Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  Pulling her beret down over what was left of her hair, she cautiously made her way down the slope of the fuselage towards the rectangle of daylight at the end. For a moment she stood there in the entrance, looking out like a small mammal at the opening of its burrow scanning for predators. She saw nothing more than a stretch of concrete, with a black car parked a hundred yards away and two figures standing nearer, waiting. Beyond that was just the stuff of an airfield: hangars, a low-lying building of some kind, a squat control tower with a glass box on top like an aquarium, where silhouettes moved back and forth against the panes. Watching her, perhaps.

  Carefully she climbed down the steps to the ground. Her shoes were too big for her and she had to drag her feet when she walked. They were all the Red Cross had in the way of women’s shoes. Her own shoes had been so ruined they’d taken them away at the hospital and she never saw them again. Anyway they were made of cardboard, whereas these were leather. More treasure.

  ‘Here she is,’ the corporal said. ‘You were right, ma’am.’

  ‘Of course I was right.’

  The woman crossing the stretch of concrete towards them seemed shorter than her actual height, as though she had been crushed into a form that was too small for her. Perhaps the military greatcoat that she was wearing created the illusion. She was the first, the very first to come back but, Atkins hoped, not unique. It was difficult in those first weeks to calculate what the chances were of there being others. As things transpired, of the women, there would be only three others. There would be more men, but then there had been more men in the first place; and Atkins only felt personally responsible for the women. Her girls. Forty dispatched, twenty-six returned safe and sound, one way or another; fourteen arrested and missing. Until this moment. Doing the mathematics meant you could push the emotions aside; she’d long ago learned to suppress emotion because by denying it the remainder of you might survive more or less intact.

  The two women met like formal acquaintances, Atkins holding out a hand almost as though to ward off any closer and more intimate gesture. If you were trying to guess you’d have suggested a woman greeting a prospective employee, a maid perhaps, come from the country. Or perhaps a social worker meeting a patient recently released from a convalescent home. Even the words exchanged had a distant formality about them:

  ‘Marian, how good to see you.’

  ‘Miss Atkins. I wondered who would come, whether I would even recognise whoever it was.’

  ‘Have you had a good flight?’

  ‘I slept a bit. I’ve grown used to sleeping in difficult conditions.’

  Atkins watched her carefully. The younger woman’s skin seemed stretched over her facial bones, giving her complexion a strangely luminous sheen. There was a darkness around the eyes, a sculpted hollowness to her cheeks. Atkins was reminded of a painter whose work she had seen in Paris before the war, a Norwegian called Munch.

  ‘Shall I take your suitcase, ma’am?’ the corporal asked.

  Marian held the case to her as though if she released it she might never see it again. ‘No. No, I’ll keep it.’

  ‘Your clothes …’ said Miss Atkins.

  ‘The Red Cross gave me some. I didn’t really have much when they found me.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘The shoes don’t really fit.’

  ‘No, they don’t, do they? We’ll soon put that right.’ But what else would there be to put right? Atkins wondered.

  The corporal held the car door open for them. ‘’Scuse my asking, ma’am. But have you come from Germany?’

  ‘Of course she’s come from Germany,’ Atkins snapped. ‘The aeroplane came from Germany; Miss Sutro must have come from Germany.’

  He looked from one to the other. He was young, barely out of school, and with a youthful insouciance that would get him into trouble in the service but maybe would be an advantage once he was back in civilian life; whenever that might be. ‘Have you come from one of the camps?’

  Atkins’s face compressed with anger at his question. Marian looked back at him with an expression that was devoid of any real feeling. ‘Yes, I have.’

  He nodded. ‘Welcome back, ma’am,’ he said.

  *

  The inside of the car smelled of cigarettes and old leather. It reminded Marian of something. There were other memories of other cars but she struggled desperately to find this particular one, groping back to a world that seemed to belong to someone else – a time before the war when there was a young girl called Marian Sutro with the smell of jasmine and sandalwood in her nose, a fragrance that came from the first bottle of scent she ever owned. And then that smell of tobacco and leather, which was the smell of the Delage in which her family had toured the north of Italy. Remembering brought with it a little burst of further recollection: she had wanted to stay in Geneva because Clément was there, but of course she couldn’t tell them that. So she and her parents piled into the car and set off for a two-week tour round the Italian lakes that was rendered miserable by her sulking. ‘What on earth is the matter with the girl?’ her father asked at frequent intervals.

  ‘Women’s problems,’ her mother replied.

  Two years later it was the same car that got them across France to Bordeaux and away on the last passenger ship out to England.

  Homecoming

  ‘Back to London, ma’am?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Oxford,’ Miss Atkins said. ‘We’re going to Oxford.’ She turned to Marian. ‘Is that all right? We thought you’d want that.’

  She shrugged. Where else might she go? Wherever she was sent, really. Choice hadn’t featured much in her life recently. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘That’s fine, then.’

  The car made its way through the regimented lanes of the Air Force station. There were rows of huts that awoke another memory, a more recent one, one she was already trying to bury like someone interring a body during the night – the camp. Rows and rows of huts under a leaden north German sky. A world of grey. As they turned onto the main road Atkins produced a cigarette case and they lit up, huddling over Atkins’s gold lighter as though sharing a secret. Marian drew smoke in greedily and coughed at the shock. In contrast to her own eagerness there was something of a controlled ritual about Atkins’s smoking. She tapped the cigarette, then wedged it carefully between her fingers before raising it to her lips like a communicant taking the host. Her fingers were stained with nicotine.

  Marian pointed. ‘Could I …?’

  Atkins frowned. ‘Could you what? Oh, the cigarettes. Of course.’ She handed over the packet and watched while Marian hid it away in the pocket of her coat. ‘Your cough …’ she said. ‘I assume you were seen by a doctor.’

  ‘Doctors. More than one. American. British. Even a Swedish one from the Red Cross. The Red Cross deloused and vaccinated us. Typhus, typhoid, everything they could think of.’

  ‘That’s good, then. But we’ll have you see one of ours.’

  There was a silence. There were so many things that might be said but somehow none of them seemed appropriate. ‘Buck sends his best wishes,’ Atkins offered, as though it was a birthday celebration or something.

  ‘Buck?’

  ‘Colonel Buckmaster.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Marian tried to picture the man and failed. A smile was all that remained in her memory, an oleaginous smile like the Cheshire Cat’s.

  ‘Where were you held?’ Atkins asked. ‘By the Germans, I mean.’ The question was almost casual, as though she was asking about a minor inconvenience, a mere delay in travel plans.

  ‘A place called Ravensbrück.’

  The woman nodded, but clearly the name meant nothing to her. ‘And you escaped?’

  ‘I was on a work commando at the Siemens factory. One day they took us westwards. I think they were afraid that the Russians were coming.’ She shrugged and looked out of the window. The outer suburbs of London – rows of semi-detached houses – gave way to fields and farms. Low
hills and the occasional spinney. A small, delicate landscape.

  ‘How did you get away?’

  Marian thought about the matter. The question implied that escape was something willed, planned, decided. But nothing was planned and every moment was a moment in which you might die; that moment of escape as much as any other. She sucked in smoke and coughed again. ‘We were being marched along this road …’ Not this road running through the Chiltern Hills, but another road crossing cold flats, rimed with ice and brushed over with snow. Not a decorative little wood on one side but a dark forest straddling the way ahead. ‘There was an aircraft. American, British, I don’t know. Two engines, I remember it had two engines. It came down low and fired at us. And in the chaos we escaped. Three of us. Others …’ Others were killed. Others died. Others vanished from her own little world, which now became that of the forests, a place where creatures hid and foraged, and died or survived according to laws that were impossible to determine. The laws of chance or nature or something. ‘We spent some days in the woods and then hitched a lift on a Red Cross lorry. They took us to the Americans.’

  ‘Do you know anything about any of our other girls?’

  ‘Yvonne.’

  ‘Baseden?’

  ‘Rudellat. Yvonne Rudellat. She was there in the camp. She wasn’t in my block but I saw her from time to time. She was using another name.’

  ‘Another name?’ Atkins had taken a notebook from her respirator bag.

  ‘Jacqueline …’

  ‘That was her field name.’

  ‘But she called herself Jacqueline. I don’t remember the surname. Galtier, something like that. Gaudier, perhaps. But she left the camp earlier, I think it was in February. I don’t know where they went. People said some kind of convalescent camp. That was the rumour. We envied them.’

  Atkins wrote: Jacqueline Galtier? Gaudier? February. ‘Any others?’

  ‘I heard stories. They said there was someone held in solitary, in the bunker. That was the rumour. A British parachutist, people said. Winston Churchill’s daughter was one of the stories. Odille? I don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Odette? She was arrested with Peter Churchill. Perhaps it was her.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  If she stares out of the window perhaps the questions will stop. There have been so many questions. The American intelligence officer asked her questions, dozens of questions that referred to a time that seemed so distant as to belong to another person in a different world. She had wanted those questions to stop but they kept on mercilessly:

  ‘How did you get to France?’

  ‘I jumped.’

  ‘Jumped?’

  ‘Parachute. I parachuted.’

  ‘When was this?’

  When was it? Time was dilated, the whole of her previous life compressed into a few moments, the last year in the camp stretching out into decades. ‘I don’t recall. October, I think. The October moon. Look it up in your calendar.’

  ‘Last year?’

  Was it last year? Days, months stumbled through her brain, the units of misery, the texture of her existence, a medium she struggled through, like wading waist deep through icy water. ‘The year before. Nineteen forty-three.’

  ‘You parachuted into France in the fall of forty-three?’ There was incredulity in his tone. ‘Where was this exactly?’

  ‘The south-west. North of Toulouse. I forget the name of the place …’

  ‘And who sent you?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s secret. If you contact British intelligence they’ll confirm my story. Please, do that. Please. I beg you.’

  ‘And then you were arrested. Where was that?’

  ‘In Paris. Near Paris, not in Paris. At a railway station.’

  ‘Name?’

  She shook her head. ‘I forget. If you show me a map, maybe then …’

  But he hadn’t fetched a map. Instead he’d sent her to the place they were holding dozens of women, a whole congeries of women, women weeping and complaining, women arguing and shouting, women picking lice from each other’s hair, women sitting huddled in corners waiting as they had waited for so long. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she complained to one of the guards. ‘I’m a British intelligence agent. I should be sent to the nearest British headquarters.’

  The guard had looked at her with pity, as though she was mad.

  ‘No one else,’ she told Atkins. ‘At least, I don’t think so. There were thousands in the camp. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, I don’t know … I don’t know anything very much …’

  ‘Perhaps later, when you’re rested.’

  Rested. It seemed so unreal, the idea of rest. When your life had been either sleep or waking, the one annihilation, the other a kind of hell, rest seemed a state of unimaginable delight. Hell or Hades? Hades was cold, wasn’t it? Her father knew that kind of thing. Hades, cold; Hell, hot. So both those places, Hell and Hades. And sleep was heaven.

  They drove on towards Oxford, the conversation desultory, as though the two of them were vague acquaintances who knew little about each other; or relatives who knew too much. There were questions she should ask – what happened to Benoît? What happened to her whole circuit? And Yvette, what happened to her? – but somehow she couldn’t formulate them into words. They lay there in her mind, ghosts of questions, mere phantasms skulking around her brain.

  Where was she going?

  She had to keep reminding herself – she was going home, wherever that was.

  They passed a sign saying Stokenchurch and she wondered what a stoken church might be. There would be some arcane meaning. All place names meant something. Even Ravensbrück must mean something. Rabensbrück, maybe: the bridge of ravens, across which ravens walk into hell. There were crows picking at the fields, crows or rooks. Once she knew the difference. Her father had explained. Rooks were more social animals, he told her. They had bare faces which made it better for them to root around in rotting corpses, which was what they did, just like people in the camp. Carrion feeders. Ravens as well.

  ‘Anyway,’ Miss Atkins said, ‘at least you are back.’

  ‘Yes.’ What was the expression? Back from the dead. But she didn’t say it because it sounded melodramatic. Instead she said, ‘I wasn’t Marian Sutro, did I explain that? I was Geneviève Marchal. She died of pleurisy and I swapped names. That was how I survived. Someone else dying for me.’

  ‘Well, now you are Marian Sutro once again.’ As if to confirm this remarkable resurrection, Atkins opened her case again and produced an identity card and two ration books. For the first time she smiled. ‘And you’ve got these to prove it. Don’t worry, they’re genuine.’

  It was a joke. She smiled. Cautiously, Marian opened the identity card. The photo looked back at her from the past – a thoughtful face she barely recognised. Almost beautiful. She had almost been beautiful. The realisation was a small shock. ‘I don’t look like this any more.’

  ‘You will soon enough.’

  ‘Will I?’ She stared out of the window, through the vague reflection of her present face, and wondered where that girl had gone and what she had been replaced with. ‘So what’ll happen now?’

  ‘Once you’ve rested we’ll have you up to London to get the medics to check you over and to have a bit of a talk. Eventually, you’ll have to write a report. We’ll want to know exactly what happened. How you were arrested, how you were treated. Where you went, all that kind of thing.’

  Marian shook her head at the passing fields. ‘I’d rather forget.’ But instead, insistently, the other memory of the other car is there – a narrow, black car with chevrons on the radiator. A Citroën Traction. The same interior smell of leather and cigarettes but supplemented by sour sweat. And the perfume of the Alsatian woman, who turns round in the front passenger seat to look back at her. ‘You think you’re clever,’ the woman says. ‘But you’ve just been luck
y. Up to now.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  The woman doesn’t reply. Her thin smile is like a hairline fracture in bone.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  The woman turns back and stares through the windscreen at the road ahead.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  No one answers. Marian can taste blood from her split lip. The men crammed in on either side of her shift their backsides on the leather seat. The car crosses the river and threads its way through a town. Orléans, she knows that. The Maid of Orleans. La Pucelle. Jeanne d’Arc.

  Slowly, with the inexorable logic of physiology, her bladder fills.

  ‘I need the lavatory.’

  No answer. They are out of the town now, driving on through the flatlands south of Paris, a forest on the left and the road dead straight and empty but for the occasional horse-drawn cart or stuttering gazogène. She repeats her demand, insistently, like a child shouting at its mother. ‘I need to have a pee. Do you understand? A piss. Otherwise I’ll just go here in the car.’

  It’s the woman who finally relents. ‘Pull over where you can,’ she tells the driver.

  The vehicle slows and comes to a halt. They are somewhere in France, somewhere on a long empty road with a line of poplar trees through which the breeze seethes like the sea raking a shingle shore. Marian holds out her hands. ‘You’ll have to take the handcuffs off. How am I meant to do anything if my hands are tied?’

  ‘Be careful,’ the Alsatian woman warns them. ‘She’s a dangerous bitch.’

  The man on her left unlocks one of the handcuffs and clips it to his own wrist, then pushes her out of the car. The other is already out with his pistol drawn and pointing at her. Any chance of escape has vanished. Manacled to her guard she turns away and uses her free hand to pull her knickers down. The men watch. The woman smokes. Marian squats to let go a stream of yellow piss into the grass and down into the ditch. One of the men, the one who had hit her round the mouth, says something to the other. She only catches some of the words – eine geile Fotze – but she can guess the rest, more or less. There is laughter – that particular male kind of laughter, smeared with dirt. She tries not to appear to understand. Her knowledge of German may be an advantage, to be kept secret. Awkwardly she straightens up and pulls up her knickers. They bundle her back into the car and the journey continues.