The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  Listening to the uninhabited wavelength was, for Vanya, like being blindfolded in a room with no roof. A hissing phase of atmospherics scribbled across the sky, and then for no reason – Howard tried guessing at the import of what came next – a rising crescendo of noise filling the earphones like being inside the thrust of a passing comet, gathering power until tipping into diminuendo, when its disintegrating tail vanished into the firmament, beyond all range, as if God had been about to say something but had changed His mind. He was coated with the irradiating and gaseous pitchblende of despair, when a quick whistle passed like a bird, mocking him in his blindness.

  Behind the static, what seemed like a ghost plane would start sending morse, indecipherable, too distant perhaps, tinkling to someone on the far side of Moscow. He listened for a while, till he doubted anyone was there at all. Some wizardry of atmospherics was deceiving him, as a mirage would trick the eyes of one in the desert who could see. He thought, when the signals again floated towards him, that because he couldn’t read the message it must be one of the most important ever sent. Meant for him alone, it was unreachable, he had missed it, had not been sufficiently alert, or he had been maliciously deceived.

  Vanya, leaning forward and putting his cigarette in the ash tray made by himself from an old tin lid, tapped the key, as if he had got the pip, you might say, sent a dot, one squeak into the aether which flitted over half the world, a single pulse liberated, picked up by Howard with a smile, the letter E, for Easy when he’d been flying, but now E for Echo in the modern phonetic alphabet.

  Then Vanya went back to musing on the charms of his girlfriend (we’ll call her Galya, Howard decided) or he resumed reading his magazine until, fifteen minutes later, he tapped the key three times, three dots in a row, and artfully spaced, rhythmically plinked without reason but as if to show he was still alive, was impatient in fact, and craved to be communicated with.

  His idea of heaven would be to have a dozen aircraft calling at the same time for their position, the wavelength sounding as crowded as if a big buck rat had gnawed a way into the parrot house at the zoo, but the most Vanya ever got was when one plane came on a few minutes after the other, and then he had to pay for the luxury by waiting more than an hour for the next client.

  Goaded into action by an unquiet spirit he sent random dots, yet diffidently now because Big Brother (Radio) might be listening for such infringements. You couldn’t be shot for it any more, but might be posted to one of those remote mosquito-infested places in the Tundra which, from ten thousand metres above, he was occasionally called to give a pinpoint. Best not to take chances, however, by letting yourself go completely but, oh! if he could, what a tale Howard might hear! Such pips and squeaks were not necessarily proof that Vanya was an alert listener, though Howard assumed he was, but it seemed obvious that because the dots were so brief, albeit chirpy, he could be a very smart sender whenever called on to communicate.

  Such operators were easily bored, and jittery when alone for too long. Having the spark gaps of the morse key only a foot or two from ever itching fingers, the temptation to give a tap now and again is more than flesh and blood can tolerate. Howard recalled flying over Germany as a long period of monotony, because radio silence had to be kept in case some German listener picked up the signal and beamed guns or fighters onto you. He had yearned to give a tap or two, even to call up a nonexistent station and send a fictitious message, but aircraft keys had a wider gap in case the bouncing should close the contacts and cause a ripple, and to tap the key meant a positive press, thereby discouraging the impulse.

  Laura had read that every telegraphist in the Japanese fleet, on its approach to Pearl Harbor, was wisely ordered to put a slip of paper between the contacts in case an operator accidentally touched the key and revealed the presence of their ships before the surprise attack.

  Vanya had received no such order because Russia wasn’t at war. Maybe he knew an operator in one of the planes, a woman perhaps, because the pattern of his dots, three in a row, like the tiniest of sparks, were as quick as if coming from a half-burnt log which had rolled off the fire. It was merely Vanya’s form of identification, to let her know he was on watch and thinking about her. Perhaps he would come out one day and make his statement of intent, go mad, in other words. No chance of that, so Howard had to do what he could by thinking for him, building a 3-D identikit picture, which could only stay in his world because no reciprocal chit-chat was either permitted or possible.

  Every wireless operator lived in Ionosphere Gardens, and Vanya was no exception. Maybe he didn’t have an airborne sweetheart, but he sure had one, if not several, in the place where he was born. He goes there every month or so. At the bus station, having not quite shaken the radio dust off his feet, he drums morse with his fingertips on the window pane, scorched with impatience. If he’s lucky he can stay a few days in the village, where he earns extra roubles repairing the peasants’ broken radios, being a dab hand at finding valves and even transistors from street markets in town. With Marconi fingers he is seen as a young man made good, and everyone loves him. The aerial blues don’t get at him in the countryside, a magic bucolic heaven compared to the grim buildings near Moscow surrounded by aerials.

  When the bus lands him back there and he sits down, and tunes in, atmospherics make sounds as if someone is sobbing far away, the breaking of a heart in deepest misery. You need earphones to hear the fully nuanced music of the spheres, so he puts them firmly on, even living out a pestilential itch in his groin to keep them there in case he should miss something. No distraction of family, neighbours, traffic or sweethearts until Grushenka, the station slavey in headscarf and baggy clothes, brings him, halfway through his stint, a slice of black bread and a glass of lemon tea. Whenever she does he manages somehow to touch her bottom, and she slaps his hand before going huffily out – though Howard couldn’t spill this part of his fantasy to Laura, because even the blind must have their secrets.

  It took Vanya some time to get sense out of a plane with a faulty transmitter, a dull and rusty note, albeit sharp enough for him, fitful mews morsing from the outer world. He pinned it down like a butterfly in the specimen box and, still on a lover’s wavelength, sent a position report to set it free.

  Laura tapped the shoulder of someone on a comparable wavelength, so he stood for a hug-and-kiss, glad to be released from his peculiar bondage.

  ‘You were a long way out,’ she said.

  ‘Too far, maybe. I’ve got you to thank for bringing me back. I often wonder where I’d end up if you didn’t.’ He would sit without food or sleep for days until he died, except that he would have to come away from wherever he was to go out to the toilet, she reminded him, as he followed her into the kitchen for tea.

  ‘I had a puncture coming back from Bracebridge, and a very pleasant man changed the wheel for me.’

  Even when she only went to the bottom of the hill he would hear about all that was seen and heard, every incident no matter how minor or irrelevant, she decided, to keep his mind alive with things other than radio listening. Sometimes by a slight downward movement of his lips, he showed impatience at such trivialities, maybe thinking she ought to invent a few occurrences to make her revelations more interesting. But that kind of talent would be too close to lying, and common sense hadn’t equipped her for it.

  The lid made a satisfying clunk onto the big teapot, then the sound of the cake tin being opened. ‘He was a gentleman, then, to help you.’

  ‘He was. It was a muddy lay-by. I’d never have got the wheel off. When he’d done he asked me to have a drink in The Foxglove, though I suspect he only wanted to wash his hands. He was about forty’ – she made a picture for Howard to see, of more details than she remembered. ‘We chatted over the drinks – I had an orange juice – and do you know, he told me he’d been a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. When I mentioned your hobby he said he’d like to meet you one day. I didn’t know what to say, but couldn’t really rebuff him. He’d been
so kind.’

  Howard, on his second cup of tea, decided that listening was thirsty work. ‘You should have said yes. Anyone who is good to you is my friend for life.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t put him off. Couldn’t really. He said you and he belonged to a fraternity. I liked that. We exchanged telephone numbers. I suppose he could have some fascinating things to say.’

  He assembled crumbs from around his plate. ‘What’s his line of work now?’

  ‘He didn’t say exactly. We weren’t in the pub for long. But I gathered it was something to do with boats.’

  ‘Would be, I suppose. Did he tell you when he’d call?’

  ‘He didn’t promise. Seemed uncertain, because of his work. But I think he was quite keen on it, because he said he would as soon as he could.’

  He had wondered why she was so long away, often did, though in this case the adventure was worth it if he could one day gab with an ex-Merchant Navy key-basher. He often had the dread that Laura would go out and never come back. Just like that. She would be spirited away forever. Hard to know why he should think so, though if you’d had one disaster another was always possible. Maybe that was it, no other reason at all. To make it unthinkable he told her about his fear, and they laughed at such an impossibility, an evening taken up with speculation as to what he would do if left alone in the house with no money. The fantasy enthralled them through twilight and into supper. He was inventive, as if he had heard the solution suggested by a message on the radio.

  ‘If I was alone, and had to get by, you know what I’d do?’

  ‘Can’t imagine,’ she said.

  ‘Nor me. But it’s just come to me. I’d take my morse key and oscillator, and a groundsheet, which I’d sit on outside the big supermarket. I would have a notice on a bit of cardboard beside me, having got Arthur the postman to write it, saying: “GOOD LUCK AND LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL.” I’d sit there, and send it in morse at maximum volume over and over again, my cap in front for passers by to drop money into. It’d be such an original way of begging that I’d be bound to make several pounds a day for my food, especially if I went into the supermarket at closing time to scoop up stuff that had passed its sell-by date.’

  ‘A brilliant idea,’ she laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be a beggar, though, you’d be a busker, an entertainer. Perhaps you’d be spotted, and you’d make a tape, and get into the top ten. You’d be interviewed on the radio. You might even go on television.’

  ‘Well, you never know, do you? Maybe I should do it anyway. It wouldn’t be a boring life, because I’d hear some very interesting remarks from people as I sat on the pavement. Children with pretty young mums would be the best givers. They’d be spellbound at the music from my morse machine, and have to be dragged away screaming because they wanted one to play with as well. Maybe an ex-service wireless op would be so intrigued he’d drop me a quid, and even stop for a chat. What a life it would be, as long as the police didn’t move me on.’

  ‘You could go somewhere else,’ Laura said, ‘couldn’t you? Outside the church, or the library. I’d certainly put something in your cap. In fact I might be so amazed by your act that I’d fall in love with you and carry you off.’

  ‘And we’d soon be back where we started,’ he said, ‘which is no bad place to be.’

  ‘I do hope that chap calls,’ she said.

  A careless and wayward signal came like a fly into his web – VIP from Lux Australis. He asked Laura to look the call sign up in his manual. Sensitive fingers were for splitting kilocycle hairs so as to get aircraft captains giving their position crossing the North Atlantic, a constant coming and going.

  The cannon shell that had swept through the Lancaster over Essen smashed the radio and blinded him. The smell of metal and burning wires in a cold darkness threw him to the deck, on hands and knees looking for his eyes, for a place to see and cool the heat of his flesh, to find a window to the outside and discover what happened. He wanted to know where he was, even to leap from the plane and find out on whatever part of the earth.

  Under his radio desk, locked in a box which Laura might know about but had never asked him to open, were his training manuals and discharge papers, the last resort to riffle through, as he used to, though no longer necessary. They lay there, best left alone in the hope of being forgotten. A life of action was no longer open to him, had been over from the age of twenty, but you didn’t complain. It wasn’t done. Life in an aeroplane had been all he wanted, made for no other, and when it was taken away he no longer felt any connection with his past or himself. For a while he was drowning in black space, happy that no one could realise his pain. He seemed normal, but the clock had stopped, pendulum and mainspring gone. Like others no doubt, he smiled when tea was brought, or his bed was made, or the MO asked how he felt.

  ‘Fine, Sir. Never felt better.’

  ‘Good chap.’

  It was the only answer. Wanting to die was lack of moral fibre, and when he thought of Laura he craved even more to float into extinction and never come back. Yet when she came, and he heard the gentle plain words she had to say, he decided to live. Her tone suggested that a similar disaster had happened to her, and there could be no greater sympathy than that. He couldn’t but want to live with a young woman who had such miraculous powers of empathy that she would match herself so equally with him.

  Even so, the mind was too often in turmoil, though no matter, as long as he kept it to himself. The Flying Dutchman was ever at the helm. What would he have done and been if he had led an ordinary life? The question hadn’t popped up of late, meaning that his existence had become normal. One less architect or clerk in the world made no difference. He could have been anything, but now he was everything because he was himself again, had been for a long time. Put your hat on in the House of the Lord, and say how do you do to the German Numbers Woman.

  Perhaps it was her day’s break, but trawling the higher reaches of the shortwave spectrum, he put his fingers to the typewriter and recorded that: ‘The Indian Government has produced a macabre plan to clean up the polluted Ganges where hundreds of corpses are brought each day and floated down the river on makeshift funeral pyres. Now three thousand soft shelled turtles are to be introduced into the waters around the Holy City of Varanasi (which he assumed was Benares) where they still feed off the corpses.’

  Such a gem made his day, better than taking down screeds of gobbledegook which blighted dreams and damaged otherwise untroubled sleep. The scriptures of the aether shape the heart. He tapped that too onto his typewriter, as if it had come through in morse, though what government would send that out? – signing off with: ‘What God hath wrought.’

  SEVEN

  Richard focussed his Barr and Stroud 8 x 30 binoculars on the block-like radio and television detector van parked in the lay-by at the end of the lane: two straight aerials to one side, and a Bellini-tosi system above the driver’s cabin. Windows blacked out, the only identification mark, apart from licence plates which he could not see, was a POLICE sign on the side.

  He looked down on a grey stone wall, covered with ivy and overgrown grass. The wooden lattice fence at the end of the kitchen garden had gone mildewed. It was a bloody disgrace, the whole plot surfaced with a thin layer of dead leaves, and a few upright stalks of etiolated currant bushes. Green-trunked trees beyond were tangled with last autumn’s twigs, and made a silhouette between him and the neighbouring hill. Ken was supposed to keep the place tidy, but was only interested in growing vegetables they didn’t need but he did.

  If they were searching for a transmitter they wouldn’t find one, but he switched off the communications receiver in case a microphone was beamed at the open window. He passed the time sending a few paragraphs from The Times on his morse key, after disconnecting the oscillator, just the rhythmical clicks to keep him occupied while wondering what the hell the car was doing there. After five minutes his wrist ached, and he was making mistakes. It wasn’t easy, without half an hour’s daily practice.


  He supposed the van was parked so that the crew inside could rest from their work of looking for clandestine television sets. They were no doubt eating sandwiches, and drinking coffee out of flasks. On the other hand maybe they were investigating him. Perhaps his more-than-ordinary aerials had attracted their attention, or some local snooper had reported hearing suspicious noises. Well, it was a free country, and you could tune in to what you liked in the privacy of your home. As long as you didn’t write what you heard or show it to anybody else. Some hopes of that. Anything sent in plain language was fair game as far as he was concerned. Reception would be just as good if he dismantled the main aerial and threw a piece of inconspicuous wire out of the window.

  They drove away ten minutes later, so he returned to his work on the highly forbidden frequencies, reflecting that they had nothing on him. He was always careful to renew the television licence.

  He opened a manual from the United States which gave the police and security frequencies, and checked them one by one on the radio. They were silent for a while, or mere oddments on short wave bounding up to the heaviside layer and coming down and leaping up again, invisibly around the world and diminishing in potency to vanishing point. Then one of the Interpol frequencies became active, allowing him to pull in a choice item of a ship that had departed from a port in Turkey. The message queried its load of phosphates, and gave the boat’s appearance: ‘Structure just aft of midships, twin funnels aft of bridge, hull dark blue with bright green bulwarks, fore and aft funnels dark grey with black top. Keep a sharp look out. Thought to have destination Trieste.’