The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  But you were in that ditch, with me and Gruber. You were there. Don’t you remember?

  Yes, I know, but before then I was firing. I can still feel my finger on the trigger, even now.

  He lifted his shaking hand as if to show Heiden.

  I can still feel the pulse of it firing.

  It was then that Bürckel had started to sob, and Heiden put his arms around him.

  Everyone was scared, you know, he said. It might have been any one of us.

  But it was me. I know it, said Bürckel. Oh God. I am going to hell.

  She had been watching him from the kitchen for almost an hour: her father’s shirt off and his braces hanging down around his legs as he worked at the pump, jabbing iron wires he’d found in the garage up into the spout to try to clear out the silt. He pumped at the handle, the muscles in his arm flexing in the sun.

  The leaves of her mother’s mint plant were now dead and crumbled when she touched them, scattering their bits over the sill. She wondered how long she could go without water before she herself turned to dust.

  If God was real and he was a good God, he would give them water. But, with the war on, how could he be everywhere, watching everything, knowing that she needed him? With so many people to worry about, how could he save them all?

  She would store every memory she had, she decided, so that no matter what happened in the hours and days to come there would always be a part of her, secrets, that nobody could take.

  One Christmas, not so long back, while the rest of the family sat about in the sitting room examining their opened presents, her father had called her over and whispered in her ear that there was something else waiting for her in the hallway if she would like to find it.

  She had gone into the dark hall and at first found nothing; then she saw in the lamplight a pair of yellow wooden camels side by side on one of the steps, and, three or four steps higher, a pair of blue elephants no more than an inch tall.

  She laughed as she gathered up the camels and the elephants and then the two gray penguins that were waiting for her on the top step. She looked down the corridor and saw the trail of animals laid out before her. She collected them together in her jumper as she gathered them up—giraffes, hippos, antelope, and crocodiles—all the way to the steps to the attic, and then up those too—parrots, lions, and polar bears—until she was in the attic and there in the middle of the floor had been the most beautiful painted ark. A wooden Noah and his wife stood waiting outside.

  The front door swung open and the man came down the hall, almost running.

  “Lydia! A glass! A glass!”

  Moments later, out in the garden, she held it beneath the spout of the pump as he worked at it, and eventually the water came out, trickling at first and then coming out faster and faster. She looked at it, cloudy and dirty, and he took it from her and emptied it into the grass. Twice they filled the glass and tipped it away until finally the water ran clear and clean, and she held it up to the sun and saw how it sparkled. Drink it, he said. Lydia did, and it tasted cool and good.

  He could not decide. A 1938 Merlot or a 1936 Cabernet Sauvignon? He had taken all six bottles down from the top shelf of the larder, but they were all French and he had never been fanatical about French wine, much preferring a Spätburgunder or even an Italian Barolo. In the end he chose the Sauvignon because it reminded him of Dieppe and the café on the beach and the seven or eight of them from the Pioneer Group sprawled out on the pebbles that night, passing the bottles around. Though it had only been a few weeks ago, it didn’t feel like something that he had experienced at all—but rather someone else’s memory.

  He found a corkscrew in a drawer, two packets of cheese biscuits in the larder, and a tin of Skipper sardines. The tin of ham he found reminded him of Norway, and he opened it and dragged the processed meat out onto a chopping board with a fork; then he cut it into slices and displayed it in a swirl on a plate that was chipped but pretty, with cornflowers painted around its rim.

  His thoughts slipped back to the dynamite store and the man called Pendell.

  Heiden had been sorry about what Gruber did to the boy. He thinks we need the clothes.

  He had dignity, Pendell had told him. Do you people understand that? Your comrade has even robbed him of that.

  Heiden gave him the identity disc he’d taken from his pocket. I got you this, he said. The other half he had left on the chain around the boy’s neck.

  Pendell took it but said nothing. He was crouched outside the store, scooping up handfuls of snow and trying to wash his face with it. He had balanced his grubby uniform jacket on the end of a broken branch that he’d wedged into the frozen ground. Heiden watched over him from the doorway, his pistol loose in his hand.

  He remembered quite vividly now looking down the slope to the clearing where the young English officer’s body had eventually been buried beneath snow. When he had trekked down there to retrieve one of the discs, the boy had looked white and brittle, clumps of frost caught in his hair. He had to keep shooing crows away that were intent on pecking at the bloody bullet wounds in the boy’s chest. He had closed the boy’s eyelids and then snapped one of the bootlaces, now wet and rotten, from around the boy’s neck and pocketed the disc, leaving the other there with the body. As he walked back to the store, he had heard the crows landing again behind him, squabbling over their find.

  That morning the storm had stopped, and he and Gruber had known that if they were going to try to reconnect with the remnants of the platoon, they would need to move soon while it was still calm and light. In the store the man called Harris kept pulling at his collar and trying to kick off the coats and blankets around him. He was delusional, mumbling that he was burning up, his tongue thick in his mouth.

  In the kitchen Heiden opened the sardines and breathed in their sea smell. He drained the oil into a cup for later, and as he picked one of the fish out with a fork he tried to remember the song the man called Harris had kept on murmuring. Something about a rabbit and a farmer and a gun, but now, thinking back, he couldn’t be sure. Nothing in the past seemed real anymore. He slipped the sardine into his mouth and held it on his tongue, savoring the taste before he chewed it and let it slide down into his throat.

  He remembered offering Pendell some chocolate he had been saving. He had opened the small round tin and offered the man one of the chocolate triangles inside, and Pendell had said, Are you going to poison me?

  And he had replied, It’s Scho-Ka-Kola. Standard soldier ration. Not very good, I’m afraid.

  Pendell had thanked him and reached out to take one of the slices, and Heiden had done the same. He had sucked on the chocolate, which had been thick and warm and deliciously sweet. Together they had watched a grouse rummaging around for food in the frosted brambles and snow, and Heiden had thought about shooting it but too late—the grouse had gone.

  Now, in the kitchen, he collected the jam jars and scraped the waxy remnants from inside and then set to chopping the ends off some candles. Initially, for some weeks, he had put the conversation with Pendell out of his mind, had forgotten it entirely; and it was only later, when it had mattered, that it had returned to him as if all of a sudden it was fresh and new again.

  We’ve a house, back home, on the edge of the marshlands, Pendell had said, half a mile to the beach. It’s pretty, very pretty. We get grouse there too, you know. It’s jolly good for bird watching.

  He had told Heiden about the Suffolk marshes, about the different types of waterbirds they had there: oystercatchers, avocets, spoonbills, all sorts of warblers on the heath, woodlarks, and stonechats whose call was a tack-tack-tack and sounded, he said, like gunfire. We live midway between the village and the sea. A sort of outpost, he said. A village called Willemsley. A house called Greyfriars, the land having belonged to a grey friar monastery once. So peaceful and quiet, he said. He had laughed, perhaps at how sentimental he was sounding, but he carried on nevertheless, talking about the lavender in the garden, the budd
leia, their chickens, a rabbit…We have a terrace that we have tea on in the summer, he said, and a piano. My wife loves to play. Have you ever been to England?

  London, Heiden had told him; he had studied there.

  London? Oh. Dreadful place, that.

  Pendell had taken off his shirt and draped it over the stick. His skin was pale and he had a dark pink scar on his shoulder. He took a handful of snow and rubbed it into one of his armpits and then the other, grimacing. Over the hours they had watched each other; and yet there, seeing him outside with his shirt off in the brutal cold, Heiden realized how thin the man was. The muscles in his arms were prominent but not large. A hard worker, and yet his hands had the delicacy of a craftsman: long, thin fingers.

  A septic shot pellet, the man said, tilting his shoulder so Heiden could see the scar.

  A battle wound?

  Pendell smiled. No. An overzealous new recruit on training actually. Happened just before we were sent out. We got it out in the end, but the little blighter’s left a bit of a hole. I’ve never had a scar before. Jolly lucky really. They say, don’t they, that every man should have a scar somewhere, a distinguishing feature. Well, now, I have mine.

  He took two glasses from the cupboard and held them up to the light to see if they were clean. He had found apples in a muslin bag in the larder, next to a string of onions in the knotted leg of a stocking, and a jar of pickled cherries that had a handwritten label that was now yellow and peeling away from the jar. He listened for sounds of the girl. She was upstairs asleep on her bed. He wanted this to be a surprise. He needed her to trust him, and quickly; they were running out of time.

  He lit the candles and let them ooze wax into the bottom of the jars so that he could stand them inside, blowing them out once they were ready. Then he pocketed all but one of the spent matches for later.

  He sucked on this last match, softening the wood, as he went about preparing the rest of the food. He’d leave one in the kitchen window, just as he’d left one in the air-raid shelter. Perhaps one more in the work shed or in a bedroom window. Three cuts and the split wood edged apart to form the figure. The simplicity of it pleased him. The simple transformation.

  Now, I have mine. Yes, that was what the man had said, and it was then that Gruber had appeared in the doorway, leaning heavily against it, pistol in hand. He glared at them both. You two are getting friendly. Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m watching you and I’m watching you.

  He had pointed his pistol at Heiden and Pendell in turn.

  If you’re going to shoot us, then shoot us, Heiden said to him in German.

  Oh, I will, said Gruber, and he pretended to fire at them—Pop. Pop.—and then laughed. You two have lost your sense of humor.

  He had laid it all out while she was upstairs. Now he watched her face as she stood awkwardly in the doorway and looked at everything spread on the blanket. Though he had opened the windows as much as he could to try to let some air in, the shutters were still closed and the evening remained hot and damp. Enough daylight still filtered in that the candles glowing in the jars on the floor now seemed a pointless gesture.

  He watched her taking it all in—the green and blue tartan blanket from the back of the Crossley, the cheese biscuits, the plate of ham, the tomatoes, the sardines, the bowl of pickled cherries and wicker basket of apples, the Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses.

  “Well, sit down,” he said. “I thought we should celebrate, having water again.”

  He had put a cushion on the floor for her, and he sat cross-legged on another. The chairs were pushed back against the wall to give them ample space. His shirt stuck to his back and across his shoulders. He tried to pull it free but it kept clinging to him like another skin, wrapping its damp heat around him.

  She sat down and he waited for her to say something—something about the picnic, about the effort he’d gone to, or just a thank you—but she only looked at him and at the spread of food and, in the end, said nothing.

  “Would your parents allow you some wine?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  He put the bottle back down and then changed his mind and poured himself a glass anyway. He handed her a plate, thinking of the picnics he and Eva had enjoyed in the garret room, or the parade days in the Tiergarten or Tempelhof Field: paper bags of lemon tarts that they had got from the Wertheim department store, Eva lying with her head in his lap, the sound of children shouting and laughing, the smell of cut grass.

  He sipped at his wine and opened the cheese biscuits and offered them to her. She took just one. He put a handful on his own plate, along with a couple of slices of ham.

  He watched her as she nervously bit into the cheese biscuit and it cracked into pieces between her teeth and fell into her lap. She collected them and, keeping her head down, piled them on her knee, and then took another from the packet and studied it as if assessing the risk of another crumbling.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about some tomato?” They had been a last-minute addition to the picnic, found growing in a pot outside the back door. Only a few had been edible and he had picked them, cut them into quarters, and displayed them on a plate. She nodded and slowly reached out to take one and put it in her mouth. He took a mouthful of wine. Outside he could hear crickets twitching.

  “I have always liked to picnic,” he said. “It is a very English thing to do, isn’t it, and everyone does it, everywhere you go. People picnic. It makes them happy.”

  He waited for a response, but she lowered her eyes and slowly reached across for another piece of tomato.

  “Do you want some ham with that?” he said, offering her the plate.

  She shook her head. She put the tomato in her mouth and dragged the flesh from its skin with her teeth; then she laid the skin out on her knee next to the pile of broken biscuit. The skins were tough, but it was little wonder she was gangly if she was going to be this fussy.

  He tried her with a smile. They’d had conversations before—she’d interrogated him about God, for heaven’s sake. Why wasn’t she eating anything when he’d gone to all this trouble?

  He took another gulp of wine. What he wouldn’t give to be drunk now: deliriously, ridiculously drunk.

  “I used to have an apartment in Berlin,” he said, trying to come up with a story. “We used to lay a blanket down and have picnics like this on the floor. Put a blanket down anywhere and some food, and suddenly everything is all right because you’re picnicking.”

  He looked at the girl. She was still offering no conversation. He tried again.

  “Do you like school?”

  She nodded.

  “I wanted to be a teacher once,” he said. “But it was not to be. War changes a lot of things. Plans get changed.”

  He took another mouthful of wine. He tried to imagine her as a woman, redrawing her in his mind with generous curves and another four or five inches of height. She would always be a slight girl. She hadn’t the frame to be much larger. Eva had been slight too.

  He could feel the alcohol now, thick like an oil spill over his thoughts, and heavy in his head. He went to the gramophone and lifted the lid, then raised the arm to inspect the needle.

  “What shall we play?” He opened the cabinet beneath and took out the collection of shellac records. He looked over his shoulder at her. “Do you have any favorites?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Then I shall have to decide.”

  It took a few minutes, flicking through the selection several times before choosing one called “Summer Classics” because it seemed the most apt. He removed the record from its sleeve and lowered it through the spoke. He slowly turned the winding lever, feeling the tension tightening, and placed the needle in its groove.

  There was a crackling anticipation before a scratchy recording of Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on Greensleeves” started. He smiled at how contrived
the selection was, how patriotic of the English to put an English composer first when Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart would have made for a much more appropriate opening.

  “Germany has produced more of the world’s finest composers than anywhere else. Bach, Beethoven, Handel,” he said. “Pachelbel, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, the list goes on.”

  “We’re not supposed to play German music,” said the girl. “Father won’t allow it.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” he said. “You take away the German composers and there really isn’t much worth listening to.”

  He emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass. The music sounded distant, as if coming to him through a dream, and the room was hot and clammy, the wine slowly unpicking him. He wished he could break her open and see what she was thinking. He wondered if she hated him, if she was still scared. He could barely imagine the house without her. There was some comfort in knowing someone was with him, in hearing her footsteps overhead, in finding telltale signs of her in the rooms—an unmade bed, a kicked-off sandal, a glass over a dead fly.

  He thought of Professor Aritz’s house in Pimlico, of Baxter pawing at his shin with his disgusting bit of bone between that shaggy-haired jaw and wanting Heiden to toss it down the hall for him to fetch and slide and skitter back over the tiles with. He had only visited the house three or four times, but each time they had gone out to the local park and took a turn around the lawns as Baxter pelted up and down, scattering the pigeons and small children.

  It had been no surprise to the professor when Heiden decided to abandon his studies in London and go back to Germany. He knew that Heiden felt it his duty.

  So…you are lost to us, the professor said.

  I am not lost, Heiden said. We all know that I was never going to be one of the great musicians.

  Perhaps not, but better than most. You sell yourself short. And I’m afraid I shall rather miss our squabbles.