The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  Pressed against the damp curb, the beating of his own heart audible over the air-raid sirens, he found himself almost missing the swish of dropping bombs and their steady explosive crump, crump, crump. At least then you knew what to expect: they either moved toward you or moved away. With the flying bombs, anything could happen. One had caught on a barrage-balloon anchor wire and spun to the ground directly beneath it, and three others at various times had passed over only to turn back and sputter toward him as if searching him out, and the toll from all four had been enormous. From the first he’d been irrationally certain they’d be the death of him. He would never get used to being afraid.

  A long two minutes later came the dull thump of a distant explosion, far enough away that the ground didn’t tremble. He shivered as he stood—the cold, the damp, some lingering adrenaline—glad that he and his sector had made it through this one, until a man farther down the block yelled.

  “Here now,” the man said, rising from a puddle and squeegeeing water from his coat with his hands. “What the fuck did you blow your whistle for?”

  “Just doing my duty,” Claus said, aware that sounded weak.

  “Well, how about you lie down in the puddle next time, and then we’ll talk about duty? Christ.” A slurred voice and rocking on his feet; it was not yet eleven and the pubs had been closed for less than half an hour—Claus kept his distance. “You’ve got to learn where they’re going to fall,” the man said. “Did you not hear the engine still going?”

  The advent of the buzz bombs had put people on edge, and there was no way to tell what this man might do; two wardens at Claus’s post had been attacked in the last week for not blowing their whistles, part of the reason he’d been so quick with his. “How about we call it an act of God?” he said.

  “Oh, that’s a fine idea. Between Him and the Farting Furies, we haven’t much of a chance then, have we?” He lit a cigarette, the lighter flashing in the dark, turning into a beacon when he didn’t let it go.

  The unhappy drunk, angry at the figure of authority; Claus wanted to laugh—it was almost a film cliché. “Put that out!” he said, and when it snapped out Claus turned up Chandos Street, part of his nightly rounds that he usually left until later. Smoke was rising in the service alley behind Winifred’s, and flaming balls were darting about the back gardens. As Claus clambered over a low brick wall to get at one, he wondered if this was another of Hitler’s secret weapons they’d been warned about.

  No stirrup pumps were handy and the sandbags were solid with dog urine, so he chased down the closest flaming ball and snuffed it out with his helmet. He hesitated to shine his flashlight on the smoking mess, unsure what he was about to uncover, then caught a whiff of roasted meat just as he made out a scorched beak. A chicken, then; the falling tail fin must have set it on fire. He shut off the light and had the absurd thought that he should have let it burn longer, to cook; now it was only ruined.

  A mad chase to stomp out the other flaming balls before they could ignite the outbuildings, and when he was done, sitting winded on a milk crate next to the last one, he counted a dozen. With the elbow of his coat, he wiped soot from inside his helmet. Winifred would be unhappy, worse than when her shallots and onions had been stolen. Those had been part of a single crop, but the chickens she’d kept for five years, baking and bargaining with their eggs; he decided to go up and see her. A good conversation might still cheer her up.

  He never liked her building. Leaning but still livable, deserted by nearly every tenant except for her and her husband, Archie, the hallway echoed like a tomb. If he were to film it, he’d want to capture the sense of claustrophobia the narrow, tilting stairway engendered, though getting the right camera angle would be tricky. He knocked on the door, and inside she turned the radio down, calling out, “It’s open.”

  When she saw him, she put down the knife and plugged in the electric kettle.

  “Don’t mind the mess, I hope,” she said, mounding the chopped cabbage with her palm. “Times I can’t sleep, it helps to be busy.” She rubbed her damp hand on her apron’s faded blue parrots and turned the radio down even more until the piano music almost disappeared.

  “Not at all. Good to see it.” His helmet clattered on the table. The radio was comforting, and this was one of the few places he could fully relax. “The Granada’s reopening. Going back as their organist?” He was sure she’d been mistaken not to find other work after the cinema had been bombed, even a volunteer effort; doing something generally kept the fear and hopelessness at bay, though for him that was starting to thin.

  Her lopsided hair trembled as she shook her head. “Too much effort, that.”

  “How about the shelter?” He unbuttoned his tunic, grateful to be even a bit warmer. June, and yet only a week before he’d been so cold that he’d typed up all his reports while wearing gloves. “They’ve missed you there.”

  “That lot? They won’t miss me. Always gave me a hard time about the books I was in charge of. If they fiddled one or went over their time limit, I let ‘em know about it and they didn’t like that, now did they?”

  “But Mrs. Bankcroft asked about you especially.”

  “Mrs. Bankcroft.”

  From her tone he knew what she thought of Mrs. Bankcroft, who wasn’t a favorite of his either, as she’d trained her canary in the peculiar trick of taking bits of sugar from her tongue, but he was not destined to discover why Winifred didn’t like her. Having once dismissed Mrs. Bankcroft, she wouldn’t bring her up again.

  “And Archie?” he asked. Her husband. “Due home soon?”

  “That one.” She waved the knife. “Too busy winning the war.”

  “Someone has to.”

  Joking had been the wrong choice. For two months her son had been missing in action, two months that had accomplished what five years of war had not, thinning her frame and graying her hair, and now her husband’s work at the naval ministry no longer interested her; there was only grief for her son. If her picture had been flashed on a screen without words or music, audiences everywhere would instantly recognize it as the face of despair.

  “No,” she said, eyes filling. “It don’t matter much now who fights, does it?”

  “Oh, please, Winifred,” he said, and patted her hand. “You mustn’t.”

  “Mustn’t what?” She sat. “Cry?”

  “Give up hope.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I have.”

  “But have you heard anything about Harry?”

  She looked at the pictures on the wall, Harry and his crew standing in front of their plane. The pictures hadn’t been there before, as she considered pictures of the living bad luck, and to see them now was unsettling. “Not directly,” she said.

  He sat forward. “You’ve had some communication from him?”

  “My leg,” she said, and patted her thigh. Before she explained, the water boiled and she made the tea and let it draw.

  “He sent me the pain, I’m sure of it. To tell me how he died. His leg was caught, see, when the plane was hit. That’s why he couldn’t get out.”

  Claus sat back, disappointed. He’d hoped for good news for her. And for himself, really; Winifred’s disintegration was like watching his mother’s slow collapse all over again, after he’d been tried and sent to prison. He wanted to reverse that. “We don’t know that, Winifred. People saw chutes come out.”

  “Six. That leaves four more in the plane. And all those six have been accounted for. Four prisoners and two dead.”

  “But that doesn’t mean the six were all of them. It would have been easy to miss some in the middle of combat. Nighttime, wasn’t it, when the plane went down?”

  “Two months and two days. If his body was turned up, or if he was captured, I’d know.” Her pale round face normally had a shiny bland smoothness, but today her red-rimmed eyes looked like peppermints pressed into dough. She moved his helmet aside to make room for a cup and saucer.

  “What’s this?” she said, holding up her s
mudged hand. She turned the helmet over and shook her head. “Can’t have you wearing it so dirty.”

  He ought to tell her, but it would only make her sadder. Instead he asked about her husband. “Does Archie know anything?”

  “Nothing.” She dunked his helmet in a tub of soapy water and began restoring its blue shine. “Not likely to, either. The plane came down over land, not sea.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Claus said. “Harry still had a chance then. He didn’t drown. And pilots can be hidden by the French for months.”

  She shook her head and dried his helmet, put it back on the table. The smells of burned margarine and boiled cabbage lingering in the kitchen, dirt ground into the floorboards, her morose insistence on imagining the worst; the strain of her missing son was overwhelming her. She seemed to be giving up, and his efforts to provide the reassurance she so desperately wanted felt feeble, so he picked up the half head of cabbage and sniffed its acidic freshness, trying to turn the conversation elsewhere.

  “From your brother?” he said.

  She nodded. “Easy enough to get still, but the bread’s become dear. We’ve lost so many freighters carrying wheat.”

  “That what Archie tells you?” He had supposed he’d grow used to it, this pumping of people for information, even those he was genuinely fond of, like Winifred. Instead, it had grown more and more distasteful, and now it was appalling to stand apart and watch himself in action. So it must be for an actor reciting lines that he despised. Yet he went on with it; he would not be found wanting.

  “Says they’ve stanched the bleeding. The submarines are still attacking merchantmen to starve us out, but he says it won’t likely happen, this late in the war.”

  She leaned closer and lowered her voice, as if they were in public. He tried to be subtle about pulling away from the smell of her unwashed skin.

  “Says the naval office wants the Germans to think it is working, though, so they’ll keep after merchantmen and not go after the troop transports. Says they’re far more vulnerable.”

  “Must be,” Claus said. “Every man we get in Normandy means it’s more likely we’ll win, I’d imagine.”

  “And doesn’t Archie say the same thing.”

  The air-raid sirens wailed again, the seventh time that night, but she either didn’t hear them or pretended not to as she set out spoons, and he wasn’t going to put on his helmet if she didn’t react; he settled for turning it nervously by the rim. For a long time she’d tossed a pot on her head whenever the sirens sounded, but she’d given that up now too.

  “Important work your husband’s doing,” Claus said, “fooling the Germans.”

  “Haven’t said the half of it. False figures they broadcast in already broken codes, torpedo boats sent out with fake wooden sides to make the subs think they’re merchant ships. It’s too hard for me to keep up with, though Archie seems to like it. But what’s the use? A few more or less mothers’ sons that die either way won’t change things.”

  “For some it will.”

  “But for others it’s already too late. Tea?”

  “Thank you.” He didn’t like tea, but he took it to be sociable. A twist of paper filled with sugar was his contribution; some months, nearly half his ration went to her.

  “You shouldn’t have,” she said as she always did, though without vigor.

  “It’s doing me no good in my kitchen. The mice get it.”

  “Well then, thanks,” she said, and took her usual two spoonfuls, tonight without blushing. She really was fading.

  “You know,” he said, and touched her hand. “The weather makes everything seem worse. Sunny day, you might feel better.”

  Winifred pulled her hand free and dismissed the weather with a backward wave. “Bosh. I haven’t been out in ages.”

  “But you can see the rain, feel it. And the cold.”

  “Oh, I’d feel the same even if everything was in bloom. All the flowers in the world wouldn’t change a thing.”

  Not true; the weather always made news seem better, or worse. His reports on morale mentioned it, the disquiet the coldest summer on record had caused.

  They finished their tea and talked a bit more about the falling prices of eggs and beef, the possibility of even getting pork, and she circled back to Harry. “It wouldn’t hurt so much, only he was such a good boy,” she said. “And I thought after he’d completed all those missions the one more couldn’t be bad. I shouldn’t have given him the go-ahead, now should I?”

  His own mother had believed that everything bad that happened to him had been her fault too. He took her hand this time. “Winifred. Even if you hadn’t, you know he would have gone. That’s the type of boy he was.” Her eyes glistened at his words and he switched tenses. “Is. The type of boy he is.”

  But he’d only deepened her gloom, and now it seemed contagious; he had a sudden chill feeling and a mental image of a door opening into a darkened room where a body lay, which he blinked away. He really should tell her about the chickens, but he worried that would push her over the edge, so instead he stood and put on his helmet. “Have to go, I’m afraid. Been inside longer than I should.” And nearly longer than he could stand; the sirens and Winifred’s small dirty apartment made him claustrophobic, a way he hadn’t felt since the first days of the Blitz. Her descent into depression was difficult to endure. For years these visits had been one of his few sources of comfort.

  Winifred was already up. “Here.” She stuffed a few potatoes into his pack. A bribe, though neither of them would call it that, which he didn’t want to take.

  Two years earlier, her Swedish tenant had told him that Winifred was up to something. Always digging in her garden, Dotty had said. But only at night. Says it damages the plants less, because they’re dormant. Never heard of such a thing myself, though I might believe her if the garden was of some account. He hadn’t put much stock in it—Mrs. Anderson was an unhappy tenant who’d once hung all of Winifred’s laundry out on the street because Winifred wouldn’t give her a key to the front door—but a few weeks later, making his nightly rounds, Claus had heard metal striking flint and flashed his torch and caught Winifred digging. Flustered, she’d pulled her tattered housecoat more tightly around her and tried the line about not wanting to damage her plants, but when he took the shovel and turned back the earth he found newly interred potatoes.

  “Look at that,” he’d said, leaning on the shovel. “Lucky you. Potatoes in your garden and you didn’t even know it. I should keep digging, if I were you. Might be diamonds next, or gold.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, clasping her hands and shifting from foot to foot in her husband’s Wellingtons. “You won’t turn me in, will you? They’re from my brother in the country, and I only sell them to my tenants to make a little extra money. I don’t gouge them, I swear.”

  “Anything else you should tell me?” he asked, his voice sounding sterner than he felt. It was ridiculous that he should make this mild woman tremble, but part of his duty as warden was to watch for black-market activity. If it was the part he liked least and was least likely to enforce, he couldn’t convince her of that; she was terrified of being charged.

  “My money’s here too,” she said, glancing back at the building, “only promise you won’t tell. Archie can drink it up fast, otherwise, and I have to keep everything out here so he won’t find it.”

  Claus had fallen quiet, deciding what to do, a silence Winifred mistook as a request for a bribe.

  “Here.” She’d leaned down and grabbed a handful of potatoes and tried to stuff them in his coat pockets. “Take these.”

  “I can’t,” he said and stepped away. A few potatoes dropped to the ground, and in her desperation she slipped on one and stumbled against him.

  “No, I insist,” she’d said, her voice loud enough he feared she’d wake her tenants. “It’s my feeling wardens aren’t appreciated enough. It’s a way to support you, see?”

  He’d taken them, sorry for her desperation
, not wanting her to go on, convinced she’d live in fear of being turned in if he didn’t. Now the bribe had become habitual, a social ritual that retained only a whiff of its origins but one he still found distasteful. The only way he could think to pay her back was with the sugar; whenever he stopped by, he made sure to leave extra behind on the table. “For Archie,” he’d said the first time. “His job is more important than mine.” That had seemed to mollify her.

  “How about you and Archie go to see your brother up in Norfolk?” he said now. “These bombs are getting worse, and lots of folks are leaving London. Fifteen thousand a day, I heard.”

  She waved him off. “Archie wouldn’t ever.”

  “You could. He’s probably safe at the ministry. But here, well . . .” He left the thought unfinished but she didn’t respond. “It might only be for a few weeks, until we overrun the launch sites.”

  She shook her head. “My time will come whether I go or stay. No sense trying to get away from it. There’s Mrs. Caulfield from next block but one what was afraid, and went by train to Reading. The doodlebug hit the bridge when the train was on it and she was as dead as dead can be.”

  He stood on the back porch, hand on the gummy painted handrail, sensing nothing peculiar. It had rained again, and the smells of damp pavement and ripening trash and turned earth drifted through the chilly air, underlain by the acrid dust from pulverized buildings. A few small AA guns were shooting blocks away, gunners testing their aim, and the surrounding backyards were lit up intermittently by tracer bullets and searchlights, and he closed his eyes in hopes of remembering it exactly in case he was ever to film it, the tiny sunbursts that seemed to erupt inside larger ones whenever the AA guns crackled, the clink of falling antiaircraft shells striking slate roofs and cobbles.