The Constant Soldier

by William Ryan

  For Yvonne

  Contents

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  Author’s Note

  1

  BRANDT FELT his mother’s arms close round him – as if he were still a child. Her embrace was soft. Her breath, cool against his forehead. He could even smell her – milk and warm bread. How he’d ended up back here, in her arms, he didn’t know.

  He opened his eyes, expecting to see hers looking down at him, her cheeks swelled by her smile, her lips full and rose red – but instead found a stretcher pulled taut by the outline of a man’s body, its mottled canvas less than an arm’s length above him. The stretcher jerked from side to side as they moved along a rough part of the road. Close by he could hear someone swearing repeatedly, their voice shrill, and, even over the sound of the vehicle’s loud engine, he could make out the rumble and thud of artillery shells pursuing them.

  It didn’t matter though. He knew she was still nearby, cradling him, her skin warm against his. The sunshine turning her hair golden.

  All he had to do to see her was shut his eyes.

  §

  The first time he woke properly, he hoped that he was still dreaming. The waking reality he found himself in wasn’t much to his liking. The world he’d visited in his unconscious state was far preferable.

  He knew he was awake because the borders of his world were no longer flexible, something he’d become accustomed to. Instead, now, the edges and surfaces that surrounded him were rigid. He was lying down. His body ached – every centimetre of it. A dull, roaring pain. His head was covered with something wrapped tight around his face. A bandage, he thought.

  He was on a train, by the sound of it, the wheels revolving to a languid rhythm, each length of track causing a small jolt that swayed the carriage slightly. The movement was soothing.

  He opened his eyes, his vision bordered by the white fabric wound around his head. Above him, a canvas stretcher. He remembered grey canvas above him from some time in the past – when, he couldn’t say. But not from before whatever had happened to him. This was similar but a different colour – a faded white, smudged and worn. A splash of brown dots that looked like blood. Old blood.

  His?

  Someone was talking to themselves nearby, a conversation with someone else in which they spoke both parts.

  ‘I won’t do it. I won’t.’

  ‘You will. You have to.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I can’t.’

  ‘You have no choice.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why? Such a stupid question. Don’t be a child. It’s not why but how. How you are going to do it. And that’s been decided. All you have to do is follow your orders. To the letter.’

  ‘But I can’t. I couldn’t.’

  ‘You already have. You just have to do it again. For your comrades. For yourself. For your country.’

  The voice was coming from above him, he thought. He wanted to lean out and look up at the person, but he couldn’t. Even blinking his eyes was hard. He shut them, suddenly too tired to hold them open any longer.

  He would have slept, gone back to the other world. But the dull ache that had held his body tight turned to pain. Extreme pain.

  §

  He was thirsty. He had been thirsty for a long time, he thought.

  ‘Water.’

  His voice – cracked and weak – sounded remote from him. He was still on the train, that was clear – he remembered the antiseptic smell of it. The train was stationary now. It was dark in the carriage and it was hot. Footsteps approached. A young woman, a nurse. Her eyes appeared to glow, despite the lack of light, and her lips were a luminous pink. They glistened.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered, as if, should someone overhear them, they would be in danger. He said nothing.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  Maybe the Russians were close by.

  ‘Water,’ he said, as quietly as he could.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get some.’

  He watched her leave – wishing she would step more lightly on the wooden floor. She was making too much noise. Didn’t she know what would happen if the Russians heard her?

  §

  Brandt was in a cafe, waiting. On the table in front of him stood a cup of coffee. Its aroma was so rich he could taste it on his tongue. The conversations around him in the long room sounded distorted – as though they were coming to him along a tunnel. The colour of the walls, the carpet, even the lips and eyes of the cafe’s customers – all were impossibly vibrant. Perhaps his nervousness had, in some way, altered his perception of his surroundings. Or perhaps it was his mind playing tricks. In this version of the truth he knew the time was five minutes to four. It was Tuesday. And she would arrive at any moment.

  The vividness of the cafe, as he recalled it in the dream, did not extend to the two men at the corner table, watching him. They were monochrome shadows around which the cafe gleamed. They were not a part of his memory. He would see them only later but already, even now, he felt the sadness of their presence. In some part of this recollection, even now, he was aware of them having followed him across the city. He was aware of what happened next being his fault. The knowledge made the coffee taste bitter.

  In this moment – before the afterwards – it was important that he should be relaxed, that he shouldn’t draw attention to himself – or to her. What they were doing was dangerous and others had been arrested already. People he knew. People she knew. Gone now. He looked down at his hand, seeing his fingers tremble as he reached once again for the cup. It was white with a gold rim – the china sparkling in the summer sunlight that flowed through the window and warmed the crisp tablecloth. His nervousness caused it to clink against the saucer, the noise like a drumstick quietly tapping on a cymbal – a jazz
rhythm. He breathed deeply, lifting the cup to his mouth, forcing it against his lips, startled by its heat on his tongue.

  He was conscious that the dream would end soon. That the ending would be difficult. He already felt the hollowness inside, the guilt at the consequences of his own stupidity. He had known the risks but he’d thought only of her and he’d hurried. He should have slowed, taken his time, doubled back on himself. Then he might have seen the monochrome men.

  But before the end – now – she came through to the room he sat in, not seeing anyone else but him. Not seeing the shadow men sitting in their corner, also waiting for her. He rose to kiss her cheek, the startling softness of her hand in his. Neither she, nor he, saw the two men stand. He smiled at her and she smiled back – not noticing the men walking towards them.

  Then the men were there, beside them – a thick hand taking Brandt’s elbow as the sweat on his neck turned to ice. Squeezing it. Twisting it. He saw her eyes widen in the instant before she was turned towards the wall by the bristle-necked fellow, his shoulders filling his too-tight suit. He remembered the man’s yellow eyes and yellow teeth as he snarled something into her ear. Brandt had brought them to where she was like dogs on a lead. He felt the wall hard against his cheek, his captor’s breath hot on his neck. It was one minute to four. She’d been early.

  The pain woke him. He was grateful for it.

  The train had stopped and somewhere, up above them, the drone of aircraft engines filled the night sky.

  He could almost remember her smile, before it was wiped away.

  It must be the morphine, lowering his resistance. He had managed not to think about her for months now.

  §

  Brandt could now move his head and was able to examine his surroundings. He was on a hospital train, its length filled with injured men on stretchers, racked in rows on either side of the central aisle. He must have been wounded as well. And that was good news, wasn’t it? He was alive. He was no longer at the Front.

  He wondered how he’d got here. How long he’d been here. He asked the young nurse when she passed by.

  ‘You were wounded. We’re taking you home. You’re going to be fine, don’t worry.’

  She smiled as if she were giving him a gift – anticipating his gratitude.

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her smile patient. ‘Home.’

  He could hear another of the wounded calling for her and caught her glance shift towards the voice, reading in it her decision that the other man could wait.

  ‘Haven’t you a mother and father? A place you come from?’

  ‘I do.’

  He was as surprised as she was by the tears that filled his eyes. He wanted to explain – about his mother cradling him. About the woman in the cafe. About what had happened to them. About the last five years. Where to begin, though? It was all so complicated. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was too late. She had turned to go to the other man.

  When she’d left, he tried to remember what she looked like – whether she’d been the same nurse as the night before. It was difficult – his memory felt liquid. Where there should be something solid – such as a fact, an image or a sensation – there was, instead, a less substantial version of what he sought. The past and present versions of the nurse, if she was the same woman, seemed to merge and then disintegrate whenever he tried to fix them.

  Could it be that she was also the woman in the cafe? Her smile was similar. She had the same suppressed radiance. But the woman in the cafe had been eaten up by the yellow-eyed man. Although so had he, hadn’t he?

  He closed his eyes and heard dogs howling and the crackle of blazing thatch. Another memory – a burning village somewhere to the east that they’d passed through two years earlier.

  They’d begun shooting the dogs in the end, the soldiers who were there before them. They’d said it was a kindness, seeing as the villagers were dead already.

  §

  Another memory, from not long after they had met.

  Their hands were wrapped tight inside each other’s. They were strolling around a circular pond. As they walked their shoulders touched, as if by accident – but there was nothing accidental about it. He’d found it hard to breathe, he remembered that. It was warm – July, he thought. They hadn’t slept at all the night before and he’d wondered, if they let each other go, whether they might just tumble to the ground. Looking back at it, they’d known then how it must end.

  ‘I love you,’ he’d said. It was a statement of fact. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He looked at her, wondering what she might say. He’d had to lean towards her, his cheek touching her cheek, to hear her response.

  ‘I know.’

  She carried her own light with her that day – a glow that made each detail of her shimmer even though the sky was overcast. It tore the breath from his lungs when he looked at her. It emptied his mind so that the simplest task was made complex. Each time he was near her he wanted to wrap his arms around her – not to hold her but to protect her. When he was close enough to catch her scent it made him feel drunk.

  He smiled at her and, even then, tried to hold the moment within himself – to fix it just as it was. He’d known the memory would be precious in the times to come. And it was just the two of them for that instant. All that surrounded them – the Gestapo, the police, the brutality and the fear – was somewhere else.

  Later, in the east, when everything was white and grey and death was never further away than the next moment, he’d tried to bring that morning back to life. But the joy had gone from it. In his memory they’d become mourners, following their own cortège. The war had changed him by then. He’d become a pale, frayed version of himself and the hardness he had accumulated along the way had distorted even the past. She was gone. And he was to blame. And what was the point in thinking about it?

  But, still, he had been that other person once. It was something to hold on to, painful as it was.

  The man above him died during the night. Quietly, without fuss. He wondered, in his lucid moments, if he was dying also. Then he reminded himself that he’d been dying since the moment he’d been born. That was how life worked. Once you remembered that, everything became easier.

  §

  He had no idea how long they had been on the train, or where they were. Time was something that had ceased to be tangible. Sometimes it was dark and sometimes it was light. Sometimes the sun was in the sky, sometimes the moon. There was no pattern to it. The orderlies placed his stretcher beside a window and sometimes the nurse opened it a crack, allowing in a freezing current of air that cut like a scalpel through the fug that filled the carriage – the fetid mixture of disinfectant and bodily stench.

  The train now travelled through snow-heavy forests and glassy tunnels, across ice-arced bridges and along frozen rivers. It passed white fields that stretched as far as the eye could see, for days on end. At one stage it slowly picked its way through a bombed-out train station – the buildings still smouldering. The snow had melted in blackened circles around them. The smell reminded him of where he’d come from – burned flesh and charred wood. There was no order to the scenery they had passed – he had no idea when or where each image belonged. He hoped they were going west – away from the Front.

  He didn’t see many people – but that didn’t surprise him. There were fewer of them these days. The war had taken so many.

  Another moment from the past. A meeting in the apartment of a man he didn’t know – possibly a lecturer from the university, although it was not discussed. Someone had asked Brandt to come. A friend. Someone who had known how he felt about the Nazis. The man in the apartment had given them new names. He had been insistent that they must never use their real ones. They must never ask any other member of the group anything about themselves and they must never reveal anything either. It would be better this way. The less they knew about each other, the better.

  The man in the apartment took the name Willi. Bran
dt’s new name had been Oskar. The blonde girl, his own age, was Judith. Oskar and Judith. They had been paired together. They would leave the leaflets in public places, where ordinary people might find them and know there were people who still resisted. No one would suspect a young couple.

  Not with the swastika pins they would wear in their lapels.

  §

  The nurse said they were going to a hospital near Hamburg. All the other hospitals were full. Each morning the sun rose behind them and each evening it set ahead of them. And that was good. He’d had enough of the east.

  Sometimes they had to wait while other trains passed – going towards where they’d come from. He saw boys looking at the train with round eyes, their uniforms still stiff with newness – their faces framed by windows grey with ice and fog. They were so young. Someone had told him they were calling up sixteen-year-olds now, and these must be some of them. Their pink cheeks had never seen a razor, of that he was sure.

  The older men, the pale ones who had been to the Front before, paid no attention to the hospital train – they concentrated on their cigarettes or just looked away. He didn’t mind – he would have done the same.

  §

  Another moment from the past, whenever that had been. A bench outside Willi’s apartment building, Brandt sitting beside her. They were early and Willi hadn’t put the watering can out onto his balcony yet – the signal that it was safe to come up. It had been a warm afternoon. They decided to enjoy the sun while they waited.

  The city was quiet. The only sound he remembered was the rumble of a cart’s wheels along the cobbled street and the clip-clop of the horse’s lethargic hooves. They didn’t hear the door open onto the balcony. They never saw the men drag him out. The first they knew that anything was wrong was Willi’s body hitting the pavement – a wet thud. By the time they’d stood up he was nothing more than a crumpled pile of clothing. A widening pool of blood surrounding him. Someone screamed. People ran towards the body. Brandt looked up and saw the two men arguing on Willi’s balcony.

  Without a word they walked away, her trembling hand holding on to his elbow. By the time they reached the corner, he was almost carrying her. There was a queue outside a cinema and they joined it. A Zarah Leander movie – they’d been planning to go and see it anyway.

  In the darkness, they held each other close and after a while they calmed down. Zarah Leander’s silver face filled the screen, singing: