Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

“Yes.”

  Still staring at me, Bode tapped the blade of a letter opener against his thumbnail. My eyes drifted to the window. The room overlooked the sea. A gull flew past, white against the low dark clouds. I remembered how we had painted the German words for DOWN WITH WAR on coins and left them lying in an amusement arcade where German soldiers liked to go. It had been Claude’s idea to use Wicked White, a nail varnish by Peggy Sage. Such a perfect name for what we’re up to, she said. White because we have right on our side—and wicked? Well, that’s obviously ironic.

  Lohse broke the silence. “You don’t deny that you disseminated propaganda?”

  “No.”

  “How long did you do it for?”

  “About four years.”

  “Ever since we occupied the island?”

  “Yes.” I thought back to the empty packet of German cigarettes that Claude had found by the main road. “It began as a small thing. A gesture, really. Then it grew.”

  “How did it grow?” Bode asked. “I’m curious.”

  “We devoted a lot of time to it. We did very little else.” I paused. “I don’t think we’ve ever been so busy.”

  “I find it astonishing,” he said, “that you got away with it for so long.”

  “We also found it astonishing.”

  His lips tightened. Looking past me, he addressed the guard. “Take her back to her cell.”

  I was held on the top floor of C block, which had once been the women’s wing. The chief jailer, a slight man, and his much larger second in command both went by the name of Heinrich. We called them Little Heinrich and Big Heinrich. The other guards were Otto and Ludwig. It was several days before I learned that Claude was farther down the corridor. Since there was an empty cell between us, and also a windowless room that used to be a library, and since the walls were made of granite, it would not be possible, Little Heinrich told me, for us to speak to each other. Sharing the floor with us were several German soldiers who had attempted either to desert or to mutiny. It seemed an oversight on the part of the authorities that we were being held in the same building as men who our propaganda had been aimed at, men who might even have been influenced by what we produced. Also in C block were half a dozen young people from the island—Belza Turner, for instance, who had tried to sail to France with plans detailing the German fortifications, and Peter Gray, not even seventeen, who had been found with a cache of guns and ammunition. Though we were old enough to be their parents, and from a different culture, there was, from the beginning, a real sense of solidarity. These were people we felt for and sympathized with, people we understood.

  Of the guards on my floor, Otto was the most approachable. He had a big, awkward body, and when he smiled I could see the spaces between his teeth. He could have played the ogre in a pantomime. “Gut morning,” he would say, attempting English—until he realized I spoke German.

  Once, when he opened the door of my cell to check on me, I asked him how Claude was.

  “Still weak,” he said.

  “Could you give her a message for me?”

  He pressed his lips together and slowly shook his head. “It’s against regulations.”

  “What if it was just a few words?”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell her I’m in good health. Tell her I love her.”

  “Perhaps. But I can’t promise.” He took a step backwards and peered down the corridor. “She’s always writing, your sister.”

  “She has writing materials?”

  Otto nodded. “She uses toilet paper from the guards’ room. The Russian cleaners steal it for her.” Even though he was himself a guard, Otto was smiling.

  I asked him what she was writing.

  “Some kind of diary or testament.” He massaged the back of his neck with one hand. “She thinks you will both be executed.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She used signs. She doesn’t speak German, not like you.”

  “And you, Otto?” I said. “What do you think?”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s not very reassuring,” I said.

  “I have no power here.” His eyebrows lifted, and he held his arms away from his sides. “If it was up to me—” Embarrassed suddenly, he backed out of my cell.

  “Thank you for your kindness,” I said.

  His face seemed to wobble, like a drop of rain just before it spills from a leaf, then he closed the door and turned the key.

  As August wore on, the interrogations began to blur, one into another. Sometimes Bode was alone, or sometimes he had one of his colleagues with him—the ingratiating Lohse, or Erich with his bestial ears, or Wolf of the Gestapo, vain and sadistic, a Nazi version of Al Capone. But Bode himself was always behind everything, always in charge. On one occasion, I was pushed, blinking, into his office. Bright sunlight burst through the window. I had become accustomed to the darkness of my cell—we prisoners called them “coffins”—and even though they had driven me across town, from Gloucester Street to Havre des Pas, my eyes didn’t seem to have adjusted.

  Looking up from his paperwork, Bode remarked on the beauty of the day. He felt like a fraud, he told me. He wasn’t at war. How could he be, in this idyllic place? He rose to his feet and paced up and down, hands clasped behind his back. He was beginning to understand why Jersey was such a popular holiday destination. He was only sorry that his wife and children couldn’t join him.

  “Come to Sunny Jersey,” he said in English, quoting the headline from an advertisement. He laughed, then switched back into German. “Is that why you live here, for the climate?”

  “Are we going to talk about the weather?” I said. “I thought that was an English obsession.”

  He stared at me across one shoulder. “You really are a very difficult woman.”

  Returning to his desk, he produced a small tin that I recognized. He must have stolen it on the day of our arrest—or subsequently, perhaps, since I was sure they would have searched the house a second time. He opened the lid, took out a pinch of tobacco, and began to roll a cigarette. It was his way of reminding me that my home was in the hands of strangers. His way of pointing out how little power I had. He looked at me as he moistened the narrow strip of glue on the rolling paper with the tip of his tongue. I was careful not to react.

  Smiling, he lit the cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “There’s an aspect to this affair which I don’t understand…”

  A fly was circling his bald head, and I found myself on the verge of a dangerous hilarity. I had to cough to keep myself from laughing. He asked if I was troubled by the smoke.

  “It’s nothing, just a cold.” I gestured vaguely. “The cells…”

  He nodded, then inhaled.

  “You owned an illegal radio,” he said. “You listened to the BBC. You translated British propaganda into German. All this I understand. What I don’t understand is your approach. The poems, the drawings—the rhymes…” His thick lips twitched. It was a smile of sorts.

  “We’re artists.”

  Even as I spoke, I felt it was a lie. I found myself doubting the life I had lived prior to my imprisonment. The glitter and glamour of Paris—it was fantasy, or wishful thinking. Even more recent memories seemed exotic, overblown. Swimming in the bay at dawn, sunbathing in the garden. The smell of Claude’s skin. The taste of her…Did any of it happen? Surely not. There was only this questioning, this smell of damp. This loneliness.

  “Artists?” Bode looked curious, but also skeptical.

  “Before the war,” I said, “Paris was full of artists.”

  “You lived in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and consulted a document. “It says here that you’ve lived on Jersey for thirty years.”

  “Not true.”

  “Should I have heard of you?”
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br />   “I designed handbills and posters for a theater in Montparnasse. I did illustrations for magazines. I illustrated books as well. I wasn’t famous, though.” I paused. “Claude was much better known than I was.”

  “Claude?”

  “Lucie. My sister.”

  Watching me, Bode tapped a pen against his thumb, something he did when he was deep in thought, or when he was suspicious.

  “You don’t look very much alike.” His eyes were cold suddenly, and abrasive, like bits of gravel.

  “We’re not related by blood,” I said. “We’re stepsisters. Her father married my mother.”

  “Really?” His voice had softened, but it wasn’t gentle. “What are the chances of that?”

  Panic passed across my head like heat. I had talked too much. I had given myself and Claude away. In an attempt to distract him, I spoke again. In as calm a voice as I could muster, a voice that verged on the seductive, I said, “Wasn’t there something you wanted me to help you with?”

  “You have helped me.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “The creativity—I understand it now.” He shook his head. “So clever of the Resistance, to think of recruiting artists…”

  I sighed.

  Calling for a guard, Bode closed the file that lay in front of him. He would see me in a day or two, he said. He advised me to use the time to search my memory. If I didn’t offer him some credible explanation, things would become difficult for me. For my sister too.

  I asked if she was strong enough to be interrogated.

  “We have already spoken to her,” he said, “at length. She’s stronger than she looks.”

  “But hasn’t she told you exactly what I’ve been telling you?”

  “Your stories are remarkably consistent.” He sat back, hands folded snugly over his potbelly. “You’re extremely well trained, both of you. It will be hard to break you down.”

  What was the truth for me was a highly polished fabrication for him, and I wasn’t sure there was anything I could say that would convince him otherwise.

  It was only when the Russians who emptied our slops agreed to deliver notes in secret that Claude and I were finally able to communicate, but for the first few weeks of our imprisonment we had no contact at all, and every time I asked Otto whether he had passed on any of my messages he became evasive or noncommittal. One night, when the building had fallen quiet, I decided to sing “Petit chagrin” in the hope that Claude might hear me and be comforted. Les mots les plus tendres jamais / Ne diront combien je t’aimais…Even the most tender words could never / Let you know how much I loved you…As I sang, I thought I felt the silence in the jail deepen, and I was certain that she was listening.

  I had sung “Petit chagrin” before—to Madame Schwob, when we stayed at Le Pradet in 1911. As I sang the song again, more than thirty years later, in the darkness of a prison cell, I remembered how Claude had woken me one morning, just after dawn, her forefinger upright against her lips. She took my hand and led me through the silent house and out into the grounds. Pines and oaks stood about, motionless and black, the hills behind them smoky, mauve. There were five palm trees on the property, she had told me, each one planted for a different child. I followed her along a path that would take us to the beach. The grass was wet with dew. Her bare legs shone. A cock crowed in a farmyard on the edge of the village. When we reached the cliff we sat in the shade of an umbrella pine, the dry earth carpeted with needles, the blue sea glittering below. I remembered how Claude turned to me, her face close to mine, and how, at that same moment, a middle-aged man with a butterfly net came up the path towards us. He stopped and showed us what he had caught that morning. He was a friend of Claude’s grandmother. Years later, Claude told me that when the man with the butterfly net appeared she had been about to kiss me. I hoped she could hear me singing, and hoped too that she was thinking of that morning in the south of France when we almost kissed for the first time.

  I was being interrogated by Bode one September evening when the door opened and a guard led Claude into the room. Behind her was Wolf of the Gestapo, in the black leather coat he liked to wear. The guard pushed Claude towards the only empty chair. She had aged since the day of our arrest—the skin around her eyes was puffy, and her cheeks had slackened—and yet something inside her seemed to have intensified or grown in strength, and I remembered the evening of the bombing raid, and how elated she had been. We’re going to be tested.

  She was staring at my wrist. “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “An accident.”

  “She tried to kill herself,” said Wolf of the Gestapo, in English.

  Claude didn’t look at him, only at me. “Is that true?”

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  “Quiet,” Bode said.

  He had a list of names, which he wanted us to listen to. If we were familiar with any of the names, we were to let him know.

  Claude raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  As Bode began to run through the names, all of them French, Wolf of the Gestapo watched us closely. He was hoping, I imagined, for a physical reaction, an involuntary flicker of recognition. My gaze drifted back to Bode. His dome-shaped head, the thick lips that peeled back from his teeth. The master race. How was it possible for these people to look in the mirror and believe such a thing about themselves? I was dumbfounded by the power of the spell that Hitler had cast over them.

  Bode was still running through his list. It was meaningless. Absurd. There came a point where I was tempted to “recognize” one of the names, if only to bring an end to the charade. But the respite would only have been temporary. They would have wanted descriptions, addresses—codes. And besides, I would have been putting someone’s life at risk…

  At last Bode stopped. “None of the names mean anything to you?”

  Claude stifled a yawn.

  “We have already told you many times,” I said. “We worked alone.”

  “In detective fiction,” Claude said, “this is what they call an open-and-shut case. You caught us and we confessed. You should be satisfied.”

  Wolf of the Gestapo spoke to Bode, but I didn’t hear what he said because Claude had touched my hand and was addressing me in French. “What do you think of our accommodation?”

  Something leapt in me at the feel of her hand on mine. I had been starved of her.

  “Our accommodation?” I said. “It’s not bad, I suppose.”

  “My room is extremely comfortable.”

  “So’s mine, actually. And the view is wonderful.”

  “No complaints?”

  “None at all.”

  “The staff are very helpful, aren’t they.”

  I smiled.

  “You know something?” she said. “I think it might be the best hotel on the—”

  Bode brought the flat of his hand down on the surface of the table, making me jump. The desk lamp flickered, but stayed on.

  “Genug,” he said in a strangled voice. Enough.

  We were returned to our cells.

  Alone again, I thought how unusual it was for Bode to lose his temper. But then the joint interrogation had not been a success. From that moment on he kept us apart, hoping he might be able to play us off against each other, and also, I think, because he realized that separation would be, in itself, a form of torture. It wasn’t until a few days later that I understood why he might have been so out of sorts. In a brief exchange with Joe Mière, a local man who was being held in a cell near mine, I learned that Bode had a girlfriend in St. Helier, a dance teacher called Miss Lillicrap, and that somebody had found out about the relationship, and had painted the front of her house with tar.

  In early October I was taken to a small room in the basement of Silvertide. The walls were gray, and the floor was bare concrete, and apart from a metal chair and a metal
table there was no furniture. A single window gave on to a grim gray corridor. The smell of bleach didn’t quite conceal the smell of something human, something rusty. Blood, I thought, or fear.

  I had been waiting for no more than a few minutes when a young officer appeared. He wasn’t someone I had seen before. I would have remembered. He was enormous, like one of the Raymond brothers, the muscles in his upper arms and thighs outlined by a uniform he had long since outgrown. His face was all harsh planes, his cheekbones clenched like fists under the skin, his forehead broad but dented at the temples. His eyes were slits. His lips were wet. He placed both hands flat on the table and looked right at me.

  “I need names,” he said.

  When he leaned over me, he made the room feel so cramped that I could hardly breathe. I felt like a character from Alice in Wonderland. Where was the pill that would reduce him to his normal size?

  “Tell me the names.”

  I wondered how many local women had swooned over his remarkable physique. I wondered how many he had slept with. I had a sudden nightmare vision of an island overrun by the young man’s bastard progeny—giant children with narrow eyes and moist red mouths.

  He was still leaning over the table. “I need the names of the people who recruited you.”

  “No one recruited me.”

  “Who did you work for? Who did you report to?”

  “Nobody. We worked alone.”

  “Two old women like you?” He straightened up and shook his head.

  “It’s not about age,” I said. “It’s about intelligence.”

  I didn’t see his hand move. All of a sudden, though, my left ear was burning. He stood back, folding his arms. He had put very little of his strength into the blow, but my whole head buzzed.

  “Give me the names of your superiors,” he said.

  He asked the same question over and over. He had the infinite patience of the truly unimaginative.

  “Let’s look at things the other way round…” I could hardly hear myself above the crackling in my head, which was like a kind of interference. “Why on earth would the Resistance hire a useless old woman like me? It just doesn’t make sense.”