He looks back to see Hannah catching up with him, her shoulders hunched. Everything around her seems to be in movement, the whipping branches, the spiralling leaves, but she is the still centre of the storm. Even her hair, clinging in wet snakes to her forehead, is not moving.
‘The gods are angry!’ Edward shouts. Lightning and thunder crackle and, with every bolt on the horizon, he can see the surrounding mountains looming claustrophobically, crowding in on him. He feels a delicious terror at his own scale beside them, a small human figure in a vast landscape – man lost in the immensity of nature, without horizons, without confinement. The rain is black ink now, bouncing as it hits the ground. Hannah was right; it is like the last day on earth.
He runs over to her and takes her by the hands. Blood is beating visibly at her temples. She is trembling.
‘Come back inside,’ she shouts, her tears mixing invisibly with the rain. ‘Please! You’re frightening me.’
‘You can’t fight nature, Han!’ he shouts back.
He is exhausted now. Releasing her from his grip, he lies down in the mud again and allows himself to be flayed by the rain. Its whip is hard and emphatic against his skin, an invading force that cannot be resisted. He feels as if the earth is rising up beneath him, a presence, a living creature that wants to flood his senses. It is prevented only by a fragile membrane of skin.
When Hannah wakes next morning she feels momentarily confused by the silence. The storm has passed. In the dawning light, she treads tentatively down the stairs to survey the damage. The drawing room is all but impassable, blocked by a tree that has come through the window, taking with it a part of the wall. It has brought with it the soily, peppery smell of freshly fallen timber and she has to climb over its muscular limbs to reach the kitchen. Here she picks her way around a broken wine glass with a rust of purple sediment in its bottom. Leather-bound books are scattered around. Paintings, tapestries and antlers have been blown from the walls and the base of the lamp is smashed, leaving the shade intact.
Outside, fragments of terracotta tiles are strewn all over the terrace, along with broken pots, upturned garden chairs, fragments of a bird table, a ripped canvas parasol and a wheelbarrow.
Her father is on the riverbank, and she wonders if he ever came back in last night. He is standing with his back to her, mist rising off the ground around him. In his hand there is a book. When he hears her he turns, a mild smile touching his colourless lips. ‘I found this,’ he says, holding out the volume. There is Arabic writing on its cover. ‘It’s the Koran. It was wrapped inside a prayer mat. It must have been on top of one of the cupboards knocked over by the tree.’
Seeing the query in her father’s raised eyebrow, Hannah says: ‘Perhaps they belong to the housekeeper.’ But she doesn’t believe it. Martin Cullen had told her that Walser helped freeze al-Qaeda assets. What if his link with the Muslim world went further than that? What if he was implicated in some way in her father’s kidnapping? Her mind is racing now and she is feeling guilty for having brought her father to this disturbing place, putting him in harm’s way again. She wants to leave as soon as possible. Their summer is over.
PART SEVEN
I
Nancy. Late summer, 1944
ONE MONTH AFTER THE ALLIED INVASION OF SOUTHERN FRANCE begins, the US ‘Blue Ridge’ Division rolls into Nancy, effectively marking its end. The psychological impact of seeing an old-fashioned bayonet charge had proved too much even for the most hardened German veterans, and the white strips of cloth they waved in surrender have now been tied to railings and doors, making it look as if there is a carnival about to start.
The liberators enter through the city gate, bulky twin towers that date back to the fifteenth century. The arch between them displays the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of Nancy, and as Charles cranes his neck to take this in, he realizes the hour of his own personal liberation may now be close.
Yet the realization makes him uneasy. For five years, barely a day has passed in which he hasn’t thought of ways to reach Anselm. Now that there is a more realistic chance of it happening, he finds his resolve slipping from underneath him like a shelf of sand. He tries to picture his friend. In his memory he always wears a sleeveless sweater and a loosened tie. His hair falls forward over an angular face. Now? God knows. Will they even recognize one another?
‘We will have to be careful here,’ a tired and dusty-looking Lehague says, snapping Charles out of his reverie. ‘The Germans will have left booby traps. Wire strung taut at neck height across roads. And Bouncing Betties. Do you know what a Bouncing Betty is?’
Charles takes a drink from his canteen. Shakes his head.
‘Castration mine. They explode shrapnel at crotch height.’
On the outskirts of the town, they pass the carcasses of cattle swollen in the heat. Humans too: the legs and buttocks of one German lying face down in the earth have ballooned to such a degree they have stretched his grey breeches to ripping point. In his now skin-tight trousers he looks like a Regency fop in pantaloons.
They pass the charred corpse of the burning German soldier Charles had dispatched with merciful marksmanship. His fingers are tiny stumps. The cloth of his uniform has burned away, exposing his scorched torso. His pubic hair is reduced to a clump of steel wool. When Charles covers his body with a ground cape it makes a crispy sound.
The civilians on the now-open bridge do not acknowledge them. They are mostly elderly women wearing shawls over their heads. Some are pulling handcarts stacked high with bundles, boxes and pans. Their town has been under siege and they have been cut off from the outside world; now they are free to come and go as they please, visit their families, conduct business.
As they enter the town proper, French soldiers receive an enthusiastic welcome from the locals. German prisoners are greeted with cold stares. There is a steady metallic clanking sound as they throw their bayonets on to one pile, their guns on another. As they are marched past the crowds, some are spat at and punched. The German bodies that litter the street are not being given a burial. Instead locals are pulling their boots off – a reminder that the Wehrmacht has been commandeering their leather for years.
A gang of half a dozen men are looting a hardware shop.
One bare-headed German emerges from a cellar after the others have been marched away. His grey field tunic is unbuttoned and torn. Though he waves a white flag this is ignored. He is dragged down a side street and moments later a shot is heard.
Anselm’s entreaties have been answered, but not in the way he had hoped. His release from pain has been to lose consciousness. When he comes round, trying to locate through his blurred vision the shadowy world he has re-entered, it takes him a long time to realize he is in a single bed, not the shelves of bunk beds to which he is accustomed. The pain he feels in his back, his legs and his chest is so sharp he begins panting. At alternate instants he feels feverish and cold.
He tries to sit up but cannot. Instead he turns his head to one side and winces. His ribs feel broken. The side of his face is pulp. His blood-matted hair sticks to the pillow. A pillow? What luxury is this? He must be in the infirmary. There are no other single beds for prisoners in the camp. It is dark outside. Who brought him in here? Has he been left to die?
The door opens and, recognizing the swaying silhouette of the Valkyrie, a whip in one hand, a bottle in the other, Anselm closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her pacing up and down the ward. Every few yards there is a whip crack as she checks that the bodies in the beds are dead. This is followed by the gulping sound of her having a drink.
She is standing at the end of his bed now. Without moving he mentally braces himself, knowing that his only chance of life is to feign death. When the whip lashes against his leg, he does not flinch. ‘Raus!’ She screams. ‘Raus! Raus!’ Another lash, this time across the fulcrum of his ribcage. Again he does not react. He can hear her laboured breathing and, for half a minute, he waits for another lash. It does not come. Instead he
feels her hands tugging down his trousers and lifting up his jacket. He can sense her eyes studying his penis. Still he does not move. A minute later he hears her take another drink and then walk away unsteadily, muttering to herself.
And then, unable to stand the pain any longer, Anselm blacks out.
When he comes round again, it is daytime. The swelling in his eye has reduced enough for him to see that the beds closest to him are empty, but there are dark shapes in the ones nearest the door. They appear to be covered in black paint. Have they been shot? The putrid, almost unbreathably heavy stench confirms it. As do the flies. Anselm sees movement now. There are rats feasting on the bodies.
Realizing he is hungry, too, he tries to shift his position, but his legs do not respond. One of them feels as if it might be fractured. His eyes roll back and he clenches his teeth.
Why is the camp so quiet? No whistles. No barks. The rattle of his breath scatters the rats for a moment, but they soon return. He realizes now that he is lying in faeces. He must get to the window. Open it. See what is happening outside. As he is sure he cannot put any weight on his leg, he must lower his upper body to the floor first. He rolls over on his belly and gasps at the stabbing sensation in his ribs. With his hands outstretched, he can touch the floor. Now he must bend his arms to lower his head, but the action makes him lose his balance and he screams as his broken leg flops down. There is a bone sticking out. Sweat on his forehead now. He drags himself towards the window, reaching for a broom as he does so. The effort to raise himself up on it leaves him shaking.
He looks out on to a desolate square. Everything is deserted, silent and flattened by the heavy sky. It is raining steadily, oily drops churning the red dust. There are some discarded petrol cans, as well as boots and rags. There are also half a dozen skeletal corpses that have been dragged to the side of the infirmary and piled up. The guard towers are empty. All that remains is the sweetish smell of decomposition, like rotting potato peelings.
He understands now. The camp has been evacuated; all the other tormented souls have gone. All the SS demons have gone, too, apart, perhaps, from the hated Valkyrie with her whip. And he has been abandoned. Left for dead in a world of darkness, excrement and mud.
But with the collapse of the hated old order has gone all his structure, all his certainty. This has been a place of work, of exhaustion, of death, but food was provided every day. Barely enough to keep a man alive, it was true. But barely enough is still enough.
Anselm feels another stab of hunger, of thirst, of self-pity. How long has he been unconscious? It must be days judging by the corpses on the beds by the door. He feels as if he is the last man alive in the world. Now he must walk this alien planet alone. Except he cannot walk.
How is he to survive until … Until what? Until Charles gets here? He knows that he must not pretend, even to himself, that Charles will be coming for him. But he cannot help it. Charles will come. He knows it, if only he can stay alive long enough. Can he do that? As if in answer to this he feels pins in his leg. Teeth. A rat has bitten him. He chases it away with the stick, but it doesn’t go far. It senses his vulnerability, the delicious whiteness of his bones.
Anselm stares at it. A stillness holds. He realizes what he must do before the Valkyrie returns, where he must wait for Charles. He moves his improvised crutch and, neither fully living nor dead, takes his first excruciating step towards the door.
Charles and Lehague try to keep their balance as they stand in the back of a half-track rumbling through the mist into a square near Nancy cathedral. The Cross of Lorraine has been freshly painted on its side and dust is sticking to its wet coat. An eerie muffled sound can be heard above the noise of the engines, even above the pealing church bells. It is a soft clapping, rising from the blurred forms of women and children lining the road. They have emerged after days of hiding in their cellars to applaud their liberators.
Charles wonders where they have got their flags from, because they are waving not only tricolours but also Stars and Stripes. As he focuses on them he sees they are made from rags, cut-up shirts and curtains.
Closer to the square, the crowds swell and women in their best summer dresses surge forward, blowing kisses, waving their hats and holding their fingers up in victory signs. After four years of occupation, the sense of relief and joy for some is being expressed through tears.
An impromptu exchange of goods is going on between the crowd and the tank crews, flowers for chocolates and cigarettes, each being tossed in the air like ticker tape. The advance is slow, bumper-to-bumper through narrow streets littered with abandoned gas masks, defaced portraits of Hitler and the burnt remnants of swastika flags.
Standing on a mangled nest of black metal and still-smoking rubble, a boy is playing an accordion. One woman appears from behind an armoured personnel carrier, half on its side in a ditch, its tyres taken, and raises her arms to be dragged on to a passing Sherman. As she is lifted, her shawl snags on the tank track and she has to jump down, divesting herself of the garment. She laughs as she watches it being chewed up. An elderly man whose toothless mouth has folded in on itself is standing above the crowd on a wrought-iron balustrade. He is giving a salute. Charles salutes back and smiles, but the smile is false. Because of the now-permanent ache of his thumb, he is feeling feverish. There is sweat on his chin and brow.
And now he sees that a mademoiselle has clambered on to his half-track. If she senses how distracted Charles is, she doesn’t show it. Instead she presses her lips firmly to his. He is surprised by the wetness of her kiss, by the taste of tobacco and smell of alcohol on her breath.
‘Merci!’ the girl says, finally breaking off. ‘Vive l’Amérique! Merci!’
Charles smiles as the girl moves to kiss Lehague, smearing his cheeks with lipstick. She gets a better reaction from him, a squeeze of the buttocks as he tips her backwards. When her hat falls off, she reaches down to pick it up and almost loses her footing as the half-track swerves. And now the girl is jumping off without her hat, running to the next vehicle behind theirs. Doughboys are holding out their arms to drag her up. She grabs an officer’s cap and puts it on. It is too big for her.
An old man by the side of the road is holding out a bottle of wine and the driver grabs it, takes a swig and passes it back to Charles. He takes a gulp too, feeling parched. When he wipes his mouth, he smears oil across his cheek. There is a pungent smell of sewage in the air.
Come nightfall, the Americans in their bivouacs and tents enjoy the generosity of the young women of Nancy. Lehague joins them, but Charles finds a hotel overlooking the cathedral and sits there sketching. Holding the charcoal loosely, he records from memory the sights of the past few weeks: the body hanging from the tree, the young men executed by Lehague, the charred remains of the French half-track crew. That they were like the piece of charcoal he is drawing them with occurs to him only when he has finished.
He is too tired to sleep well and passes the hours of darkness shivering under a blanket. The ache in his thumb seems to be increasing and, in the morning, he notices a smell. Something sickly. Realizing it is coming from his bandage, he unravels it and sniffs. The thumb has turned pasty with black blood. Has it gone septic? He searches again for his antibiotics. When he fails to find them, he rebandages it and wanders outside. As he makes his way across a park of tussocky grass wet with dew, he sees tank hatches opening to allow the lovers of the night to return to their homes.
Later that morning, Charles sees a dozen, sad-faced French women being rounded up and led into the town square. Here he watches as a crowd gathers, two men produce scissors and the women are held down in chairs as they have their hair shorn. Some have a swastika daubed in tar on their foreheads.
Charles taps a man on the shoulder and shrugs to ask what is going on.
‘Collaboration horizontale,’ the man says.
When the cut hair is piled up and burned, the sulphurous smell carries to Charles’s nostrils and lingers there. He has to look away. Sl
eeping with the enemy is a crime to which he can relate.
As the crowd disperses, another young woman is dragged by her hair into the square. A latecomer. It soon becomes apparent her treatment is going to be different. She is wearing a nurse’s uniform and, as its front is ripped, her brassiere becomes visible. Instead of cutting her hair the men look at each other and then haul her off down an alley. Judging by their lurching gait, most of them are drunk.
Charles follows. When he catches up with them the nurse has had half of her clothes torn from her and one hand is covering her chest, the other the join of her legs. One of the men, unshaven and heavily built, takes his jacket off and slips his braces from his shoulders. He then unbuttons his flies, tugs his trousers down and positions himself on top of the girl, forcing her legs apart. When she tries to resist, he slaps her face and, running a greedy hand over her hips, kisses her. She is hysterical now. Her whole body seems to convulse as she sobs.
Charles takes out his Webley and fires a shot in the air. As the crowd turn round as one, he shouts in English: ‘Leave her alone! Everyone back! Tout de suite!’ He pushes his way through them to get to the nurse. Still pointing his gun at the crowd, he puts an arm around her waist and lifts her up. When the man who had been about to rape her grabs her arm and pulls her back, Charles shoots him in the foot. The rest of the crowd back away and, as the man falls to the ground cursing, Charles leads the nurse back down the alley. Seeing an open door, he moves a stiff yard broom out of the way and ushers her inside. There is a man’s coat hanging up in the hall. He takes it off its peg and hands it to her.
The Road Between Us Page 33