The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  Jerusalem, 1920

  Whisky: burnt honey, wasp’s feet, the sticky gum from a chestnut tree. Willie held the glass up in front of the candle and the honey-red liquid glowed like love. He was sitting in a comfortable chair deep in the furthest recesses of the Hotel Fast bar. In front of him a couple danced, a European-looking fellow with his hand on the bare back of a woman in a long evening gown, her head resting on his shoulder. They were swaying slowly and everyone was watching them. The musicians were playing a tune from another place, another time, and he was four, possibly five glasses in. Ashton had confirmed it: the plane was being flown into Kalandia airfield tomorrow. He was to fly; and there was the trigger near his thigh: he was a six-year-old boy again, almost wetting himself in terror.

  Willie drummed his fingers on the paper in front of him, closed his eyes. He held a gnawed pencil in his hands. He started to sketch, absent-mindedly, drawing from memory the partridge, that very English bird. He had been such a keen birdwatcher as a child, he could remember its call: chu chu chu ka che che. He punctured the paper, a row of tiny bullet holes, and the bird became Eleanora’s body: the angular shoulders and her wrists. Then he wrote:

  Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.

  Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.

  And without feet, I can make my way to you,

  Without a mouth I can swear your name.

  The barman placed another glass in front of him, looked down at the poem. ‘Rilke?’ There was a lull in the music; Willie nodded.

  ‘Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you,’ the barman said, in German. ‘You speak German?’

  ‘A little. Schoolboy stuff.’

  The barman, Theodore, was the half-cousin of the Hotel Fast’s owner Albrecht. It used to be German-run, but of course since the British, they were expelled, only returning now. In broken sentences Willie and Theodore spoke in the private space of this language, beneath the rolling tunes from the concertina and violin, about changes coming to Jerusalem, settlements everywhere, tents being pitched across the valleys and wadis, problems at Haifa, at the ports, adjustments in boundaries and borders and walls. There was a claustrophobic element to Jerusalem, perhaps because it was a city of walls. A city crushed under its own history, and yet as soon as he arrived it was oddly familiar, and almost sleepy or dreamlike. People from one’s childhood appeared. People one had met along the way, and done terrible things with, seemed to be here. The significant English public schools were all represented. The religious groups had startling names: the Myrrh Bearers, the Everlasting Faces. It was the most famous city in the world and yet somehow it felt like a village from one’s past.

  Willie glanced across the bar. Sitting alone at a table with a nearly empty glass in front of him was Lofty. The large hat, a fist on the tabletop, a glazed, distracted, half-drunken expression, and Willie felt as if he were buoyed in the sea, as if he had been bobbed up, taken down, surrendered to a blue-green liquid lucidity, but when he looked again, it wasn’t Lofty. It was another gendarme, red-nosed, drunk, pulling off the wide-brimmed hat, his face fleshier than Lofty’s. He was seeing things tonight. The barman, Theodore, drifted back to his work, smiling, nodding.

  Salonika was a long time ago. He was now in Jerusalem. The war was over.

  If he did remember, if he did, then what would he say about it?

  Men, dying not from bullets, but from mosquitoes. One morning he had found the body of a young Irish fellow with a length of barbed wire wrapped around his own neck: suicide, to avoid another dose of the malaria fever and everything that came with it: delirium, madness. None of the regiments in and around the Birdcage of Salonika were prepared. Not enough quinine, barely any nets, tents full of men ripping into their own skin, shouting out to be shot and put out of the cycle of recovery and fever again, a spiral down to the bottom of a deadly well.

  Lofty was there with Willie. He had been held back from the recently relocated 10th Irish Division who had been sent off to take part in the Palestine campaign and he was the maddest of them all. He’d had five recurring bouts of fever and each time he came round a strip of his soul had been removed and he was even more deranged. He insisted he was fit for service; the medical reports said otherwise. He grew violent. He was strapped to his bed, considered too dangerous to transfer either to Palestine or home to Ireland. His wolf-howling could be heard across the mosquito-ridden swamp valleys so that whenever anyone walked near the tent that housed him they would say, ‘Somebody put that man out of his misery.’

  But he made one final recovery, and he talked himself out of the medical tent, in the Irish sing-song way, gift-of-the-persuasive talk when there were new nurses who didn’t know the rules. He stopped howling, looked almost normal, and finally, due to a shortage of men, he was sent up as an observer on a plane that had been scouting across the border, in the same convoy as Willie. Both planes crashed, and Willie’s own observer, Mackie, died. Lofty’s pilot was dead, and then the two of them were captured on the Bulgarian side.

  Willie lifted his drink to dampen the memory. The dancers in front of him were still shunting slowly in their personal constellation.

  In the holding room in a Bulgarian sanatorium another Englishman next to Willie had lost an eye. At least you’ve got the other one. Fuck off, he said. Rightly. Three Englishmen captured. They were treated quite civilly. A Sopwith down, two-seater, and the scout, earlier. Flames, blackout. This part of Willie’s story is burnt out now. Each nerve end shut down. Close it. Close it. Again and again the click that happened just before the rev counter crawled back. The engine making a noise an engine should never make.

  Bulgarian nurses with brown eyes put cool cloths on his face and spoke soft words he could not understand. After some time, the Englishmen nodded at one another. Bad luck. No one particularly felt like talking, sores under bandages unbearable, transitioning from painful to itchy, how much of him was burnt off? Was there much left? Lofty was three beds down and didn’t say a word at first. Something had happened to his head; lost his memory, lost his mind, lost his sight. Just simply lost. That was all Willie knew.

  ‘We never tire of having English guests,’ a man said. Light German accent, not Bulgarian, bolt-straight neck and eyes that got straight down to the paper-heart of things. It was the famous Eschwege; was he being sarcastic?

  They had all heard of him: Eschwege. He was legendary, even on the English side, known for his impressive side-slips, spinning earthward, transforming his machine into a fluttering leaf heading to dry land and then abruptly changing course. He had personally claimed seven victories to date, including Flight Lieutenants Ingham and Maxwell and others from before Willie’s arrival. He visited them in the sanatorium each afternoon; cordial, polite. Lofty said nothing, did not even respond to a greeting. The blind boy was losing the sight in his second eye and he had begun to gibber, talking to his mother, calling out for his girl.

  The nurse worked silently when she peeled back the bandages on Willie’s chest, fingers like rain on him, burning rain. She was the one who came at night, too, with a glass of water, when nightmares turned him inside out. Some days passed, time was rearranged, impossible to keep under check, and when he woke Eschwege was sitting next to him.

  ‘You can walk soon?’ Eschwege said, in English.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Willie looked at him, repeated in German: ‘I don’t know.’

  For fifteen minutes they had talked; Willie did not know what about, now. In German, light discussions, perhaps about birds. Yes. It was. Eschwege had on his knee Willie’s logbook.

  ‘It survived?’

  ‘Your whole bag did: cigarettes, camera, logbook, found some distance from the craft.’

  Eschwege had examined the drawings in the back of the book – Willie was remembering, now, as the whisky slid down his throat, as the woman swayed her snake-back next to her dancing partner – and was talking about birds. Pelicans. Did you know there are pelicans? Near the Kalochori lake. Dalmatian pelic
ans.

  Another whisky. Pelicans.

  Did Eschwege talk to Lofty? Willie did not remember, but Lofty was always there, lying on his back, snoring earth-shatteringly loud snores, and then sometimes whispering to himself, but saying nothing to Willie.

  Finally, Willie was able to move, although purple-black clouds came into his vision with the pain: were they inside his eye? Or his eyelid? Or in front of him, hovering in the air? He was helped to walk by the older nurse. He was taken into a room. It was empty, just a table and three chairs. No window. It was deep in the sanatorium and on the table in front of him he saw his own reconnaissance photographs laid out in rows of four. They had developed the film. The door opened again, and Lofty was brought in, shuffling. A young Bulgarian officer offered them cigarettes; they were not treated badly.

  The two men were left alone.

  The Irishman did not seem badly injured on the surface, but there was something wrong with the look in his eyes, one of which was seeping at its corner. He did not wipe the moisture away from his cheek. He kept whispering: ‘Crack skull of it, and blood coming out. There is a steam and a release of air when somebody dies, each time is a thrill, slightly different from the last. Not thrill. That’s not it. It’s a softer sense than that: a pulse in the guts, the sun too bright. Each time, a hit in the blood, a shot, like the morphine tried that time in Holborn, sweet little knee to be sitting on . . .’

  ‘Whatever they ask, don’t tell,’ Lofty said, audibly then: the first time Willie had heard him speak out loud since being in here. There was a smell in the room which made Willie think of rain, of dead-weather days when there is no point in going outside, and yet this room was beyond weather.

  ‘Do you remember that girl Ana?’

  ‘What?’

  Willie had turned towards him. Lofty looked clearer-eyed now.

  ‘You don’t remember? Near the White Tower.’

  The smoke on Willie’s breath filled the room around him and then dispersed. A memory: drunk, a deeply, deeply drunk night. Several soldiers, and Lofty must have been with them, in a brothel near the White Tower in Salonika. Sticky retsina. You can get anything you like here, for silver. Children sold for the price of tea, women by the handful, a fistful of hair, blood on the nostril. Dead bodies too, if you wanted it, if that sort of business is your liking. A girl. Either Greek or Turkish or Serbian, Willie couldn’t tell, and she walked directly towards them, wide-eyed with black hair. She was very young and when she reached their table she looked first at Willie, and then Lofty. Willie had been so drunk the world was frozen, the hard dirt floor welcoming. He couldn’t walk. He was dragged into a room with Lofty and another man. Bouzoukis playing, then faded. Small room, thin bed, a chair against the wall and a picture of Santa Maria hung unevenly. He could remember that. Oh Mary. Oh Hail Mary. Sitting on the bed, staring at the floor, was a child. She was ten, he had thought (she was younger, he knew). Lofty took her first. Willie concentrated on leaning his head against the wall. The other man – it could even have been Mackie, was it him? – took her next. Then they pulled him over, out of the nausea; he had vomited the retsina against the wall, made a map of the British Isles out of the putrid substance.

  His turn. He did not ask her name. He was immediately powerfully aroused. Below him, she looked even smaller, as if she were made of hollow bird bones. She had dark circles under her brown eyes. She made no noise when he pushed inside her, just as she had made no noise with the other men. He was not gentle, but he was quick.

  How had he forgotten this? He had not forgotten this, he had run through the corridor, out on to the Salonika street, carrying with him a moment of judgement that would fix itself, like a tick bedding down and feeding at the still point of his life. I did not hurt her. I only did it because I was there; I did not plan it, it is not in my nature. This is what he told himself at the time and then he shut it away.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ Willie said. He looked at Lofty: was he all there? He could remember Salonika, but his eyeballs rolled backwards so that they were mostly the whites of his eyes rather than the iris. Eschwege came into the room, then, alone. He nodded, smiled, closed the door. Thanked them for being there, as if it had been their choice.

  The camera film that they had developed on Willie’s behalf was of a series of aerial photographs relating to the port of Kavala. They were laid out in formation.

  ‘The English are going to attack Kavala?’

  Both men said nothing. Eschwege shifted his chair slightly, turned it away from Lofty, towards Willie. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly. Nobody spoke for some minutes.

  In German, Eschwege put a proposition to him: you explain what you were doing with all of the photographs and I will release you. I will also release your comrade, if you would like me to. Eschwege moved the photographs around as he said this, re-arranged them in lines, the top to the bottom, these five here, these five there. Kavala. Willie pulled one of the photographs towards him: a landscape of trenches, dugouts. The photographs made the destruction, the modern world of intolerable suffering that all sides are forced to endure, look like, what? Like an ancient earthwork, like layers of agricultural development, like a series of hieroglyphs, like tattoos drawn with ink and compasses by bored little boys.

  ‘Yes,’ Willie said, in German. ‘The spies have informed us that there is a German submarine laying mines and there will be a bombardment. Or at least, that was the plan before I went out on the reconnaissance flight.’

  Lofty, whose chin had lowered, whose eyes were rolling, raised his head: looked directly at Willie. Coughed. Did he speak German? His blue eyes were red and swollen around the rims. Eschwege moved slowly around the room, and then he opened the door and said something in rapid German to an officer outside.

  When he came back in, Willie, not looking at Lofty, in faulty German, talked him through the information, each photograph. He gave up more than Eschwege asked for and when the German left the room again the Irishman finally spoke out:

  ‘You are a fucking treacherous cunt.’

  Willie said nothing. Eschwege came back in.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and they were both returned to the sanatorium. Eschwege, Willie saw, did not respect him for talking. He saw him as a weak man. He was a weak man. Back in their beds Willie did not look at Lofty; he concentrated on the ceiling, on the open sores on his skin.

  But he was wrong about Eschwege; he kept coming back to him, sitting next to his bed, and talking. They drank decent coffee for several days and then, his bandages refreshed, his wounds cleaned, he had been taken in a wheelchair out into the harsh Greek sun. Lofty had been removed several days previously; Willie did not know where to. The blind boy was also gone.

  In the wheelchair he had been loaded into the back of a Bulgarian truck, along with Eschwege, and they had been driven to the lake. After so many days in the sanatorium the wide shimmer of the water hurt his eyes. He could see innumerable mosquitoes dancing on the surface. The Greek wind was blissful.

  ‘We could track them,’ Eschwege said.

  ‘What?’ Willie had been confused. Track the Germans? English? Irish? Bulgarians?

  ‘Pelicans. But what am I saying? You are still immobile. I think we will content ourselves with watching.’

  They sat in a small camp, with several petty officers in attendance, on the stony shore of the lake where miniature grey crabs moved sideways from one rock to another. Willie had waited for Eschwege to ask him the inevitable question: why have you given me this information, betrayed your country? The question did not come, apart from in Willie’s own head. Why had he? He had no defence. Other than it was that or surrendering to death. No way out, or up, less a travesty of King and Country, more a suicide note. It was, he had thought, near the insect-laden water’s edge, because he had wanted to run the blade of a knife along his own white skin. It was a dark memory of Eleanora: her father, catching him in the corridor one morning by the elbow: ‘She is not for yo
u.’ The betrayal of a country is nothing compared with human travesties. Shame moved through him; the sense of smashing things, of talking too lightly, of losing her because of war and the hollow despair of never being enough for her, leaving everything else meaningless. The pelicans came, as if performing, and the two men watched the inelegant flops of white underbelly on to water, the magnificent stretch of the wing. That evening Willie was transported to the barbed-wire edge of the Birdcage and thrown back to the English side, complete with his bag, his logbook, his camera, his freshly bandaged body. They had taken most of the photographs. Left him with twenty. He never knew why.

  Willie had reported it, but what he said, of course, was that he had been forced. Threats, candle flames next to eyelashes, cigarettes above the face, bright, glinting knife blades. He did not mention the lake; he certainly did not speak of the pelicans.

  ‘May I?’

  Willie looked up from the hotel paper before him and the doodling pencil that had completely scrawled out the Rilke quote and the partridge, sketched something remotely like Eleanora’s neck, and then begun a pair of pelican wings. In front of his table, blocking his view of the bar, a man was bending towards him like a poplar tree. Willie’s stomach contracted with irritation; he should’ve taken the whisky up to his room.