by Caroline Lea
A line of poetry clattered around and around in her head: she’d had to learn it by heart and say it over and over again at school. My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. Words of such loneliness and desperate longing for something unnamable. Not a bad feeling, not really. But a very big feeling. Too big for her child’s body.
She distracted herself by watching the soldiers. They made Jersey look very different. Not only because there were thousands of them, covering the roads and beaches, grim-faced and hard-jawed and marching everywhere with the stamp stamp stamp of their boots, but they were building, too. Not sandcastles. Big blocks of concrete to make grey towers and bunkers on the dunes so that, from a distance, the land looked snaggle-toothed. Cement to make bomb shelters. An enormous wall along St Ouen’s beach, like the flat sinuous body of a sleeping snake. And guns. Everywhere guns and men’s hands on them, their eyes looking down the sights.
By October, the nights started to close in and the cold and the dark crept in early over the sea. Claudine began running home after school with her head down, breath ballooning in her chest. The back of her neck itched with the feel of the glinting eyes watching her; the gleaming barrels of guns trained upon her.
After curfew, she lay in bed, the covers pulled up over her head. What would happen if she made a soldier angry? Would he shoot her and bury her in the big sea wall or under one of the huge concrete towers?
How long would it take for someone to find her bones, bleached white by sand, brined in seawater?
Running home through sand in the dark was like something from a nightmare; the ground shifted beneath her feet and sometimes there would be a dip in the sand and, for a moment, she would have the lurching sensation of plummeting off a cliff face with an unknown blackness gaping below. Then her foot would hit the sand and relief would jolt through her and she would run faster because who knew what German eyes with their German guns were lurking in the darkness?
One gloomy evening, she saw a bigger square of blackness on the dark grey of the beach and she stopped running.
What is it?
She crept closer, gasping to catch her breath. A giant hole in the sand, a little like all those craters from the explosions months ago, only with straight edges. As though someone had shaped and measured it. Almost like a shelter, but dug down into the sand, which was silly because it could easily collapse if there was ever another bomb.
She nearly turned back and walked home along the road. But that would have made her late home. She edged forward and peered in.
It was empty. Claudine lowered herself into it and felt around in the dark. Heart hammering, waiting for a monster to jump out.
No monsters. She patted her hands over a little crate, which seemed to be a table. And an empty tin, fashioned into a cup, half-filled with water. There was a crust of cabbage loaf, which felt a little dry and curled up at the edges, but at least it didn’t have teeth marks in it or, when she sniffed it, smell of mouse.
She set it back down. The temptation to eat it was like a magnetic pull.
Hunger scrabbled in her gut. Food was scarcer all the time because the soldiers were helping themselves to everyone’s bread and meat and stealing rabbits and chickens for their pots.
She tried talking to her stomach, and telling it that it wouldn’t gain anything by complaining.
No one was watching. No one would know.
It was so dark. She couldn’t see her own nose or hand. But her hands remembered where the bread was. She tore off great mouthfuls, barely chewing. Some of it stuck in her throat. A lurching moment of airless, silent coughing. She imagined a soldier finding her in the hole in the morning, a slimy gobbet of unchewed bread lodged in her gullet.
She bent double and coughed, and then it came loose. She chewed and swallowed more carefully after that.
Then, over the sound of the sea and her chewing, she heard footsteps, crunching on the sand and stones.
A soldier!
No one else would dare be out after curfew. A soldier coming closer to the hole. Perhaps coming to eat his cabbage loaf. Tight-chested, Claudine stuffed the last of the bread in her mouth and crouched down. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed herself into the side of the hole.
The footsteps stopped just above her. There was a silence. Then something heavy fell on top of her and knocked her face into the sand. She tried to scream but her mouth and nose filled up. She couldn’t breathe.
Someone was shouting. A man’s voice. But she couldn’t understand the words.
Then he pulled her upright and started shouting in her face and holding a gun against her forehead. Cold metal on her skin. The man’s spit went in her face and her eyes, which were gritty and stinging.
She tried to call for help, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was sand. She coughed and sicked up. Sour acid and grit trickling down her chin. She managed to sob, ‘Don’t hurt me!’
The man suddenly stopped shouting and said, ‘Kinder!’ and pulled the gun away from her forehead. He slapped her on the back and hugged her and wiped the spit and shingle from her face. And he was saying something else—the same word over and again—but she couldn’t understand.
She tried to spit the rest of the sand from her mouth and take a gulp from the tin cup of water he passed her. But her hands were shaking and she slopped most of the water over her shirt.
He laughed a little and held it for her, then tipped it towards her mouth, gently.
She tried to say thank you but no words came out—just a snort. Then she started to shake and her teeth clattered together, and she sat down on the wet sand and bawled.
The soldier took some matches from his pocket and lit a candle. His face, in the candlelight, was full of darkness and shadows. Like a picture of a skull she had once seen in the school copy of Hamlet. But then he moved the flame and the skull faded and she could see he had a pleasant face and kind eyes; he was smiling.
He held up one hand, like Maman did when she was telling Claudine to wait for something. He pulled out a long, thin piece of bark from his pocket and pressed it into her hand.
‘Thank you,’ Claudine said in a loud voice. ‘Danke schön.’
He beamed. ‘Gute Deutsch.’
‘Danke.’
He chuckled. Then he pointed at the piece of wood and said, ‘Schnap, schnap, schnap, eh? Schnap schnap!’
He clapped his hands together, awkwardly, and pointed at the wood again.
Claudine saw two things: firstly, that he must have cut the wood until it looked like a crocodile, with an eye and a tail and a mouthful of sharp, pointy teeth. The second thing she saw was that one of his hands was bunched up into a frozen, shiny fist, as though he had clenched his fingers for so long that the skin had grown over them. The thought of that strange paw brushing the sand from her face made her shudder.
The soldier had noticed her staring and she didn’t want to anger him, so she held the wooden crocodile up and repeated, ‘Danke schön.’
He nodded and grinned. He had ears that stuck out just a little and a biggish nose. But it was a fine nose, just the same.
She glanced again at that strange, menacing hand and then forced herself to look back to his cheerful face. And then, tentatively, shakily, she smiled.
He slapped his chest and said a word that sounded a little like ‘friend’. He did this a number of times, until she nodded and copied him.
He shrugged. ‘English very little.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Ja. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut.’
He laughed. ‘Sehr gut!’
By the flickering, orange glow of the candle, the soldier showed her some more things he had put in the corner of the hole: a chair with a broken leg, leaning against the wall. And a badly scratched table to go with it. Some more cups made from tin cans. A doll without any eyes and a teddy bear with all the stuffing ripped out. A train with no wheels. Some sticks. Things people had lost or discarded that had been swallowed by the sea then hurled back up
onto the beach.
Claudine picked up the doll and stroked the dark sockets where the eyes should have been. The blank face stared back at her.
‘Diese waren am Strand. Hier. Aber…’ He shrugged. ‘Kaput. Alles kaput.’ And he put his hands together—the bunched-up fist with its curled fingers like coiled buds, and his good hand, whole and intact—and then pulled them apart.
Then he said that long word again, which she thought must mean sorry.
It was strange to find kindness in a German soldier and to hear softness in that foreign tongue used so often to bawl out commands. As if the words didn’t matter so much as the warmth they carried, like a gift, a touch shared. Perhaps, Claudine thought, warmth and kindness didn’t have a country or a language.
MAURICE had hated them on sight, of course: they were like some sort of machine, moving all in time without a single beating heart among the whole God-forsaken lot of them.
More of them arrived all the time. At first, it had been a thousand, which was bad enough, but by winter there were nearly twelve thousand of the bastards—one German for every four Jèrriais. And the rules, the endless bloody rules: the curfews and the rationing and, worst of all, no fishing.
Maurice had hidden his boat among the rocks at Devil’s Hole and hoped that any Jèrriais who saw it wouldn’t breathe a word. Most wouldn’t want to see him come to harm, he was sure, but there were already a few loose tongues—people falling over themselves to settle old feuds by landing others in prison. Once the Germans had you in prison, who knew what would happen?
He recalled what one of the French fishermen had said about them—that the Germans were dangereux and sans pitié. It was after his brother had been caught sneaking his boat out of the St Malo Harbour. Slipping off to catch some fish for his children—staving off starvation with the hope of a silver-bodied fish.
The man had been beaten until near dead. Soldiers had raped his wife again and again, taking turns with her until she bled. Laughing while she screamed. The man and his wife and children had been put on a train and hadn’t been heard from since.
The Frenchman knew his brother was dead. He believed he would be caught soon himself, and he knew that the same would happen to him. He comforted himself that he had no wife or children.
‘Les Allemands sont inhumaines.’
When Maurice watched the soldiers marching around the island, those words were made flesh. It was the eyes. Cold pebbles. They found you out and then looked right through you, as if you were a dog in the street. Or a body in a ditch.
Maurice’s panic swelled with every passing moment: Marthe wasn’t safe. He couldn’t be at home every minute of the day—they had to eat, even if it was just the oysters stolen from the French. But he couldn’t be doing with knowing that one day he might go out on his boat to steal a netful and find himself captured.
If it was his friends, the French fisherman, who caught him, they’d give him a beating—at best. From the Germans, it would be a bullet in the head or a train to God only knew where. And all the while, poor Marthe at home alone, terrified, starving or dying of thirst or sitting in her own filth, juddering with hunger that melted flesh from her bones, believing he had abandoned her.
Or Maurice would worry about arriving home only to find that they’d stolen Marthe away and locked her up. Or shipped her off to have tests done on her. Everyone had heard the rumours. Their experiments on anyone who wasn’t normal had been going on since before the war.
It was hunger that dragged him out to sea again. They had finished the oysters and all the hard bread and the seed potatoes. Even the pickled vegetables and the jams he had put by for the winter months. Gone, all gone.
He must go out on the boat. But what to do with Marthe? She needed constant care—all her food had to be mashed. She couldn’t even swallow for much of the time. Each meal took hours, giving her tiny spoonfuls. She choked and choked, until she remembered she needed to swallow, her eyes dark pools of panic every time.
It was enough to make Maurice scream or want to rip his hair out by the roots. But he held her hand, told her she was a good girl.
My love, my dearest love.
He stroked her hair, kissed her fingers one by one, but all the while turning over what was to be done. He couldn’t let them take her away. Torture her with their knives and their needles. Lock her up like some sort of diseased animal.
I’d rather kill her myself.
So he took her out one day, an hour or so before curfew. Not many patrols around at that time.
He had mashed some old windfall apples very fine, with a little milk and the last crust of bread. He’d dug out all the medicines she’d ever been given and he crushed each tablet and mixed everything together. He tried a little, on the tip of his tongue. Bitter enough to make him retch, so he added the last of their sugar ration too.
He had her blanket. Spare clothes for her, with deep pockets. Four large stones. He had it all planned out. Everything ready.
But as he picked Marthe up, she began to scream. Just like the time before. But this time, he couldn’t afford to listen. Nothing for it but to keep walking.
He held her close, whispered against the soft skin of her ear—still perfect. Wisps of her hair tickling his face.
Don’t think on that now.
‘Come now, my love. We’re just going to sit on the beach. We’ll watch the sea together. Like we used to. Just you and me. See, I’ve brought a blanket for us to sit on. Remember the picnics when we courted? I’ve brought lunch—a little bowlful for us to share. Then we’ll have a nice sleep on the beach. Just as we used to.’
She moaned as though the poison was already burning in her blood, as though the sea water was already bubbling in her mouth.
He didn’t stop. It’s all for the best.
They were halfway down the hill when Marthe kicked her legs out, hard. The bowl fell from his hand and smashed on the stone. Apples with milk and bread spattered all over the path, like vomit. The white crumbs of tablet and powder seeped into the soil.
Maurice cursed, tried to scrape it back into half of the bowl. The edges were sharp and he sliced his finger open, but he carried on. Stones and grit and drops of blood had all mixed in with it. He cursed again.
She would never swallow it.
He felt rage in the pit of his stomach, spreading up to his hands, his face, blood boiling through his veins until he felt like one of the damned German bombs. One false movement would detonate him.
So he put down the shattered bowl and walked to the cliff’s edge and looked out at the flat blue sea and the unbroken sky. Never the same, yet unchangeable, immutable—even when the land was crawling with pissing, shitting dogs.
He drew in a steadying lungful of air. Sharp tang of salt in it. He listened to the seagulls screeching away and diving for fish. The same as ever, they paid no mind to the poison on the land. There must have been a decent shoal out there because there was a fair-sized flock of birds and they kept diving and coming up with wriggling silver in their beaks or gullets.
The sea had everything you needed, if you knew where to look. He had always fancied drowning would be a peaceful way to go. Just a few breaths, a burning while your lungs swelled for air and found water instead, and then darkness. How to miss the cliff face, though? That was the devil of it—avoiding being smashed to pieces on those rocks.
He was so lost in thought that when he heard the voice behind him he nearly jumped out of his skin and tumbled down the cliff there and then.
‘Why hello there, Maurice. And Marthe too. Lovely view today. You can see clear across to France.’
Edith Bisson.
Maurice nodded and croaked a hello. He didn’t say anything else, because how must it look with his sickly wife lying beside a cliff path while he stood gaping at the view?
Edith had always seemed kindly. She had never talked down to Marthe like she was some sort of baby—she’d always asked questions and spoken as if Marthe still understood wha
t she was saying. And she had never been one to skirt around Maurice like he’d two heads, as so many folk did because they didn’t know what to say to a man who was playing the nursemaid to his wife.
He didn’t see too much of her in the normal run of things, but he knew that some people didn’t trust her, had her marked out as a witch or some nonsense. He’d never taken much heed of gossip and she’d always been pleasant enough to him.
Sometimes, she’d found him out on market day and pressed a tea or a lotion into his hand, though she’d no reason to look after him or Marthe. The concoctions didn’t hurt; some even seemed to make Marthe a little brighter, but Maurice had felt ashamed to ask for more when he didn’t always have the money or the fish to pay.
He kept on staring out at the flat body of the sea, stretching off to lands where people had never heard of Germany—or Jersey, for that matter. Places where people had never heard the word Nazi.
Edith stood next to him, watching the seagulls. She had a quiet way about her that didn’t intrude on your thoughts.
‘Must be a fair few fish out there,’ she said. ‘Those gulls are having a feast.’
He nodded. ‘I was thinking the same.’
‘Good weather for it, I suppose—bit of a wind, but the water’s clear enough to see the fish.’
‘Yes, it’s a north-easter.’
‘Mackerel, then, you think?’
‘Could be. Or bass. Something smaller, sand eels, perhaps. Difficult to tell at this distance.’
She stood a little closer. ‘Had much to do with our German guests, then?’
‘Not especially. I’ve not been out much. Best avoided, I think. You?’
‘A little. They’re het up with me because they keep catching me out before curfew ends in the early mornings. As if I could be making off to the mainland with nothing but a basket of nightshade.’