Oberstleutnant Fischer emerged from their midst and placed one palm on the counter as if to stake ownership. ‘I am very sorry, Frau Huber, to interrupt your business.’ His manner was placatory, a thin veneer of pleasantry, as he pulled an identity card from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘We are searching for a young woman, Rachel Cohen.’
My mind raced. I stared down at Rachel’s face, hoping my eyes didn’t betray my connection to her. I read her details, all in neat, sloping handwriting. Hair: black; eye colour: brown; distinguishing marks: none. Her card, unlike mine, was stamped with a red ‘J’. Where had they got this? Why wasn’t Rachel carrying it in her bag anymore? A thousand questions skittered through my head. I took a breath. ‘I haven’t seen her,’ I said. It was the truth.
‘But you know her?’
‘She buys her bread here; she’s a customer. Is something wrong?’ I pinned a pleasant smile to my face.
He passed the card to Mrs Hedges, who scrutinised it carefully. ‘It’s that young woman who works in the bank,’ she said. ‘Nice young woman, always got a smile.’
‘Not anymore,’ Fischer said. ‘She’s…’ He stopped abruptly, stretched his jaw and pulled his collar away from his neck as if it was too tight. ‘You won’t mind if we search?’
‘No, of course not. Go ahead.’ Mrs Hedges and I exchanged glances. There was something they weren’t telling us.
The men headed for my sitting room door. Far more men than would be needed for my small house, it seemed to me.
‘Achtung!’ Fischer called. ‘Macht es vorsichtig. Ihr Mann ist Deutscher.’ Be careful, her husband is German.
‘Danke,’ I said.
He ducked under the lintel and followed his men.
For the first time I felt the invasion viscerally, that I must stand by and do nothing. Even if they were careful, the thought of these men in jackboots tramping over my rag rugs, of them opening up my drawers and looking into my personal things, made me angry. I found myself tearing one of the paper bags on the counter into shreds.
‘You never told me you spoke German.’ Mrs Hedges fixed me with an accusing eye.
‘Only a little,’ I lied. ‘You have to try to get on, don’t you?’
‘Your husband’s German,’ she said. ‘That’s what that man said, isn’t it? I understand them, but I don’t speak to them. Not if I can help it. I learnt it through music. Bach. Beethoven. I used to love opera, especially Wagner.’ She braced her shoulders and frowned. ‘Can’t stand them now, of course.’ She didn’t give me time to answer. ‘That poor girl. She’s a Jew, isn’t she? It’s on her card. I’ve heard what they’ve done to them in France. If she’s not dead by now, she soon will be.’
‘I’m sure —’
‘Some of us have principles,’ Mrs Hedges said, raising her voice and pushing out her chest. ‘I won’t be buying my bread from you again. Good day.’ And she plucked her bag from the counter and went.
I leant on the counter and pressed my forehead into my hands. I felt her words as a sharp twist in my guts.
I pulled myself upright as Fischer returned, followed by his men, who were grinning broadly as if searching houses was their favourite hobby.
‘If this young woman comes to you again, you will tell us, ja?’
‘Of course. Whatever I can do to help.’ I wiped my hands on my overall, aware of the patter of my heart under it, and my shallow breath. These men weren’t the enemy, I reminded myself. My husband’s kin. Just men like him.
Fischer swiped Rachel’s identity card from the counter, squinted at it once more, and pushed it into his breast pocket. When he left, I went through to the house. Everything was as it should be. There was no disorder. Yet still, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that only a few moments earlier uninvited guests had been trawling through here in their helmets, examining everything, prying and peeking into my business. The drawer on the sideboard was open, exposing its innards of old telephone directories, wires and plugs, scissors, string, and old birthday cards.
They’d had their hands in there. There was nothing of any importance, just bits and bobs that might come in useful. But their searching left an atmosphere behind, one I couldn’t at first find a label for, but later I had it. The room smelt of suspicion.
My bicycle was an effort to ride now because we couldn’t get inner tubes for the tyres, and so I’d improvised, like everyone else, with lengths of hosepipe filled with sand. It made for a lumpy ride that evening, as I forced it through the blustery autumn wind. Halfway up the lane to the farm, I saw the glint of helmets. Instinctively, I pulled off to the side and slid off the saddle.
The thud of German boots was interspersed with another sound. The first cohort of soldiers got closer, marching in formation, boots gleaming as they splashed through the puddles and leaves on the lane, their rifles poking upwards from their shoulders. I dragged the bike further into the field gateway. They were right beside me now, their polished leather holsters stuffed with guns. So many guns. Lugers, I think they’re called. Guns on Jersey streets would have once seemed unthinkable. But behind them…
I stared, unable to believe my eyes. About thirty men, all stick thin, unshaven, bruised and filthy, dressed in an assortment of rags. The worst of it was, they had no shoes. Just mud-encrusted cloths tied around their feet, and they were marching on this stony dirt track. One of them glanced my way, but his eyes flicked only briefly to mine before they returned to the heels of the man in front. Something about the beaten quality of those men made me rigid. It came to me in a sudden rush of heat. The Germans were using these people as slaves.
One of the last men to pass had a shirt that was torn at the back and through its flapping vent weals showed, stripes darkly encrusted with blood. I pressed myself back against the gate. The man had been whipped. Actually whipped. Yet this was no gladiator in a film of ancient Rome, it was happening now, in twentieth century Jersey.
As I watched, a leaf blew from the sycamore tree near the gate and landed on the man’s shoulder. He paused to pick it off, holding its fragile yellowing bowl in his upturned hand. A smile almost broke at the corners of his mouth. Immediately, one of the guards poked him in the back to make him move quicker. The man winced and stumbled, crushing the leaf in his fingers, but righted himself quickly and lurched forward, and I pressed my fist to my mouth. The fragments of leaf careened away in the breeze.
The second group of soldiers tramped past, after the workers, their faces fixed and impassive. Shaken, as soon as they rounded the corner, I mounted my bike and pedalled furiously up the hill.
‘Did you know they were using slave labour?’ I asked Mrs Flanders.
She sucked her lips. ‘Aye. Well, they’re only foreigners. Russians and Poles mostly. There’s a camp for them. Something called OT. Organisation Todt. They work at the quarry near L’Étacq.’
‘I just saw them. They looked barely alive.’
‘It’s them or us, though, isn’t it? With rations so low, we have to feed ourselves and the Germans first. They will keep bringing in more workers, and it stands to reason we can’t feed them all. It’s not up to us.’
‘But those people were starving. Legs thin as twigs. It can’t be right.’
‘Well, you’d do best not to complain. Or they’ll say it’s anti-German and deport you. And then who knows where you’ll end up?’
Fear twined around my throat. And that horrible feeling that I’d once had in the playground, when I’d watched the school bully kick a boy repeatedly on the shins but I was too scared of the bully to report him.
I milked the cows in silence, hearing the squirt of milk sing into the pan, but my mind lingered on those men. Seeing the state of them made me realise that we were also expendable; that they could deport us, just like the Jews, or choose to use us as slaves. We were all equally at their mercy. Yet there must be something we could do. Something. The reality of living under enemy occupation had begun to bite, but within me a stubborn resistance was growing.
>
Mrs Flanders led the cow she was milking out of the milking parlour, and I heard the latch of the gate and her hearty slap on its rump as she let it into the field. When she came back, she said, ‘I was sorry to hear about your friend. It is her, isn’t it? What a terrible thing.’ She waited expectantly.
I stood up and stretched my back. ‘Which friend? I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘That girl from the bank. Rachel, is it?’ Mrs Flanders took her pail to the churn and poured in a long stream of milk.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They came looking for her at the bakery. Have they been up here to you too?’
‘Looking for her?’ Her eyes widened as she plonked her empty bucket down with a clatter.
‘Wanted to know if I’d seen her.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘Why do they do anything?’
‘But I’d heard…’ She was biting her lip now, and her hand crept up to cover her mouth.
‘What? What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know how to tell you. Oh Lordy. I thought you knew. I went in the bank on the way back from the morning deliveries and they said … well, they told me she’d passed away.’
‘Rachel? That’s ridiculous. She can’t have —’
‘Just walked into the sea and drowned herself. Can you imagine?’ Mrs Flanders’ eyes lit up with beady glee. ‘She didn’t turn up for work and she’s not been seen since. Of course, they knew she was a Jew at the bank but had let it slip by. Now Mr Scott, the bank manager, has been arrested.’
The news gave me a jolt, even though I’d known it might happen.
‘His own fault, of course,’ Mrs Flanders went on. ‘Employing Jews is forbidden.’
That word again. ‘But how do they know Rachel’s dead?’
‘An off-duty soldier found a note. She’d left it on the beach with all her clothes. Said she’d rather die in the sea than in a camp.’
‘But Rachel would never do that. She just wouldn’t.’
‘She might. If you were a Jew and knew that if they found you you’d be deported to a German prison camp, what would you do?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe it. And why are they still looking for her in the town if she’s drowned? Surely they should be searching the beaches?’
But I knew the answer. They were suspicious, just like I was. I took the cow back to pasture and sent her on through the gate, before turning back to deal with the milk. Where was Rachel? Was she really dead? I couldn’t believe it, not a strong swimmer like Rachel. But if she wasn’t, then where was she?
A yell from the yard. ‘Céline, you idiot! You left the gate open! There’s cows all over the yard.’
CHAPTER 20
The paperboy brought the paper as I was having breakfast. Oats with milk, and a pot of weak tea with recycled tea leaves — the only reasonably sustaining meal of the day. I opened the Jersey Evening Post to see an announcement about Rachel on page two. I leant closer, my tea forgotten. It showed her identity card photograph and offered a reward for information leading to her whereabouts. The article said she was ‘deliberately evading the German authorities’ and that anyone withholding information about her would be punished.
As I pored over the small column on the kitchen table, I wondered where she could possibly go. Perhaps Mrs Flanders was right, and she’d drowned herself. But then I dismissed that thought; Rachel wasn’t a person to give up; she was far too stubborn. No, she was out there somewhere.
Troubled, I folded the paper and pushed through the door to the shop, glancing at the clock over the empty shelves. After nine, and no customers yet. It was quieter these days as we had so little to sell. The days of buttery fingers, sugar icing and Viennese pastries were gone. Now it was grey bread that wouldn’t rise, because all the flour was adulterated with sawdust or straw to bulk it out. Our good bread had to go to the Germans in the hotels first, and what was left was tough and almost inedible. We were all thinner, all tired, and all of us carried tension like a wire in the pit of our stomachs.
I heard men’s voices outside the door, and through the glass I could see helmets. What now? Were they still looking for Rachel? I tensed as the door opened.
‘Céline! So I have found you at last!’ The man in the German officer’s uniform grinned broadly at me and held out his arms as he came around the counter. For a moment, I thought it was Fred and hurried to meet him, but then I took a step back, confused. He was too tall for Fred.
The man folded me in a bear hug and then noisily kissed the air either side of my cheeks.
‘Horst?’
Fred’s brother grinned, showing even white teeth. ‘What luck I have, to be posted here. Can you believe it? I asked of course, but I didn’t expect it.’
He was taller and broader than I remembered, with the same nose and the same fair flyaway hair as Fred. But his features were flatter, as if squashed to the edges of his face, and he was ramrod straight, unlike Fred’s soft roundness. His eyes were roaming around the room, unable to be still. I couldn’t work out what it meant, him being here. Was it good, or bad?
The two men behind Horst stood respectfully at the door. Horst must be their superior, I realised.
‘But what are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I am posted here. Lucky, nicht wahr?’
‘Since when? When did you arrive?’
‘Just yesterday,’ he replied. ‘I came straight here this morning. I can’t stay long today, because I have been selected for the Organisation Todt.’ He waited, eyebrows raised, as if I should be impressed. ‘I was posted here because my English and French are so good.’ It made me smile, because he pronounced ‘have’ as ‘haf’ and his English accent certainly left a lot to be desired. ‘Why you are smiling?’
‘Nothing, Horst. You must excuse me; I am still getting used to … to the situation.’
‘I understand. It is big change for you. But do not worry. Things will be better for you now I am here.’
‘Where will you be working?’
‘One of the camps in the north of the island,’ he went on. ‘Where they quarry for stone. I am to be Kommandant there; the other man, well, he could not keep control.’
I suppressed a shudder. Fred would never believe it, that his brother could work there, where people were treated so badly.
‘Have you heard from Fred? No letters are getting to us here.’
Horst smiled. ‘No. But I get reports. I ask where he is. If you know the right people, you can find out. Last I heard, he was still in the Besetztes Gebiet in northern France — how you say, the occupied zone?’
‘Was he all right, though?’
‘You know Siegfried. He will not make a fight — too lazy. He will stay there until they build the New Order Hitler makes.’
My face froze in its smile.
Horst was still talking, oblivious to the fact he’d insulted Fred. ‘France will be a new place. They will move out the undesirables and they will be cleaning the place up.’ He strode past me to the door to the sitting room and peered through, wrinkling his nose. ‘It is not what I imagined, this bake shop. I thought it would be bigger. I thought to stay here, keep lookout for my brother’s little wife. How many bedrooms you have?’
No. He couldn’t stay here. ‘Just one,’ I said. ‘Mine and Fred’s. And a maid’s room. Oh, but it’s very tiny. Our housemaid Tilly used to have it, but she’s … she’s left now.’
‘A maid’s room?’ He stuck out his chin. ‘That will not be suitable. I stay at the hotel for now.’
I made an effort to relax. ‘Which hotel are you staying at, Horst?’
‘They put me in the Pomme d’Or, but only for two nights. It is reserved for the navy, not army men like me, and I need to be nearer my work. Do you know anywhere, Céline? A nice big room with pleasant people? With a view of the sea?’
‘Sorry, I can’t think of anyone immediately. But I’ll ask around.’ Didn’t he realise that nobo
dy would want a German living with them if they could avoid it? And a sea view. I almost laughed.
Horst turned to his two colleagues at the door. ‘My brother’s wife,’ he said. ‘Pretty, ja?’
I cringed and blushed, but the two men at the door nodded enthusiastically and Horst looked pleased.
‘We will dine together. At the weekend,’ he said, tapping a fingernail on the counter. ‘I will arrange it and send car to fetch you. Then we can talk. Will be nice, no?’
‘Very nice,’ I said. Then, as he was still staring expectantly, ‘Thank you, Horst. It’s a good idea. You can fill me in on what you know about Fred.’
He saluted me then with a neat Heil Hitler, and I wasn’t sure what on earth to do in return, so I just raised a hand in an uncertain wave. Moments later, there was the roar of car and motorcycle engines outside the door, and all returned to silence. When they’d gone, I exhaled and turned the Closed sign on the door. I needed to think.
Work at the farm that day passed in a haze. We had to work quickly as the nights were drawing in, and I had to help Mrs Flanders with her main potato crop before it got dark, as well as the milking. Now there was less baking to do, I spent more time at the farm. All the time, as I yanked the cold and filthy lumps from the freezing ground, I worried about where Rachel was, out in this cold weather, and what to do about Horst. Eventually, I realised there was nothing I could do. Horst was a fact; and that was that.
But after Mrs Flanders delivered me home in the van that night, I locked the door firmly against intruders and, to be honest, against Horst. What if he should come back? I ran my hands under the tap and scrubbed the dirt from under my nails. It would be awkward, being seen with a German officer. So far, I had managed to keep Fred’s whereabouts a secret. But Mrs Hedges had already realised I was married to a German, and no doubt the word would spread like the proverbial wildfire.
And what would happen if I was seen dining out with one of them? Perhaps I should just tell Horst to keep his distance, explain to him how awkward it was. But Horst wasn’t a listener; he never had been; he was too full of his own self-importance. He’d be in his element here, I realised — bossing everyone about the way he used to boss Fred.
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