by Ruth Hartley
They too were hungry. Yesterday the young woman had collected nettles by the empty pigsty and the four of them: the old man, the young woman and the girl and boy, had had soup for supper with some wrinkled sprouting potatoes that had been hidden in the earth near the empty chicken coop. There were no animals on the farm. Not even one chicken. There was nothing growing outside either. It was early April, too soon in the year for any fruit to have developed on the plum and apple trees, let alone for it to have ripened. No crops had been planted. The old man’s tractor had disappeared a while back and his winter vegetables had been uprooted and stolen. He had piled up all the hazel nuts and walnuts he could find, some he had even salvaged from the pig sty, but the hazel nuts were wormy and hollowed out and the walnuts black and bitter. The refugees in the shed did not even attempt to scavenge in the fields. They knew it was hopeless. They were not the first to pass and they would not be the last. The old man had lost his dog. At first he had helped the skinny creature look for dry white bones in the midden but after a while he shut the dog outside and let him wander off, a sacrifice sent on a fruitless hunt. The cat still came into the cottage with a rat or mouse but no human could get near enough to remove its catch from its claws.
The gunfire was no longer to be heard behind them but out in front to the west. The woman with her children had left their comfortable apartment in Dresden after Christmas and finally reached the old man’s cottage a few weeks ago. At first they had hoped to get all the way to Berlin but the train from Dresden had been halted by bombing and not started again. Instead they headed for the old man’s farm which was off the main road a short distance south-east of Berlin. They ended their journey by walking just ahead of the sound of the guns. The first day the guns had been a faraway, distant booming. The second day they could distinguish the different sounds that different guns made. The third day they had seen flashes and the rifle fire was so close that they had sometimes run for short distances. The old man was the young woman’s father-in-law. He had abandoned his large house on the nearby hill. It had attracted the retreating Wehrmacht and would now attract the advancing Russians. He was living in his absent cowherd’s tiny and sparsely furnished cottage. He had wrapped his family’s most prized possessions and his brother’s painting collection in canvas flour sacks and hidden them in a pit which he had dug under the shed. The night his niece had arrived with her children, the main bulk of the ramshackle artillery of the Russian Army had overtaken them but passed by the farmhouse a few miles to the north. Today the noise of the battle was loud and remained at a constant distance.
“It’s as well you did not reach Berlin.” the old man said. “First the British and Americans bombed it and now the Russians will lay siege to it. They will encircle it first and then attack. They are shelling the centre and waiting for all their troops to be in place.”
The young woman shrugged. Dresden had been bombed by the British the previous year and then the bombing had stopped for a while. That was when she decided to take the children and leave for the old man’s farm. Since then stories had reached them of the total destruction of the city. It was obvious that the Russian advance was not only inevitable but gaining ground at a rapidly increasing pace.
That morning, after the old man had spoken with the refugees outside, he took the young woman to one side and they spoke quietly together. Afterwards the young woman took her daughter to sit by the cold stove and cut all her long blonde curls off with a kitchen knife. The boy never forgot the stritch of the blade against his sister’s hair and the way she squeezed her eyes and face up against its tug. Then his mother made the girl take off her frock and put on a pair of the boy’s trousers and one of his shirts. After inspecting her for a moment longer, the woman rubbed some ash from the fire place into her blonde tufts and smeared a little on her cheeks. The girl began to look more like her brother’s younger sibling than his older sister but also considerably dirtier. At midday the old man reported seeing soldiers of the Russian infantry on the road. The refugees in the cow shed became very quiet. The woman and the disguised girl lay down on the cottage floor and pulled the rough bedding they had slept on over themselves. The floor was very cold. The boy was inadequately hidden at one side of the fireplace. They waited.
The screams started in the early afternoon. There were a couple of gunshots and a lot of shouting. Men shouting. Men shouting in Russian. Then the sound of children wailing and again the sound of screams but this time also terrible groans and exclamations of pain. The old man was grey-faced, his hands clenched. The boy could not see his mother or sister but he heard his sister whisper and his mother say ‘Shush’. He was shaking helplessly, tremors of cold running up and down his body. His teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Outside was a young Russian officer who looked as ragged, as lined and as hungry as the old man. He had once been an idealist, a student of Lenin and Marx, and he did not like to watch the mass rapes of women and children by his men. He could not stop his men from taking their revenge. They had been at Stalingrad and eaten rats. Some had eaten dead bodies. He had been told that another officer who had objected to his troops’ behaviour had been arrested and would one day end up in Siberia if he lived long enough. They said that this other officer was some fool of a poet. The idea of sex however, aroused the young officer and he scratched at his uncomfortable, distended balls. He also wanted to have a woman. Next to the cow shed in which his men were occupied, he saw a one-room peasant’s cottage. He would make the necessary search for any hidden German soldiers. He burst open the door, waited a moment, then strode in with his bayoneted gun at a proud angle in front of him. In a moment he pulled the old man to his feet and then knocked him down again with his gun butt, he yanked the shivering boy from his hole and turned to spear the bedding on the floor with his bayonet.
The old man cried out a warning to his niece and she rolled out from under the bedding just as she had always meant to. The officer kicked at the old man but moved towards the woman.
“Here I am!” she cried, in the Russian she had learnt as a child. “Take me! Let me be yours – keep me for yourself.”
“I will be good for you!” she said.
The officer was already unbuttoning his flies. He swept the room with his gun.
“Lie down!” he hissed, “Lie down all of you!” and in a moment he was tearing at the woman’s clothes. Pulling her legs apart, he forced himself into her. It did not take long before he jerked several times like a stuck pig, made a sound that was half-animal, half-howl of a baby, and then pulled himself up. He was finished.
“You can be mine.” he said, “You are mine.”
He stood looking at the woman. At the white skin of her legs and the white flesh of her belly, her pale hair spread around her head, her eyes staring, shocked. Then the door scraped again and two more soldiers burst in. The officer knew them far too well. One was just twenty and had been fighting since he was sixteen. His eyes were those of a dead fish. The other, an uneducated and brutal peasant who was older than the officer, had several times tried to challenge his authority.
“Good work!” said the brute, “She’s ready for me.” and he knelt on the bedding, his hand at his gaping trouser opening. The officer frowned helpless. The second man was erect for a second time. He had just finished raping an old woman outside.
“What’s this?” he said, he had knelt on the hidden girl’s leg and she had gasped in pain. He pulled her from under the cover roughly and flung onto the floor.
“Bloody kid! Watch what I do to your mother!” he said, and grabbing at the woman’s hair to hold her down he carried on.
The third soldier pulled the thin child upright by her ear and looked at her more closely.
“Hey!” he said, “We have a little virgin here! Let’s have some fun!
“Hey boy! This your sister in disguise? Do you know how to fuck? We’ll show you what to do!”
; Keeping his grip on the girl he reached for the boy and then he casually stripped the trousers off each child.
The boy was in the grip of long shuddering convulsions of absolute terror. For the first time in his life his penis was upright and distended in an automatic spasm of agony and fear. His sister kept slipping into and out of a faint.
“Hey! Look at this!” The Russian was laughing in incredulous mirth. “The little bastard is ready too! Let them get to it!” and he made to force the boy onto his sister.
As the second Russian climaxed and momentarily relaxed his grip, the children’s mother tried to struggle to her feet, beating at him and screaming.
“Leave my children! Leave my children!”
The second Russian pulled out his pistol and shot her in the throat.
There was a sudden quiet. The girl was unconscious, the old man collapsed onto his knees.
“Get out!” screamed the young officer, blinded and maddened with rage, “Get out! Get out!” and he struck at his comrades with the butt of his gun.
Surprised into obedience, they did as ordered and left without a glance backwards.
The boy looked at his mother. She lay on her back, naked from the waist down, her eyes and mouth wide open, and a red flower blooming out from her neck. Her hands were up, her fingers curled. She reminded the boy of the cat at home whose tummy he had stroked and who had stretched out her paws in pleasure at his touch.
Acknowledgements
The Tin Heart Gold Mine owes its existence to the unforgettable days and nights I spent in the African wilderness with people who love it, understand it and share their knowledge of it. It is inspired by the passionate and generous artists and painters I know, from Africa and Europe, who give of themselves too often without much or any financial gain.
The story is driven by my anger at the depredations caused by the Cold War in southern (sub-Saharan) Africa.
As to the mine itself, my imagination was caught by a tin heart fastened to a tree in a tiny 1914-1918 war cemetery in Marondera, Zimbabwe. The physical aspects of the Tin Heart Gold Mine are based on an old copper mine close to the Hippo Safari Camp in the Kafue National Park in Zambia which is now a Zambian National Monument and my father’s stories of an ill-spent youth prospecting for gold and working briefly on the Phoenix Gold Mine in Zimbabwe.
I am also deeply indebted to John Corley for his patient and efficient editing, to Emma Darwin for her advice, to Colin Carlin for his expertise and to friends including Lesley Bower and Claudia Naydler for reading and commenting on the novel. Terry Compton has once again made me a superb cover design. My thanks to everyone who simply allowed me to be anti-social and to write.