by Paul Griner
“I’m going up to take my watch,” Claus said. He was glad it was the first one; after, he’d at least have the possibility of uninterrupted sleep. But before he left he felt he had to say something more. “I didn’t go down in the shelters tonight.” Myra didn’t respond and he went on. “Somehow I couldn’t face it. The shelterers are all scared again, and it’s worse now. You’ve seen it. When the bloody PM’s office said last month that the Battle of London was done, they believed it. First they were elated, and now they’re depressed.”
And they were angry, at the lies put out by the Ministry of Information about Londoners’ fantastic morale despite the V-1s. The truth was that the citizens were exhausted. He hadn’t wanted to face that either. Even his time with Kate couldn’t affect that.
Myra set her book down between the ring of keys for the post’s houses and a glass of milk, the milk, like the eggs, a novelty. Had survivors of the plague marveled at the small good things the general disaster had brought them? he wondered.
“I know,” she said. “The old women and their canaries, the offers to fetch a cup of tea. It’s strangely wearing, isn’t it, now that we’re being bombed again. And the accordions can drive you barmy. Of course, there are the amusing bits too,” she said. “Day before yesterday, in Croydon, a man was after his wife to come down to the shelter because the sirens had started.
“She called down and told him to wait, saying that she had to find her dentures.
“‘Listen, you,’ he said. ‘Hitler’s dropping bombs, not sandwiches.’”
He smiled, but it didn’t assuage his guilt. He should have stopped by the shelter to see Mrs. Bankcroft. She’d have been playing something from the Andrews Sisters, softly so as not to wake others, expecting him to check in, but she’d have wanted him to put the gambling adolescents either in the lavatory or out on the streets, and he hadn’t had the endurance for that. He failed to see the harm in cards, and if he ordered the kids to the lavatory they’d only gamble there, while out on the street they’d be in danger from debris and bombs. Mrs. Bankcroft and he had fought a subtle combat over the gambling for four years, and he was tired of it.
Myra seemed to know what he was thinking. She put her hand on his forearm, the first time she’d touched him in months.
“It’s all right, Claus.”
The use of his real name shocked him; even Kate didn’t know it. He’d told her in a moment of weakness years before. Myra smiled, unusual, as it showed the gap between her front teeth—seemingly aligned with the part in the middle of her shoulder-length hair—of which he knew she was ashamed.
“This has all of us on edge. It’s horrible, really. Everyone thought it was over.”
“Yes,” he said. “I wish we’d been right.”
Keeping his eyes open required effort. He paced, he flapped his arms, pressed his nails into the skin of his palms. Eventually he dropped into a kind of semi-trance, letting images float to the surface. The strongest was of their first incident, when he and Myra had dug out an old woman together. Before the bombs hit they’d been chasing children back into the shelters, children lured outside by the peculiarly attractive sound of shrapnel falling through trees, a kind of savage whistling, and who were trying to pick up the shrapnel from the pavement though it was still hot enough to burn.
Near the blue incident flag a group of teenage girls on roller skates were bumping around the blown-about bricks and plaster, their faces and smocks black. A bomb had hit behind the skating rink, its blast wave forcing soot down the chimneys, and beyond that the back of a house had collapsed, trapping three women. Claus and Myra hung their coats and gas masks on a door that stood up from a mass of masonry and wood and began to dig, tossing aside rubble by hand at first, then filling wicker baskets when they realized they had a long way to go.
Every ten minutes either Myra or Claus shouted for the buried people to give their locations; at first all three women replied but after half an hour they were down to one, a Mrs. Timothy. Soon it grew dark and began to rain and the dusty ruins turned grimy. They’d each wanted a cigarette but had no way to light it; stupid, really—there were fires all around, as the Germans were dropping incendiaries—but neither of them had a match, so they complained about it as they dug. Mrs. Timothy heard their voices and talked back, and they realized it was a good thing to keep her entertained or, if not entertained, alert, so they chatted with her. At one point she’d said, “The stunning call of the wild goose,” and they thought she was becoming delirious until they realized that another of the diggers had just blown his nose. Their laughter was revitalizing.
Each time a plane went over, someone shouted, “Lights,” and they doused their torches, which was maddening. Claus continued to dig with his hands—the shovel worthless amid all the broken timbers—and Myra took away basket after basket of debris. Her fingertips were bleeding and he asked if she shouldn’t take a break but she shook her head no and kept going; neither of them wanted to quit when they seemed so close. They uncovered a severed forearm with a still-working watch, and Claus wrapped it in a bit of blanket and handed the package to Myra, who took it without a word. Behind her through the blown-open roof came shell flashes against the dark clouds, the insistently probing searchlights, a glowing sky when the incendiaries hit their marks.
After two hours a chunk of plaster had fallen away and Mrs. Timothy had said, “Right here, dear,” and the feeling of dull excitement he’d been laboring under exploded into a belief in their work’s nobility. It was right and good and useful, three things that had seemed hard to come by those days. While digging they’d uncovered a Bullet Talcum Powder tin under her bed, and they gave it to her, which cheered her immensely. All her treasures were in there: ration books, a marriage certificate, her children’s christening papers; she’d held up each in turn and said that she was sure she’d be all right. “Won’t anything stop me from eating now.”
They were thrilled. It took another hour to free her legs, Claus having to wriggle under jammed but creaking timbers to insert a jack, getting a mouthful of dust for his trouble, but she was fine when they pulled her out, still chatting madly. They put her on a stretcher and she died before they got her to the ambulance.
He and Myra had started to date, and a month later Myra had introduced him to Madge—an old school chum—at a pub. Madge hadn’t been able to hide a flash of recognition.
“Know one another?” Myra had said.
“No,” they both had said, too quickly. “He looks like my old beau,” Madge had added, only making it worse.
Later, in her apartment, sponging off the black line she’d drawn up the back of her calf to mimic stockings, Myra had questioned him about it, and he’d turned her questions into an argument, berating her for being nosy. Bertram had told him that if his cover was ever blown he’d be arrested and interned for the duration, and he’d had a sudden intuition that any kind of intimacy could be disastrous.
After their quarrel, he and Myra hadn’t seen each other again socially. Madge had found out about it and seemed to take a perverse pleasure in alluding to the pickle she’d put him in, but Claus had always felt guilty. He’d often wondered if it would have been different if Mrs. Timothy had died right away, before they tried to dig her out, if their first incident hadn’t been so cruelly misleading. But over time he’d come to see that he hadn’t been misled, he’d misled himself. The work was necessary, not noble, and he’d been wrong to think otherwise. It was simply a matter of surviving and of helping others to do the same, and if his survival meant cutting emotions from his life, so be it. Yet he couldn’t imagine being so cruel to Kate. Had he grown smarter with time, or simply more tired?
With fifteen minutes left on his watch, a flight of three buzz bombs appeared, their tail fires heading directly toward him. One veered east, one dropped south of the river, but the third one flew over, its engine cutting out no more than a couple of miles away, and the dull sound of its impact was followed by a second but much larger ex
plosion. Gas. He checked his watch when the night sky glowed orange. Crews would already be mobilizing to find survivors and remove the dead; at least it wasn’t in their sector. The phone rang down below and five minutes later Herbert came up to relieve him, smelling of musky cologne, his jaw cracking as he yawned.
“You all right?” Claus asked. Herbert had been beaten badly by a disgruntled Londoner for not blowing his whistle at one of the first buzz bombs—both eyes were still blackened—or such was his story; Claus wondered if it hadn’t been one of his black-market deals gone wrong.
“Fine. Fucking cold, though. Jesus.” Herbert waved his arms. “A little bit of summer would be nice. In my country this is not June. Czechs like heat!” He rubbed his stubbled face and made a burbling sound with his lips. “Not sleepy. Two to one I stay awake.”
Claus didn’t believe him but in any case it didn’t matter. He opened the door and shouldered aside the first blackout curtain, knowing from experience that even if Herbert fell asleep, any nearby explosion would wake him.
Downstairs Myra stood with her hand on the phone, as if expecting it to ring. She was wearing a white sweater now and kept her back to him, a seeming return to her regular coolness, but when she continued to stand unmoving as he approached he gathered something horrible had happened. She’d stood just so after a nearby bomb had blown out a window, after which he’d spent an hour with tweezers picking glass shards from her skin and hair, and again when her own house had been hit, killing her father. Both of those events, which had happened before they’d begun dating, seemed from another lifetime.
She half turned when he drew up beside her, her sweater giving off the odor of mothballs. “A pensioners’ home,” she said.
“How badly?”
“Disastrous, apparently. A direct hit. Its gas exploded.”
The glowing sky. About 12:45. “Where?”
“Regent Street, north of Oxford.”
He knew he was tired when the thought Tony spot for a pensioners’ home popped into his head. “Do they need me?”
“No. They have enough.” Her left eyelid blinked uncontrollably and he had to restrain himself from reaching to still it. “And besides, we can’t spare you.” She looked at him for the first time. “Others have been spotted over the coast. We’re in for a long night, I’m told.”
He had a premonition that he was about to die, which faded as quickly as it had come, and he said, about the home, “That’s awful” What else was there to say? Another appalling loss. He felt guilty at his relief that the incident hadn’t happened in their sector. The torn and crushed elderly bodies with their anklet nametags, the hopelessness of the Heavy Rescue crews, the awful fact that almost no one would be there praying for individual miracles; he didn’t want to see any of it.
“I hope they all died in the explosion,” he said.
“I’m sorry?” Myra turned so sharply she knocked the keys from the desk, and he guessed the extent of her surprise when she didn’t kneel to pick them up.
“I was thinking that to die in the fire would have been worse. And that perhaps it’s for the best, after all.”
“For the best?”
He waved his hands. “They probably had no relatives.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I’m not saying it right,” he said, and fell silent.
“Yes, even so,” Myra said, “it’s always better to live.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He retrieved the keys for her and in the next room sat on the cot that Herbert had vacated. The blankets were still warm, which was strangely comforting, so he quickly removed his flashlight from around his neck and his webbed belt from around his waist, lay down, and covered himself as best he could, pulling the blanket up around his chin and slanting his tin hat over his eyes. He didn’t care that his boots stuck out or that the blanket smelled faintly of disinfectant, and in the quiet darkness, as he sought to still his racing mind with thoughts of Kate, he nearly believed that he was safe.
July 2
HE WOKE IN AN unfamiliar room to the tail fire from another buzz bomb pinking the walls, reminding him of childhood Septembers, his bedroom glowing gold in the reflected light of overloaded hay wagons trundling past; their Pennsylvania house had been yards from the road. Until he saw Kate lying face-down, a strand of hair drifting in and out of her open mouth as she breathed, he thought he was back at the post. He wanted to brush the hair aside but was afraid that would wake her and instead stood up in a single motion and slipped his pants on, holding the belt buckle so it wouldn’t clink.
His shoes were warming in a block of sunlight on the wood floor, and the scent of strawberries drifted up from the street, where a vendor had parked his cart, chocking the wheel with a loose cobble. Claus wished he could go down and get some, but Kate’s landlady didn’t know he was there; he’d snuck up and knocked on her door after midnight, taking a chance that she’d be home, hoping she’d let him in. Mrs. Dobson didn’t even let him have food in his rooms after nine at night, and if a single woman ever slept over he’d be asked to leave. At the corner a young girl, no more than four or five, was putting broad cabbage leaves in the neighborhood pig bin.
The strawberry vendor looked up, his tin hat flashing in the sun. Claus stepped away from the window, afraid of being spied on, and then told himself he was being foolish. Who would have followed him here? Angered by the need for continual caution, he carried his stiff shoes into the other room.
Books covered every flat surface: tables, chairs, bare spaces on the floor; they were leather-bound, mostly, and expensive. He moved on with his investigation, from habit and curiosity, at the moment not disliking himself for it. Floral prints from newspapers hung on the walls, making the place look comfortably lived in; his own rooms decidedly did not.
At the sink he drew himself a glass of tepid water. Propped on the counter was a silver-framed picture of a young girl in her christening gown, gap-toothed and curly-haired. Had Kate had a child? Twice now they’d spent frenzied nights making love, but they hadn’t really talked. He heard a noise behind him and turned.
Kate stood in the doorway in a thin floral cotton robe, hair messy, face puffed with sleep, the skin around her mouth lined, which he hadn’t noticed previously; the only place she showed her age. He put the picture back, guessing that she might not want to talk about it, and glanced around the apartment to avoid an awkward stare. He wondered if she wanted him to leave.
“I’m afraid it’s rather a mess,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
Next to a bowl of lemons, a plastic toy gun lay on the counter. He held it up with a quizzical look.
“Sentimental value,” she said, and laughed. “The first decree the Germans passed after occupying Paris was that all Parisians were prohibited from owning guns. Residents, regardless of nationality, had to turn them in. I bought two from a toy store. One to keep, and one to give them.”
“Protest,” he said.
This time her laugh was bitter. “Yes. For all the good it did.”
“And these?” He pinched a lemon. “Pancakes?”
“Hoping to get some if you stay?” she said.
He felt himself blushing but was relieved when she came and drew herself a glass of water too. She drank slowly, set the glass in the sink, and picked up the picture.
“My niece,” she said. “Marie.” She splayed her fingers over the girl’s face and fell silent.
“You’re maternal.”
“I tried to be. It was horrible, after the last war, watching her waste away. The blockade.”
“Did she make it?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “She’s alive still, in Hamburg” She seemed suddenly sadder. He wanted to kiss her but wasn’t sure she wanted to kiss him—whether she was silent now from regret or discomfort or simply because she didn’t talk much in the morning. He knew so little about her.
She rested her head against his shoulder, her hair smelling of smoke and perfume, which
made him crave a cigarette. She tilted her face up and kissed him, slowly, and he felt himself stiffening against her but she pulled back.
“A smoke first.” She produced a pack from her bathrobe pocket.
“Isn’t it better to light up after?” he said.
She laughed and he took the cigarette.
“American,” he said.
“The benefits of my position. Yanks like to think they’re getting extra care.”
“Ah, so you deceive them.”
“No. But a little casual flirting goes a long way.”
“Is that what last night was?” He liked seeing her smile. “What about your landlady?” he said. “Will she be up to check on you if you don’t stir?”
“Oh, no. Saturday and Sunday are our Sodom and Gomorrah days. Anyone who lives through the bombing deserves whatever fun they can arrange. Plus bomb nights. At the first warning she’s off to the neighborhood shelter, though she insists we live by the regulations. If we won’t vacate the building it’s our hard luck, but we have to leave the front door open and unlocked so anyone seeking shelter can come in.”
She tipped soap out of a small shell on the sink and gave it to him for an ashtray.
“In prison,” he said, “I had to use a matchbox for one.”
She grew still. He hadn’t meant to say it but was happy that he had; he wanted for a change to be honest about his life, as she had been about hers. The endless lying had become second nature, but with Kate it chafed unbearably. He went on. “You were right about my tattoo. Though it wasn’t a crime, really, what I was in for.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“No. Really. Or rather, not a crime you’d recognize as such.”
“Tell me.”
He blew out a mouthful of air. “The history of my misfortunes, eh? Okay.”
Before he started, the mechanical rant of a buzz bomb interrupted, seeming to burrow through the blue morning sky directly toward them. They both stood stiffly, and as it passed over the engine cut and they waited. Two seconds, three, four; the waiting seemed interminable before the noise of its explosion came, close enough to blow the curtains in and to make her doors creak, and they both shifted on their feet.