Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was the shape of Napoleon’s hat.

  Tick tick tick tick.

  It ticked loudly, as if it was taunting her about how little time she had to rest before they had to be on the move again.

  Half past three.

  It ticked loudly like that irritating cheap watch Max had bought from the market in Freiburg when they were students. She hated that watch, but she would give anything to be irritated by it right now if it was strapped to the wrist of her husband.

  There was a knocking at the door. It was Karl. Erika hauled herself out of bed and shuffled across the room in the fading light to let him in.

  ‘How was the Mass?’

  ‘Really rather good,’ he said looking a lot less flustered than he had been this morning, but the tension soon began to crawl back over his brow as he tried to gather up all their things and get them to the station on time.

  ‘Just before you go…’ The nurse appeared at the open door like a fairy godmother. ‘I must check you over first. Make sure you’re OK to travel.’

  Erika glanced at Karl and saw him bite his lip and look at his watch and flap his arms with impatience.

  Tick tick tick tick, the hat shaped clock laughed.

  But Erika knew he was as concerned about her health as the nurse was, it was just that he had a different idea of how her health might be protected and that involved not missing any of these trains and getting her home to his wife as soon as possible.

  The nurse was satisfied and Karl thanked her as he tried to get himself and Erika’s luggage through the narrow door, like Laurel or Hardy in a Dick und Doof movie. Erika hugged the nurse to emphasise her gratitude and to stock up on embraces, as it were, for she feared without her mother and her beloved Max around she would be starved of physical affection for a while, at a time when she needed it most. Not that Karl and Martha were cold. Far from it, they were clearly doing everything they could to help their daughter-in-law, but they weren’t her parents and they weren’t Max.

  The station was swarming with people, so much so that Erika stopped in the street as they approached, doubtful that they could actually get through the entrance.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Karl said, ‘Are you feeling ill?’

  ‘No, but are you sure we’ll make it? I mean, look at all these people, Karl.’

  ‘Don’t worry, come on, we’ll make it. I guarantee it,’ he grinned as if he knew a secret passageway to the train. And in a way he did, but for now they had to push their way through the gasping, tutting, huffing hoards, the anxious, despondent, distracted droves. Women with lips pressed tightly together, men in uniform and blood soaked bandages. For a split second she thought one such man was Max. Her heart leapt. It wasn’t him. Her heart sank. She didn’t know what would be better: to see him now seriously wounded, or to know he was all right but not see him again for another six months. All the faces crowding her vision were as pale as the winter sky except for the red rings around their tired eyes. Yet they moved so fast. Survival now depended on haste. Get to the store too late and the goods would be sold out, get to the stop too late and the streetcar would be gone or the seat taken by someone else, get to work too late and risk having your wages slashed, get home as quick as possible before the air raid siren goes off. And besides all these things you had to keep moving, keep busy, because then there was no time for reflection or brooding – that would kill you faster than the lack of vitamins.

  ‘There’s so many refugees they’ve laid on an extra train,’ Karl said over his shoulder using Erika’s luggage as a battering ram against the crowds. ‘Mind would you, there’s a pregnant woman coming through!’ he shouted and bashed around with all the impunity a pregnant woman in tow affords you.

  Nevertheless, Erika still had to edge forward slowly with her arms around her swollen belly like a cage to protect it from the throng. She saw Karl had stopped, had put down all the luggage and was now talking to a train guard who looked to Erika remarkably like a rat in a uniform. The rat and her father-in-law huddled conspiratorially for a minute until Karl turned to Erika jubilantly saying, ‘I told you we’d make it!’ He winked and Erika watched amazed as the rat scurried back and forth to the train with her luggage, finding a special space for it in the goods wagon before ushering Karl and helping her to two seats which miraculously appeared in the front carriage of the train to Halbstadt. And not a moment too soon, as the rat bared his yellow teeth at them by way of a farewell and hopped back onto the platform before the train shuddered to life and groaned under the unprecedented weight of the passengers it carried out of Braunau.

  Erika looked at Karl for an explanation for this unparalleled level of customer service.

  ‘Cigarettes,’ he beamed. ‘I came armed with enough to grease more palms too should we need it along the way.’

  Erika smiled at Karl and gave his arm a grateful squeeze. She looked back at all the pale frustrated faces bustling about on the crowded platform as they pulled away. You had to keep moving, keep busy, because then there was no time for reflection or brooding – that would kill you faster than the lack of vitamins. She had made it onto the train, but that meant for the next God knows how many hours she had nothing else to do but reflect and brood. Brood about her husband, stew over where he was, what he was doing. She prayed he was safe. Funny, she thought, even before I converted, when I believed religion was nonsense, I would still pray to God when I wanted something badly enough, when I was scared enough. She prayed he wasn’t wounded, hoped he never had to go too near the fighting, that he was ensconced in some field hospital somewhere far back from the enemy lines. And then she found herself praying he wasn’t having too much of a good time either. She knew only too well how it was when men got together. And it was all men on the front. Apart from the whores. And the nurses, whom he would be working in very close contact with. And they’d probably all be swooning at his prowess on the operating table. He wouldn’t! She told herself. He wasn’t the type. Normally. But what was normal about the war? No! She let the jerking train shake this ridiculous paranoia from her head and, trance like, she watched the scene of their first meeting play out on the knees of the woman sitting opposite her.

  It was the 18th of April 1939 when she had registered at the medical faculty of the University of Freiburg. She had found herself a lovely spacious student pad with a conservatory, just like a winter garden, where she could grow things all year round whatever the weather outside. That was what told her it was the place for her. She was to share the house with a chemist and another medical student. On the first evening there, the medical student invited them all to go dancing at the Rheinterrassen. Socialising was never a problem for Erika and this evening would make meeting new people a breeze.

  Only one out of all the male students there didn’t ask her to dance that night, which made her curious about him. He was slim, blonde, wore round black-rimmed glasses, and had a high forehead, which she told herself promised great wisdom despite having no medical evidence to back it up, and a firm and chiselled chin which she would always find enticing. It was only later, when they had moved on to the Kakadu Bar, with its plush red décor and soft music that the curiosity finally got too much for her to resist. She got some information on him from her housemate, then went over and said, rather brashly, due to the volume of port sloshing around inside her:

  ‘Every other boy here has asked me to dance tonight. Every other boy has flirted with me, except you.’

  ‘Well,’ the boy, already painted red by the seedy lighting just got redder, ‘I’m not really one for dancing… nor for flirting.’ He jabbed his glasses further up his nose.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Not that you aren’t attractive,’ he stuttered. ‘I mean, I understand why all the men here would want to flirt with you, it’s just that I’m not that confident, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh really? Well, my friend Edith over there tells me you’re tipped to be top of the class in all subjects this yea
r so you can’t tell me you’re not confident.’

  ‘Ah,’ he raised a finger, almost confidently. ‘Confidence in medicine is not the same as confidence in situations like this.’

  ‘Like what? What is this?’

  ‘This. Parties, chatting. Women.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, there are hundreds of text books that tell you exactly what to do when it comes to medicine. All you have to do is memorise the facts.’

  ‘All you have to do!’ Erika mumbled to her glass as a vision of the impossible task of her studies ahead almost sobered her up. But before it could, she parried, ‘But there’s plenty of books that tell you what to do in these situations too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ she grinned.

  ‘Yeah, but look how that ends.’

  ‘Gone with the Wind.’

  He hadn’t read it, so couldn’t comment. He chose to nod politely instead.

  ‘Madame Bovary.’

  ‘That’s the one about the woman who reads too many books about love and ends up ruining her life, isn’t it?’

  She slapped him gently on his chest, ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and kept her hand there as she mischievously reeled off more of the world’s most famous love stories.

  He was captivated. Her dark eyes were so full of adventure, her high cheekbones bursting with mischief, and, with all he already knew about anatomy, it was the perfect example to him of why there had to be more to life than flesh, blood and bone. Why he believed in God.

  ‘I’m Erika, by the way.’

  ‘Max.’

  ‘I know.’

  They shook hands which seemed an absurd gesture since they had been almost nose to nose and cheek to cheek for the last few wonderful minutes.

  ‘So are we having that dance or what?’

  As he told her, he wasn’t confident on the dancefloor, but he started to enjoy it, knowing that many of the other blokes in the room were looking at him enviously. Then that made him feel vulnerable and he stepped on her toe.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she laughed.

  What if these other men came now and stole her away from him with their social confidence, their Rhett Butler boldness, their Mr Darcy dash? It’s not as if he was totally unaccustomed to parties, chatting, women, but with Erika the gears of his heart had shifted, the parameters of his world widened, the focus he had always had on his studies was now disturbed and suddenly everything got a lot more complicated. Deliciously complicated.

  The first thing Max saw next morning was his breath forming brief little clouds above his face.

  It must be even colder than yesterday, was his first thought.

  And we’re still here, was his second.

  He got out of bed still clothed in his uniform, encrusted in places with shit from the pit he’d dived into a couple of days before, but taking off anything was increasingly difficult in these temperatures.

  However, today, Jenny will wash my tunic and trousers for me. She’s good like that, he thought, emerging from the basement to see a sky so blue for a moment you could kid yourself that it was the middle of summer.

  He checked he had all the necessary items in his medical bag and set off without bothering to take some bread from the stores for his breakfast. The girls at the convent always seemed somehow to have more provisions than they did at the hospital and were always willing to share it with Max in return for his services.

  He walked down the street. Or rather he stepped his way carefully through the rubble which once was the houses standing on either side of the road. It made what would have been a five-minute walk into fifteen.

  The white marble edifice of the convent stood intact at the end of the street, apart from its windows now boarded up. Even the fragile looking crucifix on top of the façade was still there proud and erect. Max liked to think it was because it was a house of God that it had survived the blasts which had levelled much of the rest of Breslau.

  But then, was not the monastery a house of God too? And look at the state of that.

  He could almost hear Erika’s voice saying these words and it irked him. And it made him squirm that it irked him. After all, wouldn’t she have a point if she said that? Perhaps the convent was not immune from the Russian bombs because of its religious spirit, but because of the sense of sexual abandonment that now inhabited it. Perhaps he was wrong to encourage Erika to convert to Catholicism. Perhaps her irreligious scientific approach was the right approach. Wasn’t there actually something very scientific about prostitution anyway? About paying for an itch to be scratched when the itch arose and bypassing all the complicated and destructive emotions that go with love and marriage? The Nazis knew this was an important service to keep their soldier’s morale up. Perhaps that was why the convent was still standing. Because the Nazi’s devoted all their defences to protecting it? More than the airfield, the energy supplies, more than the transport network? Well, it seemed like that sometimes anyway. The Nazis housed the prostitutes in the convent to insult the nuns, that was all. If the convent and all the whores inside it had been blown to bits last night they would have drafted in more from Dresden and housed them somewhere else.

  ‘There is no need for religion in the new Germany,’ Erika had said to Max.

  Yet she had wanted nothing more than to be married to him. Marriage! A religious construct.

  He knocked on the door of the convent envious of the sky for having such clarity today.

  Bolts were yanked and the door scraped open enough so a face framed in a wimple could be seen.

  ‘Dr Portner,’ Sister Hilda smiled politely. She was younger than most of the nuns and so could still muster a smile for him, unjaded by life, young enough not to remember the Great War before this one.

  ‘Is that our Puff Direktor?’ Another very young woman elbowed Sister Hilda aside. This one was not clad in nun’s costume, in fact she was clad in surprisingly little for the time of year. But she smiled and she laughed and she welcomed him in a way which grabbed Max’s attention away from her covered counterpart Hilda, who now looked ill at the way this girl had just described him as the boss of their brothel. This girl’s name was Trudi.

  Max couldn’t resist seeing the girls in the convent as bizarre pairs. Trudi and Hilda were the very young pair, both novices if you like. Jenny and Sister Agnes were a pair – slightly more mature, both very industrious, but industrious about very different things. And Beatrix, the actual boss of the girls, as far as Max could work out, was the obvious complement to the stern faced Mother Superior, Sarah.

  Mother Sarah would not show herself on a day like today. A day when all thirty of the girls would be examined and tested by Dr Portner. There was a festive atmosphere among the girls whenever he called, as if he was Santa Claus delivering presents. All the girls scampered around and shoved each other eager to get their gift first: the all clear from the doctor.

  ‘Girls, girls!’ bellowed Beatrix, sitting on a wooden chair in the hallway, the only lady not scampering about, although trying to lounge as she did on such a utilitarian object was one of the greatest challenges of her day. ‘Let the poor man breathe and bring him something to eat first.’

  Just as Max had predicted, the hospitality of the girls knew no bounds. Breakfast would be served.

  ‘He’ll need something to line his stomach,’ cackled Beatrix, ‘before delving about in all your nether regions’.

  Suddenly Max wasn’t so hungry any more. But Jenny was there with bread and a sweet preserve probably borrowed from the nuns’ stores. And since Jenny was serving the breakfast, she got to be examined first, which she was only too aware of.

  *

  ‘How do I look?’ Jenny asked.

  Max knew she meant was she clear of infection. But he also knew she used an inappropriately seductive tone to suggest something else since he was looking directly at her genital
s at the time. He maintained utter professionalism throughout the examination. It wasn’t hard for him. Looking at the human anatomy in a disinterested and scientific manner was what he was trained to do.

  ‘There seems to be no sign of infection. You can…’

  Get dressed. Cover up. Whatever he wanted to say he just couldn’t manage it for some reason, as if he would sound like some disrespectful client of hers at the end of sex if he did, so he just waved a hand towards her hitched up dress. Which made him feel even worse.

  The only time Max failed to look at Jenny professionally was when he spoke to her face after these examinations. When she asked him how he was doing, how he was coping, as if he was the patient now, or even as if he was just a friend of hers. And then he would have to ask her something which made him feel even more vulnerable in her presence.

  ‘I was wondering Jenny, after I’ve done here if you, er, wouldn’t mind…’

  A smile began to smoulder on Jenny’s face.

  Why was he stuttering so much?

  ‘I mean, if it’s not too much trouble. If you’re free I mean, er…’

  Jenny knew what he wanted to ask, but had to enjoy the sweet sight of his shyness a little more before letting him off the hook.

  ‘Not free to, er, you know, I mean, if you have the time just t-t-to…’

  ‘To wash your clothes?’ she put him out of his misery at last.

  ‘To wash my clothes. Exactly. If it’s not too much trouble.’ He visibly relaxed.

  And Jenny saw it. So she felt the overwhelming need to see him stiffen again, so to speak, and she reached out to caress his collar as if she needed to assess just how much washing was necessary to get this uniform spotless again.

  ‘I better get at least a few of the other girls checked out first,’ he quickly added, in case she was about to start stripping him right then and there. Not that she ever had, or ever would. She would always make sure he had some privacy in the cell they used to examine the girls, usually before he had given the first one the all clear or given her the necessary treatment for gonorrhoea, so there was plenty of time to start drying his clothes, bringing him the spare uniform a client once left behind, so she said.