Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘Ingenuity?’ a more familiar voice growled. ‘I call it insubordination.’

  And suddenly Max felt his stool kicked out from under him and he fell painfully to the unyielding ground.

  ‘Jesus!’ Edgar spat in Volkov’s direction as he went to help up his friend.

  ‘Leave him on the ground or he’ll never walk again,’ Volkov bawled and the guard counting heads lost his place yet again.

  ‘The man has got some medical problems which makes him unable to stand for long periods.’

  ‘The man should have been standing like everybody else.’

  ‘Well, he could probably manage it if you lot could learn to count to a hundred in less than an hour.’

  ‘Edgar,’ Max warned, nursing his back, fearful for his pal’s safety if his vehemence continued.

  But Edgar’s patience was wearing as thin as his faith. ‘What is wrong with you? What is it that makes you think it is acceptable to treat people this way?’

  ‘I don’t treat people this way,’ Volkov sneered. ‘I treat Nazis this way. And it is small reparation for the way you have treated us. In your concentration camps. In the villages, raping and pillaging.’

  ‘I am not a…’

  ‘I have seen it with my own eyes,’ Volkov shouted Edgar down. ‘I have served on the Front too and I’ll never forget looking down from an embankment at a derailed train carriage full of dancing Germans, firing their pistols at the ceiling, bragging about their little victory and how they had ransacked the houses in the village just east of Minsk of food and booze. How they had shot any civilian who had got in their way. And then I saw one of those civilians among them. A Russian woman. They stripped her naked, rubbed boot polish over her breasts and made her dance for them. They poured booze into her throat until she gagged, but they didn’t stop until she was as drunk as they were so when they took her outside to rape her she could not have fought back even if she had dared to.’

  Max could not tell if the drops on Volkov’s chin came from his rancorous mouth or his mournful eyes.

  ‘Earlier that day before we’d fallen back, when we were making some progress along the embankment I caught sight of a figure crouched, wounded apparently, three metres in front of me in the middle of the pounded hollow of the road. I saw him start at the sight of me so I knew he was the enemy. Saw him stare with wide open eyes as I strode up to him holding out my revolver, pressing it to his forehead. His response was to snatch a photograph from his pocket and hold it up to me in his trembling hand. It was a picture of him surrounded by his wife and kids. Lots of kids I seem to remember. And I so I forced down my anger and walked on.’ Volkov drew on the chilly air as if it were the first cigarette he’d had in years, ‘He was there in the train carriage later that night. Dancing and celebrating with all the other rapists. I’ll never make the same mistake again.’

  He glared at Max on the ground at his feet as he might have glared at that soldier. For a moment Max thought Volkov was about to make good on his promise as his hand hovered near his holster. But with characteristic volatility he turned on his heels and marched across the parade ground as Max could imagine him striding across the black and torn up ground of the railway embankment.

  Netta would soon be three years old. She had been weaned and was surrounded by three doting relatives, so Erika had sent off her application to work with the National Health Service.

  It was rejected.

  ‘Why on earth would they reject you?’ Karl said with his usual paternal loyalty, arms crossed, leaning on the door frame to her attic room.

  ‘They said the area already has three medical practitioners covering a population of twenty thousand.’ Erika sat with Netta on her lap in the window seat below the Tiffany pane which cast a rainbow of colours for the child to play with.

  ‘So nearly seven thousand patients per medic is OK, is it?’ he ranted at the absent powers that be.

  ‘Apparently so,’ Erika said with a lot less fervour than her father-in-law, sedated as she always was by the light from the stained glass, and the connections it made in her head to Freiburg, the cathedral and her wedding day.

  ‘Well, we’ll see about that!’ And he stomped away down the stairs leaving Erika only mildly concerned about what he meant. She had a lot less energy than she did even when she was heavily pregnant and, although she imagined Karl would be right now marching into town to go and (almost) bang his fist on the desk of those Health Service cronies, just as he had to with the NSV ones back in Neurode all those years ago, she had no intention of chasing after him to calm him down. Besides, you never know, he might actually convince them to give her a job. He could be very persuasive, she smiled to herself.

  ‘Especially if you like cigarettes or chocolate,’ she giggled at Netta, the cushion of time allowing her to see that diabolical journey of theirs through rose-tinted glasses these days.

  She sat for a long while in the window as her child played at her feet. It was times like these that she missed Max more than ever. Times of rejection, of feeling inferior, when she needed to feel him wedge his slim body next to hers under the blanket, see the pages of a textbook confidently leafed through and hear him say, ‘I’m doing nothing for the next two days, except helping you to cram this Latin and that’s final, OK?’

  ‘Trapezius, trapezii,’ she murmured at Netta.

  ‘Bapeeziuh, bapeezii,’ Netta sang back.

  Erika laughed and felt her trapezii loosen.

  A couple of hours later, she carried Netta downstairs to find out what all the banging coming from the living room was about. She was shocked to see everything covered in dust sheets and the living room divided in two by the enormous piece of Gypsum Board Karl was hammering into place.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she called out over the noise.

  Martha appeared behind her and informed her, ‘Karl has decided that if the Health Service won’t give you a job then you should start your own practice right here.’

  ‘In the living room?’ Erika turned wide-eyed to her mother-in-law who instinctively took Netta from her tired arms. ‘I am so sorry, Martha, I never asked Karl to do this.’

  Her mother-in-law hushed Erika just as she did Netta when the child was colicky. ‘It’s OK, I know that. This is typical of him,’ she said and they both watched him as he took a break to rotate and flex his left wrist, aching from pressing on the gypsum, ‘and I think it’s a great idea’. Martha blinked at Erika in slow motion, like a contented cat, and all Erika’s anxiety was demolished and instantly reconstructed as excitement.

  Whilst Karl was busy putting the finishing touches to the partition, Erika hurried to a carpenter he recommended who could help her out with some specialised furniture for her new surgery. His workshop was nothing more than a shed behind a display room on the edge of a tiny village near Mengede, but the intoxicating smell of wood shavings and the sophistication of the items on display convinced her that Karl was right in sending her there.

  ‘A table, you say?’ said the carpenter brushing the woodchips from his dark hair and his shirt front when he finally stopped focusing on sanding his latest project and was immediately enthralled by the young woman before him with beautifully sculpted cheekbones and penetratingly polished eyes.

  ‘Yes, but not a table table.’

  ‘Not a table table?’ the carpenter repeated patronisingly, though he had hoped to sound more beguiled and amused.

  ‘No. Not a table for dining or coffee or, erm, writing.’

  ‘Like a desk?’

  ‘A desk?’

  ‘A table for writing. Otherwise known as a desk.’ His attempts to appear charmed and charming were failing miserably.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You don’t want a desk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. So what is it you need?’

  ‘A table to examine people on.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m a doctor you see.’

  ‘Ooohhh. An examination table!’ he exclai
med as if the carpentry skills needed to create an examination table were completely different from those needed to create a table to examine people on.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. Her irritation with him would have been greater if she wasn’t so uncomfortable with herself trying to describe her requirements, and her embarrassment might not have been so acute had she not found the carpenter rather attractive.

  ‘I think I could manage that for you,’ he said. ‘You’d need it to be so high,’ he suggested demonstrating the necessary height by flattening his palm in the air in front of her waist. ‘And as long as your tallest patient I suppose,’ he laughed.

  She managed to chuckle too before adding, ‘With an adjustable back and foot rest.’

  ‘OK. I’m sure we could manage that.’

  ‘Good. But it needs other things too.’

  ‘Other things?’

  ‘Other features.’

  ‘Features?’

  ‘Yes, specifically, erm, stirrups.’

  ‘Stirrups?’

  ‘Yes, two adjustable arms coming out of the end with stirrups for the feet.’

  ‘Like on a saddle?’ he asked genuinely unsure.

  ‘Yes, but these stirrups keep the patients… the female patients…’ she was hoping she didn’t have to go on; that he’d get it and save her the trouble. She could see the cogs turning behind his gradually widening eyes but as yet no light had turned on. ‘Their knees up and their legs spread so I can examine their—’

  ‘OH!’ he roared, ‘I see.’

  ‘A gynaecological examination table,’ Erika said.

  ‘A table for examining people with gynaecological, er, problems,’ he elucidated, since a table for examining people with gynaecological, er, problems clearly required a much more specialised set of carpentry skills than a mere gynaecological examination table.

  ‘Exactly,’ Erika confirmed.

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’

  They both stood there, slightly breathless and flushed for a moment – Erika was sure it must have been the dust from the wood shavings affecting her lungs – until he said:

  ‘Now, with regards to payment.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea how much it will cost me?’

  ‘Well, I do, but I was wondering if we could come to some arrangement whereby you paid me by some other means than money.’

  Erika’s heart changed gear. She couldn’t say that a lustful signal or two hadn’t flitted across some portion of her brain, as yet unnamed by psychologists, since she had laid eyes on this carpenter and the muscular forearms bulging from his shirt sleeves. Perhaps it was also memories of her parents sending her off to live with Frau von Geröllheimer in Berlin as a result of her affair with Richard, the son of a ‘mere’ carpenter in Kunzendorf, which set deliciously rebellious feelings stirring in her loins. But she had never for a moment considered acting on such thoughts or feelings, let alone whoring herself to pay for her surgery furniture.

  ‘Oh my God,’ the man said, devastated as the look on her face related her most recent thoughts to him. ‘I did not mean…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I would never dream of…’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course. What I meant was: could you supply me with alcohol instead of money?’

  ‘Alcohol?’

  Things were going from bad to worse! The man she was entrusting with the job of constructing her specialised furniture was a drunk. How could he guarantee the work would be done on time and to the necessary standards if he was out of his head on booze or hungover? And he was asking her to supply the liquor; be the agent of her own downfall!

  ‘Yes, you being a doctor and all I believe you can get your hands on pure ethanol from the chemist at a good price, can you not?’

  ‘Well, er, yes, I can, but—’

  ‘Oh that would be so good. It is so hard for me to get it and so expensive too these days and without it my brushes get ruined so quickly,’ he said gesturing to a large glass jar on his workbench crammed with paint brushes crying out for some ethanol to clean them of the paint and the varnish that clogged their bristles. ‘And I use it to get paint off the woodwork too. It really would be a godsend if you could get some for me.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Erika laughed a little too loudly to sound rational, but she didn’t care – her relief demanded it. ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement about that.’

  Max was doing his rounds. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was the middle of winter. But this winter was nothing like the last three he had spent in Gegesha. It should have been dark and it should have been cold, but the hospital was as bright as if were noon in June. No more trying to attend to wounds whilst squinting in the murky glimmer from candles improvised from empty rifle cartridges filled with industrial oil and a strand of cotton for a wick. No more skating about precariously on icy floors, no more hands and feet, backs and bones throbbing with longing for the sensation they used to call warmth. This was a gilded age, life was good. Electricity had finally reached this outpost of the Soviet Union.

  Max trailed an eight metre long cable behind him as went from bed to bed, which was attached to a Heizkissen, a heat pad strapped to his back, a present made for him by a grateful patient. The first time he tried it Max could barely concentrate on his work, his ecstasy was so great. And there was a general air of quiet bliss throughout the camp these days as so many men learned how to build Heizkissen or little radiators, or traded cigarettes or food for one from the technological types manufacturing them from the wires and asbestos the prisoners stashed under the hospital beds. The barracks steamed with the heat radiating from each man’s bed. The electricity cables strung from building to building glowed red in the eternal dusk from all that demand upon them. So it wasn’t long before the guards noticed and confiscated all the Heizkissen and Wärmestrahler. They shouted at the prisoners, smacked a few about as they reprimanded them for these misdemeanours, but they knew that as soon as they left them alone, those resourceful Germans would start making more – and that suited the guards just fine as they would have even more heaters to confiscate and sell at the market in town.

  With lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling of every building where once only bayonet-sized icicles did, the men were more inclined to outbreaks of festivity. By stashing away twenty grams of bread from your daily ration for a mere three weeks you’d have four hundred grams which when mixed with a gram of sugar and a load of berries from the barrel would cook up a treat over the fire into something akin, if you imagined hard enough, to Silesian Streuselkuchen.

  ‘Happy birthday to you!’ Max beamed at Horst presenting him with the cake which was the cue for all the occupants of the hospital, who were fit enough, to burst into song with him. Max watched his friend’s eyes sparkle, in the glow from the now redeployed rifle cartridge candles, with all the childlike coyness which that simple melody has the power to induce in someone of any age and any nationality, any race or political persuasion. And Max was sure in that moment he could see his own daughter’s eyes. The eyes that he hadn’t yet seen, bewitched by the candles. The little hands that he hadn’t yet held, palms pressed together in anticipation. The lips he hadn’t yet kissed bejewelled with crumbs and smacking with the sweetness of the cake Erika had baked for her. Behind the cake he saw a bouquet of flowers on the table picked by Erika and his aunt Bertel from the garden of that red-brick terraced house, which he hadn’t yet stepped foot in, but where they all thrived as a family without him. He saw his parents, Netta’s Oma and Opa, showering her with congratulations and gifts on her birthday. Each birthday. Each of her two birthdays he had missed.

  He’d kept a biscuit in his mattress after eating the rest Mrs Lagunov had given him in return for treating her for a bout of constipation.

  ‘Take them as a token of my appreciation,’ she’d said from the corner of her mouth without the c
igarette in it, one eye closed to the smoke curling out of her nose, waving with one hand to the table whilst in the other she held little Oleg to her sagging breast so he could feed.

  He’d kept the biscuit for weeks, until Netta’s birthday. Then he’d told himself he was tasting the birthday cake that Erika had made as he nibbled on the cookie. Told himself the tears he quietly cried were tears of joy at seeing his family again, not tears of anguish trickling down his cheeks into his mouth and tainting the sweetness therein.

  ‘Happy birthday, little darling,’ he mumbled.

  He was standing at the window, hands deep in his pockets, cable trailing out from under his coat like a monkey’s tail. He was looking out at the sea, as black as ever in the Arctic afternoon, but uncommonly still. In all the time he had worked in this odd hospital standing in the water, he had been able to hear the waves slapping and flopping around the stilts, hear them grinding at the shore, see their whitecaps catching the moonlight on the horizon, sense that static soundtrack to his work even when he was back in the barracks. But today the sea had been stretched smooth like a gigantic piece of black leather pulled tight over the earth. So solid did it look that Max thought he could jump down from the bridge and run out across the surface. Run for miles. Run away. But to where? If he kept running straight he would be at the North Pole in no time, he huffed, and shortly after that he would be in Canada perhaps. Canada! Such a quicker route via the North Pole than travelling across Europe and then all the way over the Atlantic. On his stretched leather sea he could be in Canada in a matter of imaginary moments. Free of the Russians and this bloody prison. And then what? He demanded internally. What happens then? Then you are further away from your family than ever. What use is that?

  The unusual stillness outside meant that even his billowing thoughts within could not deafen him to the sound of Horst’s tattered boots slapping the earth urgently even way over by the perimeter fence where he’d resumed his sprint after being counted through the gate. He smiled at the unmistakable sound of Horst’s loose sole flapping about as he ran. He smiled because he had another birthday gift for him.