The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  And now he was here, and it was all her doing—she had cried wolf and the wolf had come.

  She stood up and looked at her reflection. She would not cry; she would not let herself. She wouldn’t think anymore. She imagined her body filled with pebbles, like the people in the half-buried bungalow on the beach—a girl now made of stone.

  She found him in the sitting room in her father’s chair, still drinking her father’s wine. He didn’t look up and at first she thought he was asleep. She waited in the doorway. She wasn’t quite sure how she should stand and she found herself fidgeting. He must have known that she was there. He must have heard her breathing. She could feel her heart quickening. Should she take another step in, say something, do something?

  He lifted his head and looked at her.

  “Scrub that off,” he said.

  She stood quite still, thinking he might change his mind, then felt the blood drain from her. He got up and walked towards her, standing closer than he’d ever been before.

  “I don’t know what game you are playing,” he said, “but you are out of your depth, so stop it. You haven’t the slightest idea what you are doing.”

  She turned her head, holding it still, and waited for the slap, but it never came. And that was when she finally burst into tears.

  The door was warped and swollen but after several attempts they managed to push it open. A steep bank rose up immediately from the door, and he and Aachen scrambled up it. The rain fell heavy, soaking through their greatcoats. Over to the right were some old, dilapidated stables. To the left the institute building stretched on until it reached a perimeter wall. There were vehicle tracks and broken plant pots spilling their earth and dead roots. The lawn had been made muddy with the tramping of feet, and Aachen slipped in it, cursing. Heiden searched the institute windows but there was still no sign of her.

  They walked a short distance away from the building, trying to find their way back to the front. Heiden sensed something and stopped—eyes watching him perhaps. Was it her? He turned and looked towards the woods, and then signaled Aachen to follow him as he cautiously moved closer. Something was filling him with a sense of unease. For a moment they both stood at the edge staring into the darkness, to where the trees grew thick and close, and then Heiden took a few steps in and held still, listening. The rain poured down but beneath its torrent he heard a sound like a whisper being muffled. Aachen didn’t seem to notice, but Heiden glimpsed movement there in the brambles—something had shifted.

  He stepped in further, ushering Aachen to follow and pushing branches aside with the tip of his gun as he quietly picked his way through. His eyes caught another movement, a shuffling up ahead where the trees in the copse were clumped thickly together. Another sound. A ssshush. He raised his gun and took a few steps, then signaled to Aachen to take them from the other side. He didn’t want to hurt them, just drive them back to the building. But something made him hold still. His hand was trembling. He could see Aachen edging closer to them, his gun held ready, finger curled around the trigger. And that was when Heiden called out, before he knew what he was doing and before he could stop himself.

  Eva?

  Aachen looked at him, confused, and for a few moments there was nothing—no movement, no sound—and then slowly, very slowly, she rose up out from the brambles, wet through and covered in mud, her face pale and washed with rain, her eyes wide with fear.

  Eva. My God. Eva. What the hell…?

  She signaled with her hand, and then, cautiously, one by one six other women, dirty and dazed, still in their drenched bed gowns, eyes red and bewildered, staggered up from within the brambles around her, two of them taking hold of her hands.

  He lowered his gun and glanced at Aachen but Aachen didn’t move, his gun still pointing directly at the women. He looked at Eva and at Heiden and then at Eva again.

  What’s going on? he said. What is this?

  One of the women tittered. Eva looked at Heiden; a look of desperation. What in God’s name was she thinking? What in God’s name was she trying to do?

  It was then that he had been aware of Metzger behind them, and Rosenheim and Foerster too, all three standing at the edge of the wood looking in, their pistols pointing.

  Do you know this nurse, Lance Corporal? And even now he couldn’t quite remember what, if anything, he had said or tried to say.

  These aren’t criminals. Eva’s voice was suddenly strong and defiant. These aren’t murderers. These are good people, she shouted. Good German people.

  They are nothing, Metzger said. Retards and lunatics. A drain on our resources. We’re fighting a war, Nurse. We have to flush out the waste. Take them back to the bus.

  But Eva wouldn’t, she couldn’t, she said, shouting that they were taking them to Brandenburg, that they weren’t ever coming back, not ever.

  You take them back to the bus or God help me, Metzger yelled.

  No, she said. I won’t, even though Heiden begged her, pleaded with her.

  For God’s sake, just leave them.

  I can’t, she said.

  Please, Eva!

  No, she said. Can’t you see? It’s not right.

  And he could see, but he couldn’t stop it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rosenheim and Foerster, both with their guns pointing at the group of patients, and Metzger next to them. Not far from him Aachen stood, his own pistol shaking in his hand. He didn’t seem to know who to point the gun at first, Eva or the women or even Heiden. Heiden didn’t dare move.

  What happened next, he could not be certain; only that in the midst of the commotion that followed—as Metzger raged, and Heiden pleaded, and Eva cried, and neither Aachen, Rosenheim, nor Foerster seemed to know where to point their guns—Eva had suddenly made a move and two of the women scattered as well. In the confusion as Metzger yelled Stop! and Heiden shouted Don’t shoot her! Please don’t shoot! still Eva had run to him and a single shot had fired.

  He had woken with a gasp and now he sat on the floor, his back resting against the side of the bed with his knees pulled in to his chest. The wooden floorboards were warm on the soles of his bare feet. The house still held the heat of the day, clinging to it in every pore. His eyes were swollen and he could feel a pulling in his head like tendons tightening; all he wanted to do was sleep. The same line would play over and over in his mind, the only words he remembered from that day with any clarity—him shouting at Metzger, Don’t shoot her. Please, don’t shoot. But Metzger shot anyway.

  In the dynamite room in Norway there had been nothing to do but run it on a constant reel, to see her face and that of Metzger. He hadn’t been able to shake it off, and he had wanted to scream, to go out into the snow and scream out the words just to get rid of them, but they were always there trapped inside him. Don’t shoot her. Please, don’t shoot.

  He had played the line so many times now that it was worn thin, almost indecipherable, a lie perhaps that he’d told himself so often that it now felt weighted with truth, because perhaps he had said no such thing. Perhaps, in those few moments, he had only thought it and managed to utter nothing at all to stop Metzger. Perhaps, in fact, he hadn’t even thought it but had dropped it into the memory later as an attempt to redeem himself, and maybe there had been no time to stop it. Don’t shoot her. Please, don’t shoot. But Metzger shot anyway.

  It had been waking him like an alarm call—this shot, always the shot—and beneath that now was the soft undertow of the girl’s breathing. He didn’t dare turn and look in case she wasn’t there. He tried to imagine that it was Eva’s breath, Eva sleeping so peacefully in the bed behind him, that there was no girl called Lydia, no Norway, no Pendell, no Gruber, no war. He was in the garret room in Berlin and Eva was safe and sound.

  He smelled the burned tinge of gunpowder in the air sometimes, and often he woke feeling the blast still resonating in him, the rumbling aftermath of a dream. And for the briefest moment he thought Metzger had missed, or just fired into the trees to scare them, but her
legs had slowly buckled from under her, collapsing as if from inside, and she slipped, almost graceful, to the ground. For a moment there was no sound but the rain coming down through the leaves, and then the two women who had been holding Eva’s hands opened their mouths and shrieked.

  He had tried drowning himself once, without even knowing it. The memory was there again: him walking out and out into the sea, and it was only when some soldiers pulled him back—Hey, sir! Where are you going?—that he realized what he was doing.

  It was a wonder he remembered anything of the campaign. He had passed through it like a hollow man, devoid of feeling, thought, or emotion. Perhaps he did rape the woman in Narvik. Perhaps they all did. Perhaps that was why he had staggered out of the railway administration building and retched into the snow, his cock still sticky with other men’s cum. Or it was the sight of them doing what they did and him doing nothing that made him sick. Or something else. Something different. The war had found its way into his head somehow, like a raindrop trickling into his ear.

  In his sleep he still searched the corridors of the institute as if one day he might find her, cowering there in the depths of the boiler room, or sitting on a bed in an empty ward. I’ve been waiting for you, she would say.

  The girl slept behind him. The bedroom was pitch black.

  He had tried to haul Eva’s body up because her eyes were still open and looking at him and her skin was still warm and he was sure, so sure, that he could still hear her breath. He kept shouting, struggling with her rag doll limbs—Come on! Get up! Get up!—but she was too heavy, a deadweight, and she slumped to the ground.

  He slipped down beside her on his knees and took her hand in his and squeezed, squeezed it hard, saying, Please, and, Eva, please, and, Eva. Please get up. He was aware of Metzger standing behind him as he crouched, the tip of Metzger’s gun tapping at the back of his shoulder, and Metzger saying that she had made him do it, that it was an accident. Wasn’t it?

  Wasn’t it?

  He lowered himself down onto the bedroom floor and felt the side of his face press against the floorboard. He wrapped his arms around himself and brought his legs in tight. If he folded himself in tight enough perhaps he could disappear.

  He had stroked the back of Eva’s hand, the fine soft skin, the warm nubs of her knuckles. He had held it up to his lips, still warm, fading but still there.

  And maybe without thinking he had nodded.

  Metzger said, Good. Now get these pathetic creatures on the bus.

  He stared at the damp earth, the rain coming down so heavy now that it was disturbing the leaves and splashing off the branches. He was vaguely aware of Metzger walking away, Rosenheim and Foerster following, and then, after a while, Aachen too. He felt numb to everything around him, barely existent at all, as if, like her, he were lifting up out of his body. He slowly hauled himself up, and shut his teary eyes, trying to press it all away, and feeling everything swaying around him. When he opened them again the women were still sitting or standing around in the mud, wet through in their filthy gowns. They stared at him with their bewildered faces.

  Come on, he said, unaware that the voice was his. Please. Come on. Get up.

  He rested his head against the bed, and when he closed his eyes he could see the small annex room of the dynamite store. Outside, the storm was quieting. Snow was falling softly now and there was a low whistling of the wind as it coursed through the gorges. It was midafternoon. Even if the snow stopped falling, they should wait until morning before they moved on. He stretched his arm out along the cold floor and tapped out a rhythm on the concrete. Tap-tap-tappity-tap. In the main room neither Gruber nor Bürckel spoke. The fire crackled. The damp twigs spat. He drew circles and treble clefs on the dusty floor with his fingertips. He imagined the concrete away, until it became the warm skin of her back, and his fingers were trailing over her body, feeling its softness, its warmth, its life, and when he lifted his hand to his nose, he was sure that he could smell her. She was still there on the tips of his fingers and in the cold curl of his hand.

  It was two in the morning. He couldn’t sleep. His mind was heavy with tiredness and yet thoughts still crawled back and forth. The voices and images were out of sync, an incessant noise in his head. He had been sitting in the chair watching her—the flickering of her eyeballs beneath the skin of her eyelids suggested that her sleep was perhaps not as peaceful as it looked. He wondered what she had been thinking, making herself up like that. Did she think he was an animal?

  He quietly picked her dress up off the floor and folded it, laying it over the foot of her bed, then placed her sandals side by side beneath the dressing table, undoing the buckles so that in the morning they would be easier for her to put on. Then he picked up the toy bear she had left on the floor and shone the faint light of his torch on it. The bear was saggy and moth-eaten, its fur worn away in patches. He had a hole in one of his armpits, and when Heiden gently squeezed him a faint breath-like puff and flecks of stuffing dispersed like dust into the air. Mr. Tabernacle, she had called him. Hardly a name at all. He had an old school tie around his neck and a couple of threads were still hanging out of the socket where one of his eyes was missing. He needed a button sewn there, or a patch.

  He sat the bear on the chair and made his way down the stairs, shining his torch on ahead of him. He opened the front door and stood on the step for a moment, feeling with relief the freshness of the summer’s night cool upon his face. He stepped out onto the gravel, taking his pistol from its holster, eyes and ears suddenly alert as his feet crunched over the chippings. For a few minutes he stood watching. There were very few stars out. Thin clouds pulled across the sky, moonshine trying to find a way through.

  He pulled out the piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and read the scrawled address. He would have liked to have seen Professor Aritz again. He had thought often of the cottage in the painting that hung at the end of the professor’s hall. When he envisaged it in his mind now, it was difficult to tell what was real and what were embellishments added over months of dreaming: roses over the doorway, the small four-paned windows, the window boxes, the soft, warm stone. The professor had said nothing of a garden, but in his mind Heiden had given it one—slightly overgrown, and everything in flower and bursting with color. He could smell the fragrances and hear the bees bumping against the windows. A little sanctuary, so far from anything that not even a war could find it.

  In the store in Norway he had stood for hours at the small window, trying to see through the impenetrable mesh of frost and snow. If he stared long and hard enough he saw things in the ice, just like da Vinci had said: shapes and patterns, connections forming, fractures that he would follow like trails. Images lifted out of the frost as well: a boat on a sea, silhouetted birds flying, and faces and figures. He had seen himself once, in a field, or at least a figure that could have been him, sitting all alone on what might have been a log—it was difficult to tell.

  He sometimes imagined he could bring her out of the snow, make her walk out from between the trees, across the clearing and up the bank to the door. He would open it and there she would be, the blizzard blowing around her. Metzger’s bullet would have gone right through, in one side and out the other, and done not a fraction of damage but for the smallest, most ridiculous of holes. She would stand there, beaming at him, and say, Ah, so this is where you’ve been hiding. I’ve been looking for you.

  It had been impossible to think forward, only, it seemed, to think back. If he had been able to turn himself off, to shut himself down, he would have. Thoughts and memories clamored and clawed at him, an endless rabble of voices, images that flickered and flared. He scratched at his head to try to get them out, and covered his eyes, and buried himself beneath his arms. He scrawled lines in the concrete floor with his knife, over and over, digging out channels.

  You’ll make it blunt, Gruber had said, but Heiden ignored him.

  He kept thinking back, always back, this time to the field i
n Voreifel close to the Luxembourg border. He wondered if this was what he had seen in the frosted window—the image of himself sitting not on a log but an overturned tin drum, resting his foot on a drag harrow and having his lunch; he had liked to take it at a peaceful distance from all the rabble of the boys. This must have been November, because the 3rd Mountain Division had been on training there at that time, practicing maneuvers through the open country—November and the first mention he’d heard of the Pioneer Group. The afternoon was sunny and bright but with an autumnal nip in the air, and the ground was damp, the night’s frost still wet in the grass. He was sipping from his field flask when Lieutenant Ziegler joined him. Ziegler was in his thirties but looked older, the war already graying his hair at the sides. His ears stuck out wider than most, and whenever Heiden saw him he had an almost irresistible urge to pick him up by the ears and give the platoon leader a little shake. His funny looks were a contrast to his fierce temper, but Heiden had always considered him a fair and tolerable man.

  It’s Heiden, isn’t it? he said. You’re one of the General’s Bavarian crowd.

  I’ve spent time in Bavaria, yes. My grandparents…But I’m from Berlin.

  Ziegler nodded and opened a linen bag he had with him, pulling out some black bread wrapped in cardboard. He took a bite and thoughtfully chewed on it before he said anything more. Had Heiden heard of the Brandenburgers? They were looking for a certain type of soldier.

  Heiden had asked, What for?

  Espionage. Sabotage. All very exciting, I’m sure. I’ve seen your ways, Lance Corporal. I could make a recommendation.

  No, thank you, Heiden said; he was happy doing what he was doing.

  Fine, Ziegler said. I’m glad to hear it. But if you change your mind…