The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  They went from body to body, looking for men they knew, and softly mumbling the names as they were found or simply pushing the eyelids shut. He could barely see the shapes of his two companions as they drifted about through the mist on their own bewildered wanderings. One of them shouted. Hey! Hey! And then started calling out names—Röthke, Schröder, Studmann, Türke—his voice echoing through the trees—Where are you?—but there was no reply.

  He staggered back: young and lanky and frightened. He was a Schütze, a marksman, and just a Private, not long out of school, whom Heiden would later know as Bürckel. The young soldier stared at him, questioning, and shook his head in disbelief.

  When the third man came crunching back towards them through the snow, Heiden saw that he was tall and stocky, built like a bear. He’d lost his helmet in the cross fire, and he took another from one of the dead as he passed and smacked it against his hand to beat off the snow.

  They’re all ours.

  Heiden nodded.

  The man slapped the helmet on his head. Jesus Christ, he said.

  They walked all day, exchanging names but little else. The older, bearlike soldier, Gruber, was a Lance Corporal and the same rank as Heiden, but he had served for twice as long and made a point of telling Heiden that. For most of the day Gruber lumbered on ahead through the snow, taking the lead without any consultation, while Heiden followed behind with the boy, feeling sick to his stomach. The more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that there never had been any Norwegians. Did the others understand? Should he tell them, he wondered? I think we did this to ourselves.

  Bürckel bore the brunt of Gruber’s anger. He was fresh out of training, and he had a way of blinking, slowly and thoughtfully, as though he was mildly but constantly surprised by everything. He would cry before the day was out; Heiden could see it in his face. He walked more slowly than the other two and froze every time Gruber coughed, as if he thought it might be gunfire. It wouldn’t have surprised Heiden if it had been Bürckel who had started the firing. There was plenty of room for panic in his bewildered blue eyes.

  The snow got deeper and their progress slower. The straps of his pack rubbed the skin raw under his clothes, and the cold bit at his nose and cheeks. Every limb felt dead and heavy. Not much further, he kept telling himself, although he had no idea where Gruber was leading them.

  They stopped to change their socks and drink from their canteens, the freezing-cold water drizzling out from around the lozenges of ice that had frozen inside. He took out a compass and map, holding it to the trunk of a tree.

  Ach! You’re wasting your time, said Gruber. We’ve no idea where we are.

  And so an argument followed. Heiden was adamant that the Ofoten line was up-country. That was where the others would head, and that was north, he said.

  How the hell do you know? said Gruber. You can’t even tell me where we are!

  But by this point he had endured enough of the man. He hauled his rucksack onto his back, then folded the map and gathered up his rifle and slowly set off again through the snow.

  So you’re in charge now, are you? Gruber yelled after him.

  Heiden did not reply.

  She turned the handle as silently as she could and then opened the door just wide enough to slip through. She closed it behind her, keeping her hand on the handle until it had turned fully back again in case it made a sudden click. She leaned back against the door and breathed. Alfie’s room was in darkness, all the shapes and silhouettes of his things losing their edges in the night as if they were slowly fading away.

  She didn’t know what time it was, but she knew it was late. Even after the soldier’s breath had slowed and grown softer, she lay there staring out into the blackness for what must have been hours. Eventually she could bear it no longer and slid out from under the sheet, and now she was here with Alfie and already she felt safer.

  She sat on the floor against his bed with Mr. Tabernacle held to her chest, his single black eye watching. She had never known where the other one had got to, falling out somewhere and forgotten, looking out now perhaps at a very different world: a dusty, fluff-filled corner beneath a floorboard or under a chest of drawers, or perhaps out there in the undergrowth of the garden or half-buried in the woods.

  She lay on Alfie’s bed and pulled a handful of blanket from beneath her and held it to her nose. A tiny white feather had caught itself within the wool and she picked it out and held it—so soft and downy in her hand it almost melted away. She concentrated all her thoughts on him, on squeezing him back into existence, until at last she could feel him in the room with her, sitting on the bed, the tips of his fingers gently pulling locks of her hair out from beneath the neck of her nightdress and stroking the back of her head.

  Tears began to swell, trapped behind her closed eyelids. She saw Old Mr. Howe opening the gate and cycling awkwardly up the drive. She saw the tires of his bike slipping in the gravel. She had thought about it so often these last few days that she couldn’t shake the images. Perhaps her mother had been there already, scrubbing at the doorstep or sitting on it shelling peas in a bowl and catching the morning sun on her face. Mr. Howe might have guessed what was in the telegram he was delivering. He wouldn’t have cracked his usual quips, but her mother wouldn’t have known. Going to be another scorcher, Bill! she might have said. Or I’m doing peas. You can take some with you. I won’t eat them all on my own. And maybe he just handed her the telegram, or maybe he said, Annie—I’m sorry. And he would have walked with his bike back down the drive, his bag of letters in the basket at the front, the cycle clips around his ankles; and her mother would open the telegram but she would know it already. She would feel it in her stomach, in the dark space where he had grown inside her from such a tiny seed. She would know, and she would walk partway down the drive as if they were her own last steps before her legs finally buckled from under her.

  For the rest of the afternoon no one spoke. Snow fell, growing heavier, until before long they were caught in a blizzard and he had lost all sense of direction; after two days of mist the mountainside, forests, rocky outcrops, and gorges were all starting to look the same.

  He tried to remember the marching tune, because he was sure he had carried one with him all this way, and for some reason he was struggling to recall it. Without it he didn’t feel that he could walk another step.

  As it was though, it was the boy, Bürckel, who fell. He had been staggering for some time, weaving from side to side as if he was barely conscious, and then his legs crumbled and he fell into the snow, sobbing. Heiden struggled to haul him up but he was a slack weight in his arms.

  Get up, he said. Get up.

  The boy shook his head. He would not move. He sat half-collapsed, his gloved hands pressed into the snow, his lips blue and his breath short.

  Heiden looked up at Gruber, who was standing some distance ahead watching.

  Help me with him, he called.

  But Gruber wouldn’t.

  Heiden struggled to pick the boy up.

  Gruber, for God’s sake, help me!

  Ach, just leave him, the man called back. If he wants to die, let him die. Look at the state of him anyway.

  But Heiden would not leave him.

  You get up. You get up now. That’s an order, he shouted. With both his arms around the boy and with every last bit of strength he had, he hauled Bürckel back to his feet. Over the howling blizzard, he spat the words into the boy’s ear. We are not going to die. Do you hear me? We are not going to die! So don’t you say you can’t go on! Don’t you fucking dare!

  With their arms around each other, they slowly set off again, staggering to catch up with Gruber, but Gruber was already walking on ahead, disappearing into the storm.

  From the chair she watched him as he slept. He didn’t look “bad.” She leaned in as close as she dared. His hair was straight and dark and fine, falling loosely over his forehead. He had long eyelashes for a man and his face was tanned and smooth. She wonder
ed how old he was. When she looked closely at his face she could see the faintest of lines crisscrossing his skin. She wanted to gently lift his eyelids open to see his bright blue eyes.

  The wound on his shoulder looked like a bullet hole, and yet the hole it had made seemed deeper, as if someone had stuck a finger into him or something had been dug out. Perhaps he had been chased like an animal, hunted down and captured and tortured. Perhaps inside he was all broken. She wanted to kiss the wound, like her mother used to do—to somehow magic it better. A German had probably killed her brother and yet, with his sleeping body there in front of her, she felt strangely safe.

  She put the backs of her fingers as close as she dared to his nostrils so that the breeze of his breath blew warm against them and tingled, and then she lifted her hand to her own nose but smelled nothing but her own fingers. He did look a little like her father, such a strong chin, such sharp cheeks. They had the same slant to their noses, and there was something else, something deeper, a suggestion of her father that she couldn’t quite name. She watched the flickering of dreams playing beneath his eyelids. She wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, just to feel if he was warm.

  He dreamed of the men slipping over the side of a boat like oily droplets into black water. The boat was dark; lights off, engines silent, the swell slapping against its hull. A huddle of hooded silhouettes watched from the rail. Then a nod, a hand signal, and the swimmers peeled away, six men fanning out, their breaststrokes barely etching a ripple.

  They made their way through a thin mist, the waves rippling almost silently against them; their rucksacks, strapped to their chests, clung like limpets; their ammunition boots, tied and hanging from their necks, dragging beneath them through the water.

  They passed silently through debris—the remnants of a torpedoed tug: bits of wood, fragments of blasted crates, rags of paper and maps, the body of a seaman face down and bumping gently against a spar. A searchlight skated out across the sea from the coastal battery, and one by one the swimmers slipped beneath the water as it passed over them. Deep below them, moored contact mines hung like sticklebacked moons.

  Sunday

  The curved corrugated-iron roof of the shelter had been buried, but now the earth was dust dry and the dead vegetables were lagging out of the soil, their roots bared to the sun. On one side of the shelter door were flowerpots shaped like amphorae and full of crisp dried lavender, bees busying themselves among the scented heads. On the other side was a pile of sandbags and a garden hand fork. High up in the cloudless sky he could hear the grumbling of a plane.

  He looked up, waiting for the noise to fade, and pushed open the door. Ducking his head beneath the frame, he sidled in, his foot fumbling for the narrow steps inside. A sequestered coolness embraced him, and for some reason Keats jumped into his mind—“Cooled a long age in the deep delvèd earth.” Professor Aritz, he thought, would be proud. A hurricane oil lamp hung from a hook in the highest point of the ceiling, and, taking a box of matches from his pocket, he struck one, lit the lamp, and dropped the spent match into his pocket for later. A warm orange light filled the tiny shelter. The floor was covered in duckboards. A slatted wooden seat ran along the entire length, and on the other side were two wooden bunks, each with a small pillow and blanket, chilled damp. At the end of the shelter a blackened metal box acted as a table and looked as if it had once been burned out. On it were two half candles, a few paperbacks and a Bible, a pack of playing cards, and a small photograph in a frame. The picture was of a boy of maybe eighteen or nineteen in a smart soldier’s uniform. His hair looked newly cropped and he was trying not to smile. The photograph reminded him of Bürckel. Gruber had said, That boy’s a ticking bomb.

  He sat on the lower bunk and held the lamp up. The air was dank and earthy. Everything was dusty. As the oil lamp flickered he felt a little claustrophobic, as if, with his knees up and arms huddled to his sides, he was too big for the shelter or it was too small.

  It was Gruber who had found the concrete store, tucked away from the edge of the mountainside beneath a canopy of trees. Its roof was covered to a depth of two feet, and great surfs of snow were blown up against its walls. A small square window at the front was shuttered up, and so was another at the side. They had stood outside as the storm howled around them, Heiden beside Gruber, rifle ready, while Bürckel hung back. Gruber pushed at the door and tried the handle but it wouldn’t budge. Then he rammed his shoulder hard against it. There was a split and a crack as the door splintered and broke open; and inside there was sudden shuffling in the dark and hurried movement. Gruber fired once, then again. He shouted something and they crowded in to the smell of sweat and cordite, and the sight of three pale faces. A man in a naval uniform was standing in the far corner against the wall. A second was squatting in the opposite corner, wrapped in a coat. The third was slumped against the wall, Gruber’s two blackened shots through the chest.

  The two remaining men raised their hands.

  Norwegian? Heiden shouted.

  British. We’re British, the man standing said. Please. Please, don’t shoot.

  Standing up and putting the lamp down on the floor he took the books, candles, and playing cards off of the tin box and prized the lid open. Inside were two cans of soup, some smelling salts and disinfectants, boric ointment, cotton and bandages, a torch, and some spare batteries. He considered taking them all with him but then changed his mind—he had enough to carry. He sat back down on the bunk, waiting like he had done as a child for his father to come home. Sometimes his father would come in bloodied. He and his Freikorps comrades were always getting drunk and into brawls. He’d spend his nights at a beer hall on Alexanderplatz looking for trouble. He wasn’t like that when Heiden’s mother first met him, she had said. Before the last war Heiden’s father had never been an angry man.

  It was at times like this that he missed his mother. She had been religious. His father had not. They had fallen on opposing sides of the fence on so many matters. His mother—being the family optimist—said it was good that she and his father had taken views on so many things. Every argument presented the boy with a choice. But it wasn’t always that clear to him, between belief and nonbelief, black and white, right and wrong. Like many of his generation he had floundered with life’s numerous options. The Third Reich had helped them on that. It had freed them of the worry of choice, giving his generation focus, something to believe in when God was no longer any good, or perhaps not even there.

  The older he got, however, the more baffling he found it—caught between doing what was good and God’s way, and what was right and the way of the Führer. As God fell out of favor, Heiden was happy for the National Socialists to take the upper hand. Many, it seemed, didn’t care which way society was going so long as somebody was steering it somewhere. Eva had not been so sure.

  He got onto his knees beside the bunks, taking the oil lamp down with him. In the narrow gap between the bunk and the floor a farmyard had been set out: herds of metal cows, ducks, horses, pigs, and sheep. At the far back, beyond the fields of tin animals, something was caught between the bunk and the corrugated wall, slipping down behind the makeshift bed. He moved the lamp closer and reached under until he could just about grasp the papers between his fingertips and pull them free. It wasn’t a document, as he had hoped, but a homemade book of sheets of paper folded and threaded together in the middle. The cover was drawn in crayon and pencil—a large face with a wonky crown, and behind it a castle on a very rounded hill and what was perhaps a gray dragon or maybe just a large dog. Each letter of the title was written in a different colored pencil, and it ran all the way around the edge of the cover so that he had to keep turning the booklet to read it: The Incredible Adventures of the Tiny Princess.

  He flicked through the story and smiled at the crudely drawn pictures. As he reached the end a photograph fell out. It was the photograph the girl had been talking about: She was standing in front of a window, a year or so younger, the flash of the
camera shining in the dark glass behind her as if it were a halo. Someone had drawn lines in the condensation, two thin swoops arching up from behind her shoulders and then swooping back down like angel wings. He looked at it for a little while and then slipped the photograph into his pocket.

  He pulled one of the spent matches from his pocket and put all but the head of it into his mouth until the wood had softened, and then took the small knife from his other pocket. He rested the Bible on his knees and, in the flickering glow of the oil lamp, he laid the match on it and made three incisions into the wood: one from the base to a point midway up the match, and one on either side just below the head. He carefully opened up these cuts until it was just right, then smiled to himself, for it had not broken. The secret, he remembered, was in the softening of the wood.

  He stepped out of the air-raid shelter into the blazing sun. Midmorning but already hot. Another unendurable day. He tried to loosen the man’s braces but they still dug into his shoulders, causing him some discomfort at the site of the wound, and he sweated beneath the straps. He unfastened another shirt button and looked up at the sky; the plane was long gone but it or others would be back.

  From the corner of his eye he saw something moving in the vegetation beneath the trees nine or ten feet into the wood. Something small and white. It moved again and then stopped, half-hidden beneath the dock leaves and ferns. He took a few steps closer across the lawn, taking his pistol from his pocket. A creature of some sort, perhaps a cat. In the rush for people to leave their homes no doubt a great number of pets had been set loose into the woods and fields to fend for themselves. But this wasn’t a cat or a dog; it was too small. He cocked his gun and waited for it to move again. The release of the safety lock startled it, and he watched as a pure white rabbit scampered deeper into the woods, its fluffy tail bobbing as it scurried beneath a fallen branch and vanished.