Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘No. Not you.’ Irma grabbed his arm in a claw-like hand; she held him hard enough to hurt. ‘Stay here.’

  Bewildered, he said, ‘Very well. Then Fred must phone.’ He turned to Fred, who sat staring at the wine. ‘Fred, call an ambulance. Tell them about your wife. And see if he, Joe, can offer any help before they come.’

  He turned back to Irma, not looking to see if Fred complied. But then he heard the chair scrape back, Fred’s heavy, uneven step as he made for the door.

  Viv was weeping openly now, seeming much younger than her fifteen years, but she didn’t appear to be hurt save for a winding. Alfie put an arm around her.

  Ernst asked Irma, ‘What is it, Frau Miller? What are you afraid of?’

  Irma was convulsed by another contraction, and gasped. But she leaned closer to Ernst so the children could not hear. ‘My husband, Obergefreiter. I’m afraid of what he might do.’

  ‘About the baby?’

  ‘We’ve hardly talked about it. I don’t know what he’ll do - I’m frightened.’

  Ernst thought he was beginning to understand. ‘The baby is not his.’

  ‘I wasn’t unfaithful to him, Obergefreiter.’

  ‘Your relationships are your business.’

  ‘But that’s the point. It wasn’t a relationship at all. Not like that. It was during the invasion.’

  And then he saw it. ‘Oh. This was not, um, not your consent.’

  She bowed her head, shamed. ‘I’ve told nobody. Not even Fred. But he knows, deep down. I thought if I fought them off, the soldiers, they would take Viv - we had been hiding, you see—’

  ‘What unit were they? Did you learn that, do you remember? Wehrmacht or SS? If you can tell me precisely when this was, I could probably identify them. The Wehrmacht is strict on these matters, Frau Miller.’

  ‘Not the Germans. It was before the Germans even got here, before I’d seen a single wretched German. They were British. British soldiers, retreating. They came to the house and just took what they wanted. Food, drink... Fred knows, inside, I’m sure of it. But I don’t know what he’ll do about it, Obergefreiter, truly I don’t. I’m frightened, ever so.’ Her grip closed around his arm again. ‘Stay. Please stay!’

  V

  In Hastings, because of the various royal birthday events, it was gone nine by the time George got home.

  There was a pearl-white glow coming from the living room, and a murmur of German voices, the dull thump of martial music. He kicked off his boots, left his helmet on the occasional table by the door, hung up his jacket, and walked into the living room. Julia Fiveash sat on the sofa, her feet up on a pile of George’s books. She wore her black uniform jacket, unbuttoned, but her long legs were bare, looking as if they were carved from marble in the television’s cold light. She had a glass of whisky in one hand and a fag in the other, with a heaped ashtray on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘You started early,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Long day.’ Her blonde hair was loose, and tumbled around her shoulders when she turned to look at him.

  He peered at the television. He saw pictures of German soldiers on the move, and crude maps with bold black arrows thrusting across them.

  ‘Not Walt Disney, I take it.’

  She pointed. ‘There’s Moscow. You can read, can’t you? It’s a newsreel on our glorious advances in the east.’

  George found the television fascinating, whatever the subject matter; he’d only glimpsed sets in shops in London before the war. It was probably one of the Germans’ more successful propaganda moves, he thought, to set up a television service in Albion. It made up for the lousy cinema, where all you ever got now was a handful of films from before the war which were deemed ‘safe’ by the propaganda ministry, shown over and over, or else subtitled German movies, all sturdy farmers and marching youths. Of course the American cartoons on the television helped. George had heard that Hitler liked Donald Duck.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘where have you been?’

  ‘Work,’ he said bluntly. ‘We didn’t get the day off. I’ve got to go out again in an hour for the curfew.’

  ‘Oh, must you?’ She pouted, and uncrossed her legs, parting them slightly. ‘It’s already been such a long day.’

  He turned away. ‘Well, mine’s not over yet.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Have you eaten?’

  She waved a hand. ‘There was a reception at the castle. For the holiday, you know. Quite spectacular, actually. Fireworks. Did you see them? Well, I ate there. Just nibbles. You know me, I eat like a rabbit.’

  ‘Whereas I could eat a bloody rabbit.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a grump.’ She turned back to the television.

  He went to the kitchen. He knew there was a tin of Spam in here, unless Julia had swiped it. Since he had lost Hilda he had learned how to rustle up a decent fritter. He rattled around, looking for a frying pan and a bit of vegetable oil, hoping the gas pressure would be up tonight. He was tired, and vaguely annoyed that Julia hadn’t prepared anything for him. He clung to his petty irritation. Better to feel like that than to think about what he’d been doing today.

  Even on the King’s birthday the occupation was churning through its deliberate processes. It was already six months since the orders had gone out to exclude the town’s Jews from certain areas of work, such as teaching and policing. Now the process of ‘translocation’ had begun. At the moment it was simply a question of summoning males of working age to the police stations. Most of them turned up. The Germans always worked through civilian authorities, so it was coppers like George who were interviewing these bewildered-looking young men, some of whom didn’t consider themselves Jewish at all. The first transports had already crossed the Channel, taking the men to a holding camp in Drancy, before they were to be sent further east to the Reich’s great labour projects out there. It was all bloody, an endless slog of bureaucracy and bewilderment and cruelty.

  And George knew what was coming next. According to Harry Burdon it was already happening on the continent, in France and Belgium and Holland. Soon the forcible round-ups would begin. And then it wouldn’t be just working-age men who would be shipped out, but old folk, women and even children, and you could hardly tell yourself that they were bound for labour camps, could you, George? He still thought it was best to do his duty. But if the occupation lasted long enough for this sort of thing to be happening on his watch - well, perhaps he would have choices to make.

  As he got the Spam slices into the frying pan with a bit of batter, Julia came into the kitchen. She leaned against the door frame, smoking; she’d taken off her jacket now and wore only her shirt, her legs bare.

  ‘You look filthy,’ he said to her.

  ‘I bathed this morning.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ll take it as a compliment, then. It was quite a do, you know.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The King’s birthday reception. They were all there. Heydrich was the big star in town.’ Reinhard Heydrich was head of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the Party’s own security service. He was also the Reichsprotector of the occupied territory. ‘And Josef Trojan turned up, brandishing a letter of commendation from Himmler ...’ She listed more names.

  He half listened, not very interested. The Germans were always politicking. All the great Nazi barons had their representatives here in the protectorate - Himmler, for instance, with this Trojan. ‘Do you realise,’ he said, interrupting her, ‘that every name you’ve mentioned is a German? They all carry on their plotting and sucking-up and back-stabbing among each other as if the rest of us don’t exist.’

  Julia laughed. ‘I imagine it was the same in India under the Raj. Oh, I met one interesting chap. English, I mean. Claimed to be a second cousin of the King.’

  ‘Which king?’

  ‘Well, as Edward and George are brothers, that’s rather a silly question, isn’t it? In fact this chap is another Edward, viscount something-or-other. Now he’s c
ome down from London, and he claimed that there’s a theory going around up there that all this is divine retribution.’

  ‘For what?’

  She blew smoke out through pursed lips; her lipstick was a little smudged. ‘For deposing Edward, of course. That bully Stanley Baldwin - even Churchill thought it was the wrong thing to do. And now England’s reaping the whirlwind.’

  ‘What a load of cobblers. This isn’t the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Well, it’s a point of view. Heydrich rather took to the viscount, I think. He said he admires our aristocracy.’

  ‘A pack of traitors, if you ask me.’

  Julia sighed. She crossed to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He could feel her breath on his neck, the shirt rustling against his back, the smooth firmness of her body only a couple of layers of cloth away from his own. ‘Ah, dear George, you are always so browned off, aren’t you? You despise most of the English more than you despise the Nazis, I think.’

  ‘Mind my fritters.’

  ‘Oh, to perdition with your beastly fritters.’ She pulled at him, turning him around. Her face was close to his, her eyes and mouth wide, and her hair was a golden cloud in the dim light.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered. ‘I really am batting above my average with you.’

  ‘You say the most ridiculous things.’ Her lips closed on his and her tongue flickered, alive; he tasted cigarette smoke and wine and a hint of spice, the relic of her reception with the Nazis. She grabbed his balls, her moves confident, decisive. ‘And do you despise me?’ she asked breathily.

  ‘You ask me that every day.’

  ‘You despise what I do. The people I work with. Everything I believe in.’ And, it went unsaid, he despised those of her colleagues who had executed his daughter in cold blood. ‘And yet here we are. Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about this bloody war.’

  ‘Kick me out, then.’ She massaged his crotch, while her other hand pressed into the small of his back. ‘Go on. Just push me away.’

  ‘You and your bloody games. You’re cracked.’

  ‘And you say that every day too. Tell me to leave.’

  He took her wrists, and gently disengaged her hands from his body. ‘I’ll tell you to pack it in for now. Believe it or not I’m hungrier than I’m randy, and those Spam fritters are calling.’

  She laughed. She spun away, bunching up her hair behind her head with her hands. ‘You do sound your age sometimes. All right, I’ll leave you alone. Just make sure you wake me up when you come in from the curfew.’

  VI

  21 September

  They were in a muddy field, once the football pitch attached to a boys’ prep school, now fenced off with barbed wire and sentry towers and guns. In the grey light the men stood in their rows like tree stumps, shabby in their battered coats and wooden clogs, with their shaven heads. The Wehrmacht guards walked before them, their rifles in their arms. This was the dawn appell.

  The stalag commander walked out and stood before the men. Because this anonymous Sunday was Sea Lion Day, he announced, the first anniversary of the invasion, the prisoners would get a boost to their rations, a bit of pork sausage from their cousins in Bavaria, and the work kommandos would be allowed an additional hour off in the middle of the day. There were the usual ironic cheers from the ranks.

  Willis Farjeon, standing tall in his blue RAF greatcoat, murmured, ‘Good old Boche with all their memorial days. As long as we get a bit of extra kip they can make a memorial out of anything they like.’

  ‘I bet you’d like to make a memorial out of my arse, you bum bandit,’ called one of the men.

  Willis turned and grinned. ‘And you’d like a lick of my pork sausage, wouldn’t you, pongo?’

  ‘Bit early in the morning for that, Betty Grable,’ murmured Danny Adams, the SBO, actually an NCO in this other-ranks camp, a blunt scouser of a sergeant-major.

  The men calmed down and endured the rest of the appell.

  Gary couldn’t care less about any of it. He just stood there huddled in a greatcoat that still bore the bloodstains from the day he had been captured a year ago, after only a few hours in combat. He did look for Ben Kamen. The men of the work kommandos tended to cluster together, separate from the ‘housewives’, as stalag slang had it, the men who remained in the camp. Gary couldn’t see Ben today.

  Breakfast was a bowl of watery potato soup and a tin mug of the brownish liquid the goons called ‘tea’. Then the kommandos filed to the camp gates in their work parties, past the solid buildings that had once housed a headmaster’s office, and a medical room where nurses had searched little boys’ heads for hair nits, and now a German trooper with a machine gun sat in a corrugated-iron shed on the roof.

  At the gates they loaded themselves on their lorries. A young man called Joe Stubbs saw Gary coming and made a show of helping him up into the truck. That was the standing joke with the lads, that Gary, at twenty-six, was an old man, in fact an old Yank.

  It was a few miles from the stalag to the old Roman camp at Richborough, where the monument was slowly being built. The men endured the rattling journey in silence.

  At Richborough Gary and his mates stripped off their greatcoats and jackets. They got to work. Gary had to mix concrete, shovelling sand and mortar into the maw of a grinding mixer. After a year all the men had long lost their flab. Their elbows and knees were prominent, their faces gaunt.

  There were perhaps a hundred men working here, prisoners or civilian labour, in parties scattered around the camp. Richborough had been converted into a construction site, with ramps laid roughly down over the Roman ditches. A steady stream of lorries turned up through the day with rubble core and marble blocks and other supplies, to be unloaded by the workers. At the heart of it all was a forest of scaffolding, from which the four great feet of the double-arch monument were already rising.

  It was turning into a dismal autumn day, the sky a grey lid, and a hint of the rain to come prickling in the air. The men grumbled, but Gary didn’t mind the work. The physical effort made it easier not to think. But you worked slowly; the stalag diet of spuds and swedes and the odd bit of meat didn’t provide enough fuel for anything more than that. It wasn’t a pleasant thought that the cold today was a foretaste of the winter to come; the last had been bad enough, and Gary had lost his fat since then.

  The men worked, the guards patrolled. Mostly the guards were soldiers of the Wehrmacht. But today, maybe because of the Sea Lion anniversary, the Wehrmacht troops were supplemented by men in khaki uniforms. They had armbands bearing the swastika-on-George’s-cross symbol of the Albion protectorate, and when they spoke you could hear accents from Kent and Sussex and Hampshire and even London. These were the Landwacht, a German equivalent of the Home Guard, Englishmen who had volunteered to work for the protectorate authorities. When these characters had first turned up the prisoners had gone out of their way to give them a hard time, trying to knock off their tin hats with bits of hardcore, or spiking the muddy ground with nails embedded in bits of wood. But the Landwacht blokes responded with a ferocity not matched by the Germans, and there had been one occasion when Wehrmacht troops had had to intervene to stop a beating.

  After the others were already at work, Willis Farjeon came sauntering over to Gary’s group, as blithe as you pleased. ‘Morning, pongos,’ he said brightly.

  ‘Watch your backs, lads,’ said Joe Stubbs.

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that, Stubbs, you love me really.’ Willis stripped off his coat and took a spade.

  Joe Stubbs was only nineteen, a farmer’s son from Canterbury, a private who had been captured during the German advance after only a day’s active service and barely a couple of weeks’ training. To him, it seemed to Gary, war was the stalag, adulthood was being a POW. ‘Piss off, Farjeon,’ he said now, angry, nervous.

  ‘And the same to you, Stubbs, you lout.’ Willis came to work beside Gary. He was tall, rakish, good-looking in a David Niven sort of way.
He wore his black hair slicked back, though where he got the Brylcreem from was a matter of rumour, and he had a fine pencil-thin moustache, black as soot. A fighter pilot shot down over Kent during the invasion, he looked mid-twenties but he might have been younger. He said to Gary, ‘And how’s our resident member of the Dunkirk Running Club this morning?’

  ‘What Stubbs said.’

  ‘Oh, now, now. I am aware you’ve been ignoring me, you know.’

  Willis Farjeon made Gary squirm. Gary had found he simply couldn’t stomach a certain class of Englishmen, the public-school types as he thought of them, who sneered at everybody around them from the goons to their fellow prisoners. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Farjeon.’

  Willis smiled, working as hard as the rest. ‘Ah, but I’ve things to say to you, or so I hope. We have a mutual friend, after all.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Hans Gheldman. The little Austrian?’

  Gary frowned. ‘Hans Gheldman’ was the pseudonym Ben Kamen was using in the camp, hiding his Jewishness, posing as a second-generation émigré with an American mother. In the early days in the stalag Gary had quickly made contact with the escape committee crew and persuaded them to run up a fake set of identification documents for Ben. ‘I know Hans,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Funny little chap, isn’t he? Always scared of something. Well, so would I be, stuck in a place like this with a German accent.’

  ‘Austrian. Hans is an Austrian-American.’

  ‘Yes, but men like Stubbs here are always going to suspect him of being a mole.’

  ‘Fuck off, Farjeon,’ said Stubbs. ‘They’d never stick a mole in with a Kraut accent. Even the goons aren’t that stupid. You’re more likely to be a mole than fucking Gheldman.’

  ‘How peculiarly perceptive he is,’ Willis said, speaking of Stubbs rather than to him. ‘Well, Hans is nervous. He does speak of you, you know,’ he said to Gary. ‘Quite often - your experiences before the invasion - how you lost your wife.’