A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  *

  ‘Mac – I’ve got the biggest surprise ever for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’re going on a long journey in an aeroplane.’

  ‘Are we Bea, honest? An aeroplane like Francis used to fly?’

  ‘No, not quite like that. One that carries passengers. We’re going on a little holiday.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To see Francis... to where he’s working.’

  Francis had wangled a Foreign Office jaunt to lecture on Cold War politics at a NATO training base in the Bavarian mountains. Mac misses him and his face lights up at Bea’s news. A week later, they are in a London taxi heading from their hotel to the airport. He is excited at all the capital’s famous sights but grips Bea’s hand during take-off, afraid yet trying to hide it. A stewardess asks if he would like to meet the crew.

  Mac is led to the flight deck, wide-eyed. His only question is to ask if the pilot is going to drop any bombs.

  ‘No, ’course not. All that’s finished now. The war’s over.’

  ‘Francis was a pilot.’

  ‘And who’s Francis, young man?’

  ‘He’s my new Daddy and he and the old one used to bomb the Germans.’

  ‘Well, not any more. We’re all on the same side, now.’

  The aircraft banks low for its final approach into Munich. Through the cabin window Bea sees specks of humanity moving in the streets below. Here are shopkeepers, mothers, teachers, railwaymen, musicians, clerks, librarians, architects, engineers, decorators, scientists, doctors. Unremarkable citizens. Ordinary people. Just like us.

  But for Bea, each was the tiniest of cogs in the factories where Hitler industrialised murder. They obeyed his order to hate their neighbours, the Jews, hounded them into ghettoes, stole their belongings and ensured every cattle truck was full of human cargo for the journeys that few, if any, would survive.

  Bea feels nauseous with revulsion. She will soon have to move amongst them... to smile, talk and eat with them while never believing they stopped being Nazis when their Fuhrer fired a bullet into his unhinged brain.

  It had become politically expedient for all the untold crimes of these new allies to be forgotten. But why should the agony of the unavenged dead go unheard? Bea knows she must rein in her loathing. If Arie can operate here, so must she.

  *

  Francis has organised a NATO driver to meet them in an official car. Mac sleeps in Bea’s arms on the long journey through streets once tyrannised by the fascist Brown Shirts, then out into the countryside towards their hotel.

  Mac remains underweight for his age. There is still a vulnerability about him which remains immune to all the security they offer. She pushes the flop of brown hair from his innocent face and wonders about the man he will become.

  Francis says he will need to go away to school soon if he is to toughen up and make anything of himself. He insists Mac will be able to cope. Bea is far from convinced yet still they put his name down for Francis’s old school.

  She looks at the passing scenery. It is an overcast day and there has been a shower. There are birch trees everywhere... hunched and heavy with rain and paler than bones, like markers in the land of the dead.

  What in the name of Jesus must it have been like?

  She puts her free hand close to her face and peers through the bars of her fingers. That was all there would have been – thin cracks between the metal-strapped planks of the wagons to gulp a breath of air or lick a flake of snow. No food, no water, no space to sit or rest. Each was a coffin, deep in human waste in which the sick would die and those without hope go mad. Iron wheels on iron rails, the beating machinery of destruction, all day, all night... screaming, screeching, pouring out smoke to blow like wraiths through the branches of trees.

  Birch trees. Everywhere.

  Birkenau.

  *

  Bea and Mac leave the Hotel Alte Post and go to meet Francis in the square. The village is in a deep bowl of oppressively close mountains. Mac stares at all the life-size bible scenes painted in bright colours on the outsides of shops and houses. He has seen nothing similar before and does not like the frightening depiction of Christ nailed to the cross, oozing blood.

  ‘Why do they do these pictures, Bea?’

  ‘It’s the way the people round here have of thanking God.’

  ‘What are they thanking God for?’

  ‘For keeping them free of the plague a long time ago.’

  ‘What’s the plague, Bea?’

  ‘It was a most terrible disease.’

  ‘Why was it terrible?’

  ‘Because big red marks came on people’s bodies then they died soon after.’

  ‘Was it to do with the war, then?’

  ‘No, Mac. This happened hundreds of years ago when there wasn’t any medicine.’

  ‘So weren’t the people here marked by the plague?’

  ‘Some of them were but most of them escaped so that’s why they still paint their houses and put on special plays to give thanks.’

  They see Francis and Mac runs to him to be lifted high in the air with delight. Bea and Francis embrace and Mac babbles his news about what he has seen and done in Garth Woods.

  They go to a small restaurant and sit below a wall of antlers from deer shot in the forests nearby. Francis orders spatzle for them – small egg noodles, gently cooked and served with a basket of black bread. All around are German men... chewing slowly and efficiently. Mac feels their gaze upon him because Bea and Francis are speaking English. He has only ever seen Germans snarling orders in comics and heard stories of how they tried to kill Francis and his first Daddy. Mac thinks them even nastier in real life. He moves his food round the plate and fixes them with all his impotent hostility.

  ‘So, little friend... what would you say to another surprise?’

  ‘What sort of surprise, Francis?’

  ‘Well, the Germans are very good at making toys and in this village, there’s a shop that sells the finest wooden toys in all of Bavaria.’

  ‘And I can have one?’

  ‘Yes but only because you’re the best little boy in all the world.’

  Francis leads the way through cobbled streets full of more weirdly painted houses. The shop they are looking for is in an alley of three storey buildings between a bakery and a jeweller’s. The window is cluttered with every sort of toy – puppets, dolls, Noah’s arks full of beasts and birds. Inside, Mac does not know what to look at first. A young woman emerges from a back room. She has golden hair coiled in a bun and a long white pinafore stuck with curly wood shavings. Francis could only be English in his tailored Norfolk jacket and brogues. But he remembers enough German from the days when he might have had to bail out of his bomber.

  ‘The lady says to choose anything you like, Mac – whatever takes your fancy.’

  Mac picks up a wooden car and a helicopter then sees just what he wants – a fort with a working drawbridge. Francis insists Bea has a present, too. She selects an exquisite Madonna and Child which the assistant herself carved from a log of lime wood.

  Francis pays cash and praises her great skill. Then he gets out his cine camera and asks if he might film her at work.

  She is embarrassed but Francis is all charm and she agrees. They are taken into the little grotto of a workshop behind a beaded curtain. It smells of linseed oil and sawdust. One shelf is lined with the decapitated heads of clowns waiting to be given sad or smiley faces.

  Francis goes down on one knee to shoot his sequence then pans across to another wood carver whittling a thin plaque of alder on his bench. The man’s hands are a fascinating contradiction – thick, heavy, almost brutish, yet able to guide a narrow-bladed chisel like a surgeon’s knife. Every trim and slice of the pale-grained wood slowly coaxes out the tormented despair of Christ crucified hidden beneath.

  For Bea, what is being revealed is the face of another anguished Jew.

  Francis moves in closer. The wood carver doe
s not let his concentration lapse. He is in his mid fifties, fit and strong with the leathery bald pate of an Alpine climber. The films runs out and Francis bows in gratitude.

  ‘Wie heissen, Sie?’

  The wood carver hesitates, but only for a moment.

  ‘Frank... Wilhelm Frank.’

  *

  Breakfast next day is hard boiled eggs, ham and radishes. Bea and Francis tell Mac to eat up as they are going mountain walking. They set off down a street named after King Ludwig, cross the clear, icy waters of the Ammer river and pass chalets with big gardens and trees full of linnets and blackbirds. The metalled road gets steeper and gives out to a dirt path. It hairpins up and up, through woods of spruce, linden and birch.

  Mac loves it. He has brought his toy pistol and runs ahead to make sure it is safe. They turn a corner and find another image of Christ hanging on a cross, thirty feet high and sculpted from blocks of cloudy Kelheim marble. Mac jumps out from behind a tree.

  ‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’

  Bea and Francis pretend to fall down then find a bench where they sit and admire the scenery. Mac heads back into the trees to look for spies. Far below, the bell of the village church marks the hour and echoes round the circling mountains from its golden-domed tower. Francis checks his watch.

  Bea calls Mac to her and gives him a bar of chocolate.

  ‘Can I go and play again now?’

  ‘In a minute, Mac. Just be good and wait here till I say.’

  Beyond the figure of Christ, a man appears from within the semi-circle of trees which are its backdrop. Mac spins round and points his gun at him.

  ‘Bang! Bang!’

  ‘No, Mac. Stop it. Don’t do that now.’

  Francis quickly walks across to the man. They shake hands and talk for a moment. Then the man disappears back into the trees and Francis returns to the bench.

  ‘What’s Uncle Harry going here?’

  ‘That wasn’t Uncle Harry.’

  ‘It was. I could see him.’

  ‘No, Mac. It wasn’t anything like him. It’s just someone I had to meet here.’

  ‘But you gave him something.’

  ‘No I didn’t. What a good story-teller you’re becoming, little friend.’

  Bea and Francis both laugh. But Mac knows what he saw.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Evie wondered if she should rescue McCall from the female mourners who fussed him into a corner with their wan smiles and sympathy. Yet it did not need a wake for his vulnerability to bring out their mothering instincts. It was always in his face. Evie made no move. She was too sensitive to her own position. Shun any prominence, attend only to Bea’s wishes. Critical eyes were watching, alert for gold diggers.

  The windows remained covered by the builder’s blue plastic sheeting which cast a theatrical ghostliness across the drawing room. Bea looked ill even without these stage effects. The more people nodded over her as though she were a stupid child, the angrier she became at being unable to answer back.

  McCall reminisced about Francis with some old Foreign Office types. They were the last knockings of Empire and the darker arts beyond politics. The flag would soon be lowered on them, too.

  After an hour, Bea could take no more. Evie and McCall helped her into the nurse’s car. Bea tried hard to form words to express what she was feeling but nothing came so she just held tight to McCall.

  When everyone had gone, he sat with Evie at the kitchen table and talked about the VIP in the diplomatic Jaguar.

  ‘If he was a friend of Bea’s, why didn’t he come back to the house?’

  ‘Mac, how would I know?’

  ‘Are you sure it was actually him?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘But that footage was shot years ago.’

  ‘I know but those high cheek bones, the penetrating eyes – he’s still got them.’

  ‘But you were only side on to him in the church.’

  ‘Listen – I’m trained to remember faces. It’s part of what I do, OK?’

  A door to McCall’s past had opened as another closed. He had to locate this man, ask about Elizabeth and why Bea and Francis had airbrushed a year from his life. The film of his mother, like that of his father, summoned her back from the grave. McCall had seen himself in her arms and all he had meant to her. It did not matter that they lived in a condemned house or were church-mice poor.

  His mother cried out to be acknowledged for who and what she had been. Evie knew what was in McCall’s mind – and why.

  ‘I can find out which embassy the Jaguar came from, if you’d like.’

  ‘That’d help.’

  ‘There’s someone in the diplomatic protection squad who owes me a favour... and listen, McCall – you’ve no need to upset Bea with any this.’

  ‘Why should it upset her?’

  ‘Come on, you can see how she is. Another stroke and that could be the end of her.’

  *

  Once a week, Edgar Fewtrell put on his best court pinstripe and ate supper at the Bale of Cloth restaurant in Lower Broad Street, close to where weavers of the middle ages once toiled in their damp riverside cottages. He always reserved the same table and high-backed settle by the cast iron grate, ordered the same meal of spinach, new potatoes and three cutlets, well grilled, with two glasses of house red. He was usually be gone by nine.

  Soon after the funeral – and when Evie was back in London – McCall rang him to make an appointment but was invited to the Bale instead. They talked about the progress of roof repairs at Garth, Bea’s sad deterioration, McCall’s depression.

  ‘I can’t seem to sleep or concentrate and the thought of work... I just dread it.’

  ‘It’s called grieving, Mac. Let it happen.’

  The restaurant gradually emptied. Coffee was brought. Mr Fewtrell poured and asked what else was on McCall’s mind.

  ‘There was a man you were talking to after the funeral... a bit stooped, had a walking stick and a chauffeur.’

  ‘I think he was just one of Francis’s old pals. Why do you ask?’

  ‘So he wasn’t someone you knew, then?’

  ‘No, just another mourner.’

  ‘He looked a bit foreign to me.’

  ‘Yes, I’d say possibly eastern European from his slight accent.’

  ‘Who invited him?’

  ‘I suppose he must have seen the death notice in The Times.’

  ‘But he didn’t come to the house afterwards as I would’ve expected.’

  ‘No, he probably had to get back to London again.’

  Fewtrell clasped his hands across his belly. He had a rather aldermanic face, soft cheeks flushed pink in the firelight. Yet McCall sensed a steeliness behind his pernickety bachelor ways and said he had seen the Nuremberg photograph in his study.

  ‘Oh, that. All our yesterdays, Mac.’

  ‘I never realised you’d been such an important witness to history.’

  ‘Well, in truth I was only one of the clerks but it was a fascinating experience.’

  ‘How did you get onto the prosecution team?’

  ‘My father knew Hartley Shawcross. He thought it’d be interesting for me.’

  ‘And was it?’

  Edgar Fewtrell moved position slightly and stretched out his withered leg.

  ‘You know, Mac, there are some artists who sit in a landscape for days and don’t paint a stroke because first, they have to absorb the essence of all they see, to get to the very fundamentals of what touches them as human beings. In a way, Nuremberg was like that for me... however dreadful the details of what I saw and heard were, they became secondary to the overwhelming truth of the whole experience.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That we must never let our guard down against man’s capacity to bureaucratise evil and wickedness for his own purposes.’

  ‘Yes, but surely Nuremberg proved that man lives by law and is civilised by law.’

  ‘To some extent, it did. But the truth was we
hanged a few of the ringleaders... that’s all.’

  ‘But that is justice, man’s ultimate decency, the formalised triumph of right over wrong.’

  ‘Mac, Nuremberg was a symbolic, political act as much as anything because the dock has yet to be built that could have accommodated all those who should’ve stood in it.’

  ‘I don’t see the alternative. There was a trial with evidence, a prosecutor, defence – ’

  ‘– true enough but remember this... the law doesn’t always deliver justice.’

  Fewtrell paid the bill in cash and they walked into the fresh night air. A slight mist rose from the river. Above them, the sky was a clear sweep of stars. The old lawyer and his callipered leg could never get into McCall’s low-slung Morgan so they stood talking for a while longer.

  ‘We need to meet again soon, Mac. There are papers to sign, things like that.’

  ‘About Francis?’

  ‘Yes, but you, too.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you’re going to be very well off and we shall have to make plans.’

  *

  Was she awake or dreaming or dead? Who kissed her in the half shadows?

  Bea was laid out under the tightly drawn sheets of her hospital bed, arms by her side, head sunk into the snowy white col of her pillow. It was neither day nor night. Figures seemed to hover above her then dissolve. Cleaners, nurses, doctors and the families of those like her, clinging on to whatever remained, came and went like the spirits who kept her company.

  *

  ‘Elizabeth McCall’s rung me again, Bea. Edward’s still giving her a terrible time.’

  ‘You can’t carry on being his skipper, Francis. The war’s over. He’s not your responsibility any more.’

  ‘But he’s only like this because of what happened.’

  ‘Come on. He’s a damned excuse of a man.’

  ‘He wasn’t always.’

  ‘Well, his wife can’t keep running to you every five minutes.’

  ‘But there’s no one else... and there’s their boy to worry about. I’ve told her I’ll drive down tomorrow.’

  ‘But Arie’s coming – ’