Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  The boys usually disappeared together on a Saturday morning before anyone could protest, tearing down the lane and climbing over the railings at St John’s to play football with the other boys. The West End held different delights for me. For a curious child who wanted to know everything of the world, it was all there the moment I stepped off the dented stair from the shop to the pavement of Tottenham Court Road.

  This Saturday Mother, generally quiet and slightly elusive, was in a vile mood because Benjamin, the little one, clumsy and in thrall to Geoffrey’s wicked suggestions, had covered his weekend clothes in mud by jumping in puddles in the ditch. The clothes reeked because there was horse manure in the mud and Mother was at the wash tub in the courtyard muttering in Welsh. Benjamin sat at the kitchen table in his long johns, a look of black thunder on his face. His tin soldiers were scattered across table and floor, a small chubby hand having laid great swathes of the troops to waste. Geoffrey had long since given up on the game and gone out with a friend who’d thrown stones at the window from down on the pavement to catch his attention. This was how boys communicated, I knew; by primitive means.

  I put on my hat and stepped out from behind the curtain enclosing my bed, ready to go and find adventure on the windy streets. ‘You will do everything he says, won’t you, Benjamin?’ Benjamin, four then, glowered back at me from beneath his dark curls. His clothes would not be dry until tea, by which time it would be too late for anything, and a whole Saturday would be wasted.

  ‘I hate you,’ he said quietly. ‘And I hate Mother.’ We were always saying such things. What casual horrors children can be.

  ‘Save it for Geoffrey,’ I replied, adjusting my boater over my long dark plaits. ‘He’s the one who gets you into trouble.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Can’t I come out with you, please?’

  ‘But you don’t have anything to wear.’

  ‘My school clothes.’

  ‘Mother will want to wash those too.’

  ‘She hasn’t taken them down yet.’

  ‘We should have to get past Father.’

  ‘He won’t care.’

  ‘Oh, come on then. But don’t annoy me. No being a baby.’

  ‘Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, thank you.’ He sprang down from his chair and began to dress. ‘I’ll show you where Geoffrey keeps his sweeties.’

  I laughed, eight and merciless. ‘You think I don’t know where he keeps his sweets? And I know where you keep yours too—so watch out!’

  We walked along Tottenham Court Road towards Great Russell Street for the British Museum, the street noisy with horses and motorcars and fruiterers and paperboys shouting. London smelled of animals and coal smoke and roasting chestnuts, not the food of migrants as it does now. Benjamin insisted on holding my hand. I hoped not to see Boris, or anyone else from school. I had planned to look around Shoolbred’s and Pritchard’s but Benjamin would just whine and all the glamour of the mannequins with their slender waists and meshed hats would evaporate. And the museum was always worth the walk.

  Benjamin had to look at the mummies before he could be persuaded to visit any other rooms. There was no point in arguing with him. The dimple in his chin deepened when I hesitated: a warning. He was not too old for public tantrums, and it was best not to draw attention, lest some well-meaning adult sent us home to Mother. It was not that I minded, really. You never grew out of the mummies, though I was not quite so enthralled as Benjamin, his face against the glass before a mummy of a cat, mouth slack. I waited as long as I could. ‘Come on, Benjamin,’ I said eventually. ‘My turn.’

  I walked quickly across the wooden floors, listening to the heels of my new shoes clop beautifully with each smart step. The trick at the British Museum was not to look at the same things every time, much as you loved them. I was filled with an idea of adventure, of newness, that kept my feet moving. I could not stop for the gems or the crockery. Deliberately I passed through doors I had not noticed before. Past a hundred glass cases of statues and swords, I was drawn on, another door, another empty corridor beyond the Saturday crowds, through the great halls. I glimpsed rooms of wrapped treasures, cardboard boxes. They were packing things up to store, with the air raids, and so I was engaged in a sort of race to see things before they were gone. I entered a dark room and knew that this was where I had been headed. I turned to hurry Benjamin along. Behind me was an empty corridor. Benjamin, I thought. Why must you . . . But no matter, I would retrace my steps in a moment. He would not be far behind.

  The cases were lit and under the glass were scrolls of parchment and huge books with leather or wooden covers open at some carefully selected page. A few solitary men, mostly very old, stood entranced in the light at certain cabinets, like figures on a stage at the beginning of a scene, emerging from the dark. I found the way actors did that eerie; I could never quite get over the fact that they had been there in the blackness without my knowing.

  I placed a finger on the glass in front of me and stood on tiptoe. There was a huge book before me, handwritten with ink in Latin. I imagined the hand writing on these stiff yellow pages. The inkwell. The candle for illumination. I was enclosed in the pool of light around the box and its miraculous contents as though I had left London and this modern age. The glass was cold against my nose and eyelids. I followed the words, mouthing them quietly, thrilled to be speaking Latin, even if I did not understand it. I had the feeling that I could reach through the glass and touch the page, know it by touching. And if I could touch the paper, just once, it might give me something, transmit some magic.

  I saw myself doing it, my finger running over the writing. My mind ran ahead and I could feel it, the ink on the page. I saw in an instant that all the people who created these objects were joined together by a gossamer strand. They were part of a special group, like monks or soldiers. Standing here in this light I believed myself one of them, touched by the glitter of whatever had touched them as they sat at their desks with their ink and their parchment and their dim light. Knowledge seemed suddenly like a cloud of golden dust and something had brought me to this room and drawn me inside it.

  A hand fell heavily on my shoulder and I let out a little cry.

  ‘It’s all right, my dear. We’ve got something for you.’ I turned to see a guard in his smart uniform, a little round man only as tall as Father. My heart surged for a moment. I believed I might be given some special souvenir, that my connection to these objects was so clear and radiant that I was to be awarded some prize of my own. But then Benjamin stepped from behind the guard, the fat, grubby icon of my responsibilities. ‘Thank you,’ I sighed. ‘I was just coming back to fetch him. Come on, Benjamin.’ I took his plump little hand. ‘If we go now we can catch the Variety at the Oxford.’

  ‘All right. But will Mother be angry, do you think? And will it be me she’s angry with, or you?’

  ‘You. I shall go out again if she carries on. But she’ll be angry whether we go home now or at suppertime. Come on, there’s a new show playing. Boris tells me it’s terrific. There’s a funny song they teach the audience. And minstrels!’

  On Tottenham Court Road we crossed the street well before Father’s shop and I made sure we remained concealed amid the Saturday shopping crowd, away from the kerb. The long coats and shopping bags formed a shifting but solid wall around us. I felt luxurious in a Saturday crowd, as though I was on a picnic rug on grass with cushions looking up at the trees. On the busy street, surrounded by adults with their purpose and their mysteries, I was warm and safe and tingling with promise. The company of children did not put me at ease as a rule, except for Boris and my brothers. Children were and probably still are brutish and fickle, bored by intellectual conversation. Among the grown-ups I hid if it suited me, to listen and learn the secrets of being older, or if I was among Father’s friends when they drank beer in the shop after closing I would recite poetry or Shakespeare and bask, careful not to smile, in their appreciation. ‘She has the ear!’ Father would exclaim, c
lapping his hands. ‘She shall be authoress! If I had these children’s education. You think I would sell tobacco to make my crust? My Hannah, you will make your papa proud.’ And the men stood close and raised their glasses in foreign toasts, exhaled thick pungent clouds of cigar smoke. I wanted to be instantly grown, completed, to prove Papa correct. Oh, I was in a tearing hurry to be the marvellous, accomplished person of my imaginings.

  We drew level with Father’s shop. I saw in a momentary gap in the crowd Mr Poppy, the barber whose shop backed onto ours, emerging from the side door, his huge belly covered by a white apron, chatting to a newly shorn customer who was rubbing the back of his neck. Benjamin was slowing, tugging at my hand. ‘Can we go home and get some food? I’m hungry.’

  ‘No! We’ll never get out again and we’ll catch it from Mother without having even seen the show. If you go back in I’m not waiting for you.’

  ‘But, Hannah . . .’

  We could not afford a scene here, so close to home. ‘Listen, I’ve got a shilling. We can buy a bag of cakes from Mintz’s and sneak in the back of the Oxford without paying.’

  ‘Lor, Hannah. I do like cake.’

  ‘It’s common to say lor.’

  ‘Father says not to say things are common. It’s snobbish.’

  ‘Don’t say lor and I shan’t have to.’

  I tugged Benjamin along into the dense tide, past the swirling of bodies around the entrance to the tube, like water down the plughole of the basin, and on towards Oxford Street. He put his foot out off the kerb into the path of a motorcar—I felt the straightening of his arm as he stepped out, and I pulled him back sharply. The car roared past a yard in front of us. Inside the adults sat sombrely, obscured by the reflections of the building and my own face in the glass. I saw that I was frowning, as they were, mirroring the mild scowl of adulthood.

  Emil

  GALLIPOLI PENINSULA, MAY 1915

  It was hard to imagine his body back to the beginning now, from here in the dugout, though he had been that person, new and ready, a month before. In front of him, Thomas lay on his low bunk across the trench, shaking and pale, his attention inward. They lay close, side by side. If Emil put his hand out, he could reach him. He did not know whether he was sick or just frightened but, nevertheless, they had orders to go over tonight. He closed his eyes and tried to remember. He did not know why he did this, except perhaps that it was a version of himself he wanted to return to. It was still perhaps close enough.

  Between the flat metal of the Aegean and the dawn sky there had been no line. The ships were suspended for a few moments in a grey globe and then it was light enough to see that they sat on a flat surface, that smaller destroyers were in front of them, coming forward towards the cove. All night he and Thomas had lain on the ridge in the dark until a rocket lit the sky and the guns had started. The noise was greater than factories and mills. They had not slept, waiting, and the long fat launches dropping from the destroyers across the grey water were not quite real. But he watched the water and the men, shells cracking out over the boats, stirring up the water in little cyclones. Between shells he heard the knock-knock of the Turks’ rifles in the gullies below like bullets in a cigar box. The boats were close enough to see the matchstick oars and the little men jumping out of them into the water.

  He looked for individual men, began to fire his Mauser, and the things in the water began to fall, whether from his gun or others he could not be certain. There were so many that he fancied he saw the survivors wading through pink blooms of corpses, gathering and bumping in the waves. Something opened out in him, emptied him of the usual feelings: tiredness, pity. Over the next hour, his body loading and firing the gun as though it were part of the untiring mechanism, of the rifle itself, enough came through to fill the beach and he watched them disappear into the gullies, wondered when they would reach the top, if they had killed enough to prevent them from taking the ridge.

  As he loaded he took a moment to look at Thomas. It was hard to believe that they were here. Emil was awake in every cell, his lungs full of gunpowder, the sun growing warm on his neck. There had been fear but now he found he could do it. He was a soldier. He could go on and on, if asked. He would shoot them even as they drew closer and he could see their faces. Whatever he was ordered to do he would do. His body was ready, sprung.

  By nightfall it was hard to know just where the British were, but he was ordered to rest for a few hours and he ate his bread and lamb fat in the dugout he shared with Thomas. It was lined with sandbags and they had built a roof of pine logs and dug long shallow dishes in the soil, filled them in with pine needles for sleeping. They lay in their trenches facing each other, the earth rumbling with mortar fire, the lantern on the shelf flickering. The sound was more incredible when you were not physically involved with the firing, when your body was separate and the guns existed outside you.

  ‘Tell me what Uta let you do. I don’t want to die without knowing.’ Thomas was shouting but it was through lip reading and long familiarity that Emil understood him. He had known from his smile, before he opened his mouth, what he was about to say.

  ‘I promised not to tell anyone.’

  ‘Come on. It’s me.’

  ‘No, Thomas, rest.’ He snuffed out the lantern and they turned away from each other. He could not imagine sleeping ever again. It was only decorum that made him turn away, to allow privacy for his friend in the night. He smoothed a patch of soil in front of him with his hand and thought again of Uta, who lived in the apartment building across the road from his parents. The day he told her he had been conscripted, he had waited on the street as she trudged slowly across the road, tired from her work hunched over a sewing machine in the glove factory. She was too far away for him to see her face but her step quickened when she saw his shape in the shadow of the building. There was no one in the apartment. Her parents were visiting relatives. When he told her, sitting on her narrow bed in her room surrounded by dolls, she let him briefly put his hand up her skirt and touch the thin strip of flesh between her stocking and her corset. The skin was cold from her walk home, his fingers warm from his pockets. He had tried before but this time her hand did not stop his until it was there, at her thigh.

  He did not want to lie here like this; his body was drawn to go back out and take the gun. He held his watch in front of his face and waited for shell fire above to illuminate its face. An hour until they took over.

  They had lost that position, soon enough. This dugout, in which he watched Thomas shiver silently, was further back. He no longer lay impatiently, waiting to take up his gun. He reached out a hand and laid it on Thomas’s shoulder. He could not stop him shaking.

  In the quiet times, leaning against the pine-log wall, eyes closed, face in the sun, when any of them might go mad with the memory of what they had seen and their fingers had touched, Emil took to writing letters to his father in his head. Two months since the British and their friends had landed and he had not written a single real letter, though all around him, even now, the Turks were hunched over scraps of paper, smoking and frowning. He could not manage the performance. It was a gesture he could not make, a falsehood: to have them read a letter, to see his handwriting, to believe these were the words of the boy they knew. Still, he had the same urge to tell as anyone.

  Dear Father, he wrote in his mind, Thomas did not want to go out that night. He had formed an idea that God would take a dim view of his skill with a rifle. The odds were evil, he said, with his strike rate. You would be happier going out there with your knife? I asked him, many times. God would be happier, he said. Perhaps you’re surprised, Father, that he spoke like this. All I can say is that those who believed in God when they arrived aren’t so sure now, and those that were wavering see him in everything. Well, I said to Thomas, for tonight, you have a Mauser, and unless we’re to be shot for desertion we had better take our posts. I went along the trench to mine and over we went. I survived another action. When I returned to Thomas at the end of
it he was lying across the lip of the trench. He looked as though there was nothing wrong with him, as though he was sleeping off a hard night. The dawn did not wake him. I sat next to him and took his hand. It was still warm and I saw then that his face was not whole, but I’d seen worse by then. I was thinking, when his hand goes cold, it will never be warm again, so I had better stay.

  You have taught me that a man must act where he sees injustice, that this is what a man is, that in every moment might be the making of history. Father, if thoughts were treason they would have shot me many times over. But I can tell you here, where there’s no one but us, that the only way to act in this place is to die or to run, and a dead man does nothing for anybody.

  The Germans were drinking in their trench during a ceasefire for retrieval of the dead and wounded. Emil filled his tin mug and passed on the bottle of brandy. One of the German officers, Stemmer, was making a joke about the Australians. He called them armadillos: shell on top, tender meat beneath. He said that he liked to see their faces, feel how soft they were inside in spite of their muscles. Emil played cards in the officers’ trench between actions, to hear German, but if this was what he had to listen to he’d rather be among the Turks and understand almost nothing.

  Out across the gullies the night was falling, the shadows in the creases of the land spreading across the hills. From the dark cracks came the men, the ones who came at night, more and more of them. Turks, British, Australians and New Zealanders. A German, always the same one, with a face he knew from his past but could not place. They emerged from the cracks in the land exposing their wounds obscenely. He blinked and banished them, knowing they would be back. They always came at this hour as the shadows spread from the gullies.