Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  Sarah sat down at the kitchen table. “Who told you that? That it was my birthday?”

  “No one,” Albrecht said, slipping a black vinyl disc from a sleeve on the inside of the gramophone’s lid. “I read it in your Bible,” he said more quietly, aware that mention of that day would unsettle her, when right now he wanted nothing more than to make her glad he was there.

  He busied himself at the gramophone, taking the small crank from out of its clip in the box and fitting it to the square bolt at the back. He began winding, slowly at first, then quicker, talking to Sarah as he did.

  “You have no music here,” he said with his back to her. “I thought you might like some.”

  Sarah didn’t reply. Her head was bent to the table as she traced the knots and whorls in the wood with her finger. She felt awkward in his presence, remembering the last time he’d stood in this kitchen, the veil of his thumbprint across her bride’s face. Albrecht was determined, however. In the past two weeks spring had come to the valley, and with it his senses had returned. It was as if he’d never experienced a change of seasons before. Bare stone walls revealed purple crocuses along their jagged tops, the birdsong multiplied, the melodies of song thrushes and blackbirds shot through with the sudden drilling of a woodpecker. He felt lighter than he had ever done, possessed of a quick, fragile potential. The turning within himself he’d first detected on those early walks through the valley was complete. He’d unlocked, and in doing so had woken another part of himself too. As if waking from a deep sleep into a clearer light of reality, he’d found himself thinking of Sarah every day.

  For the past months he and his patrol had regularly listened to the Oxford professor’s gramophone and records. The music had stilled them. At times it had lifted them too. Now Albrecht wanted Sarah to experience this. More importantly, he wanted to share the experience with her. Not for the music, but for the sharing, for the creation of a common ground between them. A common ground that was not a consequence of war, but was in spite of it.

  Albrecht lifted the polished steel arm and lowered the heavy stylus to the revolving record. The needle met the groove with a sudden crackle and hiss.

  “Bach,” he said simply as he stepped back from the table and leant against the windowsill, folding his arms in anticipation. “The Cello suites. No. 4.”

  He lowered his head and at the same time, as if his movement had created it, a bow drew itself deeply across a single bass string before melting to a higher note that fell back towards the first. At the end of that descent, the bow drew across the bass string again, ricocheting the notes higher once more to repeat the movement, the same as the first, but different too. Each time the bow pulled across that bass string, brief and sonorous, a scattering of breadcrumbs on the table near Sarah’s hand vibrated over the wood.

  Sarah’s kitchen had not heard music for months. Before all this happened she used to sing to herself as she worked in here, cleaning the grate or peeling potatoes. Each chore was lightened and quickened by song, a hymn hummed or sung just under her breath. But since Tom’s leaving she hadn’t sung to herself again. With this record, with the sound of this single cello emanating from a battered leather case, everything in the room, the table, the dresser, the range, the horseshoe over the door, seemed in contact with a new element. The trees she could see through the window over Albrecht’s shoulder now moved not with the buffeting wind as before, but under the command of the rise, fall, and procession of the music.

  The pattern of the music changed, the stab of a sudden high note rising through a smooth flow of the other phrases. The surprise of it picked at Sarah’s heart and she found herself suddenly looking up at Albrecht. She was met with the top of his bowed head over his folded arms. Standing there like that he looked like a body prepared for the coffin.

  The bow was moving quickly over the strings now, building rapid ascents before falling back to the familiar foundation of that single bass note. Sarah remained motionless at the table, but inside her mind was racing after those notes. It had been so quiet. So silent. And now this. So much sound, so intricate and yet so simple. The weight of the winter months seemed to collapse about her, undermined by this music like the blocks of snow along the banks of the Olchon, weakened and loosened by the river’s renewed energy.

  The first movement came to an end with a return to the original phrasing, closing not with the single bass string that Sarah unconsciously anticipated, but with a smoother, longer note, drawn out to a sudden silence. The stylus hissed and popped in the record’s grooves, riding the slight waves of its surface like a boat anchored out at sea. The wind outside seemed amplified and a blackbird’s song rang through the yard, as if all the sound about them had been washed clean in the cello’s music.

  “The Allemande,” Albrecht said barely audibly, his head still bowed. Sarah didn’t understand, but again he appeared to conjure the music, as with these words it began once more, lighter, faster, with contralto vibrations at its heart.

  Again Sarah and Albrecht remained motionless as the battered gramophone filled the room with its music; Sarah seated at her table, pockmarked and scored by generations of hungry farmers, and Albrecht standing at the window, the coldness of the wind penetrating the panes at his back, his eyes closed and his inward vision travelling back to distant concerts with Ebbe before the war.

  At the end of the second movement he spoke again, even quieter than before, “The Courante.”

  Again they listened, and Sarah too found herself transported, not to a faraway past but to her present. In all the months of silence, she hadn’t been able to think, to once make sense of things, to see clearly. Now, with her kitchen filled with more sound than it had ever heard, she found a silence in which to think, a cavern of reflection carved from the notes piling and crowding about her.

  The end of the Courante caught her unawares, a series of foreshortened ascents that slipped back, once more, to that bass string, trembling the breadcrumbs beside her fingers.

  Albrecht, however, had been ready. She turned her head to see him standing over the gramophone, his hands poised on either side of the revolving record as if he would pounce and catch the final dying note before it slipped into silence. He did not, and waited instead until its faintest resonance had passed before raising the stylus from the disc with one finger, as he might the chin of a crying girl. Swinging the arm to one side he flipped the record, wound the crank, and lowered the needle again, all in what looked like one swift movement.

  “The Sarabande,” he said, not looking at her as he took up his position by the window again. There was something in the way he said this, a promise in his tone, that made Sarah strain to catch the first note from the record’s initial grooves of empty static.

  When it came she understood. Languid, slow, pregnant with sorrow, the strings seemed to belong to another instrument altogether. A regretful but wise and saddened cousin of the cello that had played the first three movements. Sarah found her own head dropping now and her eyes closing. It was beautiful but she could not bear it. The music seemed to know. About her hours on the hillside, the wind like the sound of her own blood in her ears, the long nights lying awake in her abandoned bed. It was as if the notes of her heart over these past three months had been dictated directly to the hand that drew this bow over these strings to describe, so perfectly, the complex yet simple geometry of her damaged soul.

  The movement closed, not as the others had with definite strokes across a string, but with the lightest of touches, almost accidental, the contact so slight that the final note barely breathed from the string before extinguishing, leaving a resonance of more substance than the note itself.

  The gramophone hissed. The wind shivered the panes of the window. “The Intermezzo,” Albrecht said in a whisper, “a bourrée.”

  Again on cue the music began, played once more by the first cello, a succession of rapid, tilting phrases. But Sarah was still listening to the Sarabande, its echo running under everything she hear
d in this movement and in the final Gigue, which made an inevitable return to the patterns of the Prelude.

  The suite played itself out as it had begun, with a strong pass across a deep bass note that left its imprint on the air as physical and real as if a pebble had dented the atmosphere of the farmhouse kitchen. The needle ran to the end of the final groove and stayed there, riding the revolving thud of the record’s silence, the pulse of nothing playing into the room. Albrecht didn’t move. If he did he felt he would spill whatever it was he held so delicately within him.

  The record turned, its regular heartbeat the only sound now other than the playful, intermittent wind outside. He stared at the stone flags at his feet, feeling the resonance of the music settle within him. Eventually he could bear it no longer. Slowly, he raised his head.

  Sarah was looking directly at him. Her eyes were glazed with tears, the skin about them blushed with unspent crying. He allowed himself the slightest of tender smiles.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. Her voice was clean and hard as bone, pared of all depth by her anger. Her eyes remained locked on his. “You’ve won this war. Why don’t you just leave now? Leave us alone.”

  It was no good, Albrecht saw that now. He was not, as he had hoped, the sum of his parts, of the parts of himself he’d rediscovered in this valley. He was, after all, no more than the sum of this uniform, of this war. He had no power to shape his future. He could not extract himself, escape from what he had done and what he had been part of, through no will of his own, over these past five years.

  “I know what you think,” Sarah continued in the same cold tone. “Just because we live out here, because we spend our days with animals, that’s all we are.” She let her eyes flick towards the gramophone before staring back at him. “Think I’ve never heard music before? Well I have, like you’ll never know too. From people, not from a record either.”

  She stopped. The Sarabande still played within her. The fragility of its sadness had turned her chest to shivered glass and her head into a cloud of gathered tears. She glanced at her row of novels on the top shelf of the dresser, then returned her eyes to him again as she continued, more quietly than before. “I read, you know. I read books. So don’ come here with your music. I know what you’ve done. We all heard the wireless. In Belgium an’ Holland. Them Jews weren’t just taken to new homes, were they? So don’t come here and cover yourself with this music. Because I see you,” she said, her words no more than a whisper. “I see you.”

  She was tearing it down. Everything he’d wanted to create; a rare sharing. He’d selected the suite specifically with her in mind. He had brought it to her, brought her music and himself to this cold, lonely, silent house. And now she was destroying it. Albrecht felt the pressure of a childish frustration gather in his chest at the loss of the moment, at this injustice done to him and his character.

  “Do you really think they’ll come back if we go?” he said quietly, trying to suppress the anger in his voice. “Do you really think they’re alive at all anymore?”

  Sarah’s eyes didn’t falter. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think Tom’s alive. I know he is.”

  Tom. She used her husband’s name like a needle to pierce him. Albrecht broke from her stare, his eyes falling upon the plates, leaflets, and books on the dresser. They came to rest on Sarah’s wedding photograph. He let out a sigh. “I hope for your sake you’re right, Mrs. Lewis,” was all he said.

  The single heartbeat of the record was slowing as if the pulse of the house was weakening. Albrecht crossed to the gramophone, lifted the stylus and swung the arm back into its clip. Placing one hand on the record, he stopped its turning, then stood there, his head bowed, as the silence seeped back into the room.

  “You think they’re dead, don’t you?” Sarah said quietly, her voice her own again.

  Albrecht closed the gramophone, then leant against it, both his hands on its lid, his head hung low between his shoulders, his eyes closed.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “They know this area well, I imagine.” He paused, clearing his throat. “And from what I’ve seen, men like your husbands have been well prepared.” He thought of the bunker he’d visited outside Oxford, the rows of glowing jars filled with urine, the stacks of supplies under the bunks. “And God knows,” he continued with an empty laugh of a sigh, “this war might be full of terrors, but it’s full of miracles too.”

  “Like here?” Sarah said.

  “Yes,” Albrecht replied, his eyes still closed, nodding his head. “Like here.”

  They remained like that for several seconds before Albrecht straightened up and turned round. “I should leave. I am sorry if I’ve upset you, Mrs. Lewis.” He fastened the latches on the box and slid it off the table. He was walking to the door when Sarah stopped him with her question.

  “Why d’you come here? In the first place I mean. Why here? Was it t’look for them?”

  Albrecht turned to face her, a faint smile playing on his lips. “Oh no, Mrs. Lewis. We came here to look for something much more interesting, I’m afraid.”

  “And did you find it?”

  “Yes,” Albrecht said, his eyebrows raised as if surprised by his own answer. “Yes, we did find it.”

  Sarah frowned and shifted in her seat. “So what was it?” she asked. “Or can’t you tell me that either?”

  Albrecht rested a shoulder against the door frame, the gramophone box still held in one hand. He looked down at his feet for a moment. When he looked back up at Sarah, his face had changed. There was, once again, some of that lightness Sarah had seen when she’d first answered the door.

  “Something my superiors wanted,” he said. “Something they wanted very much indeed.”

  He appeared on the verge of laughing at some secret joke. Sarah was both irritated and intrigued. “Here? They wanted something from here?”

  “Yes,” Albrecht replied, nodding his head deliberately. “Yes they did.” His smile slipped for a second before returning with a new energy. “Will you let me show you?”

  Again he looked like the younger man who’d come calling for her on a blustery spring morning. “It’s not far, and I think perhaps it might prove a better present for you than this,” he said, lifting up the battered leather case. Lowering the gramophone again he watched as the nick of a frown-line appeared between Sarah’s eyebrows. Remaining at the open door, he stood there, motionless, waiting for her answer.

  It was sacking cloth. Sarah could see that now, its folds and pleats longer and smoother than the jagged stone walls around them. As Albrecht moved towards it the torch beam lit up its coarse surface. Sacking cloth. Just like she’d put about her shoulders all through the winter.

  Albrecht took hold of the corner and pulled. The cloth slid off whatever it covered and fell to the floor with a slow slump, like thawing snow breaking from a cornice. There was another sheet underneath, tarpaulin this time, like the tarpaulin Reg used to cover his hay ricks. Albrecht pulled at this and it too fell away. At first Sarah could see nothing but the glare of the reflected torchlight. She squinted away from it, the beam sudden on her eyes after the darkness of the cavity they stood in. But then Albrecht shone the torch at the wall instead, and when Sarah looked back she saw the pale wood of the packing crate raised on a pallet, and then the darker wood of the frame within. Inside this frame she could make out a lighter surface that almost filled it, shaped like the gable end of a house and stained with darker patches. She moved closer and saw this surface was covered in illustrations and blocks of written text.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Albrecht’s voice came from behind her, out of the darkness. “The world,” he said. “Or at least an idea of it.”

  Sarah had not come here easily. Although she’d eventually agreed to let Albrecht show her why his patrol had come to the valley, she’d grown nervous once they’d left Upper Blaen. She didn’t trust him and as they’d walked up towards the head of the valley, then around its western wall above
Maggie’s farm and The Court, she’d stopped several times, shaking her head, telling him she wouldn’t go any further. But in the end something had brought her here. Something in his tone, in his look had convinced her she needed to see this. To make sense of things, to explain what had happened to her life over these past four months. So by the time they reached the Red Darren, a sandstone cliff jutting from the head of a scree slope high up the valley’s wall, Sarah was ready to follow Albrecht as he collected a torch from behind a boulder and stepped inside a tall, narrow crevice in the rocks.

  Although the stone of the Red Darren was most often split horizontally, making it look from a distance as if it had been built from massive rough-hewn bricks, several vertical rifts like this appeared irregularly along its half-mile length. Sarah had never been inside one of these rifts and she was surprised how quickly the only light was that of Albrecht’s torch illuminating the damp, angular walls. She gripped the hazel walking stick she’d taken from her porch, the V at its head worn smooth as glass by the pressure of Tom’s thumb over the years, and hoped the dogs, which she’d left waiting at the mouth of the crevice, would still come to her if they heard her calling.

  When Albrecht had stopped in front of her and shone his torch at the back wall, her heart had begun racing once more. There was nothing there. He had lured her into this cliff and now there was nothing there. She gripped the walking stick with both hands and leant her weight towards the entrance, ready to run back towards the light at any moment. But then Albrecht had moved closer up to the rock before stepping sideways and disappearing into a larger cavity. Sarah followed him, coming out into a man-made hollow with wooden struts and a brattice running along its sides. The struts were split and splintered, as if they’d been hammered into place in a hurry. Sarah looked around her, remembering how Tom had once told her how soft this stone could be before it was exposed to the air. “Like butter it is,” he’d said on one of their early walks together as he’d slipped his hand into a crack in the cliff and pulled out a clump of crumbling rock. Albrecht shone his torch about the hollow, following Sarah’s gaze with its beam until she finally saw the sacking cloth that had fallen away to reveal this frame and the world inside.