The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  He imagined Eva living here, walking down the same landing, her own arms full of sheets, making their bed up perhaps, tucking in the sides, patting out the pillows, a sprig of lavender tucked beneath the covers. She’d sit in the sitting room reading the newspaper. She’d worry about the world, the things that were happening that she could do nothing about. She would catch him watching her over her half-rim glasses—What’s so funny? she would say—and then she would laugh at him and it would make him smile.

  In Berlin he had rented a small garret room in the corner of a large tenement block. The building had been constructed in the 1920s—part of a new architectural movement designed to bring functional living space to the masses—but already it was looking worn out and tired, as if functionality was a hard grind. There was a kitchen area in the corner with a surfeit of cupboards, most of which remained empty. In the living area they’d hung paintings over the walls to hide the patches where the plaster was pulling away. Eva would sometimes bring him flowers, holly, grasses, even clutches of twigs if that was all she could find. She’d tie a red ribbon around them and put them in a chipped glass vase—and there they’d sit, bold and defiant in their color, until they turned gray and dry.

  He had chosen the room solely for its window and view. They would sit opposite each other, legs thatched together, feeling the snug of each other’s toes beneath their buttocks, or Eva leaning back against him between his open thighs.

  From up high Berlin looked peaceful, all the sound drained away, all the disturbances, smells, and struggles. They would watch the sunsets—the reds and pinks and oranges unfurling themselves from behind the buildings. We’re halfway up to heaven, Eva told him.

  Yes, he said. Or halfway down to hell.

  They had no table and would eat cross-legged on the floor, Eva laying out a red checked cloth with tassels around the edges so that every day was a picnic day. They would listen to the dripping tap, to the tick of the metronome swinging, to the wireless or the gramophone—Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei,” Kreisler’s “Liebesleid,” Ponce’s “Estrellita”—all of which they themselves had played on some occasion or another. Sometimes they would push the furniture back and waltz about the room, bumping into things as they went, their feet drawing invisible patterns on the floor. The waltz was the only dance that he could do without tripping over his own feet. Eva would tease him, saying that he made the dance his own, and he would tip her back into his arms and pretend he was going to drop her so that she shrieked and laughed.

  Now, in the sitting room, he lifted the sheet from the piano and opened it up, then sat on the stool and gently rested his fingers on the keys.

  If you ever go to fight, she had said, I want to fight too.

  He had laughed. And what would you fight for?

  Freedom and justice. I don’t know. The rights of all people…

  German people?

  Everyone.

  You can’t fight for everyone, he said. You have to take a side.

  Why?

  Why? He laughed again.

  I don’t want to be left here dangling, worthless. I’d have to do something, she said.

  He let one finger play its droll note and hang for a moment in the air.

  “I can play ‘Clair de Lune.’” The girl was standing in the doorway, fingering the buttons of her cardigan. “I could play it. If you want me to.”

  “No,” he said. “No, thank you.”

  He closed the lid and she stood there a while longer, perhaps thinking he might change his mind or do something, but he didn’t; in the end, she backed out into the hall and disappeared. He draped the sheet back over the piano; it was better not to touch.

  She slowly retraced her steps back upstairs and found herself drifting into the bathroom. She perched on the edge of the bath, its numbing coolness under her thighs making her feel suddenly helpless. She wondered what to do. Earlier she had made them a lunch of sorts but had left his on the sideboard along with a note so that she didn’t have to speak to him. Then she’d made herself busy, getting a room ready for him, because if she were more like her mother perhaps her mother would come back. Soon, surely sometime soon, someone would come to look for her. She had taken clean, ironed sheets and pillowcases from the cupboard. Her mother always put clean sheets on the bed when a guest arrived, even if the sheets on the bed hadn’t been used. It was better to have fresh sheets, she said, and, besides, the spare room often smelled musty. Fresh clean sheets and an open window, her mother said, soon fixed that.

  She’d tugged the old sheets from the bed and set to making it up again with the new. As she worked, she had pretended that she had a little girl of her own who today was insistent on reading something to her, a pamphlet she had found.

  “Yes, yes,” she said to the girl. “Now come on, you’re getting under my feet, and I’ve a WVS meeting at eleven and washing to hang out and cakes to bake and dinner to cook for your father. Go and read that thing in the sitting room if you want to read it, but not under my feet.”

  She shooed the girl away, then turned back and looked at the bed appraisingly. The sheets’ corners could have been tucked in better but she had at least made an effort. She supposed it only right that she treated him like a guest.

  Alfie said that spies were the people that you least suspected, and in Wales the boys had always been talking about codes, symbols carved into the trunks of trees, shapes cut into the sides of stiles to give the Germans directions; even an ordinary pile of stones might mean the invasion was coming. She had spent hours in Wales hiding under the bed, trying to find secret messages in her mother’s letters. They were so dull and ordinary that they must have been hiding something. She wrote of nothing but shopping trips and days out. She’d gone up to Southwold, she wrote once, and half the shops were boarded up. It really was a waste of a day. The place was like a ghost town. The galloping horses were still there though, and that funny little man. Do you remember? And when Lydia wrote back and said that she did, she put a tiny dot next to the letters that spelled out I LOVE YOU. When her mother’s reply arrived, several days later, she studied it for hours to see if she’d used the same code and then had been disappointed and quite surprised that she hadn’t.

  She looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. She was definitely looking older, and rather pale despite the summer. She bit at her lips to make them red, then refastened the clips that kept her hair out of her eyes. You can’t let yourself go, she said to herself, just as her mother did, and then she sighed as her mother did too. You’ve got to be strong. She took the cloth from the cabinet and wiped it around the sink bowl, clearing it of the dried specks of white foam and tiny bits of hair spattered from his shaving. Just like her father, she thought—leaving bits of himself in the sink.

  If she went down to the kitchen now, she might suddenly find him there, or her mother. Oh there you are, her mother would say, as if nothing much had happened. We wondered where you’d got to. Didn’t you hear me call?

  Voices. Always voices. It had never been a quiet house. The sound of the wireless or the gramophone or the piano coming from the sitting room. Alfie and Eddie’s shouts and cheers coming from the dining room where they shot the bagatelle ball around the board that their father had made and it clattered about among the pins. Cheer up, darling, her mother would have said to her. Her father would say, Don’t cry.

  They all had something they tried to think about to take their minds off the march. Some counted in foreign languages or wrote poems or letters to loved ones in their heads. He made up rhythms to walk to that fell in line with the long, hard slog. A slow base beat: left, right, left, right, one-two-three-four. He would lay tunes over the top. A mournful song for his cello or, if the march was flat and easy, a fanfare of trumpets, bringing in a lone violin sometimes or a clarinet or a soprano, turning it operatic. The starting point was always the rhythm though. He could write concertos, adagios, or waltzes to it. It didn’t matter, as long as the rhythm kept his feet moving, kept him som
ehow alive.

  Occasionally, low over their heads, came the deep-throated grumble of a plane circling—paratroopers perhaps, but beneath the tree cover and thick cloud it was impossible to tell.

  The weather worsened and they became sluggish and despondent, staggering through the snow and battling against the wind. As they moved downslope to lower ground, the mist thickened and he began to feel nauseous. The packs on their backs had grown heavier with every passing hour, and they could barely see more than ten feet ahead of them.

  They pushed on, but as the dimly lit afternoon seeped away the gale winds drove the snow hard into their faces. They struggled to make headway, lurching and staggering through the blizzard like drunkards. Eventually they dug in for the night and fastened their tent quarters together in groups. Some, himself included, lit small stoves, but they offered little warmth. Where they could they dug shallow trenches in the snow between the trees as a feeble line of defense and took turns watching long into the frozen night.

  They hadn’t had much equipment when they’d landed; the majority of it had been washed overboard on the journey over, and the supply ships destined for Narvik had failed to arrive. Most of the weapons and provisions they had they’d seized from the Norwegian arms depot at Elvegårdsmoen, but it wasn’t enough. A few winter bivouacs, but no skis and no camouflage equipment. Against the French Alpine troops they would be easy pickings. Their clothes were insufficient. The snow clung heavy to their greatcoats, slowly soaking through the material and freezing them from the inside out.

  He shared a tent with three others, one of whom spent most of the night coughing. The night was long and bitter, and full of strange forest noises. In the early hours of the morning there was shooting, bullets puttering into the snow. Norwegians, they supposed, but none had seen a thing. The platoon took their positions and fired back, but the night was too dark and they were too exhausted to do much but shoot blindly into the trees. When the gunfire ceased some tried to sleep. They crawled out of their tents at first light to find the men on watch blanketed in snow, seven of them dead—not shot but frozen inside their clothes, their lips sealed shut with ice and eyelids stitched closed with frost.

  In the spare bedroom he remade the bed, laying the sheets and folding them tight around the corners of the mattress, so it now looked as if made for a welcomed guest. He smoothed down the blanket and plumped the pillows. The bedroom was small but adequate.

  He opened the wardrobe and, checking the girl was not watching, he flicked through her father’s clothes, picking out a tweed suit that was frayed around the cuffs but looked smart enough, a crisp white shirt, and a pair of black boots not too dissimilar to his own. He turned down the framed photograph on the dressing table, then undressed and put on the man’s shirt, his trousers, some brown socks, and button-down braces. He sat on the four-poster bed as he heaved on the boots. Eva had always liked him looking smart.

  There was a job, she had told him. She was going to apply for it. A hospital. Out in the country. Not even in Berlin. It was paying thirty marks a week, she said. Think what she could do with that.

  He had looked out of the garret window and slowly let out a sigh. The sky over the city was turning mauve. Dvořák’s Cello Concerto was playing on the gramophone. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to be happy or to feel that she was doing something good, it was just…

  But now he couldn’t remember.

  It’s a psychiatric institution, she added. So you don’t need a state certificate. They train you on the job.

  But what about the orchestra?

  All this talk of war, she told him. Everyone was getting involved somehow. All the most experienced nurses will probably end up being transferred to the general hospitals, and institutions like this…they’ll be left with no one. I need to be doing something more useful. Always it came down to that, he thought. And anyway, no one has the time or even cares about going to music recitals anymore. Music won’t save anyone; it won’t win us a war.

  She was being ridiculous of course. All this talk of war would blow over by Christmas. You’ll see, he said. And then you won’t need to worry about saving people. We’ll all die old and gracefully, and incurably bored.

  But Eva was adamant.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. He had almost forgotten where he was: standing in a strange room in front of a mirror and looking at himself or someone very much like him. The boots were a little big but everything else fit perfectly. He adjusted the braces and straightened his collar, leaving the top two buttons undone. Too hot for the jacket but he’d perhaps wear it in the evening. He would invest in this house, he decided; give himself to it until every detail of it was embedded within him—boots, books, bricks, and all.

  He ran a comb through his hair and gently patted it into place, then studied himself once more in the mirror, with the faintest flicker of a smile.

  Her mother had probably spent hours sewing the shillings into the cuffs of her cardigan, Just in case, and now, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, Lydia had unpicked them all and taken them out and she didn’t know why. The broken threads still hung from the ends of the woolen sleeves, and she pulled them out like needle-thin worms. I want to make sure you’ve always got some money with you, whatever happens, her mother said. Just in case. She looked at the pile of coins on the floor, all her mother’s work undone, and felt rather sick. You’re always meddling, her mother would say, but Lydia couldn’t help it.

  Now her mother wouldn’t come back. Lydia didn’t deserve it. And what had she been thinking, talking to the man? She shouldn’t have made the bed for him. She shouldn’t be helping him at all.

  She got up and brushed the bits of thread from her grubby dress. Her legs were covered in scratches and bruises. You’re not a girl’s girl, are you, dear? Joyce had once said. Lydia had never been one for dolls; she had always preferred to be with the boys, charging through the house barefoot, fighting with sticks, kicking at balls, making camps and going on adventures. The boys in Wales had been a different breed though—they were savages, and she had no mind to play with them. They seemed to think that evacuees like her and Button had been sent for them to torment. Get the vackies! they’d yell as they came bursting out of the woods and down the hill, waving sticks and throwing stones. It was almost always Button they got, and when they did, they gave him a pounding so that he came back to the house bruised and bloodied.

  She climbed into the wardrobe and carefully shut the door. She felt oddly safe in there, in the dark. She understood now why Button had hidden in wardrobes—here, and in Wales, and maybe back in his homeland too. You could pretend that you didn’t exist, that nobody could find you, that outside the wardrobe everything was ordinary and exactly as it should be.

  I was about your age when the last war started, her father had said. It will be all right, you’ll see.

  Through the darkness, she heard the sound of Alfie running up the stairs, bounding up them two at a time as he always did. She pushed the doors open and tipped herself out onto the floor, scrambling quickly to her feet, and ran out into the corridor. She looked both ways.

  “Alfie!” she called, feeling an inexplicable tremor of hope. “Alfie! Are you there?”

  He sat on the floor of the study, taking each drawer out of the desk in turn and painstakingly sorting through its contents. He kept a notebook beside him, and every now and again, as he pored over letters and photographs, newspaper clippings and receipts, he jotted down items of interest: dates and names and past holidays, a week in Southwold last August, a wedding in the New Forest…The Torquay Saloon, he discovered, had been bought from a dealer in a town called Stowmarket for what he thought was an extortionate price.

  He thumbed through photograph albums and a collection of postcards tied together with string, most of them from a woman called Em. He would take a small collection of letters and photographs, he had decided, and he picked out a few and put the rest carefully back in the drawer.
r />   She sat cross-legged on the floor outside the door at the end of the corridor. He had slowly been searching the rooms of the house, for what she didn’t know, but she had come to the firm decision that he wasn’t to go into this room. She dug at cracks in the floorboards with a broken match she’d found on a windowsill and listened to the house slowly expanding in the heat. Every hour brought more dust in the air. It got inside her, filling her lungs. She imagined being dead, her body like an empty shell containing nothing but dust. Or she imagined throwing open the wardrobe door and seeing her mother crouching in the corner, just like Button. Ah, you’ve found me, she would say, as if everything was a game. With her eyes squeezed tight and her concentration pulled taut and steady, Lydia could put them anywhere she wanted. Her mother at the piano. Her father in his work shed, or out on the terrace with his newspaper and carpet slippers, the smell of his Woodbines drifting in through the window. Alfie in the garden with Eddie bowling a few overs.

  She could put them all in the garden, a whole throng of people. She could put them there on a Sunday, one of her mother’s annual garden parties for the Red Cross, perhaps. Last year, she remembered, in the morning they had gathered around the wireless—Chamberlain had been speaking to the nation. But in the afternoon they held the party anyway, war or no war—her mother had insisted because everything was planned. Trestle tables on the lawn. Her mother put out cream teas, strawberries, cider, and their homemade elderflower wine. Some of her father’s chums played a banjo, a guitar, a trumpet, and a slide trombone. There were flags in the trees, and streamers. People squatted on the edge of the chicken run or fed carrots through the grill to Jeremiah. Some of the ladies from the WVS danced barefoot in their summer dresses on the lawn, and one of them tried to do cartwheels, laughing, with cornflowers and celandine poking out of her hair. Alfie and Eddie served drinks on trays and threw each other wry expressions.