Beck puts a restraining hand on Ewa’s arm as an official car speeds past on the boulevard. Then he steers her across. In the budded branches of the tree-lined central walkway, birds trill.
The street lamps have come on, but dimly. From what she has overheard in the dining room, Ewa knows that this is because there are fears, despite the vast distance, of English bombers reaching here soon.
The narrow commercial streets are almost deserted but there is a spill of yellow light from the glass doors of the cinema.
‘Do you already have the tickets?’
‘Of course.’
Beck pats his breast pocket and opens the foyer door for Ewa to enter. Breath briefly deserts her at the sight of so many field grey uniforms clustered across the chess-board tiles. Chrome gleams against the red walls and German voices, loud, indignant, excited, crowd the air. There is a sense of occasion, as if something momentous is about to happen, and the few women there are tastelessly overdressed in pale fur and lace-covered hats as if for a wedding. It seems a ridiculous fuss for a film show, not even a new film, at that. But Ewa feels suddenly out of place in her sober jacket. At least she put on the lipstick.
Beck nods and smiles. Hands raise to him in casual half-heils, but he seems keen to move forward and does not introduce Ewa to any of his colleagues. Once cocooned by the plushness of the auditorium, Ewa begins to breathe more freely. The cinema always gives her a rush of childish anticipation. She remembers how she would hold her mother’s hand throughout the show, gripping it at moments of high emotion, or whenever she wanted her mother to return the squeeze. She wonders what her mother would think, seeing her here with Beck, and for a sudden horrible second she is glad that her mother is dead.
The auditorium is stuffy and overheated. Beck indicates seats at the front of a shallow tier which are the best in the house.
‘Is this all right?’
‘Of course. Lovely.’
As he sits, Beck takes off his gloves and places his own bare hand over Ewa’s as it rests on the arm of the seat. It is so long since anyone held her hand. She does not return his pressure, but neither does she pull her hand away.
The red velvet curtains swish, the lights dim and stale heat settles on to Ewa’s limbs. Despite the heave of grey uniforms around her, she finds herself relaxing into her seat. Without exactly meaning for it to happen, her hand turns over so that it folds into Beck’s.
His profile flickers in the white light from the screen. Then, he leans his head towards Ewa so that hairs from both their heads entwine. ‘Can you see all right, and hear?’
Ewa nods and leans her own cheek towards his, although she has nothing actually to say. One of her forefingers presses against his with a pressure so slight she is not sure what she herself means by it. Heat flushes through her chest and she cannot stop herself unbuttoning her jacket.
Orchestral music, overloud and tinny, wraps the curving auditorium. Ewa glances vaguely at the newsreel procession of Russian fields and rivers before casting a look across the front of the stalls. The cheap seats are sparsely occupied and no one there is in uniform. In the swirl of cigarette smoke through the projector’s beam, a woman’s head is illuminated. Ewa stares. Is that Gertruda? The waved, flat hairdo is identical, but Gertruda is a Pole. She would not be allowed in here without a DVL badge, like the blue enamelled ‘Wartheland’ pin on Ewa’s own lapel.
It looks like Gertruda though. Why on earth would she come here? Her German is no better than a five-year-old child’s. She’d be unlikely to understand all of the dialogue in the main film, let alone the more complicated explanations about the Eastern Front that are rolling through the newsreel.
Ewa feels, faintly, the weight of Beck’s hand lifting away from hers. And then there is a word from the announcer that flips Ewa’s eyes from Gertruda’s crimped hair up to the screen. The word is polnischen. Polish. Not der Pole, as in ‘the backward ways of the Pole’, or ‘the filthy habitations of the Pole’. No, polnischen. The respectful adjective – a word that implies a nationality, a real country. It is not a word that she can remember hearing in German since the start of the war. A drip of perspiration runs down Ewa’s neck and between her breasts.
But her attention is now fixed to the screen. A sunlit black and white river curves beneath an escarpment. The roof of a wooden mansion towers above waving larches. Then there are men milling about in cold sunshine, some in long leather coats and stiffly peaked caps, others in grubby side-buttoned tunics. Spades pitch. Sandy soil sprays into the air.
Ewa squints then as the camera passes over strangely shaped bulges in the ground. The announcer speaks quietly over the choir of male voices that sing a murmuring song. Ewa concentrates on the lumps of soil but there is no telling what they might be. Polnische Offiziere, says the voice through the sad singing. Polish officers. The air in the auditorium is growing thicker and hotter. Ewa realises that she can hardly breathe.
But Beck, she senses, is moving. Or not moving, in fact, but tensing into rigid stillness. The screen fills with more lumps in the soil. And then these lumps turn into arms, hands, heads. Not real limbs or heads, of course, they are too dusty and weightless. Hollow. Like deflated footballs, or rag-dolls left too long in an attic.
Live people now fill the screen. Women. Babies. Although as the camera moves away it is clear that they are not really alive; their smiles are too fixed, their clothes too old-fashioned. It is just a pile of photographs being sorted by a German soldier. The photographs must be from the soil. The loved ones of the empty men; their rosy babies having baths; their young women with hopeful eyes and just-trimmed bobs. Other things are brought out of the soil; a pair of spectacles, the glass unbroken; a pen, that even through the crusted soil, seems to display its lizard-skin whorls.
‘Oh, Jesus!’
Ewa’s hand leaves Beck’s and flies to her mouth, pressing against it, stopping any other involuntary sound that might seep out. But the announcer’s voice continues; his clipped German is doleful but indignant: ‘what we have found here in the forest of Katyn reveals the work of the Bolshevik monster in all of his inhuman savagery…’
Beneath larch trees, workmen in side-buttoned shirts begin to pull the empty men out of the earth. There is clearly no weight to these toy-like humans. They emerge easily, dust-covered and shredded, but still in one piece. The labourers poke at the empty men, rearranging limbs and rotted clothing. One persistent worker raises, again and again, the bare white globe of a head until it balances upright on a neck. Ewa’s hand presses harder against her mouth. Heat seems to have robbed the air of oxygen.
And then, one of the peasants, a wizened old man in a brimless cap, takes up a hacksaw and sets about one of the empty men’s arms. Sawing. Through the raggy sleeve and into the arm. The empty man shudders and gives off a small cloud of dust as if to protest, but he is unable to stop the peasant cutting into his bone.
It is too much. Ewa’s hand leaves her mouth.
‘What is he doing with that hacksaw? Why in God’s name is he sawing off someone’s arm?’
She has directed the question to the screen, but then she looks around and sees that every face on the balcony is turned towards her. In the white glimmer of the screen all of the faces are the same colour and each has the same look, both baffled and irritated. Only Beck’s expression reflects her own, although his eyes, when they come to rest on her, are blank.
Ewa begins to rise. ‘I’m sorry, Heinrich. It’s so hot… I must leave.’
He stands and moves aside. But as she bursts up the stairs, out of the darkened auditorium and through the deserted lobby, he is close behind.
In the cold night air, she stops and clings to the wall beside the foyer doors. She does not feel faint. Not in the least. But she bends over anyway with her head pointing to the ground to look more convincing. The reassuring hand that she expects to feel on her back does not come. Instead there
is the strike of a match. Slowly Ewa straightens and sees that Beck is beside her, his cap pulled low over his eyes, his cheeks hollowed by the drag on his cigarette. He tilts the packet towards her but she shakes her head.
‘I’m so sorry, Heinrich. Those bodies… and the heat made me feel unwell.’
He does not say anything. His face is half-lit by the yellow glow from the foyer but his eyes are in shadow. Ewa feels that she must say something else to fill the silence, to explain.
‘Usually, I don’t mind what they show of the battlefields, but it was just those close-ups…’
‘I think he was recovering the wristwatch.’
Beck’s voice is thin and distant.
‘What?’
‘The man with the hacksaw who you were asking about.’
‘Oh, I…’
‘He was trying to take the wristwatch from the corpse. Items like this, as well as the photographs and personal effects that you saw, will be extremely useful for identifying the bodies.’
‘I see. I’m sorry, Heinrich. I hope I did not embarrass you.’
He shrugs and a cold wave builds inside Ewa’s chest. She has not seen him like this before, so locked into himself and distant.
She stands tall. ‘I feel much better now. Shall we go back in?’
Beck taps his cigarette against the wall and leaves a grey smudge on the white paintwork.
‘No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. They all heard what you said.’
‘I only said…’
And then, as Ewa remembers her exact words, she understands what he means. The subject of her question about the hacksaw, even her mention of God, did not really matter. But with a drench of horror, Ewa realises that she asked the question in the wrong language.
Beck flings his cigarette stub to the ground and sets off. Without speaking, Ewa walks alongside him down a passageway on to the dark street. And as Ewa glances up at Beck’s face, she realises that he, and perhaps amongst all of the Germans there, only he had understood, without any need for translation, every Polish word that she had said.
White Waltham & London, England
Saturday 17 April
‘Still here?’
Vee looks round. She has been standing by the locker room’s high window, arms crossed, watching a condensation trail dissolve into sky.
Sonia pulls off a knitted red pixie hat as she comes in. ‘I thought you’d be all dolled up and gone by now.’
‘What?’
‘For The 400.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that!’
Vee shrugs. But she has thought of little else since reading Stefan’s peculiar invitation. And that’s the problem.
Sonia puts a hand on her hip. ‘You are going, aren’t you?’
‘No, I don’t think I am.’
‘Why ever not?’
Vee sighs. ‘It’s too much of a distraction.’
‘What is?’
‘Men are.’
‘Obviously. That’s what they are designed for.’
‘But things are complicated enough without… you know…’
‘Sex?’
Sonia’s eyebrows arch and Vee shrugs, not quite able to admit to herself the depth of her longing for Stefan to touch her.
Sonia leans forward so that the woman in the other corner cannot hear. ‘Well, all I can say is I’m bloody glad that Tony and I have done it while we’ve had the chance. You never know…’ Sonia’s voice tails off as her eyes slide to the high window and the haze left by the contrail. A shadow seems to pass across her gaze. ‘He’s rather late back from Cosford now, as it happens.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be all right, Sonia. He’s such an experienced pilot.’
‘Oh, I know. Probably holed up in a pub somewhere waiting for the weather there to change.’
But Sonia bites her lip and Vee is glad to change the subject back.
‘I haven’t got the energy for a night out in London anyway, or the clothes.’
‘Buck up, Vee.’ Sonia goes to her locker. ‘I’ll lend you my uniform skirt if you don’t want to dance in slacks.’ She fishes around inside the metal walls. ‘And I have something here to perk you up.’
Sonia pulls Vee down to sit beside her on the gym bench and unscrews a small brown bottle. Squeaking out a plug of cotton wool, she shakes two white pills on to her palm.
Vee blinks. ‘Benzedrine?’
‘Just the thing.’
Sonia goes to tip the pills on to Vee’s hand. But her face turns again to the window at the drone of a distant engine. Vee knows, instantly, that this plane is twin-engined and high horsepower, a Wellington, probably. It is most definitely not the single-engine Fairchild in which Tony is expected, and has been expected for some hours. For a second, Sonia’s dark eyes deaden and Vee knows that she must have realised that the plane is not Tony’s.
The brown bottle hovers in Sonia’s hand. Vee wonders if she should she say something, some platitude, perhaps, about Tony staying on for another pint in that mythical pub. But words would only turn foreboding into something more plausible. And reassurances, Vee knows, have a nasty habit of being proved wrong.
Vee grasps at the grooved white tablets from Sonia’s cupped palm. She sees suddenly that there’s no point trying to stay away from Stefan. He will remain a dangerous distraction whether she sees him or she doesn’t, because either way, she will not be able to stop thinking about him.
‘Two?’
Sonia’s eyes gleam. ‘Why not? They’ll perk you up no end. Get you to London and back fresh as a daisy. And here’s something to wash them down.’
She pulls a silver hip flask from her greatcoat pocket and holds it out. The whisky stings and then coats Vee’s throat with smokiness.
‘Glen Elgin. Daddy’s best.’ Sonia takes a long swig then puts the flask back in her pocket. ‘I think we deserve it.’
Vee closes her eyes for a second. The heat from the whisky is searing into her gut, fanning across her lungs, bringing warmth and energy to her arms and legs. She could almost start dancing right this minute.
‘Will everyone else be in evening dress, do you think?’
‘No, no, darling. Even at The 400 women are starting to wear their uniforms. It would be unpatriotic to stop them.’
‘Will your skirt fit me?’
Sonia is already up, rattling at the metal door, pulling out her tailored navy skirt, and signalling Vee to stand up and have it held to her waist.
‘It may come up a bit short, but respectable enough. You don’t need to bother with stockings now the weather has cheered up. And look, you can borrow these too.’
The silky ball that Sonia slips into Vee’s hand unfurls into a pair of French knickers. ‘Go and change in the lavs while I find Marjorie. I think she is going up to town tonight and I’ll ask her to make room for you.’
Vee’s heartbeat is quickening. Tiredness evaporates into a little halo of light around her head. Yes, she will go. And even if Stefan isn’t there, a trip to London will be better than mooching around in her digs at the farm with nothing much to do. She takes Sonia’s skirt to the Ladies.
As soon as it is on, Vee feels a thrill of anticipation. Without quite admitting to herself why she is doing it, she wriggles off her flannel bloomers and feels the stroke of Sonia’s silk underwear run up her bare thighs. The skirt lining is silk too, and the cut as close-fitting as an extra layer of skin. She is rather glad, in fact, that she has no stockings.
Sonia was wrong about the length, though. The skirt’s hem is definitely shorter than regulations permit. But Vee is pretty sure, as she slips out of the Ops block, that she can make it into the back seat of Marjorie’s Lagonda without Captain Mills seeing her knees.
As the car engine booms, Marjorie Hyde-Barker looks over her shoulder from th
e driver’s seat and gives Vee a tight smile.
‘I’ve left the hood down to give a bit more space. I do hope it’s not too blowy, or too much of a squash. Sonia said you’d not mind.’
The back is not really meant for passengers. Vee’s legs are wedged up against the front seat where Freddie Dunne is sitting.
‘No, of course not. It’s very kind of you, Marjorie.’
‘Well, quite a coincidence us all wanting to go to The 400 tonight. And we must make the most of the petrol ration, mustn’t we? All set?’
Marjorie lays a fuchsia scarf over her rolls of auburn hair and ties the points under her chin. Feathery pink chiffon leaks from the bottom of her greatcoat as she stamps on the accelerator and the Lagonda exits the aerodrome gates with a roar like a Hurricane. Vee’s head is pushed back against leather upholstery and polished wood. Above the lane, evening sunshine filters through half-bare branches. Grassy verges flash past, and then pavements, lamp posts and a parade of shops.
As they join the by-pass, Marjorie crunches the gears and the Lagonda thrusts forward. Vehicles around them seem to ease back into slow motion. Marjorie drives as if she expects everyone else to get out of her way and mostly they do. The roar of engine and wind fills Vee with lightness. She never knew that driving along the Great West Road could feel so much like flying. Or perhaps it’s just the Benzedrine.
Dusk gathers around crowding houses. Despite the dimness of tape-choked headlights, the Lagonda’s speed does not let up in the blacked-out streets. When the engine is finally silenced and the headlights extinguished, Leicester Square’s lollipop trees loom black in the darkness.
Vee spills out of the car onto the pavement, uncramping bent ankles and strained calves. Her head fizzes, and her eyes are alert to every shadow. Freddie is stuffing greatcoats into the car and pulling up the roof. Marjorie shimmers on the pavement in a haze of pink chiffon.
She unties her headscarf and strides off, beckoning. ‘This way chaps.’
Vee follows her into a narrow doorway and down a dim staircase. The stairs widen. Curved chrome is cool under her hand. A blaring saxophone wail cuts through the buzz of voices and the fog of tobacco smoke. Cigarette sparks stud the shadows.
When We Fall Page 8
