Wait for Me

by Caroline Leech

  “Bloody rain!” she said, shaking the excess water from her hand.

  “I agree,” said a voice behind her. “Bloody rain!”

  Lorna spun around too quickly. Paul was sitting only ten yards away on the trunk of a tree that lay at a drunken angle to the ground.

  Considering the deluge falling so near, he looked remarkably dry in his dark gray army sweater and the maroon scarf she had knitted. In contrast, Lorna knew she must look like a thoroughly drowned rat. Stray strands of hair were plastered to her face, and her white cotton shirt was sticking to her arms and shoulders.

  Even though she knew—she hoped—that her wet shirt was not showing off anything more embarrassing than an unflattering undershirt, Lorna suddenly felt exposed under Paul’s scrutiny and tried to pull her sweater back over her head. She only succeeded in dropping both her coat and scarf onto the ground, and anyway, she knew she’d never get the damp sweater back on with any dignity.

  Then Paul was at her side, picking up her coat. Lorna started. Standing this close to her, he seemed far bigger than he had done when he was sitting at a distance in the lambing shed.

  Paul squeezed the fabric of her coat with strong fingers.

  “This is very wet,” he said. “You will become sick if you put it on again.”

  “I’ll be fine, it’s just a bit of r-r-rain.” Lorna shivered and tried to take her coat from him.

  Paul held the coat just an inch or two beyond her grasp, then tossed it over the nearest branch. He then stripped off his own sweater before Lorna could protest and reached forward to put it over her head.

  Lorna took a step away from him, feeling acute discomfort at this unexpected intimacy.

  “No, really,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “But your coat is wet,” Paul repeated, holding his sweater out toward her again.

  The warm flush of blood rising in her cheeks stung under the biting chill of her skin.

  “You really don’t need to give me that,” Lorna insisted. “You’ll need it.”

  “But I do not shiver.” Paul looked at her as if perplexed. “It is only a sweater. And you are very wet.”

  Lorna was shivering hard now, and his genuinely puzzled tone made her wonder if her pettiness was justified. It was only a sweater.

  She took a tentative step toward him. He gently pulled the sweater over her head and down around her shoulders until she was swaddled in it to the hips, her arms stuck inside the warm body of the heavy sweater. When he moved even closer to reach behind her head to release her wet braid, Lorna did not resist.

  Paul was less than an arm’s length from her now, and Lorna let her eyes roam across the tight scarring of his face. Having given herself permission to look now, she realized that she was no longer as shocked by the damage as she once had been. The stretched skin, the puckering, appeared almost familiar.

  Keeping close, Paul untied the scarf from his neck, looped it around Lorna’s throat, and stepped back half a pace.

  Lorna inhaled deeply, the shivers already subsiding. The wool was still warm and held a strong pleasant smell, of hay and sheep and mud and wood smoke. It was welcoming, comforting, and safe.

  Paul was watching her carefully.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  Paul smiled. “You are welcome,” he said.

  Leading her lightly by one dangling woolen arm, he guided her to the tree trunk on which he had been sitting.

  “Perhaps we will sit here to wait for the rain to finish.”

  Lorna said nothing, but sat down on the lower end of the log.

  Paul was about to sit down beside her but seemed to change his mind. Instead, he moved to sit on her other side, as if he deliberately wanted her on his right.

  From this side, Lorna could see almost none of the damage to his face, and she regretted having stared so openly at it. Of course, he must be self-conscious. For a moment, she considered apologizing, but that would probably make matters worse. Instead, she tucked her mouth down behind the thick collar of the scarf, hugging herself within her warm cocoon, relishing the comfort she felt, both from the sweater and, she would admit, from Paul’s presence.

  Because in spite of herself, Lorna couldn’t deny anymore that Paul was rather nice. And perhaps, if the war didn’t exist, they might be sitting there simply as friends sheltering from the storm.

  She allowed herself a quick glance sideways at him. He was looking out into the heavy rain.

  “I did not know that your Scottish weather could be so . . .” He searched for the word. “So exciting. I have only seen a storm like this one time before, when I visited the great mountains of Bavaria. The thunder jumped from one mountain to the next.”

  “Like an echo?” asked Lorna.

  She had never seen a mountain herself; a school trip to the Lammermuir Hills in the Scottish Borders was the highest she had ever been. She tried to imagine the Bavarian mountains.

  “You call it echo?” Paul asked. “In German, we call it Echo also. And do you know what we call thunder and lightning?”

  “I don’t know any German at all,” Lorna said, shaking her head. “You must think we’re not very clever. You speak such good English and we speak no language other than our own.”

  He waved her comment aside.

  “In Germany, we call thunder and lightning Donner und Blitzen.”

  “Blitzen?” repeated Lorna. “Like the Blitz?”

  A shadow crossed Paul’s face, and Lorna could have bitten her tongue. Why had she mentioned the German bombing raids on London, which had devastated the city and killed thousands of people? The war would never be far away, she knew, but did she have to remind him about it?

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I just thought it just sounded like the same word.”

  Lorna could feel her ears burning, but Paul only nodded.

  “Blitzkrieg means ‘lightning war,’ so you are right,” he said. “And do not apologize. I am not proud that my country has killed many of your people, though please remember, your country has killed many Germans too. But that is what war is about. We do not like it, but we must all live with it until it is ended.”

  There was an unmistakably bitter tone to his voice. Lorna wasn’t sure how to respond, so they sat in silence for a few moments.

  “What was it like for you in the war?” she asked finally.

  Paul did not respond immediately.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said. “My brothers never want to tell me anything either.”

  Paul took a deep breath and held it for several seconds before he spoke again.

  “When the Wehrmacht called me to join, I tried to tell them I could not go because my mother and my sister needed me.” Paul seemed to address his quiet words to the rain and the trees rather than to Lorna. “But the officer called me a coward and asked if I knew what happened to cowards.”

  Lorna knew the answer to that as well.

  “So I said good-bye to my mother and to Lilli and I went to the army.”

  Paul swallowed hard, and Lorna found her own throat tightening. She knew how it felt to say good-bye.

  “When I had finished learning to be a soldier, they sent me to France. Not Paris. Paris was too good for us. Our captain told us that we were worth nothing, and therefore they were sending us to the most gottverlassen . . .”

  He frowned.

  “Is ‘god-abandoned’ an English word?”

  “I think it would be ‘godforsaken,’” offered Lorna.

  “Yes, he said they would send us to the most godforsaken place on earth to keep us out of the way of far braver Germans who would win the war. So we sat on a beach in Normandy for three weeks . . .”

  Normandy. The hairs on Lorna’s neck rose. Could she guess what was coming?

  “. . . staring at the empty English Channel, and we began to believe him that we were worth nothing to the generals in Berlin. But Normandy was not godforsaken; it was very beautiful.
<
br />   “There was little to do and the weather was hot, so we had picnics and we swam in the little river running down to the sea. But then a storm came down, so we went indoors to wait for the sun to shine again over the empty sea.

  “But the next morning, the sea was not empty. It was full of boats, and the sky was full of airplanes and parachutes, and the beach was full of soldiers.”

  “D-Day,” Lorna whispered. D-Day, the day last June when the Allies had invaded the northern coast of France, pushing the German army back through Normandy to Paris, and onward to the low countries. Lorna was sure John Jo had been there, on D-Day—the Royal Scots certainly had been, she’d seen it in the newspaper, but he’d never told her anything of importance like that in his letters home.

  Paul seemed not to have heard her. “I was in a Blockhaus, a machine gun post, looking over the beach. One of my friends was shooting on the gun, and it was so loud. . . . I tried to talk to the control room on the telephone, but it was dead.”

  Paul paused. He lowered his head and Lorna could not see his face.

  “Then the Blockhaus was hit, by a shell or a grenade, and I was thrown behind a metal table. It gave me shelter from the explosion.” Paul lifted his hand to cover the left side of his face, and Lorna could see his hand was trembling. “Or from most of it.”

  Lorna sat frozen, not daring to move, desperate not to break the moment. She couldn’t bear to hear more, but she also couldn’t bring herself to stop him.

  “There was smoke, and I could not breathe. I knew I had to leave, but how? I could see nothing and I could hear nothing, but somehow I found a way out. There was so much pain, and I was bleeding very much from here.”

  Paul put his hand onto the side of his rib cage where Lorna had seen the dark pink scar.

  “I lay in the wet grass against the Blockhaus wall and I thought for sure I was in hell. The ground shook. I could not hear the bombs, but I could feel the air punch me as each one fell. And I remember feeling sad that I could not smell the sea anymore.”

  Paul’s voice was barely audible, and Lorna had to lean in to him so she could hear. Although this meant she was pressing her shoulder against his arm, he seemed not to notice.

  “After a long time, the bombs stopped and I tried to look, but my eyes did not work. There were men and trucks going past, I could feel them, but I could not see them. They did not come to help me, so perhaps they thought I was already dead. And the pain was so bad, I decided death would be best. So I lay there, and I waited to die.

  “But I did not die. Instead I woke and an American soldier was talking to me, a medic. He knew I was still alive before I did. Is that not funny?”

  He lifted his head and looked at her now.

  Lorna squirmed until she had one arm into the sleeve of the sweater, and then she extracted her hand from inside the cuff and laid it on his arm.

  “Were you hurt very badly?” she whispered. “I mean, apart from your . . .”

  This time, she could not look at his face, could not study his injuries as she had done earlier. Now it upset her too much to think of the pain it had caused him, so instead she studied her own hand where it lay on the thin cotton of his shirt.

  “I was lucky,” he said quietly. “So many of my friends were not. In the hospital, they gave me operations to save the skin on my face, and they said that I might need more in the future, but still, I know I am lucky to be alive.”

  Paul put his hand into his pants pocket and brought out a handful of small pieces of metal and wire. From them, he picked up one of the larger fragments in his fingers. It was dark metal, about one inch square.

  “The American doctor took this from here.” He pointed to his rib cage. “From a grenade, I think. He was a very good doctor, but the hospital was only an old house, and he worked with the few tools he had. I was very sick for a long time, and often I wished I had died. But then I thought of Lilli and my mother waiting for me, and I made myself get better and stronger.”

  Lorna gingerly touched the tip of one finger to the piece of shrapnel, which could have, should have, killed him—it was a piece of an Allied grenade, thrown by an Allied soldier, just like her brother. Had John Jo been one of the men running up that particular Normandy beach alongside the Americans? The thought sickened her. But then again, Paul was not blameless either. Perhaps John Jo had faced the German gun firing from Paul’s Blockhaus or one just like it on another beach. Had her brother watched as German bullets tore apart the men beside him?

  Suddenly the doubts crept back in. She must not forget that this man was an enemy soldier, she must not forget he was German, that he had been trained to kill men like her brother and his friends. She forced herself to remember this, even though this new friendship was making it easier to forget thoughts like those.

  Lorna came back to the moment and realized that Paul’s palm was still outstretched, and it held other pieces of metal and wire. She remembered his strange behavior the day before. Were these the things she had seen him picking up in the yard?

  “What’s the rest of this?” she asked. “Why would you want it?”

  Paul closed his fingers over the fragments and put them back into his pocket.

  “It is nothing,” he said. “I pick up little pieces of metal I find lying around. I like to keep them.”

  “For what?”

  Paul turned his face toward Lorna, and though she was aware again of the scorched skin stretched over his left cheek, she was entirely distracted by his eyes as they held hers. How like the gray storm they were.

  “The rain clouds . . . ,” she said without meaning to.

  Paul looked away from her and out through the trees. The unburdened clouds had lightened and were lifting away.

  “. . . have all gone,” he finished, and stood up. “The rain is over, so will you let me walk you home?”

  Ten

  On the Tuesday after the rainstorm, Lorna returned home to find Mrs. Mack at the stove humming one of her busy-in-the-kitchen tunes. Lorna gave her a hug from behind.

  “What are you still doing here?” Lorna asked. “You should be getting the bairns’ tea, not ours.”

  “I’ll be away in a minute or two. But Sheena’s on a day off today, so there’s no need for me to rush around for once. Now you’re here, though, make yourself useful by filling the teapot while I get the eggs. Your dad and Nellie will be in soon.”

  Mrs. Mack disappeared through the scullery door with the egg basket almost the same time as Lorna’s dad came in the other door from the yard.

  “So what does a man have to do to get a cup of tea round here?” he said, tossing his jacket over the back of a chair.

  Once Lorna had poured the boiling water into the teapot, she lifted down three cups from the dresser. As she did, she noticed the little hook on which her father had hung his broken watch was empty.

  “Did your watch get fixed already?” she asked.

  “Oh, well remembered!” her dad said, and instinctively glanced at his empty wrist. “Where did you put it? Donald Hastie has business up in the Old Town on Thursday and says he’ll drop it into Christie’s the Jewelers for me.”

  “Me?” Lorna was confused. “I didn’t put it anywhere. Maybe Mrs. Mack moved it to do the dusting. Why don’t you ask her when she comes back in? Or maybe it was Nellie?”

  Lorna’s dad scowled. “Why on earth would Nellie have touched it?”

  “I don’t know why, but—” Lorna said as she poured out the first cup and handed it to him.

  “Well, somebody’s been having it. And nobody else has been in the house this last week except us four. So please ask Nellie about it if you see her before I do.”

  Nobody else has been in the house. . . .

  “Because if I don’t get that watch to Donald before Thursday, I’ll be waiting weeks more to get it to the mender’s.”

  Nobody else . . . except . . .

  The floor dropped away from her. On Friday, the day after the storm, the day after he had
wrapped her in the warmth of his sweater and they had talked for so long, Paul had been in the house.

  Lorna had walked home along Coffin Lane as usual, and she’d seen Paul leave the barn. Dangling a large tin mug from one finger, he’d knocked once on the kitchen door before going in, even though he wasn’t supposed to. After less than a minute, he’d come back out, and thinking about it now, Lorna remembered he’d been carrying something. Not the tin mug, too small, but something he’d slipped into his pocket before she could make out what exactly it was. And then he’d stooped to pick up something off the ground, which he’d also pocketed.

  Lorna at the time had been so wrapped up thinking about the damage done by the shrapnel he carried around, she hadn’t thought any more about it.

  Until now.

  What if it had been her grandfather’s watch in Paul’s hand? What if he had stolen it so he could sell it in the camp, or barter with it?

  He might not need money to buy food or clothes. He had his uniform and Sandy’s coveralls and the gloves and scarf. And it was clear from his developing muscles—Lorna pictured him again at the water pump—that he was being given enough good food to eat now. Who knew why he’d need the money, but her dad’s precious watch had been sitting there for the taking.

  Lorna struggled with the idea. The boy she’d talked to in the woods wouldn’t have taken it, she was sure. He had been warm and kind. But was that enough? He was still a German. And while he might have told her of his home, his family, and his work, really, what did she actually know about Paul?

  Her dad stirred milk into his tea. Should she tell him of her suspicions? She had no real evidence that Paul had taken the watch. Her dad needed Paul’s help, and Lorna was glad he was here for that reason, if for no other. And Paul had been through so much already. But what else might he steal if she said nothing? And who else could have taken the watch anyway?