Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “I don’t think my mother will be very proud of me.”

  “How would you know?”

  “She’ll see me as a traitor and a coward. That’s what people will be saying in the village I come from.”

  “If that’s how she sees you, then she’s blind,” I said. “It’s not her fault. Most of the people in your country have been blinded by the events of the last few years. That was Hitler’s great achievement, to rob an entire nation of its sight. If the German people had been seeing clearly, they would never have followed him, or even obeyed him. But you, you’re seeing clearly.”

  On the other side of the wall the silence seemed to have grown much more intense.

  “It’s your clear sight that upsets them,” I went on. “It’s because your eyes are open, and theirs are not. That’s why they say bad things about you, Siegfried—if they say bad things. That is your name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You don’t mind if I call you that?”

  “Of course not. What should I call you?”

  “Suzanne.”

  “It’s good of you to talk to me, Suzanne.”

  “I would put my arms around you if I could. I would comfort you.”

  “That’s what you’re doing—with your voice.” He paused. “Please don’t stop.”

  I talked to Siegfried for half the night. I tried to be the mother he deserved. This is why I learned the German language, I thought. It was for this. Later, when I ran out of things to say, I sang to him, as I had sung a few months before, for Claude. I sang “Le coeur du poète” and “Fermons nos rideaux” and “Quand les lilas refleuriront.” My voice was old and weak, and I doubted he could understand any of the words, but none of that mattered. Though I didn’t hear anything from him I kept on singing, just in case he still happened to be listening.

  At first light, footsteps came up the corridor and stopped outside his cell. A key turned in the lock. The door scraped open. I called out to Siegfried, telling him I was proud of him, and that I would always remember him. He didn’t answer. The door slammed shut, the footsteps faded.

  Though I lay quite still, I never heard the firing squad.

  They must have shot him somewhere else.

  On a February evening, my cell door was unlocked and Little Heinrich appeared, with Koppelmann, the prison governor.

  “Aufstehen,” Heinrich said, then moved aside.

  Reluctantly, I stood.

  Koppelmann stepped into the room and briskly rubbed his hands together. “Cold in here.”

  I said nothing.

  Bending down, he tested my pallet with the flat of his hand, as if he were checking into a hotel. Was this curiosity or sarcasm? With the Nazi high command, you could never be sure.

  “I have some news,” he said.

  I waited at the end of the bed, my hands by my sides, my nails pushed fiercely into my palms.

  “Your death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment,” he went on. “It seems you won’t be executed after all.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  Koppelmann seemed baffled by my response. “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “Pleased?”

  Ever since the trial, I had been living in a state of trepidation. Three months of thinking that I might be shot at any moment. But not knowing which moment. Never knowing. Three months of trying not to think. And now someone was standing in front of me and telling me that none of it was true—and I was supposed to be pleased? Besides, I wasn’t sure if I believed him. What if this was another of their sadistic games?

  Koppelmann was still staring at me. “I’m beginning to understand why Bode was so frustrated. You’re quite impossible.”

  “And my sister’s sentence?”

  “It has also been commuted.” He stepped over to the wall and examined the damp plaster. “You will be allowed to share a cell.”

  Something burst through me, then slowly dropped and faded, like fireworks falling into a dark sea. I stared at my hands—the small red crescents in my palms.

  Koppelmann was watching me over his shoulder. “You’re pleased about that at least.”

  I said nothing.

  He still hadn’t answered my question, and he wouldn’t, and I thought I knew why. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that if our sentences were being commuted it was out of weakness. The war was as good as lost, and the Nazis didn’t want it to be known that they had executed two old women. They were feeling apprehensive. They were playing safe. Could Koppelmann read my thoughts? Perhaps. Because he gave a small disgusted shake of his head and then turned on his heel and left.

  It was almost two weeks before Claude and I were reunited, long enough for me to wonder if the governor had changed his mind. But he hadn’t. When my cell door opened and Claude appeared, I took her in my arms and held her, and I remember nothing except her yellow jacket, which was too close for me to focus on, and the tapping of her heart against my chest, and I thought of the time I called at the apartment on Place du Commerce, the time she ran down the hall and hurled herself at me with such force that she almost knocked me off my feet, her slender arms around my neck, her hot voice in my ear. I love you, I love you, I love you…

  THE WRONG SHOES FOR A FIRE

  1945–1954

  When we were released from prison, just fifteen minutes before Churchill’s broadcast to mark VE Day, I stayed behind and talked to Otto and Little Heinrich, who had been good to us, but Claude rushed out into the town. On her return, she told me she had struggled to feel any true exhilaration or relief. She felt she was imitating a feeling that ought to have been flooding through her. It had certainly been flooding through the crowds she had mingled with in Royal Square. She had seen a pink hawthorn tree, and it was everything that she was not, its double blossoms seeming to explode in front of her, ecstatic. She sank onto the curb. Began to cry. Something had been given back to us, but at the same time something had been taken, and the sense of loss was more immediate, and more acute. It was as if we had come to rely on the presence of an enemy, and without it there was nothing left to hold us up, nothing we could define ourselves against. Once freedom had been tampered with, she said, it wasn’t so easy to reassemble.

  Our friend Vera had arranged for us to stay in a house belonging to English people who had abandoned the island in 1940. In an attempt to make us “feel at home,” she had brought a few things from St. Brelade’s Bay, things Edna had saved from our house before the Nazis raided it—some glass ornaments, an antique chest, and a book of poems by Robert Desnos. Vera was a kind person, but her kindness could feel like an imposition, since she tended to offer services we hadn’t asked for and didn’t need. What’s more, she had converted to Catholicism, and was evangelical about her new religion. Though Claude doubted she would be able to stomach the arrangement for longer than a night or two—she had taken to referring to Vera, rather caustically, as “Faith”—we set off for the house in the late afternoon, pushing a wooden handcart that contained our Red Cross parcels and various personal possessions. We were grimy and flea-bitten, and looking forward to our first hot bath in many months.

  Not long after leaving the prison, we saw the woman from the tobacconist walking towards us. This was on Union Street, near the Parish Hall. When the woman caught sight of us she came to a standstill, and one of her hands flew up to her mouth. Then she turned and ran. As she fled down the nearest sidestreet, something bulky tumbled from her pocket. I called after her, but she kept running. She didn’t even glance over her shoulder. In the bright sunlight, her crumpled shadow slid along the white brick wall beside her, like a crude evocation of her shock, her shame.

  “Her face,” I said. “Did you see?”

  Claude nodded. “It was green.”

  I crossed the street. The woman had dropped her purse. Inside, among other things, was her identit
y card, some loose change, and a photo of a plain young girl with pigtails.

  “What shall we do with this?” I asked Claude.

  She shrugged. “Hand it in, I suppose.”

  Outside the police station, she took out a pencil and a small piece of paper. Leaning on a low wall, she scribbled a few words on the paper and slipped it into the woman’s purse, next to the photo of the girl.

  The officer on duty asked if we wanted to leave our names. After all, he said, moistening his lips, there might be a reward.

  Claude told him we weren’t interested in rewards.

  His smile was sudden and benign. “Well,” he said, “it’s someone’s lucky day, isn’t it.”

  Later, I asked Claude what she had written.

  “How much did they pay you?” she said.

  We had often suspected someone of betraying us, but we had never been able to work out who it was.

  Now we knew.

  We stood on the road outside our house. A still blue afternoon, the sun hot against my hair. The fractured metal glitter of the sea. There were fortifications all along the coast, more conspicuous than I remembered, and more ugly. I thought of the slave workers who had lost their lives—some had been buried in the very structures they had been forced to build, if the rumors were to be believed—but nobody was talking about the slave workers, or about the Jews, or about brave people like the Reverend Cohu and Mrs. Gould, who had been deported and were probably now dead. The island had been liberated, and the most important thing, everyone kept saying, was to “get back to normal.”

  Earlier that day, I had spoken to Edna on the telephone. I had told her we were coming to St. Brelade’s Bay. She warned me that the house was in a state. I asked about Kid. She’d had him put down by the vet, she said, not long after we were arrested. If she hadn’t done it, the poor thing would have starved—or else the Germans would have killed him. I heard crying in the background. Edna had had a second child while we were in prison. When the phone call was over, I told Claude what I had learned.

  “No,” she said. “No, no…”

  I followed her down the slipway and through the door that led into the garden. Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of the Germans. There were bullet casings in the flower beds and boot marks on the lawn and, worst of all, the concrete wall was still there, crude and blatant, blocking our view of the bay. Claude stood on the terrace, near the front door, and called for Kid, the single syllable lifting plaintively towards the end. She had always believed their lives were intertwined. It was as though he was her shadow or her spirit—the embodiment of some treasured, hidden part of her. If she summoned him, he would hear her. He would come. It was a warm day, and she wore a Burberry raincoat over an elaborate jacket and a pair of trousers cut in the style of jodhpurs. She was sweating.

  I asked whether she wanted me to take her coat.

  “No,” she said again, more sharply.

  One by one, she checked the sun traps Kid had always favored—the stone porch, the south-facing windowsills, the roof of the shed.

  “Claude,” I said, “he’s not here.”

  “Be quiet.”

  Under the bright fall of light I saw how imprisonment had altered her. She seemed fragile and querulous. Her mouth had lost its youthful certainty.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Edna—”

  She came at me with her fists raised. “Shut up, shut up—”

  I gripped her wrists to stop her hitting me, then pulled her close and held her until all the fight had gone out of her. He had had a long and happy life, I told her. It would have been cruel to leave him on his own, with no one to care for him.

  She pushed back from me. “He’s dead.” She stared down at the grass, mouth trembling, hands fidgeting in her coat pockets. “I loved him so much.”

  “I know you did.”

  I took her in my arms again. She wouldn’t hold me, or even move.

  The wall at the end of the garden blurred. The smell of hot grass was heady, almost sickening.

  “I know you loved him,” I said. “I loved him too.”

  Her body began to shake. She seemed to have forfeited all the power and defiance she had showed during the trial, and I worried that the months in Gloucester Street—especially the months she had spent alone—might have broken her. I closed my eyes and held her tight, my cheek against her hair.

  “My little bird,” I murmured.

  Though we knew the house would have been plundered, not just by the occupying forces but by local opportunists and thieves, we weren’t prepared for the scale of the devastation that awaited us. Much of our furniture had been stolen. Many of our books and artworks too. Almost all my drawings. Electrical wiring had been ripped out of the walls. Floorboards had been prized loose. Edna had told me that German soldiers had been in to clean the day before—the smell of bleach was so fierce that it burned my nostrils—but when I opened a cupboard in the drawing room it was full of everything that had been swept up: torn and crumpled photographs, shards of glass, dried mud. We moved from one room to the next in silence, like ghosts of ourselves. The sense of emptiness kept growing. They had taken all the beds except the one where George and Edna slept. They had taken the curtains, the towels, the sheets, the lamps, the keys. They had taken the light switches and the doorknobs. They had even removed the locks.

  “There’s nothing left,” Claude said. “It’s just a shell.” She stood in front of her Pleyel, hands clenched into fists against her thighs. The piano, miraculously, was still there, though someone had spilled a drink over the keyboard, staining the white keys a sticky pink. “It’s like a rape.”

  “We still have the most valuable thing of all,” I said.

  “Our lives. I know.” Her voice was dry, sardonic.

  She played a chord that jarred the air. The piano needed tuning.

  “Don’t worry, my love,” I said. “I’ll have the whole place cleaned and painted. I’ll make it beautiful again, just like before. I’ll even do something about that wall. In the meantime we’ll stay in a hotel.”

  My promise felt hollow, rash. What were we going to do for money? All our assets were in France, and it seemed likely they would be tied up for years to come. I wasn’t even sure how we would live from day to day.

  Later, as I followed Claude out of the house, she came to a halt. “Do you have the camera?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Knowing our Kodak had been seized by the Nazis, Vera had lent us hers.

  “Could you take a picture?” she said.

  “Of course. Where?”

  “Here. In the doorway.”

  I positioned myself on the terrace with my back to the light and looked into the viewfinder.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She reached into her pocket and took out the metal eagle a German prisoner called Niedermayer had given her as a memento. She brought it up to her mouth and gripped it between her teeth.

  I clicked the shutter.

  Some weeks later, when the film came back from the developers, the image disappointed me. At first glance, it had none of the drama or daring of the photographs we had taken before the war. Claude was wearing her pale raincoat, and a headscarf was knotted loosely beneath her chin. She had thrust one hand into the pocket of her jodhpurs. Behind her was the front door, which stood half open. Beyond that, the darkness of the interior. Her body cast a thin rind of shadow onto the door’s curved stone surround. There were also shadows on her shoulder, and on the hem of her coat, and the shapes reminded me of butterflies. Black butterflies. She had Niedermayer’s insignia between her teeth, of course, but in the end it was just a photograph of a woman standing outside a house…Then I looked more closely at the expression on her face. She was giving off an unexpected confidence, a kind of optimism, something I hadn’t noticed at the time. This was so unlike her that my breath
caught in my throat. What lay behind this latest incarnation? Was she celebrating the defeat of our enemy? Presumably. But she also appeared to have been influenced by Blood and Sand, a Rudolph Valentino film that had featured a woman dancing with a rose between her teeth. Was she alluding to our love, which had endured in spite of all that we had been through? It seemed too obvious—too simple. There was something I had failed to understand.

  It was only years later, when I moved to a different house, that the deeper meaning came to me. As I stood at my bedroom window, watching a stray cat pick its way through my rockery, I thought of Kid. Always a skillful and determined hunter, he would often appear at our front door with the body of his latest victim wedged between his jaws. In the photograph, Claude might well have been referring to both our triumph and our reunion, but she was also paying homage to a member of our family who had not survived. The picture was a performance, as all our pictures were. She wasn’t just a Resistance heroine, showing off a trophy from the battle. She was a cat on a doorstep with a mouse.

  Towards the end of June, while Claude and I were having breakfast at the Casa Marina, a hotel in St. Helier, I was called to the telephone. The Jersey Weekly Post was on the line.

  “Is that Miss Schwob?” the journalist said when I picked up the receiver.

  “This is Miss Malherbe. Her sister.”

  “Good.” He told me he had been trying to track us down for weeks. He wanted to write a piece for the newspaper. His voice was eager, resonant.

  “A piece?” I said.

  “An article that covers your experiences during the war.”

  Claude and I had already been approached by the Daily Herald, an English newspaper, and by an American magazine, and Claude had agreed to both the interviews on one condition: I had to do most of the talking. When I asked her why, she told me she wanted our achievements conveyed in simple language, and she thought I would be more direct and less distracting. She was always so perceptive about the newspapers—how powerful they were, and how they lent themselves to all manner of distortion. In that sense, she was her father’s daughter.