Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  A peal of wild laughter from down on the beach. Sometimes, on a hot night, when no one was moaning and the guns were quiet, they did not sound like soldiers. You could smell the fires. They were roasting meat by the sea, eating and talking. For days he had been lying in his dugout with a fever from a mosquito bite, waiting for quinine. He would give anything to swim in the ocean—the water would be warm—and then sit on the beach, clothes clinging to salty skin, eating and talking to other men about something that was not killing or cigarettes or when the post might finally arrive.

  Perhaps when the dead had been removed and buried they would stop walking out at him at dusk. He could hear those Turks not on duty in their trench close to the Germans, their murmured prayers. He wondered whether the retrieval parties would find Thomas’s body, whether they would pray over it.

  He remembered a hot night by the Rhine. He and Thomas played cards by the light of a little fire. They had stolen liquor being unloaded outside their fathers’ social club and lay on the damp grass moaning, the stars swirling. Thomas’s head lay still on the ground, in the summer field. He was becoming something of a heartbreaker around the town. His sister asked about him in her letters to the front. He had not yet answered her.

  He let himself imagine for an instant, his head light, that he had never left Germany, that he had been allowed to simply go from his studies into work as an electrical engineer, to marry Uta. There was no pit burial, no faces to be sprinkled with lime. He felt movement near him in the deepening dusk. It was Captain Hass, gentle behind the lines, softly spoken, yet Emil had seen him shoot an able-bodied Turk for coming back with wounded in the midst of an attack. The captain looked him up and down. ‘You’ve been declared fit, haven’t you, Becker? You can go out tonight.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  There was a rumour that Germans were a prize to the Australians on the beach. They did not really know for certain that they were there, it seemed, or how many, but if they found one they had no interest in taking him back down to the pen. It was said the Australians had been promised extra leave for whoever brought back a German head on a stick.

  In half an hour, if he chose to, he could end every sensation in his body: the lice running up and down his neck into his hair and shirt, the dried mud caked around his feet, the rod of electric fear in his back, the hunger that made him dream in his scarce moments of sleep of the cinnamon rolls in the Konditorei on Unterstrasse, the noise of the guns that rattled his brain and made every thought an effort. The memory of Thomas lying in the mud, over the lip of the trench. Afterwards, while Emil’s body remained here among the Turks, or was dismembered as a trophy for the Australians, some other part of him would travel to the fields on the edge of the Rhine, away from the factories and the town, where all you could hear were birds and the wind in the leaves. Hares running in the fields, more than you could fit in your rucksack.

  But that was not the plan he had formed as he emerged from delirium in the medical tent. He stirred his legs, gave them a little shake, went along the tunnel to wait with the Turks. The insects swarmed and dived. He could hear them in the quiet of the ceasefire, and men’s voices, just talking. One he knew, Faisal, gave him a cigarette and they chatted a little in the Turkish he had picked up from the men between actions. A group was returning to the trench from the burial, quiet. He took his position. Can I do it? he asked himself.

  The machine gun in the trench started up along the line and he climbed to the lip, ready to go over. He wondered how bad the pain was going to be. And now the Turks were running forward, he with them, firing, some falling. Their voices in the night, the strange words and rhythms, helped him not to believe that anything in this world was real. He let his rifle slip towards the ground. He waited for a mortar flash and looked down, took aim—that is my knee, there are my toes, not those, wait for dark, now, do it—and fired.

  He came to in the dark. His leg lay against another’s that did not move and was hard. God was talking to him. He was asking him how you fix a Howitzer that has ceased to fire. Quickly, while they come forward with rifles, how do you fix it? No, not God. Father. He always wanted to learn what he could from Emil’s education, wanted to add to his own understanding of machinery, and Emil loved to explain to him the smallest details of how a machine worked, how you might fix it when it failed. His voice came, as clearly in the dark as though they were sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table. ‘Ah yes, I never would have thought it was something so simple.’ But Emil could not answer him. His throat was very dry. The blackness was like velvet across his eyes, and the hard leg did not move.

  There was no time for gentleness for the Turk who dragged Emil over the pocked mud to the medical tent. The firing had ceased but it was never safe in the open. The Turk let Emil’s leg slam and bounce along the ground. Every impact sent a shock the length of his body. The astonishing pain. So this, precisely, was how much it would hurt. It obliterated thought. The light was coming. He could smell the burial pit somewhere close, bodies decomposing in spite of the lime. The world was the Turk’s stretched face against the fading purple sky, the sharp breaths, the rhythmic jarring of pain. In a shallow ditch the Turk laid him down. Through a thicket of dry grass he saw the man running low, zigzagging like a hare from hollow to hollow, back to the line. It was almost light. Stay down, he thought. He lost him and then his helmet emerged again. He heard German voices. In his head he said, I am breathing. Please, don’t put the lime on my face.

  They tipped him onto a stretcher and carried him around to the back of the hospital tent where a line of men groaned or lay still and silent in the dark. The medical officer shone a torch into his eye, looking at something at the back of his head, shot something in his arm. The others on the stretchers rose up and gathered around him. They all peered, the Turks; they too wanted to look at something beyond his eyes. They shook their heads, ignoring their own wounds: arms stopping at the elbow, burnt faces with pink eyes and mouths. Then he felt himself pulled backwards towards the green centre of Europe away from the wild cliffs of the coast, to a place where the earth stood still and there were women.

  The Turks on their beds in a long row were grey in face and limb, some gangrenous and foul. They moaned, day and night, though they received visitors, wives with hips that held the eye. They had only been taken back as far as Constantinople. He wondered whether his injury would take him back to Europe at all.

  Be quiet or die, he told them silently. From his own body rose the constant tang of old blood, confusing him. He did not bleed anymore and his dressing was changed regularly.

  Early in the morning shafts of light slanting from the high windows onto the beds along the wall opposite made them seem blessed in their disfigurement, as though they were about to be taken away to something better. City sounds—hawkers, children—cooking smells from street vendors, coffee, drifted in. He longed to venture outside to see. The intricate hot mystery of the palaces, lanes and bazaars, the call to prayer.

  The sister was a dark woman with a lined face like a peasant, and very strong. She lifted men on and off beds, often without assistance, though it was true that many of them were thin, looked weightless. He could feel the ripple of his own ribs when she dragged the sponge across them. She smiled when he used fragments of Turkish to ask for cigarettes and water.

  On the night shift there was an Austrian nurse who he had discovered was nineteen, a year older than him. He slept when he could in the day so that he could talk to her. He didn’t know if she was pretty. The hair at her temple was an ordinary brown colour, disappearing under her cap, and her features seemed even enough. He couldn’t tell anymore, but she had hips and a bosom and looked soft. Her skin was clear. She seemed clean. She was a quiet girl among the Turkish soldiers, eyes cast down like a Turkish woman, but if she had a few moments she would sit on a wooden chair beside his bed and answer his questions. He tried not to scratch at the memory of lice.

  What sor
t of school did you go to? Do you have brothers and sisters? What writers do you read? Why did you decide to be a nurse? Tell me how the houses look in your street. Who are your friends? Once he found the recklessness to say, ‘Describe your room at home,’thinking now she would turn her face away, never answer him again. She paused for a few moments as she did with every question and then she told him, stepping out gently into her description as always. She shared a room with her sister in her parents’ apartment in a village in the Alps. They had a bed each along opposite walls. Between them was a window that opened out onto the town square. Over the roofs one saw the mountains. When the war began a year ago the square was filled with people singing and she and her sister leaned out their window and listened to them until late at night. She almost fell, she was leaning so far. Her sister pulled her back as she slipped by grabbing hold of her plait. He closed his eyes. He could see it. The people in the square, the girl wide-eyed, careless, her sister more sensible, alert, grasping the long thick plait. He too had sung when they set off. And Thomas.

  But she also told him when he asked of the meals at home: ‘There is almost nothing to eat. Old bread. Pea soup that has been stretched out for days. No coffee. Hardly any milk. A neighbour’s baby died.’ She frowned when she spoke, a little furrow appearing over her nose.

  The Turkish sister mostly left them alone unless there was an emergency, a fresh delivery of wounded, the bathing of a burnt man. When he heard the cries of one of these and knew that the nurse, called away from him, was holding him, his heart ached for her and he wished that the answering of his questions was enough to keep her here beside his bed.

  They moved him away from her after a while, to a large house on the edge of the city that had been converted into dormitories for recuperation. He was not given a chance to say goodbye and he was surprised at the wrench he felt as he bumped along in the back of an uncovered lorry, his leg jarring, crutches either side of him. Here were the streets of Constantinople that had been calling to him. He glimpsed a shady courtyard filled with flowering vines on the tiled walls, a family meal taking place at a long table. A young woman was serving, bending forward. She looked up and saw him as the truck passed down the narrow street. He saw her eyes, and they were much more beautiful than the nurse’s, but it was the Austrian girl’s ordinariness that had touched him. He might have seen a hundred girls like her any day of the week in Duisburg.

  At the house, there was an overgrown garden to hobble around, games of cards, sudden booze bounties, bawdy talk, even whispers of revolution—or desertion, if you gave it its proper name. We could just . . . not go back. Longing glances at the hills that led down to the sea. He avoided these conversations. Such thoughts were a contagion. There were men being shipped home or back to the fighting, newcomers with astonishing afflictions, a former schoolteacher who was coaching the men in French, obscure phrases guaranteed to bewitch any woman into weakness and acquiescence. They bet cigarettes from home on cockroach races. Emil picked them well. He never ran out of cigarettes and was often able to buy liquor and chocolate. But he knew this was a brief interlude of unreality. And soon a letter came, congratulating him on his immediate promotion and providing instructions for transport to Palestine.

  Hannah

  LONDON, 1917

  Miss Taylor had blonde curls and milk-white teeth and stood very straight in front of the class as though she had been trained as a ballerina. I always sat a little more upright, walked more carefully in her presence. She had just asked the class for the capital of Switzerland. There were no hands in the air. It was hot and the boys tipped back on their chairs, the girls with the fashionable hairstyles and nicer shoes showed each other notes, believing themselves clever, unobserved. Imbecilic, I thought, not that they would know what that meant.

  ‘Go on, Hannah,’ Boris whispered from the next desk. ‘You know it.’

  I would not look at him. Berne! a part of my brain shouted, Berne! But another part prevailed: Do not speak, it commanded. It is beneath you. Miss Taylor cast her gaze around the class, round blue eyes falling upon everyone before me, until eventually she raised a beautifully shaped eyebrow kindly. ‘Hannah, dear?’

  ‘I do know, but somebody else can answer. It’s all right.’

  Faith, one of the stylish girls, groaned quietly somewhere behind me. I knew her groan of old.

  ‘But I’m asking you, Hannah.’

  Just then the raid alarm sounded, starting quietly and quickly building to a deafening blare. We were not used to daytime raids. Miss Taylor blinked sternly and said, ‘Quick, children, under the desks, just as we’ve practised.’

  I felt the withdrawal of Miss Taylor’s attention like being cast into a cool shadow but I dutifully stood, picked up the Philip’s atlas I was sharing with Boris and pulled out my chair from under my desk. We dragged our desks together amid the screeching of the other children doing the same and crouched beneath our shelter, holding the atlas above our heads as though we were running home across Fitzroy Square in the rain with a newspaper for cover. Boris trembled. If our school had been hit, and they unearthed us later, they would have found us preserved in rubble, twenty ten-year-olds and one adult crouching, heads bent, as though what we did not see could not hurt us. Or perhaps they would decide that we were praying for mercy.

  The others whispered in their neighbour’s ear, hands cupped to their heads, made faces. When I saw that Miss Taylor was under her own desk, staring at the floor, whispering, I shuffled away from Boris, poked my head out from under the desk so that I could see through the window—but there was nothing there. I inched back to Boris, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I closed mine too for a moment and imagined I saw it: the long fountain-pen shape of the German zeppelin, its slow dark mass gliding out from the roofs. I didn’t know that they had decided to set the Gotha planes on us by then, that the mesmerising zeppelins were already fading into the past.

  I opened my eyes to peek at Miss Taylor. I do it now with air hostesses when there is turbulence: How bad is it? Should I be scared? It seemed I should. She was indeed praying, trying to pretend that she wasn’t. Her hands were clasped in her lap and her lips were moving. I hoped that if there were such a being as God, against the insistence of Father, he would be kind enough to listen to Miss Taylor. I felt confident that Miss Taylor would pray for us, or at least for me, and so I considered myself to be insured. I was my father’s girl enough to draw the line at praying for myself.

  When we arrived home from school the shop was empty. As we entered its cool shade and tobacco and cinnamon smell, the bell ringing behind us, there was a space behind the counter where we would usually expect to see Father smiling in his black waistcoat, consulting his chained gold watch and saying, ‘Ah, children, I believed the buka got you. Why so long to walk one hundred yards?’

  On the narrow stairs we heard Mother shouting in Yiddish in the apartment.

  ‘What is she saying?’ Geoffrey whispered.

  ‘That she cannot bear it a moment longer.’

  ‘Bear what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hysteria will solve nothing,’ Father was saying in English as we entered the flat. And then, ‘Tishe, deti.’ Hush, the children.

  Throughout dinner Mother clenched a handkerchief and ate nothing. She looked pale and her hair had come loose from its bun. I saw suddenly that she was beautiful. I could not stop staring. Had her eyelashes always been so long, her skin so pale? She seemed to be from some other world, this woman I so often ignored as she moved about the kitchen and leaned over the tub in the yard. Now her white blouse, her long cheekbones, seemed touched by light. A ghost at our table while the rest were noisy, smelly, ruddy, alive. Father wrapped a dark square hand around hers and she pulled it away. The boys made big eyes at each other over their dishes and Benjamin could not help but giggle. I wished, not for the first time, that my two infantile brothers could be exchanged for an older one, away at war, who came home and spent his pay on taking me to t
ea at the Lyons Corner House or Selfridges.

  As we cleared the table there came a sharp rap at the door. It had to be Mrs Reznik from upstairs; she was the only one with the key to the side passage in the alley that adjoined our staircase behind the shop.

  ‘Come!’ bellowed Father. She thrust her head around the door like a mouse, her long face twitching at the smell of food. ‘Mrs Reznik.’

  Father stood from the head of the table. ‘Will you eat? There is plenty left.’

  ‘No, no. I have just had supper.’

  ‘But Mrs Reznik! You insult my wife’s cooking.’

  ‘Oh no. Well, just a little.’ She was already at the table next to me, pulling back the chair I had just vacated, easing her mantis frame into it and waiting for a clean dish. She had money, I had seen inside the biscuit tin of bright silver shillings and crowns that she kept at the top of a ladder in the loft. She wouldn’t spend it on food for herself, though, and was as thin a person as I ever knew, though quite vigorous and nimble in spite of being considerably older than Mother and Father. If I had as much money as that I would have spent most of it on chocolate and cake on the black market and rations be damned.

  I dragged over the extra chair from beside the bed, behind the curtain, and we sat, waiting for her to finish eating. She hunched over her bowl, a thin person who could never be warm or full, long mechanical arms scooping relentlessly. The borscht disappeared quickly and as she wiped the dish with her bread we were able to stare openly at her deep red moustache, so absorbed was she in the act of eating.

  ‘Do you need Hannah tonight?’ Father asked eventually. They spoke in English. Father always spoke in English to Mrs Reznik. It seemed to me like acting, for the benefit of others, for two Russians to speak in English. I could not see why one would bother, but then my interest in manners has always been a little underdeveloped.