“Oh.” The ambulance, jolting over the fields, was slowing down. She felt a sense of urgency.
“And open your mouth a little bit.”
“Oh,” she said. Their mouths locked together. She could taste him. A jolt ran through her, from her feet upwards, a tight shuddery feeling. She was sinking into him. The ambulance slowed to a walking pace. With reluctance, as the ambulance stopped, she let go. Opening her eyes, she saw that his were still closed. There was a very odd look on his face.
“Did I hurt you?”
He opened his eyes and smiled. The men were coming round to open the doors at the back.
“An arrow to the heart, nurse,” he said.
The doors opened, she climbed out. François did not look at her, let alone notice her burning cheeks. There was an hour to the dawn and no time to waste. The men helped Arnaud up and unwound him; they were in a high open place. Arnaud showed them where to put three sticks in the ground as markers for the plane to land. The man on the bike had gone; the cheminot told Ilse to hop back into the ambulance. They were to retreat to a safe distance; if the English pilot saw too many people, he would not land. Ilse was shivering uncontrollably with cold and with excitement.
Arnaud took off his coat and, awkwardly, slung it round her with his good arm. “Don’t forget me, Violaine,” he said in her ear, then shut the door.
She watched as he walked away across the ground and stood beside one stick with his wireless transmitter on the ground, with his good hand holding up a light for the plane to find; François stood some distance away holding another. She looked from one man to the other. Then the ambulance turned, dipped into a hollow and they were gone.
Dawn came but the plane had not and now would not; it was too dangerous to overfly France by day. Still, the audacity of the English pilots gave everybody hope. Each drop of supplies, each man picked up, each little bit of progress gave their struggle a boost.
Arnaud was smiling at her. “I probably sent the wrong coordinates,” he said. “Are you glad, Red?”
“Not at all,” she said provocatively. Ilse took off her nurse’s cap and let her hair down for him, since he loved red hair so much. They sat on his coat under a tree and smoked her cigarettes. François and the other man had gone away in the ambulance, looking for a new place for him to spend the night. They had perhaps an hour, at best two, to spend together.
“How old are you?”
She countered at once. “You tell me first.”
“I’m twenty.”
“Me too,” she said. How young he was to do such dangerous work. It occurred to her that she did not know anybody her own age.
“You don’t look eighteen. How old are you really?”
She whispered in his ear. “Sixteen.”
He whistled. It was only a little lie, by four months.
“You look wonderful.”
“I am wonderful.”
Flirting was nearly as good as kissing.
“I don’t know anybody like you, at any age. Why aren’t you at school? Why do you do this?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “It was this or the Chantier de la Jeunesse.”84
This made him roar with laughter.
“Me too,” he said. “I’m a Boy Scout. That’s where I learnt Morse.”
“Any idiot can do Morse,” she said.
“Read this message, then.” Very gently, he tapped on her neck.
“The enemy is on horseback and has an arrow,” she said. He was somebody you could say anything to. When François returned, she would probably be sent back to Marseilles to hang around and feel that she was going slowly mad; this young man would be taken away and hidden in another place. Feeling regret about this, even while he practised his Morse, very distractingly, told her how much she liked him.
“I’m Jewish,” she said. “I’m German. A refugee. That’s why I can’t go to school.” She watched his face closely, waited to see it harden.
He looked merely puzzled. “I don’t know anybody Jewish. You don’t sound German.”
“I don’t feel it,” she said.
“Does it matter very much to you? Being Jewish?” This was too hard a question.
“It’s about being. Not becoming,” she said. “Life has to be about becoming.”
“I come from a village,” he said. “I’m a country boy. Is that bad?”
She did not know. She tickled his nose with a blade of grass.
“So, where did you learn kissing?” she asked.
“From you.”
When he laughed, his body shook and he winced with pain.
“Be serious. Teach me something,” she said. “A poem.”
“I’ll whisper it in your ear. Come here.”
When he had taught her some very enjoyable things to do with ears, he remembered a poem he had learnt at school.
“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.”
He translated it.
She frowned. “Not very gallant.”
“It’s Shakespeare, the very best. I prefer things that are real. And not fantasy. That’s why I like you, very much.”
Ilse felt herself blushing again. “I don’t want to like you too much.” “Why not?”
“I keep losing people.”
“How very careless. You’ll find it hard to lose me. I’ll be back in Marseilles soon. As soon as I can.”
There came the sound of an engine. A farmer’s van was chugging down the track. She glimpsed a hat. It had to be François. Arnaud started talking very fast.
“Now, that kissing we did. Very nice, but we can do better.” He put his good arm round her and pulled her closer. “I want to hold you— that’s it. Put your arms round me. Just so you understand the difference, I’m going to kiss you properly. Hold on tight. This is the real thing,” he said. And it was.
TWELVE
Hamburg, December 1941
The moon glinted on dirty snow as Nicolai bicycled round the frozen Binnenalster, singing in his head. This, the smaller of the two lakes, had been completely covered with camouflage netting and cleverly made to disappear. The Lombardsbrücke was also hidden under green gauze fixed to wire netting; a false bridge had been built over on the outer Alster to fool the bombers. He too had his false self. Wearing a uniform, his swing gear concealed in the saddlebag, he understood his city’s shams and subterfuges. Nearing Dammtor, air-raid sirens howled. He headed for the biggest bunker, concealing his camera under his sweater, fastening his coat up tight. The Leica presented a particular problem; photography was increasingly frowned upon as anti-German.
Pushing his way in, he stood in a crush of sullen people in damp coats, sweating with the heat of people shoved together in too small a space and all afraid as the thunder of distant bombing rippled over them. He breathed through his mouth to keep out the distinctive stench of sweat and unwashed clothes, as penetrating as bleach or lime. People stank and no wonder, when each month they were issued with one piece of soap the size of a matchbox. A joker next to him, a big fat fellow reeking of beer, kept farting and saying “Beware! Gas alert!” with a moronic laugh. Most faces were bleary, with eyes red-rimmed; people short on vitamins were surviving twelve-hour shifts in a factory with little sleep. But they were surviving: they were lucky. Excellent men like his father were sent away to fight and perhaps to die in Crete and Yugoslavia while career officers like Colonel Oster, who should have been despatched to the Eastern front, sat cosily on their arses in Lübeck.
His father’s letters described the ice colours of the sea, foaming up on a beach that was a dark volcanic grey. He was collecting little shells for Sabine, and green pebbles of glass, which the sea polished smooth, then slid up onto the shingle. Climbing a broad track, he had encountered a viper sunning itself, coiled, black and fat and looking exactly like a bl
ood sausage until it raised its wicked head and spat. A brown-skinned boy high on the crag had taken fright at the soldiers, had called to his goats in a broken voice, scurrying them away from the column of men. That boy, he wrote, had reminded him of his son.
Closing his eyes, Nicolai wished himself into that cloudless sky, that pure air. If he had been the boy who herded goats he would not have run away. He would have offered his damp cheese and dry bread to the German officer with the kind face, while the animals bleated and nudged them. He could imagine his father’s hands taking out his penknife and adroitly pulling out the blade. But the sun flashed on the sharp steel and nothing could be held in place. Away the imaginary boy went, scrambling and scraping, and Nicolai was back in the dark places.
The all clear sounded around two o’clock. The cold was a punch in the face. Somebody had taken his bike. Rage surged up, that electric impulse when a door was slammed in your face. Furious, he called out, “Who stole a bike belonging to the Hitlerjugend?” He had seen an apathetic queue galvanised to homicidal fury when a butcher shut his doors on them. When the man said he had tried to eke the meat out further by issuing eighty grams when the ration card said a hundred, they nearly lynched him. With clenched fists, Nicolai stared belligerently round. He would have to travel on crowded, infrequent trains, the stench such that people regularly fainted. It wasn’t just the bike: it had taken him months to get his outfit together, buying it piece by piece on the black market. Nicolai felt his way to the station on the icy cobblestones, his feet sliding about. Dammtor station was a shapeless dark mass, covered with matting to conceal it from the enemy. If he hadn’t known it so well, he would have been hard-pressed to find it. No train would leave for hours. The waiting rooms were locked, the benches too public. He could not afford to be picked up by the Gestapo; he had no good explanation for his presence here. He leant against a dark corner, snatching fitful moments of sleep.
The slamming of doors awoke him some time after three in the morning; a troop train had arrived and there were dark figures on the platform, stretcher-bearers wearing armbands. Wounded men emerged on crutches, others were being carried off. A high-pitched screaming noise erupted. One of the men being put on a stretcher was howling like a dog. “Stop them! They’re going to cut my legs off!”
Nicolai leant back into the shadows. The man’s face was almost completely black with frostbite. One ear was swaddled in a thick clump of bandage. He started to sob. The stretcher-bearer leant forward and threw a blanket over the man’s head. He flailed to get it off. His face came into view again, screaming. The bearer wadded a mass of something white together and shoved it into his mouth; abruptly the noise stopped. The head fell back onto the stretcher. The figures of the damned with their blackened skin flowed past; in minutes they were absorbed into the night and the station was empty. Occasionally Nicolai spoke to the ambulant among the one-armed, or to a one-legged veteran swinging himself past on crutches. He knew their bitter tales. He beat his hands together for warmth, to remind himself that he was alive and well.
Klaus said the ones with frostbite were the lucky ones; inside Russia the poor bastards were dying in their scores of thousands. “We got wine and perfume and stockings from France,” he had said. “Even the workers were eating foie gras. Now Mother Russia is chewing up our troops and spitting the bits in our faces. The masses won’t stand for it.” Admiring Russian fortitude, the grim determination to defend the motherland at any cost, he spoke of the coming Bolshevik revolution as inevitable: Germany’s working class craved it. Nicolai was not so sure. Because of Russia the shops had emptied. Because of Russia, the previous month every citizen had received a red printed card with a hole punched in it with their ration cards. This, to be hung on the radio dial, obscured everything but the official channel. It held a sharp reminder that anyone who listened to foreign stations would be mercilessly punished. A week later local Party snoopers called at each house to check the cards were still attached.
“They know how to make you curious,” said Klaus, who listened to the BBC and Radio Moscow nightly; he claimed half Germany did. After all, it only took a second to twirl the dial back to the Deutschlandsender. Foreign stations were the source of the new crop of rumours, which sprang up every morning; Magda brought them back from the markets, wishing the potatoes would grow as fast. One of the most improbable turned out to be true: that the Japanese had bombed the American fleet in Honolulu, and that Hitler had declared war on the United States.
When, at last, he was home, he went in at the back cellar door, made his slow ascent of the cellar stair, one step at a time, pausing and listening hard—if Lore was awake, his footfall would bring her out. His mother never woke. One night there would be an air-raid alert in their area and he would not be there: he wondered what his mother would say then. Sometimes Lore told him off, said he should not be out at night and especially not in low jazz dives. Cheeks hectic with a pink flush, the hair tumbling down her back, she was her most beautiful. At other times she was still, a strange yellowy white the colour of candle wax, almost as pale as her nightgown. She slept little; frustration woke her, she said, and worry. Once she dreamt that Ilse had found her way to America and for days reverted obliquely to the topic, wondering if dreams could be portents or messages. Misery lay in her eyes, in a certain way she had of staring at nothing. These moments, when he might perhaps take her hand and sit with her for ten minutes, both yawning, speechless and too tired to sleep, were precious. In the day there was never a moment without Sabine or some intervention. She said that he was her friend. He was, of course, but that was not quite how he saw things.
The Hitler Youth calendar for June showed a Bund deutscher Mädel girl in tight shorts and a white top leaping over the camera with arms stretched out. He kept her in his bedside table. Falling into bed, how often he was that camera. Again and again, the tanned girl leapt over him, her long smooth legs and high breasts so arousing that he could not help himself. She was mixed up somehow with Lore’s touch and the whore Klaus told him about, who had helped him to wash himself. The idea of a girl washing him was so exciting that at night he could not stop until, brimming with hot shame, he swore he would never touch himself again.
His father came home on leave from Greece, bursting into Nicolai’s room very early with a lens and spider-leg stand for close-up photography. They were unused, in the original box; he had bought them secondhand from Major Handelsmann, his commanding officer and friend.
“You can be a little spy with this and photograph secret documents,” he said, winking and at once starting to fit them together. Shaking off sleep, Nicolai observed how adroit his father was. He had forgotten his good looks, his fine figure set off by the smart grey tunic, how when his father laughed, he threw his head right back. When Nicolai got out of bed, they were both astonished to find that he was the taller by a good couple of centimetres. His father, embracing him, could not stop measuring the height difference with rueful delight. There was a grey shimmer on his dark hair. Sabine’s present, bought during a stopover in Rome, was a huge doll. She hung about in the doorway, sucked her thumb and was shy. Their father sat Susu on his knee and made it talk, showed Nicolai how its big blue eyes opened and closed, and never once looked at Sabine, who, fascinated, crept closer and closer until suddenly she was on the other knee.
The darkroom was big enough for the two of them to stand side by side, his father saying nothing, merely observing and indicating approval with a friendly squeeze to the elbow. He was to develop the films his father had taken; he watched pictures of little boats, white triangle sails forming in his tray, alongside harbours and fishermen mending their nets.
“What was Greece really like?”
“In the water round the coast there are creatures that really do sing, like the sirens,” said the gentle voice, “a kind of walrus, I’m told. I’ve never seen them.”
“I meant the war, Vati.”
The elbow squeeze was a little firmer then. “War is too
stupid to talk about. It’s got to be got through, but time here is too precious to spoil. I don’t want any of it stuck in your head.”
He would not satisfy any curiosity on anyone’s part. He was charming and cheerful and Nicolai rejoiced at his kindness, noticing how he included Lore in everything and talked to her in the most courteous and attentive way. But when his father sat down in the drawing room to listen to the news on the radio, his face could no longer conceal itself, it furrowed into anxious lines.
“I hear rumours, you know, about what’s really going on,” Nicolai said. “Don’t you trust me?”
Then his father rubbed his forehead and his face, smoothed out, took on a momentary, false calm. “Let’s talk about happy things,” he said.
A wonderful smell of warm gingerbread wafted from the kitchen. A bowl of stuffing stood on the side and a fat goose, when there was no goose to be had anywhere, not even a rabbit. In the oven, chestnuts were roasting, the skins blackened and split. Magda took one out, pinched off the skin to reveal the sweet creamy nut, so hot it would burn his tongue if he wasn’t careful. Nicolai stirred the red cabbage, breathing its vinegary sweetness, squashed the soft peppercorns with a fork. He had helped for much of the afternoon, setting the table with the best linen and china for a dozen. Sabine helped, too, filling salt cellars and carefully picking up each scattered grain on the tablecloth with a well-licked finger. A distant cousin of his mother’s, an officer who had been on the Eastern front, was one of the first to arrive. Nicolai steered Franzl into the sitting room, thinking that he might interrogate him about Russia. Klaus said the officers always knew more. He was a white-faced young man, smelling of nicotine.
“Why have the troops stalled in Russia if General Guderian is such a genius?”
Franzl looked at him suspiciously. “Even General Guderian cannot advance without fresh troops and supplies.”
He poured a glass of whisky from the decanter on the sideboard, emptied it. Whisky, like goose, was not to be had anywhere.
The Children's War Page 30