by Jason Hewitt
‘You said you will help. Look for Petr,’ he said. ‘Můj bratr.’ He sounded resentful. ‘You promise. Now you send me home.’
‘I’m not sending you home,’ Owen said. ‘No one is going to force you, but you should go.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are lhář.’
‘I’m not lying. Listen,’ said Owen. ‘Your brother is going to find you. He will come home to you in his own time. You don’t have to be the hero and find him yourself.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I look for Petr. I save you. Two lives. And now you don’t care.’
‘I do.’
‘Now you with English.’
‘That’s not true,’ Owen said.
‘Co jsem všechno pro vás udělál! I do for you.’ He was getting upset now. ‘You English are all stejní. Same.’ He held two fingers up together. ‘Mm? You leave me like you leave our country. You sell us. To Hitler. It is not your country to sell. You betray us. Hm? You owe us.’ He jabbed his chest. ‘Me.’
‘I know,’ said Owen, ‘and I’m sorry.’
‘You know Angličani. People. You promise help. You don’t remember.’
‘I didn’t promise anything,’ he said. ‘Anyway, help who?’
‘Petr,’ said Janek. ‘He will lead. We find Petr. You and me bring him back. Then, revoluce!’
‘What revolution?’ said Owen.
‘Sokol zase bude létat,’ he said, flying his hands as if they were a bird.
He meant his symbol – the sokol – Owen thought.
Then Janek pulled out a black strip of material from his bag and threw it into Owen’s chest – the familiar-looking armband, Petr’s symbol threaded on it, just like he’d seen another man wearing in the photographs now above the bed. He tried to force it into Owen’s hand. He wanted Owen to wear it.
‘No, I’m not getting involved.’
‘Pomůžete nám!’ Janek shouted.
‘It has nothing to do with me.’
Janek scrambled off the bed. ‘Yes! Yes!’ he cried. He took one of the books from the desk, found a blank page and ripped it out, then held it out for Owen. ‘You write, hm? You write. Napište anglické vládě. English government. They give help. You tell them. Help to us. Help to Petr. Help revoluci. Yes? You betray us. Now you help us. Yes?’
He kept on talking but Owen had heard it before. They would clear all the Germans out, all the Hungarians, all the Russians. Just Czech, Janek had told him. Nobody else. It was their country.
‘And you help. Yes?’
Owen laughed. ‘Write to the British government and do what? Ask them to help you? But I don’t know anyone. Who am I supposed to write to? No, I’m sorry, but no.’
‘Musíte!’
‘Why?’
‘You owe me. Two lives!’
‘Yes. I know. You saved me. You saved my life two times. I know!’
‘No, two lives you owe me. Not your two lives. My two lives. For me. Mine.’ He pulled out his wallet and snatched out a photograph, then shoved it in Owen’s hand. It was the portrait of the boy’s parents.
‘Two lives!’ Janek shouted.
He walked out of the block, through the camp, out of the gates and some distance along the road through the field, the woods closing in around it until eventually he slumped on the verge and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He felt quite sure that he would splinter and break.
He kept seeing the same images: the dark sky and trees lurching over him as the boy dragged him up the short bank from the river and into the field, the sound of his efforts as he heaved and struggled towards a house, and then could drag Owen no more. Cold wet hands undoing the buttons at the top of Owen’s shirt, and then taking hold of his wrist. There was nothing else, no other clue, before he lost consciousness. Just the vague sound of two shots, and then a third; and in the darkness the boy had run.
In the mess his eyes followed Martha to the bar, watching as she poured them both a Scotch and then reached up to replace the decanter, her whole frame rising a little as her feet exalted her on to her toes and held her there for a moment. Nothing had been said about the night before. All day she had kept her eyes anywhere but on him, while he had scrutinized her for clues that she was about to turn and say something. Now it hung between them, this rumbling aftermath.
Taking her seat across the table, she set his glass down and lifted her own to her mouth, slopping the Scotch around the ice cubes before she drank it in a mouthful and sighed as if she’d needed it.
‘Isn’t it a little early for this?’ he said, staring at his glass. It was still afternoon.
‘You know Hamilton is doing everything he can to dig out some information about you,’ she said, ignoring the comment. ‘He’s sent a communication over to your Bomber Command that we have you safe and sound. They’re going to get you on a plane home. If not tomorrow, then the day after. You’ll be back in London by Tuesday, with a bit of luck.’
‘That would be nice,’ said Owen. He had prayed someone would tell him these words so many times over the last few days but now, hearing them for real, the relief did not come.
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Strange that he hadn’t thought that far. ‘Find out what I was doing before all this nonsense and try to put my life back together, I suppose.’
‘Do you know what your Bomber Command also told Hamilton?’ she said.
‘No.’
She held his eye and then leant forward a little across the table as if she were about to whisper him a secret. ‘I don’t think Anneliese Dreher is the only person we know who’s been spinning little lies. Do you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You told me you were a pilot.’
‘But I am.’
‘You’re not though,’ she said with a vaguely triumphant smile. ‘You’re a goddamn liar. You’re not an RAF pilot at all. Your brother was. You’re just a flight engineer.’
Outside he sat against a pile of boxes that had been stacked beside the main entrance of the admin block and held his head in his hands. Why had he ever allowed himself to think he was a pilot? The truth was that there was no hero in him, no matter how deep he dug. There had been days when he had believed it – days when he saved an infant from the road or stopped an innocent farmer being clubbed to death – but now all of that belief had fallen away. With every new thing he had learnt, every new memory bolted on, he felt thinner, not fuller, as if the real Owen was only a splinter of the man that he rather hoped he had become.
Not a pilot then, but a flight engineer.
Always his brother’s sidekick.
The role he knew was designed for men like him – monitoring and operating the plane’s systems, the fuel management and engine oil and temperature coolants. While Max pushed the plane through the sky, hands at the yoke or edging forward the throttle, Owen had logged and noted and recalculated those fussy little details, his eyes fixed not on the sky ahead but on the dials in front of him. Was that why his natural instinct all those days ago had been to log everything that came to him? BOY = CZECH = BREAKFAST.
It had always been Owen, not Max, who had snuck away to read copies of Flight or spend his evenings hunched over The Aircraft Engineer supplement, trying to understand the articles on wiring lug design and airscrew performance, all the strange equations and terminology that had intrigued him with their mystery, while Max had been the one on his pushbike bombing it down the lane. It had never been the accolade of flying an aircraft that had fascinated him; it was the science, the physics and aerodynamics, the nuts and bolts and wiring and pistons that somehow got the crate up into the air. Beneath the gleaming skin of a Lancaster there were 55,000 identifiable parts all playing their intricate role.
In the end, he thought, leaning back and considering this with a strange relief, everything came down to mechanics: the workings of a plane or a watch or a frog; the joints that held a man together; the mechanics that propelled him forward and walked him thr
ough the snow and dust.
Max and he, of course, had therefore been on different training schedules, not even at the same station half the time. That must have made the thing with Connie easier, allowing him to duck and dive the days when Max might be around. For a month she had even given Owen a key; and on leave days he would take the number 2 tram from Victoria Embankment, following the rails through Kennington, Stockwell and Balham, along Tooting High Street to Colliers Wood and then Wimbledon. There at the station he’d hop off, changing on to the 604 trolleybus that took him along the Kingston Road until it dropped him on Caversham Rise. Sometimes before he went in he would sit on the front steps, collecting up the fallen geranium petals while he took a cigarette, satisfied by the warm weight of the key in his pocket.
Only once more did he ask her to leave Max.
You know I can’t do that.
He poked his finger into one of the boxes he had been sitting on, where under the weight of the others one of the sides had split, and pulled out a lipstick. It must have been the delivery that Haynes had been complaining about. Still, no one had bothered to move them. He took the lid off and wound it up. He held it up, a slight wetness to the crimson colour in the sunlight. There must have been hundreds of them in the boxes. He would give it to Anneliese. She would look pretty with a bit of colour.
‘Oh, hello.’ A young man in army overalls had appeared out the door and was standing beside him. ‘You busy?’
‘Not especially,’ said Owen. He slipped the lipstick into his pocket.
‘Guvnor wants this lot shifting. I don’t suppose you could gi’s a hand. They just need running up to the stockroom. Jesus.’ He scratched the back of his head as he looked at the boxes. ‘I didn’t realize there was so many.’
Owen said that would be fine.
‘I can probably take three,’ said the boy. ‘Do you want to load me up?’
He handed the lad a box and piled another on top, then moved some of the boxes around, getting the one from the bottom that was split so he could put it on the top of the pile in the boy’s arms. As he moved them away from the wall he stopped. He bent down. My God, he thought. There was the symbol – the swooping wings and the ‘v’ for a head, the box around it scratched into the side of the wall with something sharp, like a nail or a knife.
‘You all right there?’ said the boy.
Owen got down on his knees to take a closer look. He ran his finger over the scratches in the stonework. This wasn’t the work of Janek. It was a wound that was old and weathered. The symbol, he realized, had been there in the wall for some time.
‘What is it?’ said the boy.
‘Nothing.’ He stood up again and passed the box.
Then it quickly dawned on him who must have left the marking.
‘Actually, do you know what? I can’t help after all. Sorry. I need to see someone. It’s urgent. Sorry, but I just remembered.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said the lad. He seemed a bit disgruntled but Owen was already running.
Martha said it would take some time – time she did not have – but she would go through the cards that the nurses had started to complete and there were new noticeboards going up with names from other camps.
‘You’ll need to be patient, mind,’ she tried to explain, but Janek would not.
He went from block to block, ward to ward, and bed to bed – a Czech man, he said, Petr Sokol, showing them the photograph and newspaper clippings, saying all manner of other things that might prompt someone to remember.
The two Czech boys – Otmar and Mikoláš – went with him. Owen too. They paced from ward to ward. Does anyone know anything of a Petr Sokol? But Owen kept on forgetting who they were looking for. His eyes kept being drawn to the women in the beds, seeing reminders of Connie in every face: the shape of her eyes, the line of her jaw, the indentation of her lip.
The same nurse from yesterday appeared at the doorway. She held a familiar-looking card in her hand. ‘Petr Sokol?’ she called.
But there wasn’t any answer.
Strange how things came and went. In all the turmoil of the day he had quite forgotten about some things, but seeing the button on the ground stopped him. He bent down to pick it up where it had been trodden into the dirt. It was covered in mud, round and metallic, almost the size of a threepenny bit and with four eyelets, dusty broken threads tangled between them. It looked familiar.
He took the tin button out of his pocket and weighed them both in his palms, and then held them up to the sunlight. They were the same – the same size, colour, style and shape, and each with the same four eyelets and broken strands of thread still knotted and tangled around the holes. It was only when he laid them each in the palm of a hand and brought his hands together that his palms seemed to form a face; the two silver-coloured buttons stared back at him like eyes.
A single tin button lay in the shadows. It was only the sunlight streaming through the carriage window as the train clattered on that had made him notice. It soaked in through the glass and was sliced by the wooden slats of the seat opposite him where the girl sat, a dusty shaft cutting through the dark beneath the seat and falling on the button so that in that moment it had caught his eye. For a while he had looked at it, hidden there behind her ankles, the stark white of her socks and the red gleam of her sandals, her suitcase parked beside her. She held the teddy bear on her lap, the same styled button for an eye, the other fallen from it, and now he saw it lying beneath the seat. Behind him he was aware of the SS troops making their way through the carriage, getting closer, checking everybody’s papers.
He bent down and said something in German like Excuse me, before he reached under her seat. Ich glaube, es ist Ihnen etwas heruntergefallen. I think you’ve dropped something. He pulled out the button. Hat Dein Bär ein Auge verloren? Has your bear lost an eye?
What made him pick the button up? What made him bend at that moment, just as the SS officer making his way through the carriage, going from passenger to passenger, had finally reached them? Owen looked up – Has your bear lost an eye? – the button still in his hand, and something in that moment had passed between them. Perhaps she had seen the help he needed, the ink on his hand, the now smudged and useless documents. Or something in his own eye that told her that he was not who she thought he was. For even though he had said it and she had quite clearly seen the button there in his hand, the bear still held tightly in her lap, when the officer had approached them and said ‘Papers’, she had still made a fuss.
Mein Bär! she said. My bear! Oh, mein Bär! she cried. She was up on her feet and then down on her knees looking under the seat, scrabbling around on the floor of the carriage and between people’s legs, making them move, getting everyone up. Sein Auge! His eye! Oh, nein!
Papiere! He needed to see their papers.
But no one was taking any notice. All around them people were lifting their feet up or bending over to look beneath their seats, moving luggage, shaking out coats, and saying things like: Oh, let’s have a look.
It must have rolled somewhere.
Are you sure you’ve lost it?
Yes, look, she said.
Papers! I need to see your papers!
She held the bear up with its missing eye and then started to cry, so that in that moment’s distraction while a dozen people at the end of the carriage looked for a button that both she and Owen knew very well Owen was holding in his hand, she created for him an opportunity.
And there it was now – this button that in those crucial moments had distracted the officer from his papers long enough for the plane to come over, for the sound of it to fill the carriage just as it filled his head now, the train slowly rattling over the bridge, while all around him the good passengers hunted for a button to appease a distraught child travelling on her own. In that briefest of commotions, merely seconds, he had pushed past the officer to the outside door and, unnoticed, opened it and stepped out on to the end of the platform. The train had slowed to cross the brid
ge. Up above them the plane had passed overhead but when he looked up he saw that, slowly and deliberately, it was beginning to turn, curling back towards them as it started its descent.
That night the Czech contingent threw a farewell party. They lit fires around the parade ground and sang Czech songs, encouraging the other refugees to join them so that before long, the whole square was filled with a throng of people. There were trumpets and accordions and percussion played on anything that would hold still long enough: pots and pans and the bonnets of jeeps, discarded tins strung up on twine, the back of someone’s head . . .
The two boys from Janek’s room – Otmar and Mikoláš – had made firecrackers that popped and fizzed through the dirt, crackling as they scurried beneath people’s feet, making them jump, or shoot off somewhere like miniature rockets. There was alcohol, of course, taken from nearby houses, and Owen was not surprised to hear rumours that earlier a nearby farm had been held up at gunpoint, a group of ‘liberated prisoners’, it was claimed, forcing their way in and stealing a wheelbarrow piled with bottles of homebrewed beer.
Many of the military team came out to join in. They had as much to celebrate as the Czechs, said Martha. Every refugee sent home was one less to worry about.
‘You don’t get many moments like this,’ she said, ‘when you get a chance to take stock and realize that actually, yeah, we’re doing all right.’
Most of the medical staff and volunteers sat around on chairs outside the tents in the square, smoking and swigging beer. Guppy sucked on a foul-smelling cigar that a Hungarian had given him, and for a while there was some debate as to what was actually in it.
With a drink in his hand and puffing one of Martha’s Luckies, Owen allowed himself to relax. He thought only of that night and his strange sense of belonging, and his gratitude that come tomorrow, Janek would be on his way, and then him too, and Martha had at least made promises about Anneliese and that she would do everything she could to ensure that Little Man would be all right. The only moment when the past crept up on him was when someone released a makeshift Chinese lantern from a top-floor window. For a while they watched it floating up into the sky, where it drifted over the rooftops.