Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  He slept a little more and when he opened his eyes the next time he saw Jenny again. He tried to blink the apparition away but it remained, it reached out, it squeezed his arm gently. He felt it. She was real. She was there.

  ‘I thought I was dreaming,’ he said clearing his throat.

  ‘Well,’ she gave a sweet snort, ‘I know I’m what most men dream of, but no, this time I’m really here.’

  ‘Do you?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know that? That men look at you and dream that they were with you?’ She cocked her head so he clarified, ‘I mean, do you know how desirable you are?’

  There was something about lying in bed in her presence, despite his injuries, that made him feel strong and confident to ask such things, as if they had actually just made love and were lying there together alone, not in a hospital surrounded by patients with a grinning Edgar watching from the desk.

  She blushed, ‘Well, I don’t think I’m desirable.’

  ‘Of course you do, otherwise you’d never have believed you could make a living out of it.’

  She looked a little deflated, miffed even, that he had referred to her profession. And she was. Miffed that he had brought it up before she’d had a chance to say, ‘And what if I stopped making a living out of it?’

  ‘Are you?’ he said beginning to sit himself up, but thinking better of it when he felt the blood start thumping through his sore head. ‘Stopping?’

  ‘I thought I might. Since the right man came along.’

  Max felt suddenly nauseous, but he couldn’t tell if it was his concussion or the thought of Jenny falling in love with someone. And when he dived a little deeper into that sea-sadness he could just make out that it was the thought of Jenny falling in love with someone other than himself that made him really sick.

  So he had to ask, ‘Have you found the right man then?’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d bloody well lost him for a moment there,’ she chuckled, mopping his brow with a handkerchief and staring directly into his eyes in case he missed her meaning.

  When he had so proudly talked about his daughter to her and the girls in the apartment, she knew, as far as her own rules went on the subject, that he was now out of bounds to her. However, when news of Max’s brush with death reached her, her own response – the way she grabbed her fox fur coat and found herself persuading one of the officers to drive her into the camp within minutes of hearing about it, fluttering her lashes and flashing smiles at the Soviet despite being out of her mind with worry – told her that her own rules were a load of rubbish, and that rules meant nothing when it came to matters of the heart. The fact that Lagunov was in the room when this violence was meted out on Max, made her resentment for her profession even greater as she tried to scratch images from her head of the Lieutenant straining and grunting over her whilst his wife was languishing in the shitty apartment next door breastfeeding little Oleg.

  Her words and her touch were better than any medicine Edgar could have prescribed Max, even if he had all the resources of his once prosperous homeland at his disposal. As she leaned over Max and kissed him full on the lips, Edgar would not allow himself to see it as an adulterous act to Erika. He envied the fiery rush of emotion his friend must be feeling and wished him well. Who knew if they would ever get out of here! And anyway, since in this place or at home Edgar was doomed to a string of furtive fumbles down alleyways and could never sit in the Platz and kiss his partner in the full blaze of the summer sun, he enjoyed an even greater kinship with his friend now than ever before.

  Tears rolled down Max’s face as he luxuriated in the sensation of her lips fusing with his. Jenny saw them and wiped them away with a questioning smile, but no words. He reached up to her face to initiate another kiss and she obliged. Again the tears came. The tears of a lottery winner, of an Olympic gold medallist, of a freed man, or simply of a man who hasn’t felt the lips of a woman on his for years and years; and of a man who knows from bitter experience that this rapturous beginning may one day require an agonising severance, a heart-breaking ending.

  It was too much having this girl squealing in the kitchen when there were patients sitting in the hallway waiting to be seen. Karl was at work, Martha was out and Erika could hardly keep leaving the patient she had, to tell her daughter off – how unprofessional would that look! So as soon as the asthmatic woman had left her surgery she marched out to the back of the house grabbing Netta by the scruff of her neck as she went through the kitchen and shoved her into the cellar where Bertel kept the chickens.

  ‘No, Mama, no!’ Netta wailed as the door was closed on her and she found herself in a dark cramped hovel that stank of chicken shit. ‘How long? How long do I have to stay in here? How long? How long?’

  ‘Until you can learn to be quiet,’ her mother said in that nonsensical ways adults do when they don’t know the answer to a question.

  Erika tried to compose herself as she entered the house and approached the next unimpressed patient sitting in the corridor, desperately blinking images from her eyes of her four-year-old self with a bleeding foot being locked in her bedroom at the villa where she was imprisoned like Ash Fool until the Hitler Youth broke her out nine years later.

  She wasn’t just furious with Netta. She wasn’t really furious with Netta at all. She was seething because Babyface had exposed her like a common criminal last night. She was angry at him for not understanding, not seeing the whole picture. His face had never looked so wrinkled as her explanations did nothing to assuage his suspicions. She told him she had no idea what the bald man would actually do with the cyanide; told him to remember how strapped they all were for cash at the time. She even told him she asked purposefully for such a small amount that nobody could do any real harm with it, but, in truth, she didn’t know enough about its properties to have a clue just what could be done with it. She could tell Babyface even doubted the existence of the mysterious bald man, since none of the boys had seen him that day in the Platz. But it was just that they hadn’t noticed him as they were too busy criticising the Gauleiter and hurrying to the warmth of the café.

  ‘Just because you didn’t see him, it doesn’t mean he never existed. You should understand that concept better than me!’ she had quietly ranted at Babyface. But it was Max she really wished she’d said that too. Babyface was never a devout Catholic, and so she was even angrier now at him for not being devout; and at Max for not being around to hear her argument about believing the unseen; and at herself for being neither devout nor sure of her National Socialist principles anymore. This grey middle ground she paced about in these days was utterly infuriating to her. And what was more annoying, she could only compare it to some kind of Catholic purgatory. Perhaps the purgatory in Dante, she winced, that intimidating, sheer-sided grey, grey mountain. And then she found herself on the edge of a mountain and the mountain was Walmendinger Horn, up in the Allgäu Alps. Hans, the tall blonde Swiss boy, was there, holding her red booklet with one ungloved hand and telling her to be careful. Telling her:

  ‘I like you, Erika. I like you because you are clever and strong. Just take care of yourself and look around you at all the other sides of the story before you make up your mind.’

  What a patronising fool, he was! Of course she would look at all sides before she made up her mind. She saw the eagle riding the thermals far below their feet, its wings spread out like the eagle which sat atop a swastika on the book she snatched back from Hans. She saw herself clambering to her feet. Heard her thirty-year-old self bellowing through the wind at the back of the boy’s head:

  ‘It’s listening to all sides of the story that has got me in this mess, you idiot. If I had just stuck to my guns things would be as clear as the sky and as pure as the air up here. But now it’s all grey. Grey grey grey. And it’s all your fault!’

  She saw her boot on his back. Felt his moment of futile resistance. And then she turned away quickly, hoisted herself back onto the plateau, telling her
self that it didn’t really happen. She didn’t see it for sure. So it couldn’t have happened. Not in that way anyway. The last time she saw Hans he was fine. He probably held on just fine, despite the shove she gave him with her foot. Only later, when she was long gone, did he lose his balance, as he tried to get up off the ridge, and fall. Yes, that was how it must have happened.

  ‘But you just said yourself, just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,’ Babyface’s disembodied voice was whistling in the Alpine winds blasting through her skull. ‘And you can’t deny you saw your boot on his back. You saw that, didn’t you? You felt yourself push him, didn’t you?’

  Her next patient was telling her all about her various ailments, but Erika didn’t hear a word. She was too busy raging inwardly at Max, wishing he had done something terrible too so she didn’t feel so bloody toxic next to him all the time.

  In the gelid jaws of January the cables hung from hut to hut glowing brighter than ever against the black sky, as if it was intentional, like neon in the cities, and not the result of poor rigging and excessive current. Such shoddy and overused infrastructure often had dire repercussions and Max and Edgar had had their fair share of patients with burns and electric shocks. So as they trudged into the camp for dinner and saw the cable above the mess hut in the distance snap with a firework flourish and lash itself to the man smoking below they were not surprised, but ran to administer to what appeared to be the worst case of its kind yet, whilst Bubi ran to the office to tell them to cut the power.

  By the time the doctors reached the man the electricity was off and the men in the mess hut had crowded outside to see what those lightning flashes and the sound like a massive and tightly tuned drum being beaten two or three times were all about.

  The patient was black, his clothes and his skin, much of which had fused into one grotesquely new substance which covered his bones. It made him hard to recognise and until one of the guards shouted, ‘It’s Volkov,’ even Edgar and Max, who were face to face with him assessing his airway, had no idea who it was.

  Bubi arrived with some burning tapers for light in which Max saw Edgar sit back on his haunches, clench his teeth and take his eyes from the patient.

  ‘What are you doing, Ed? The patient has burns inside and out, his airway is closing up as the swelling begins.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Edgar shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him now.’

  Max looked around him at the crowd comprised of prisoners and guards, and told Bubi to move them back to give them space to work. Then, when he felt he could hiss at his colleague without being overheard, he continued:

  ‘You mean you’re refusing to treat him?’

  ‘Of course I’m refusing to waste my time on a dead man, especially when it’s him. And you should be too. Have you forgotten what he did to you? What he did to Horst? What he’s done to so many men in here since the day we arrived?’

  ‘Bubi, get me a pen. Not a pencil, it has to be a pen, and a knife from the kitchen. Quickly! His heart is still pumping, he just needs some air,’ Max said blowing into Volkov’s lipless mouth.

  ‘He’s the enemy, buddy, why help the enemy?’

  ‘Because I help people. That’s what we do, as doctors, right? And, if you didn’t know, the war was over four years ago.’

  ‘Really? I hadn’t noticed,’ Edgar said looking down his nose at the smouldering sergeant gently fizzing in the snow beneath him.

  Bubi arrived with a pen and a knife as ordered.

  ‘Hold the light near his face, Bubi, so I can see into his mouth.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Max,’ Edgar scoffed.

  ‘His upper airway is swollen shut. A tracheotomy is indicated.’

  Max took the knife, which had been used to slice potatoes not many minutes before, and made a vertical incision below Volkov’s well-defined Adam’s apple. Then he fumbled with the pen, discarding the lid and the cartridge inside leaving him with a metal tube which he forced into the Russian’s windpipe. Immediately his chest expanded as Volkov took a breath of Arctic air through the tube. His incised windpipe bubbled as he tried to moan from the unimaginable pain his incinerated body was enduring. His eyes grew wide in the light from the tapers Bubi held as his body sucked gratefully at the air but his mind realised that the maintenance of consciousness the air brought only meant the perpetuation of the pain his nervous system registered. Max sat back to reassess the situation and Bubi leaned in and whispered to Volkov:

  ‘Serves you right.’

  Max heard Bubi and grief crawled over his skin like maggots over the floor of the hospital. If only I hadn’t lost control in front of him when Horst died, Max sighed inwardly, mourning the boy’s early discovery of the human capacity for vindictiveness.

  ‘So now what, boss?’ Edgar sneered. ‘That was a nifty little trick with the pen, but with burns this severe the rest of his airway will close up eventually and we have no resources to deal with a patient like this.’

  ‘Get a stretcher, Bubi,’ Max asked gently and then answered Edgar, ‘We make him as comfortable as possible until the end.’

  ‘With what? We have no morphine. We’ve hardly got any aspirin left, not that aspirin would touch him in this state.’

  Volkov’s still blue eyes moved around in his blackened skull indicating how he was taking in everything said over him and how he wanted so desperately to beg for help, to plead with these resourceful Germans to come up with a solution, like they had for every other predicament in this hellhole, to save him or put him out of his misery.

  ‘Carry him to the hospital,’ Max ordered as he helped Bubi lift him onto the stretcher.

  ‘He doesn’t want to go to the hospital,’ Edgar said with thinly disguised mockery. ‘He’s afraid of catching something in there, remember?’

  Max surprised himself by hesitating even though he knew Edgar’s protestation was absurd now.

  ‘Then take him to the office,’ another officer said slipping through the crowd; the crowd that was already thinning – well, some of them had left their food on the table and it needed to be eaten before it got cold or before someone else took advantage of the distraction and stole it.

  Bubi and a strong-stomached guard carried the stretcher to the office. Max followed. Edgar remained by the mess hall – it was dinner time after all – and called after Max:

  ‘You were right, Max, sorry. This is a much slower more painful death for him. I see there was method in your madness after all. I like it.’

  Volkov more than anyone else in Gegesha had made it clear to Max how he resented him for the ‘perks’ he was afforded for being a doctor – if you could call a coat made from man-eating vermin, a twelve kilometre round trip on foot in shabby boots, near alcoholic poisoning from an excessively grateful Colonel and delving your hands into unsanitary and festering parts of humans perks. But Max never persevered in his vocation here because of the perks. Or even because of fear of punishment if he lost a Soviet patient. It never occurred to him all the time he went into town that he should be anxious about that; that he would be punished for it if he did lose one. He simply hoped for the best for everyone not to save his own skin, but because that’s what he hoped for all his patients – as all doctors should. And he was as proud of this as he was of his Iron Cross.

  When the officers had left the room repulsed by the sight of their charred colleague and the guard who had carried the stretcher had hurried outside to throw up, not so strong-stomached after all, Bubi and Max were alone with Volkov. That was when Max put his finger over the end of the pen protruding from Volkov’s throat and told himself, as he locked eyes with his Polish comrade, that he was shortening the patient’s inevitable suffering and that he took no satisfaction whatsoever from being the one with his finger over the hole.

  She had hoped her letter to Babyface would bring him to see her, just as it did. Somewhere in the maelstrom of emotions she now constituted she wanted him to stop her seeing Rodrick, but when he
spoke to her so condescendingly, with such surprising censure, she felt like a child, locked behind the villa gates, or admonished by a handsome Swiss boy, and it made her seethe. It made her want to kick against the gates Babyface was once again closing on her. It made her want to slap the disapproval from the faces of parents; however, whereas once it was her own, now it was Max’s. And the only way to kick against all this disapproval was, of course, to do the very thing that they all disapproved of.

  But, perhaps equally as predictable, was the lack of pleasure she found in Rodrick’s bed this time. As the beast of a man mauled her breasts and poked at her genitals his weight on her was oppressive, his words afterwards nothing but dumb mooing to her now. And that was exactly how she wanted it to be. Then, instead of being told what not to do all the time by everyone, she, for once, would enjoy some control and tell another adult what they couldn’t do.

  ‘I don’t want to see you anymore, Rodrick,’ she said coldly, standing next to the bed where he lay as she dressed.

  He was speechless.

  ‘We had some fun. It was… nice. But I’m too… busy with the surgery and everything.’

  She almost lost some of her poise as his silence sucked these pathetic excuses from her, which only made him more repulsive to her.

  ‘But what about all we talked about?’ he managed as she grabbed her coat. ‘About us getting married, about you living here?’

  ‘Here? Really?’ she said with all the contempt she could muster, as if he’d just asked her to move into a cow shed. ‘Besides, I’m already married, Rodrick.’

  She hurried out before he could say it, but his cry of, ‘Erika!’ reached her on the stairs just as Hans’ voice had when she had kicked him as mercilessly from the outcrop, and she clamped a hand over her mouth so her sobs could not be heard as she fled into the street.