by Michael Pye
He’d gotten used to sidestepping the dung from the horses that drew carts around the city. So he was startled at the seven trucks parked along one side of the street in perfect order, large to small. He checked them like a collector: Opel Blitz, the kind that ran on gas and not diesel, and a square-cabbed Ford V3000S with a box behind the cab for firewood and a gas generator, and a Mercedes diesel with the huge insignia still, just, attached to the radiator grille.
They were unofficial trucks, going about under the remains of sundry paint jobs; the effect was like city camouflage. One looked ominously old, a canary-yellow square-backed tug, suitable for taking bread around a suburb. One looked fit to carry a whole life’s worth of furniture. Two of them carried the names of household movers.
That morning, Nicholas met his mother for the first time: saw her operate. She commanded this whole convoy. She demanded. She checked and she bustled about. She wasn’t the film clerk anymore, or the pretty woman who went out to dinner and came back late, or the mother who looked after her boy, when she could. She called the drivers together and made them listen while Nicholas fidgeted on the steps of a building which did not exist anymore.
She went inside each truck. The large one opened on newspaper and cloth and carpets, all wedged between wrapped things. The small yellow van carried boxes jammed together with blankets under and above them. Nicholas had no idea his mother had such possessions, or that they needed such protection.
When she came back from settling the drivers, she asked if he wanted to ride up front: first truck in the convoy, driver’s cab. Of course he wanted to ride there. He would be the venturer, the explorer. He would be the guard and the intelligence man. He would gobble up the great roads.
He clambered into the cab, shook the hand of the driver who had one week’s start on a fine wide moustache and smelled of tobacco and coffee. Lucia climbed up after him, and slammed the door.
The driver sounded his horn and kicked the starter button just above the gas pedal. Slowly, laboriously, the engine caught and the weight of the truck rolled forward, out of the dead street.
Nicholas saw a banner across the street: “Our walls are breaking. Not our hearts.”
He saw a statue facing the wrong way into a wall.
He knew this was not the right day to be traveling. He thought they would certainly be stopped.
He had just seen all the furniture still in the apartment, Katya starting to wipe it. But the furniture wouldn’t fill all these trucks, even if it had been loaded while he wasn’t looking.
He wanted to see what was in the trucks. Then he understood that was the very last thing he should want. “Don’t you look,” his mother always said. “Don’t you ask!”
They went slowly, in a cloud of black engine smoke, a faint smell of spilled fuel. They must have carried cans of fuel, because there was little chance of finding it along the way. Three of the trucks certainly worked on wood gas, so they had great hunchback stores and furnaces behind the driver’s cab.
Nicholas studied the road ahead as though that was the map, and he was responsible.
He saw a wasted city, dust devils getting up among the ruins, the colors all wasted and buried, leaving only ghosts of concrete and brick.
He started to sing, the driver joined in, Lucia joined in.
Lucia watched the road in the side mirror. She shifted in her seat. She looked back again. Then she leaned across Nicholas and she grabbed the wheel and she said: “Stop now. What the hell is going on?”
The driver stopped, sat back, and said with a patronizing kind of patience: “You could have run us off the road.”
“There are no trucks following us.”
“All the trucks are following us.”
“I can’t see anything on the road.”
“Listen,” the driver said, “you want to look like a convoy from the air? It doesn’t matter if we’re civilian, not to the bombers. We’re better off seven trucks, apart.”
“I’m waiting here for the other trucks.”
“We go down the autobahn, they kill us. Seven trucks together, they’d never believe we weren’t military.”
“I haven’t gone to all this trouble,” his mother said, “to give some fucking truck driver the profits.”
And they waited until the trucks caught up, stopped behind, and the drivers each came out to ask what was happening.
After that, Lucia insisted the convoy stick together and stop often, and at each stop she’d get out and open each truck’s doors and examine the cargo. The men had strong, cold coffee and beer, and bread and sausages.
They rolled south all day, skirting places. And they didn’t travel down the autobahns, which had already been broken by bombing; they used old roads, side roads where they could.
Nicholas saw soldiers on horseback, soldiers sleeping in a ditch. He half expected lances and pikes and cannon out of some tapestry; he looked through the windows, and he looked back in time.
The driver said they were lucky it was spring. In winter, you had to warm up the engine with a blowtorch and then you had to rock the whole damn truck back and forth to get the pistons and the bearings moving. Nicholas listened to every detail. He had a small boy’s fetish for the ways machines work, for figures and specifications: two-liter, six-cylinder, however many horsepower. He could hold the whole machine in his head, and somehow control its performance on these doubtful roads.
They kept moving at night, lights fixed down on the road, with the truck engines masking out the sounds of any planes above. Sometimes, they crossed other convoys that were on the move, shadows on the other side of valleys, great metal machines suddenly smoking out a wood: official, drab, purposeful convoys. At three in the morning, nobody could stay awake; so they parked off the road in the shelter of trees and Nicholas slept with his mother in the cab. The driver took a blanket down to the ground.
Before he slept, he propped stones under the front and back fenders. He said it would take the strain off the leaf springs and stop the truck rocking in the night.
Nicholas didn’t sleep at first. He could check the trees through the window. He listened for engines, planes, wind in the branches, animals, birds, coughs and snoring from the drivers, and he watched for lights. But he must have fallen asleep, because there is nothing in his memories until the moment of waking up abruptly and staring into an unknown face, under a cap, with a uniform coat and its collar pulled high: the sort of face you see across counters, across desks.
Lucia also woke.
She did something so curious: she pouted and she half complained, as though she’d been caught underdressed by a man she quite liked. Nicholas didn’t understand such things, but he saw the oddness of her reaction—no shock, not even surprise, just complete absorption in keeping the attention of the man at the window.
She told Nicholas to stay in the truck.
There were two cars parked on the road, long black cars: staff cars, Mercedes cabriolets, with great rolls of mudguard on either side of the high radiator and their enormous headlights blinded. Nicholas classified the cars, as usual. The first one looked like a 320, so it had to belong to someone important.
There were six men, standing by the cars in long leather coats. There must have been some light—moonlight, starlight—because he distinctly remembered glints on the coats as though they were polished. Lucia was arguing, gesturing.
He had to trust her so perfectly. They were out in the middle of a wood, nobody around, six men with guns in big, official, influential cars, and she had to explain how seven civilian trucks were on the move, how a woman came to be in charge, how an Italian and Swiss woman could have business here, how anybody could legitimately be heading for Switzerland; because Nicholas knew she could not tell a lie. There was no time or material for a lie.
The sky began to come back: like a pale cloth, then all suffused with pink, then bright.
The men seemed amused. Nicholas didn’t know if that was good or not. They seemed to like to kee
p Lucia talking at the roadside, to alarm her, to make her flirt and chat and charm, to detain her.
Nicholas watched the sky turn red behind the trees.
Lucia shrugged her shoulders hugely. She came back to the truck and she picked up a thick envelope of papers for them to read.
One of the men, the oldest, considered the papers and clicked his heels and said: “Madame” in a parade-ground voice, as though he meant it. It was definitely “Madame”; he was trying to be respectful to a foreigner.
The sky was blue like a robin’s egg is blue. Lucia smelt of sweat when she got back into the cab.
He should have asked her. But he wouldn’t have known how to frame the questions: What are we carrying, why are we carrying it, why does it matter, why did they let us go? If he’d been able to ask those things, he would already have learned mistrust, and he still had to depend on Lucia.
Besides, he saw how serious she was. This was not the time for him to ask questions.
Much later, when he woke up in the long nights, eyes wide, brain stopped, and wondered how he could even be connected to such things, he had others to protect. He wanted wife and child, all the years, to live as they wanted and not to concern themselves with a convoy creeping down to the Alps. He didn’t want to infect them with his doubts.
So the doubts grew until they stole his sleep. He was a realistic man, and knew he never had a choice—just a boy in a wood in a war—but he was sure he could never trust anyone who claimed that all morality was suspended for them because they had no choice. Year by year, he learned not to trust his own story, then not to trust himself.
The official cars droned away into the dawn. The drivers woke, complained, went off into the woods, and came back for cold coffee. One of them wanted to make a fire, but Lucia kicked wet leaves over the first flames and told him to get on.
They rolled around Magdeburg and Dessau and Weissenfels. They avoided Bayreuth and Nuremberg and Augsburg. They held to local roads, and then made dashes on the autobahns where they could, and then went back to the slow, narrow roads that they blocked for hours. Lucia muttered that she didn’t know if it was worse to be bombed by the Allies or harangued by the peasants up ahead and behind them. She used a bad word before “peasants.”
They saw the smoke coming up from Stuttgart.
Lucia argued with the driver; she wanted nothing to happen without her orders. She said they’d be faster crossing Lake Constance, which he insisted on calling the Bodensee. He said she was crazy to think the ferries would be running as usual. She said he lacked faith in the Reich. He said: “And you have so much faith you’re moving to Switzerland?”
She said: “Then we’ll go in by Thayngen and Schaffhausen.”
Lucia never wanted to stop. The driver insisted. There was a cacophony of shouts and horns. When the truck rolled to a halt, and braking had begun to seem a long, slow, chancy process, they all looked back.
Five trucks followed. There should have been six.
“We lost one,” said the driver, complacently.
Lucia kicked him once, hard, in the shins. He still had that soft, half-fancying look on his face, happy to be doing a job for this bright lady, but Nicholas wasn’t sure his mother had done the right thing.
“Then find him,” his mother said.
One of the other drivers, a man in late middle age carrying a lifetime of beer in front of him, came rolling up. “Went just off the road,” he said. “We’ll need a tow rope to get him out.”
Lucia said: “Do it.”
The heavy-bellied man checked the driver, just to see his reaction, just to know what to do. He couldn’t tell because Lucia’s manner and her accent were at war.
She sat on a wall. She watched the convoy, her particular convoy, turn back on the road. Nicholas never saw her face so bare, so tight and angry.
Nothing was safe until everything was safe across the border. And she wanted to be safe.
A black bird came down in the next meadow, then another. They could hear, over the gunning of engines half a mile back, sheep blathering in a field. They could hear the wind.
“It’s nice here,” Nicholas said, wanting something innocent to say. “Is it pretty like this in Switzerland?”
She rounded on him. “Pretty? Like this?” She spat. He never saw her spit before. “This is all,” and she reached for a word violent enough, “landscape.”
Nicholas said: “But the birds—”
“Some people,” she said, “like birds. Some people like life.”
“There’s life here.”
“What’s living,” she said, “is out there with its tail up shitting. That’s all.”
Nicholas stood up. “I like it,” he said, obstinately.
She wouldn’t answer. He could read a kind of contempt in her eyes: he had given up, he was not struggling on. He liked fields, and birds, and landscape; he did not value will, plans, organizing.
Breath knotted up in his stomach.
And she left him. She started walking down the road to where the men now had the lost truck grappled to a cable, and the largest truck was nudging it out of the roadside mud.
He didn’t want to follow her. He sat back on the wall and he listened, harder than he ever listened before in his life. Every sound in the city pushed itself on you; here, you had to seek out sound and break its code.
He could hear a kind of whispering.
He turned. The whispering was just a roar at a distance, he realized. Across the valley, water was breaking out of the rock, falling like hard smoke, the spring melt busting out of its usual course and arcing out into the air.
Under his breath, he started to sing: “Cucù, cucù, Aprile non c’è piu . . .”
The largest of the trucks was struggling now, a sound so large it filled up the view and made the birds scatter. Then it stopped. He looked down the road, and he saw the convoy back in perfect line.
Lucia was shouting. Nicholas listened to the water. Lucia was gesticulating.
He clambered back into the cab of the truck, back in the convoy again, that little smoking particular of gas and wood fumes that stained the rosy, gilded sunset.
Two men in familiar brown shirts, rifles over shoulders, belts full of cartridges. Barbed wire across a bridge; it looked the way roses look in autumn, all bare and looped and thorny.
Men in procession, marching with shovels: no ease or enthusiasm, just taking used bodies home. They had a uniformed guard.
Across the bridge, men in Swiss uniforms under Swiss flags. There were white signs on trees and the posts that carried power lines: “Halt! Swiss territory! Crossing of the border forbidden. Violations of this order will be put down by armed force.”
Lucia put on a hat.
One of the brownshirts and one of the Swiss guards from the other side came forward and talked to her. She kept saying: “Household goods.” Then the brownshirt said it, and the Swiss said it and shook his head, and Lucia said, firmly: “Personal effects.” Then she pulled out all of her papers.
The brownshirts saluted. Nicholas was not at all surprised. If she could turn away a line of predators in the forest, she could cope with these frontier pen pushers, whose guns were only ornament.
The Swiss asked for passports. Lucia produced hers, which was, by right of marriage, Swiss. One of the Swiss said, a little sharply: “Welcome home.”
Then Lucia produced other papers, in a slim envelope. He consulted them, and was democratic with Lucia, but not sharp anymore.
There was a brief fuss about the drivers: whether they could be relied upon to go back. Lucia promised. The Swiss guards were not convinced. Lucia was welcome to cross; Nicholas was welcome to cross; there was no problem with the trucks, or their contents. But the drivers were another matter.
The bridge was at last a proper frontier, a place of suspicion and delays, of administration licking its fingers to turn the pages of passports and officials consulting each other out of earshot of the civilians on the road.
The Swiss soldiers had caps like turtle shells, rifles across their backs, sloppy trousers. One of them carried Lucia’s bags across the bridge for her.
She did not seem happy to be across the border. She kept looking back to where the trucks, their engines now shut down, bulked frozen in the low evening light.
“We’re here,” Nicholas said, and then regretted saying something so empty. It certainly wasn’t enough to take her eyes from the trucks.
She seemed to be willing their lights to catch, their engines to turn over, the whole convoy to roll over the bridge and into her brilliant future.
FOUR
He was all rusticity the next weekend, his memories stowed away: brown apron, pot belly, gray hair rampant, slipping peels off potatoes cooked two days ago for Rösti. The kitchen at Sonnenberg had always been Nicholas’s territory; not even Nora disputed it.
He listened for Helen’s car on the hill. The day was brisk, sky like a photograph, there must be a breeze: he hoped they could go for a walk. And Henry was coming, which would make it hard to find a corner for quiet talk.
The car stopped. Through the window he could see Henry and his stroller being unpacked at the roadside. The boy stared at the geese snapping about. The geese complained. Helen had a stuffed lion by the paw.
Henry, properly solemn, knocked at the door.
Nicholas smiled hugely, and he hugged Helen as though he needed to, and then he lifted up Henry, who said: “Geese,” and wriggled.
Then he was putting butter in pans, taking up great scoops of the soft, light gold of potato. Helen was trying to take over the process, teasing to work the grater or the peeling knife, but he resisted. “I never have anyone to look after,” he said.
Henry went upstairs to practice coming downstairs, which he had not quite mastered.
“I would have gone with you,” Helen said.
“They didn’t want you, either.”
She so obviously wanted to ask how it had gone, what he had seen, if there had been any insults to add to the simple, miserable fact of his exclusion. But she could hear Henry bump, bumping on the stairs, coming down on his buttocks, and she went to see that he was all right and when she came back the moment for questions had passed.