by Robert Edric
‘He won’t be here for that long,’ she said. She put down the book and turned to face him.
‘Oh?’
‘Not according to him.’
‘Whatever you tell me, I won’t repeat anything,’ he said.
‘He’ll still get to know.’
‘Not from me. What about the conditions of his parole?’
‘He said he wasn’t going to stick it for much longer, that he could do a lot better for himself somewhere else. She begged him not to go, but he said they’d got more important things to do than to come looking for him. He told her she’d lived her life by the book and look where it had got her.’
‘They will go after him,’ Mercer said. ‘I know it makes little sense, but it’s what they’ll do. They’ll have no alternative.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s the Army.’
‘And are the rest of you included in these plans of his?’
She looked sharply up at him.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Only you.’
‘He told me not to say anything. Especially to her.’
‘It won’t happen, Mary.’
‘Why won’t it? Because you say so?’
‘And you’d go? Just like that? You’d leave your mother and Peter? You’ve just said you know they’ll come looking for him.’
‘Exactly – him, not me.’
‘And your mother would once again be—’
‘He said she’d had her chance. She could have gone any time he was away. She could go with him now – we could all go – but she won’t.’
‘This is all she knows,’ Mercer said, realizing how feeble a reason or excuse this was to her.
‘And so I’m expected to stop here and rot with her, is that it?’
Once again, he heard Lynch in everything she said. Unwilling to prolong the argument to its predictable conclusion, he indicated the teapot on the table, suggesting to her that he made them a drink, but, as before, she insisted on doing this herself. She stood panting after her outburst.
‘Did he say anything more specific?’ he asked her when she had regained her composure and as they waited for the kettle to boil.
‘I’m not that stupid,’ she said, her voice now even and low. ‘He’d soon get as sick of me as he gets of her. I’d get in his way. I’m already in his way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I heard him. I was supposed to be asleep – we both were, but we weren’t – and he said he wouldn’t even have come back here in the first place if it hadn’t been for me. He wanted to see me, he said. He said she was flattering herself if she thought she was the reason he’d come back.’
‘He came back here because it was part of his release agreement,’ he said.
‘That’s what she said.’
‘And?’
‘He just laughed at her and said, “Exactly”, and that as soon as he was in the clear, he’d go. He told her then that he was thinking of taking me with him. She started screaming at him. He told her he’d asked me and that I’d been desperate for him to take me. She accused him of lying and he said that all she had to do was ask me.’
‘And did she?’
She shook her head. ‘She won’t do it. But I can see it every time she says something to me or looks at me.’
‘And what will you tell her if she does ask?’
‘She won’t.’
‘Because for as long as she doesn’t ask, then she doesn’t have to hear you say you’re going.’
‘Something like that.’ She lifted the steaming kettle from the stove and poured the water into the teapot.
‘It would kill her,’ he said.
‘She’ll get over it.’
‘That’s him talking, not you.’
‘He says I’ve got to start thinking of myself. What else is going to happen to me stuck here?’
In the drawer of the table upon which she set the cups and saucers lay the plans from which the houses and the road’s end had already been erased.
‘I’m going to be sixteen soon. Millions of girls of that age are already working. And I don’t mean on farms or in factories. I told her what you’d said about me going to college.’
‘And?’
‘At first she said you ought to mind your own business, but I think she could tell that I was taken with the idea. In the end, she seemed quite keen on it. But then she spoilt it by saying there wasn’t a college in the town, so where would I go?’
‘I take it she mentioned none of this to your father.’
‘What do you think? She knows what he’d say.’
‘He’d say you were likely to get your head stuffed full of fancy words and ideas.’
‘Exactly like you.’
‘Exactly like me.’
They sat together at the room’s centre, beyond all sight of anyone looking up from below. She put down her cup and held out her hand to him.
‘What?’
‘Your hand,’ she said, and gestured.
He held out his hand and she clasped it. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘That’s all you ever say sometimes. “And? And? And?”’
‘And?’ he said. He felt her fingers settle into his palm.
‘I just wanted to see what it was like. I’ve never held a man’s hand. Except his. You think I flirt too much with the others on the site.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. You don’t say it, but you think it.’
‘I just think you ought to be careful, that’s all.’
‘Why – because they’re supposed to be grown men and I’m only a girl?’
He saw again how lightly and easily she moved around him.
‘Something like that.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s what they think as well. They’re not going to try anything, especially now he’s back.’
‘There’s still a lot of room for misunderstanding.’ She gripped him harder. ‘You should listen to yourself sometimes. Sometimes you talk round and round in circles because either you don’t want to say what you mean or you don’t know how to say what you mean.’
‘Lucky for me that you can read my mind, then.’
‘I know. You can let go now.’
He released his slack grip, but her hand stayed where it was for several minutes longer.
‘You’ll go, won’t you?’ he said as she finally withdrew from him.
‘A minute ago you told me he was lying, that he was using me and that it would never happen.’
‘I meant with or without him. He’s just the stick come back to stir everything up.’
‘More tea?’ she said, mimicking a voice she might have heard on the wireless.
‘And you understood that all along.’ He held out his cup to her, and in that instant she seemed a completely different person to him.
‘She even said that she’d be better off without him,’ she said.
‘She might be right.’
‘So what have any of us got to lose?’ She licked her finger and wiped at a mark on one of her shoes. ‘I saw Jacob and Mathias yesterday,’ she said, straightening and sitting back in the chair with her cup held on her legs.
‘Together?’
‘In one of the lanes not far from town.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘Just standing.’
‘Did they see you?’
‘I went and said hello to them. I don’t think Jacob was very well. He could barely talk. Until I showed up, Mathias was standing with his arm around him. He told me that Bail had had some unwanted visitors and that he’d brought Jacob away from the yard until they’d gone.’
‘What visitors?’
‘He didn’t say. Everybody knows about Bail. Mathias asked me what I was doing. I stayed with them for half an hour. I don’t think Jacob wanted me there. I think I make him uncomfortable.’
‘Oh?’
‘Probably something to do with his sister,’ she said, but wit
h no true understanding of what she was suggesting.
‘Perhaps,’ Mercer said, unwilling to speculate on what he only half-understood himself, and hoping to divert her from any closer understanding of how Jacob might regard her.
After that, she rose. ‘I ought to be going. I only came to bring the lighter.’
‘No you didn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll find out who lost it.’
‘The reward was my idea,’ she said. ‘Not hers.’
‘It’s still a possibility,’ he said.
‘Besides which, you’d already guessed.’
He followed her down the stairs, but she told him to stay inside as she let herself out.
‘You think he’ll be watching?’ he said.
‘He usually is. That or he’ll get to hear about it.’
‘The new shoes suit you,’ he said.
‘No, they don’t. But I could hardly make my appearance in fashionable society wearing a pair of old sandals, could I?’
It occurred to him then, watching her go, and watching the men uncoiling the cable running to walk alongside her, that she possessed nothing, and that when she finally did leave her home and her childhood behind her, then she would leave them completely, taking nothing with her, and afterwards reinvent herself anew in the eyes of a world which knew nothing of her.
Part III
35
‘Among my liberators’ – Jacob paused, as though surprised at his own use of the word – ‘was a Scottish medical orderly. A Scotsman. Few of us, even those among us who spoke some English, could understand much of what he said. He told us to call him “Jock” and said he was from Glasgow and that this was why we couldn’t understand him. I was still suffering from dysentery, a result of the typhus. I shall never forget his first words to us upon opening the door to the barracks in which we awaited him, fearful and disbelieving. He stood there, bathed in the sunlight of the opening, looked in at us all, some of us already stumbling and groping towards him, and he said – I shall spare you his accent – he said, “Oh, my poor bloody boys.” Those were his words. “Oh, my poor bloody boys.” Even draped in the blankets and overcoats we had been able to gather from the already-emptied huts, we were still all so thin and so small to him. There were men there old enough to be his father, his grandfather even. “Oh, my poor bloody boys.” It was all the compassion I needed. That, for me, was the moment when I knew for certain that I alone would continue to live.’ He paused again, blinking rapidly at the memory, savouring it, ensuring that not even the tiniest part of it had been lost to him.
‘This was in Belsen?’
Jacob nodded.
‘How long had you been there?’
‘Since the start of that last winter. By train again to a compound outside Braunschweig, and then marched to the camp.’
‘And was Anna still with you?’
‘Not with me, but she was embarked on the same journey. I heard afterwards that a great number of women had been taken to Sachsenhausen – there was a camp there – and from there to Belsen a few weeks later.’
‘Fleeing the Russians, presumably.’
‘Of course fleeing the Russians. They were animals. What horrors they would commit, what atrocities. Imagine: sixty miles on the other side of the Wieser and I would have been back in Holland. It made no sense to move us, weak and suffering as we were, most of us never likely to be well enough to work again, but the orders were to move us and so they did.
‘The barracks in which we awaited our release stank to the heavens. It was a designated typhus barracks. Corpses lay where the life had departed them. There were only makeshift latrines. Even those of us long accustomed to that stench were made to retch by it. Anyone else opening that door would have been knocked over by it. As if the sight of all those skeletons was not enough. But that Scotsman just stood there. “Jesus dear God All bloody Mighty.” He had come past mounds of corpses to reach us, and I imagine his own recollection upon opening that door will remain with him for as long as my own memory of him will remain with me.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He went away. I could barely stand. I wanted to call something out to him in his own language. I wanted to explain to him what he was seeing. I wanted him to know that we were men in there, and not some grunting, shuffling animals he had unexpectedly come across.’
‘He wouldn’t have thought that.’
‘No, but it was how some of us had come to regard ourselves. A man swinging himself down from an upper bunk kicked me in the face.’ He opened his mouth wide to reveal the gap which still remained in his teeth. ‘By the time I myself reached the doorway ready to explain all this, the man was standing back from the barracks and in the company of several others. They all wore berets, I remember, not helmets, black berets. Our liberator was explaining to these others what he had seen. He was standing with his back to us, and the other men were looking over his shoulder at us. And seeing that they were distracted, he too turned and saw us again. He pointed to us. He was crying as he spoke, and the other men, I noticed, kept their distance from him. Someone shouted for us to go back into the hut, but no one heeded the call. Eventually, I made my way outside and called out to these men in berets. Someone heard me and came to me. As he came, another of the prisoners reached out and touched this man’s arm, and he flinched at the contact, struck out and shouted for everyone to stay away from him. I saw that he wore an armband with a red cross on it. He shouted to me from beyond the gathering crowd. He wanted to know if I was English. Needless to say, my answer disappointed him. He called for me to tell the others not to go any distance from the barracks. I told him that there were corpses in there, too, and that few of us had been outdoors in over a week. It was a bright, dry day. Some of the others lowered themselves awkwardly to the ground and sat with their heads in their hands.
‘I remember a woman came to us, another prisoner, asking everyone she encountered if they knew of the husband she had not seen for two years. Or if not her husband, then her father, or her brothers, or her sons. She wore a yellow headscarf, I remember, and I remembered that Anna, too, had worn one of the same colour. It was all I could do to stop myself from shouting to ask her where it had come from.’
‘Did you see Anna upon her own arrival there?’
‘I was fortunate. Everything was in disarray. We were the sweepings, swept one way and then another, each push of the broom leaving so many fewer of us to brush away. I learned of Anna’s arrival from a man selling home-made alcohol. He told me where she was and how to find her. There were still guards, of course, but they were not the men they had once been. Most guessed what was coming, and most, I imagine, were just pleased to be far beyond the reach of the Russians. There was even a rumour that the Germans had signed a pact with Churchill and the Americans to fight the Russians when Hitler finally capitulated. When our Scotsman first appeared, the man beside me, a Pole, listened to his impenetrable accent and said, “American? Russian?”’
‘I heard the same rumours,’ Mercer said.
‘I found Anna in the company of some of the women she had known in Auschwitz. They had travelled there together. There were three times more women in Belsen during those last months than there were men. And among them there were at least a thousand children, most of whom died before the end. There were furnaces for the corpses, but too many corpses for the furnaces, and so the bodies piled up. Someone had decided that the children should not be thrown into piles, but that they should remain clothed and that they should be laid out in lines to await disposal. There were even babies, who must have been born, lived and died using only their bodies’ reserves.
‘Anna was already sick and weak from the journey, but there was little doubt then in my own mind that this was where we would remain until the war’s end, and so I told her to rest and to save her strength, to do whatever was necessary to persist. I lied and told her Holland was only twenty miles away. I told her that the English and the Americans would be there within weeks, days even.
Month after month I told her this, as though it were all that was needed to keep her alive. I even managed to buy some medicines for her – though God knows what was in the bottles I was given. I told her to eat all she could. I told her where I was, told her how she might contact me. I asked the women who were with her to take care of her and they promised me they would. It was a desperate fool’s paradise we inhabited. How could I ask anything of them? How could they promise me anything in return? All I had left to try and persuade them to help was the fact that we were brother and sister, that this connection still existed between us where so many millions of other similar connections had been so brutally and arbitrarily severed, and where countless thousands now wandered completely alone. Perhaps I thought that by showing them how we two had survived, they might be able to accept or believe the same for themselves. Perhaps somewhere out there, waiting or wandering alone and without hope, was their own brother, or husband, or father. I know it makes little real sense now to think like this, but it made sense then. For almost two years we had lived without any real expectation of surviving, and now here, at last, was the faintest light towards which we might both turn our faces. So much. And even if it was a few more months, and not weeks or days, then surely it was still something we might endure.’
‘How long did she survive after her arrival?’ There was no other way for Mercer to ask the question. He had not gone to Bail’s in anticipation of hearing this tale, merely to determine what had happened concerning Bail’s visitors of two days earlier. His concern was unfounded. Nothing in the place had changed, and only Bail and Jacob continued to live there.
‘I worked it out afterwards,’ Jacob said. ‘She survived for thirteen weeks and one day; and four weeks and two days later, the camp was entered.’
‘And you were safe.’
‘Saved. I was saved. No one waved a wand and brought the dying back among the living. That, too, had seldom been a journey that might be travelled in reverse in the past, but now it was possible.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘To stop dying and to start to live again. For a sick man to become healthy and strong again. For some – thousands – it was already too late – they were too ill, too far along that particular road. For some, I think it was the shock of knowing they might survive that killed them. They had lived as nobodies for so long, as those animals, that suddenly to turn back into a somebody again, a human being, with thoughts and feelings for the others around him, was too much for them. I saw one man killed by a bucket of clean water thrown over him by his friend in an effort to revive him. He was barely conscious and the water hit him and the shock of it knocked his head back against the ground, and when the water had finished running from his face, he was dead. He hadn’t even seen the men in berets who had come to save him.’