by Otto de Kat
Kate enjoyed visiting the wards, or the smaller sick rooms with only one or two occupants. She came in from the open air, fresh from the street with a newspaper under her arm, into a world that stood still. The domain of the infirm: a small town of beds criss-crossed by lanes reflecting a hierarchy of diseases and injuries, a laboratory of whispers and groans and tears interspersed now and then with a smile or a kind word. An incomprehensible world of gestures and codes and nameless sorrow, all under the harsh rule of war, the feared and hated war, the spectre all endeavoured to ignore, in vain.
*
How the young black soldier managed to make landfall in the Richmond Royal Hospital was unclear. He had been brought over from Africa badly wounded, no-one expected him to pull through. But he recovered, little by little. She visited him every day, remaining at his bedside for an hour or so, giving him drink when he was thirsty or plumping his pillows. Small acts, to be sure. The boy responded almost exclusively with his eyes, he hardly spoke. Sometimes he said “Thank you” in an unfamiliar accent, dusky and warm. More often he dipped his head, or briefly lifted his hand.
Kate knew his name from the medical dossier: Matteous Tunga, soldier in an umpteenth infantry division, wounded en route to Abyssinia. Sucked into the morass of the war, fighting here, fighting there, winning, losing, marching on, nearly drowning, overtaken by storms, caught in a sniper’s sights.
Matteous occupied a cubicle on his own – by chance or by design? – and met Kate’s eyes the first time she put her head round the door. He lay very still, lifted a few fingers, said nothing, yet all of him cried out for answers. Kate stepped inside, patted the blanket and told him her name. She asked if there was anything she could do for him. No response. She saw the fever in his eyes and hesitated before sitting down on the chair beside his bed. The cramped space, designated for the seriously injured, was more of a storeroom for medical equipment with a bed and a chair squeezed in. Fortunately, there was a window overlooking a courtyard, or rather, there were treetops to be seen and beyond them the wall of another building. The hospital bore a close resemblance to its supply station: the military barracks. Efficient, austere, straightforward. Only the inner courtyard was spared the rigour, having been turned into an English garden with rose beds, apple trees, a long oval beech hedge, jasmine bushes, poppies.
Kate stayed no longer than five minutes the first time. During that short visit she offered him a glass of water and helped him as he drank, her hand cupping the nape of his neck, where the short, bushy hair began. She sensed the fever rising from him, and caught the unusual scent of his skin. She had never been so close to anyone so dark. A wounded man, a black boy thousands of miles from home, a frontline soldier in London, of all places – she would have thrown her arms about him had she dared.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. His eyes were closed, but he gave a slow nod of acknowledgement. As Kate was leaving she noticed the sun slanting across the bed. How black can a person be, she wondered.
She visited him day after day, week after week, for months on end. His small room became a second home to her, with each hour-long encounter an exercise in taciturnity, an exchange of silences. After a time she could feel that he looked forward to her visits, and that he relaxed the moment he saw her.
“Matteous,” she murmured, and at once he turned his head on the pillow to face her. A clear-eyed, gentle look, less fevered than before. He smiled, extended a hand, which Kate clasped, and they continued to hold hands for a while. He even chuckled a little, as though rediscovering the ability to laugh. She let go of his hand, for fear of embarrassing him. She was determined not to mother him too much, though all her old instincts were coming to the surface. Once a mother and that was it: you were lost for the rest of your life, or enslaved, or whatever you liked to call what motherhood did to women. Beneath the surface lies a reservoir of talent for loving, according to some doctor Kate had met. That’s as maybe, she thought, but having to carry a reservoir around sounded rather burdensome. Doubtless a man’s idea. A son’s. And a rather technical way of putting it, too. Talent, reservoir, an odd choice of words for something as elusive and inexplicable as love.
Kate usually said “Matteous” more than once – she so liked the sound of his name. His reaction was to bring his fist to his chest, on the side of his heart. A quick, fluid gesture, much as a Roman Catholic makes the sign of the cross.
Growing accustomed to his garbled English and French, she came to understand him better. The words began to flow, gradually becoming sentences. And so, after weeks of little more than gesticulations and looks, they were able to carry on a conversation. Matteous talked, and she listened to his gravelly, cautious voice seeking to temper the horrors he related. It was hard for him to get his account in the proper order. His battalion was from the Congo, conscripted by the Belgian governor of the colony. Matteous himself was Congolese, aged twenty-three or thereabouts. The village he grew up in was little more than a scattering of huts, the surrounding forest had been his teacher. They were supposed to drive the Italians out of Abyssinia, and set out from Léopoldville northwards to Sudan, and on from there. From the fragments of Matteous’s story Kate was able to piece together the route taken by his division, not that it really mattered in which direction they had been heading, and whether on foot or in vehicles. She did not need to know exactly where they did battle or where they encamped. She did not ask, and what he told her was sketchy. His journey from Africa to England came out as planes with mattresses on the ribbed steel deck, agonies of pain, bumping along on stretchers, manhandled into the backs of trucks, men in uniform abandoning him in the blistering sun to await onward transportation.
“They can bear that,” one of them had said. They, the others, the blacks, they didn’t mind a bit of sun. In his feverish brain the remark had taken root.
He had saved the life of a Belgian officer, and had suffered major injuries in the process. The officer insisted on his being taken to London come what may, to save his life in turn. He did not know the name of the officer or what had become of him, but in the meantime here he was, stuck in this hospital for an eternity, and he was desperate to get out, go back, where to he did not know. Kate listened to him and promised to return the following day.
For several days that followed Matteous rambled on, each time beginning his journey from Léopoldville afresh, along the endless River Congo and onward to Abyssinia to throw out the Italian, whoever that might be. The river was a thousand miles long, she discovered.
“Snipers, Miss Kate, snipers in the trees.” They had fired at the officer from an ambush; where this had taken place he could not recall. He had managed to drag the officer away in the nick of time, and in so doing ended up with a bullet in the back and another in his foot. The odd thing was that he had been able to carry on walking for a further hundred metres; he had felt the impact of the bullets, but no pain.
Matteous spoke in simple words, with long pauses. Sometimes he dozed off, and she would leave without rousing him. Rain against the window, stormy skies, sunshine, March, April, May, from winter to spring: the boy was on the mend, watched over by Kate. Miss Kate, who helped him move into the main ward once he had sufficiently recovered.
*
Leaning over her balcony, Kate reflected on Matteous. He would be discharged from the Richmond in two days’ time, but where was he to go?
Her mind returned to the single occasion he had told her of a different experience, more harrowing than that of war. How, a long time ago, his village was attacked, how his father was axed to death, and his mother dragged away. How he had fled into the forest. Matteous had wept soundlessly, clutching Kate’s arm with a shaking hand – not for long, just a few halting sentences. He had not spoken of it again.
London had been under bombardment for months, with German aircraft flying over the city centre at the most unexpected times. During the previous fortnight, however, all had been quiet. The air-raid sirens had fallen silent – almost eeril
y silent, for her mind was programmed to hear them. Barkston Gardens had been spared until now. Her neighbourhood apparently held little appeal: no factories, no government offices, no harbour, no prominent buildings. It was like living in a village. One or two pubs and restaurants, some shops, a school, small gardens, a chemist, a church. Children played in the street – how wonderful, playing in the eye of the storm, how superior of them! The only incursions on normality were the air-raid sirens. And the mandatory blackout.
Should she offer to put him up at her flat? Her heart said yes, but her head said no. Matteous would quite likely be returning to the Congo, although she could not imagine what sort of life awaited him there. The daily hour in his company, the wary rapprochement and the struggle to find words, the sounds of the ward and the intermittent voices and laughter from the courtyard, all these things gave her an unprecedented sense of kinship with a stranger. She could not speak to Oscar or Emma about this, nor did she wish to: they would not understand. Oscar and Emma lived in a different world.
She would find lodgings for him in the neighbourhood, not too close and not too far.
*
A black beacon in a surf of beds. She saw him at once when she entered the vast ward, which for the past weeks had served as his bivouac. It was indeed a bivouac, a foxhole into which he had dug himself. But today Matteous was up and dressed in an old, shabby uniform. Hardly anyone spoke, and he kept quiet himself. A few nurses were attending to him; their manner was brisk, though not without kindness. He stared at them as though they were apparitions drifting by. Clouds over a battlefield.
Kate stood in the doorway, waving to him. He took a step forward, stiffly like an old man. The men lying in the beds on either side nodded towards him as he came past, one raised a hand in greeting, all in silence. A salute to a soldier, a solo parade reviewed by a small army of patients brought in from all over, bandaged and splinted and patched up. Matteous, soldier, made his way across Africa and was never the same again. Now he made his way across the ward, to the door where Kate stood waiting. She took his luggage: a wicker basket. A basket with a lid. He turned around one last time with a shy, near-rueful glance, as though taking flight from an enemy that had already been defeated. He raised his hand to an imaginary cap, and went through the door which Kate held open for him.
On their way to the exit they paused in the courtyard overlooked by his cubicle, from where he used to hear the nurses’ voices. He smelled the jasmine Kate had told him about, the hedges and the flowers: fragrances of a foreign continent.
She led him gently past the garden, through the reception hall, to the street outside. They went to catch the bus Kate always took to the city centre. Matteous seemed half asleep, she thought, or rather, as if he were dreaming. His movements were unsure, everything about him seemed dumbfounded. She realised that London was unlike anything he had ever before seen. And that the ease with which she walked down the street with him was unsettling.
Kate had found him a bedsit on Earls Court Road, ten minutes away from her flat. She had not yet told Matteous about this, and was unsure about his reaction. She explained when they were sitting side by side in the bus. Did he understand, did he know what she meant? He stared motionless out of the window, incredulity in his eyes at the city he found himself in. He had spoken of Élisabethville a few times, but to her it had sounded more like a sprawling village.
She sensed his bewilderment, and repeated her news about the room she had rented for him. He replied with a quick fist to his heart, and gazed out of the window again. The route travelled by the bus was not exactly cheering. At the Richmond Royal Hospital all was clear-cut and regulated, but outside all was devastation. The whole bus route was a miracle, as Kate reminded herself daily. Despite the danger and disruption, London Transport kept daily life moving. Buses had to run, and they did. Stops might be bombed beyond recognition, depots shattered, roads impassable, but somewhere, in some magician’s den, new routes were contrived, new bus stops organised, broken vehicles replaced.
As they drew nearer to the city centre the traffic thickened, and Matteous stopped looking outside. He said something Kate did not understand. Perhaps he was not addressing her, for it was more of an invocation, or a short prayer in a language she did not recognise, the language of his parents. The other passengers stared at them, and especially at him. A bird of paradise from overseas, a soldier with a wicker suitcase, a displaced person. Kate helped him down from the bus; his wounded foot was not yet properly healed. Following him up the stairs to his room she could see how poorly it functioned, whereas out on the street he had been able to hide his limp. Well, at least they wouldn’t be wanting him back in the army for the foreseeable future, she told herself.
The room with a bed and a kitchen in the corner was not much bigger than his cubicle at the hospital. Matteous left his luggage on the bed and walked to the window. Kate followed him with her eyes, hearing the soft hiss of a gas geyser at her back. His shoulders, the window, the traffic, the worn carpet on the floor, the melancholy of it all. They had come a long way. She from a life among clever diplomats and well-educated folk, he from the raw Congo heartlands.
“Why?” he said.
Now it was Kate who failed to respond. It was a question she was unable to answer. Why had she taken the trouble all these months to visit him daily, to listen to him, collect him when he was discharged, find him lodgings? Of all the soldiers she had offered assistance to in the hospital, Matteous was the only one to have affected her so deeply. A dreamed-of son, someone who needed her, a lost child, a boy holding out his hand? There was no explanation, she reckoned, and anyway she did not need one. Looking past Matteous out of the window, Kate saw that it had begun to rain, and his question dissolved in the patter on the glass.
Chapter 3
Oscar wore a dark-grey coat, a dark-grey hat and dark-grey trousers, beneath which his tan shoes struck a jarring note.
He walked hurriedly under the arcades of the Gerechtigkeitsgasse. Seven p.m., the city was all but deserted. Sunshine had been predicted, but it was raining, and the tourists, such as there were, stayed away. Oscar heard the echo of his footsteps: a pleasing sound, breaking his own small sound barrier. Reflecting on this, he slowed his pace, his haste receding. The shop windows slid past him. He paid no heed, he saw nothing and no-one.
Oscar Verschuur, aged fifty-six, was on his way to the first secretary of the Swedish legation. It was the second day of June 1941, and it was raining in Berne, capital of sun and snow and flower-filled Alpine meadows. Welcome to the heart of Europe, welcome to an oasis of tranquillity and rectitude. Willkommen! The word was blazoned on placards and windows – God, how the sound of German had come to grate on his ears.
He knew who else would be present. David Kelly, the British resident minister. Pinto, the Portuguese military attaché. Horst Feller, a Swiss diplomat. Walter Irving, the American chargé d’affaires. Ismet Fahri, the Turkish envoy. And the American journalist Howard Smith, just arrived from Berlin. It was to be an informal dinner party, all protocol having been waived. Ambassadors mixing with lower-ranking diplomats was generally frowned on, and having a journalist present always carried an element of risk. And risk-taking was not normal ambassadorial practice, but in Berne, on that particular day in June, other considerations applied. Over the past weeks of gathering menace in a world already in the grip of fear, everything had come to be viewed in a new light.
Verschuur had recently learned the date. It was quite soon: June 22, just under three weeks from now. But he knew he had to keep the information to himself, there was no other option. He was a past master at keeping secrets, it had become second nature to him. He enjoyed it, it was food and drink to him. It was what he did for a living, his brief being to uncover what lay hidden, and to cover up such tracks as had been inadvertently exposed. He was a cover-up artist. A diplomat, on secondment to the Dutch legation, with a covert mission.
But this secret was different. In an unguarded moment
, he had been hurled out of his orbit by a message to which he could not shut his ears, even as his lips had to remain sealed. The ramifications were immeasurably vast and terrifying. Three more weeks to go, and it was impossible to breathe a word. Yet there was every reason to give out warnings, telephone government ministers, sound the alarm, raise a great hue and cry.
Oscar crossed to the other side of the Junkerngasse, then turned into the Kreuzgasse; he walked past the cathedral and down the Schifflaube, stopping at no. 52. The door was opened by a maid, who took his coat and hat. He was late, too late according to the rules of diplomacy, the higher ranks having already arrived. But there were to be no rules this evening, no-one was there in an official capacity, it had more the air of a conspiracy. Verschuur was acutely aware of the anomaly of the scene before him: a British ambassador and a Swiss diplomat having a chat at a side table over a carafe of white wine, a Turkish envoy resting his hand on the shoulder of an American, a Swede showing a German newspaper to a Portuguese. The diffusely lit reception room was the stage for a shadow play in which he, Verschuur, was the last actor to make his entrance. Unheard music passed through his mind, the voices, the gestures all around him, an entire alphabet of goings-on. He noted that they all raised their heads when he came in, saw a smile here, a wave of the hand there. Björn Henderson, the Swedish host, stepped forward to greet him: välkomna, welcome, willkommen. That German word again.