eyes were appraising, cold. “That will be all—for now.”

  Claude was elated by her performance—she had fooled the head of the Gestapo—but the effort had exhausted her.

  She slept for the rest of the day.

  Three months later, in the middle of June, I stood on the beach below the house, drying myself after an evening swim. The tide was out, the sea a flat, metallic blue. As I toweled my hair, I heard what sounded like a muffled drumbeat. A man on a black horse was riding in my direction. Farther out than I was, where the sand was wet, he was wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. His body was thickset, deeply tanned. The horse’s hooves flung arcs of spray into the air. As he rode past me, at a distance of twenty yards, he took one hand off the reins and waved. Did I wave back? I’m not sure. I recognized him, though. He was Baron von Aufsess, the new civil administrator. I had seen him once before, in Royal Square, lounging on the backseat of a chauffeured car, and Edna, the source of all gossip, had told me that he had a suite of private rooms in St. Helier where he drank champagne and liqueurs and courted svelte young women from the island. Claude referred to him, in English, as “Baron von Abscess.” I watched as he swung round and galloped east again, towards Le Frêt, the last of the day’s sun on his back.

  Earlier that month, the Allies had launched an assault on Saint-Malo, which lay due south of us, no more than fifteen miles away. In bed at night we heard the dull boom of shells. There were orange flickers in the distance, and in the morning smears of black smoke showed on the horizon, like scuff marks on a skirting board. After fierce fighting, the town had fallen, and from that day on the twenty thousand German troops on Jersey were cut off, with no means of escape. The baron must have known the war was lost, and that it was only a matter of time before he would have to contemplate surrender. In the circumstances, it was tempting to view his dash across the firm dark sand as arrogance, but I saw something else in it, something that was more deserving of sympathy or understanding—a willingness to give in to a fleeting exhilaration, a few sublime moments of thoughtlessness. That, I imagined, was why he had waved.

  On returning to the house, I found Claude in the big room, where she and Peter were cleaning the chimney. I told her about my sighting of the baron. Dusting the soot off her hands, she looked distinctly unimpressed. There had been something poignant about it, I said, trying to explain. Something very human. I actually felt for him.

  Her lips twisted. “Do you know what that horse is called?”

  I told her I had no idea.

  “Satan,” she said.

  It was six days after my birthday, and we were halfway through our evening meal, a thin wheat-and-turnip gruel, when there was a banging at the door, such a banging that the windows rattled in their frames. I looked at Claude. She was motionless, her hands closed into fists on the edge of the table, her eyes slanting across the room. The knocking came again, even louder than before.

  When I opened the door, there were five Nazi officers on the flagstones, their faces exhibiting a sullen, brute determination, a kind of boredom. Or perhaps they were listless with hunger, as we were. The German army was short of provisions too.

  “Suzanne Malherbe?”

  The officer who had spoken had blank eyes and a big bald head. The look on his face was one of disdain or disgust, as if he had just bitten into something that tasted bad.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Colonel Bode. Geheime Feldpolizei.”

  This was the man who had questioned Claude back in the spring.

  “Step aside,” he said.

  He pushed past me. The others followed. The shoulder of one man caught the barometer that hung in the hall, almost dislodging it. In that moment, I realized tha
t the typewriter we used for all our tracts and leaflets was on the desk in Claude’s study, in full view. We hadn’t had time to put anything away. Before I turned back into the house, I noticed that one of the officers was standing on the lawn, facing the sea. He was wearing a long black leather coat. Wolf of the Gestapo.