by Mal Peet
Koop said, “They’re going to work their way round to the back of the end bungalow. I don’t think they know we’re in here.” His face was banded black and white by the narrow beams of light through the boards.
Oskar’s breathing was shallow and rapid. His mouth was so dry that he could only say, “Right.”
Koop said, “We’ll go out the back door. Then run like shit down that hedge. Get into the trees.”
“Jesus, Koop.”
Koop took hold of the front of Oskar’s sweater and pulled him into the hall. When they got to the door, Koop eased back the bolts. Both men cocked their guns and leaned their backs against the wall. Oskar made the sign of the cross over his heart. Koop looked at him and said, “Okay?” When Oskar nodded, Koop opened the door and they stepped out into the light.
The pit had been scooped out long ago by men quarrying sand and gravel. Now it was so disguised by gorse and bracken that Koop didn’t see it until he was falling into it.
The pain from the wound in his back was so intense that when he rolled to a stop he had to fight to stay conscious. The trees surrounding him revolved one way and then the other. When he’d managed to make them stay still, he realized he was lying exposed in a patch of sunlight. He dragged himself into shadow. His left leg was very difficult to move now. When he’d got himself into a sitting position with his good shoulder against a tree, he forced himself to think. He also tried to stop shaking, but couldn’t.
He’d lost the bloody Sten, and he was in no condition to go looking for it. He’d never be able to climb back up that slope. Did he still have the Luger? Yes, he could feel the weight of it in his coat pocket. But so what? If it came to a shoot-out with the Germans, he’d have no chance. He was still shocked by how many of them there’d been. Oskar’d never had a hope, the poor damn idiot. He’d run down the wrong side of the hedge. God! They couldn’t have missed him. His scream had come through the bushes at the same instant as the bullets. And as for Eddy and Wim and Willy . . . Koop had heard the flat boom of hand grenades. The SS had blown holes in the walls, for sure. Then just poured the machine-gun fire in. Dear God. He was alone now. For a terrible moment he was stricken with self-pity and on the verge of tears. It was another stab of pain in his back that brought him out of it.
What he had to think about, the really important thing, was, had he been seen? Had he made it to the hedge before the Germans came round the corner of the house? Maybe, just maybe. The bullets that had hit him were meant for Oskar, definitely, and he didn’t think he’d been shot at after he’d reached the trees. And it was quiet now. Did he dare hope? It was so tempting to . . . No, stupid, stupid! The Germans would work out pretty damn quick that there had been five of them there, and that they were a body short. They’d look for him, all right. Shit, shit! He had to move.
He couldn’t tell how far he’d come, how long he’d been dragging himself through the woods. He’d got slower, he knew that; the leg had got heavier and heavier. It was weird that it didn’t hurt very much. Look at the sodding blood, though! His left trouser leg was soaked with it, and when he moved his toes he could feel the thick stickiness inside his boot. He unbuttoned his trousers. Clenching his teeth, he slid his right hand down his thigh, easing the claggy cloth away from the skin. The hole was about halfway between his knee and his hip, on the left side. It was big enough, he reckoned, for him to get his little finger into. He felt round to the inside of the thigh. No exit wound. The damn bullet was still in there. When he pulled his hand out, it was gloved in blood. He yanked his coat belt free of the loops, and with great difficulty tightened it around the top of his leg.
Standing up was murder. When he was steady, he tried to feel the wound in his back but couldn’t reach it. He was unsure whether the wetness under his shirt was blood or sweat.
He now tried to get his bearings, but the lie of the land was baffling. The ground seemed to rise and fall in no particular pattern. The sun was on his left, so he was facing south. South was, he figured, the only direction he could take safely. Okay. He’d head that way and hope there’d be some easy way out of this blasted pit. Sooner or later, he’d come to somewhere he’d recognize. And then, if he could stay alive long enough, he’d find his way to the men who had betrayed him and kill them both.
The sun was setting behind a rippled bank of cloud when Tamar left the radio room, and he stood watching it for a while. In the farmhouse kitchen he sat in the old armchair, and Marijke curled onto his lap, her head on his shoulder and her legs over the arm of the chair. It was the touch of his unshaven jaw against her forehead that reminded her that this was how she used to sit with her grandfather when she was a child. She remembered his smell. Cattle, woodsmoke, soap: those predictable, safe aromas. How he would pretend to groan under her weight. She felt Tamar’s fingers caress the back of her head.
“Should I light the lamp?” she asked.
“Later,” he said. “Don’t move yet.”
Dart was woken by the tapping on his bedroom door. His first act was to brush the spiders from his face, even though, as usual, there weren’t any. When he managed to get the door open, Sister Hendrika was standing in the passage, cupping a little stub of candle in her hands. The flame was reflected in both lenses of her glasses so that she seemed to have eyes of fire. She took a step backwards when she saw him.
“Dr. Veening would like you to come down to the kitchen,” she said. “He said to ask you to bring your bag.”
It took Dart several seconds to understand her words. “What time is it?”
“A little after five o’clock, Dr. Lubbers.”
He’d been in bed for two hours. He had no memory of falling asleep. A piece of time had simply vanished.
“What’s going on, Sister?”
“I don’t know. A man . . . Shall I wait for you?”
“No, I . . . I’ll be down in a minute.”
There was no one in the kitchen when he got there, but the stove had been lit, somehow, and a kettle and a saucepan of water were heating. Light and low voices came from the scullery, and when Dart pushed the door open, he saw the body of a man lying on its side on the steel-topped table. Horribly, it looked as though Albert Veening was peeling the skin from one of its legs. Sister Agatha was bent over the man, but she looked up when she heard the door creak. Dart now saw that Albert was using kitchen scissors to cut away the man’s blood-soaked trousers. He looked at the dirty colourless face pressed against the tabletop. The eyes were closed and the mouth was open and lopsided.
Albert glanced up. “You’ll know this man.”
Dart could not speak, because he seemed to have walked into one of his own Benzedrine nightmares.
“Koop de Vries,” Albert said. “He has at least two bullet wounds. One in the leg, but I can’t see how bad it is until we clean him up a bit. He’s also been hit in the back, high up, left shoulder. I’ll cut the coat open in a second, and we’ll have a look.”
Dart still couldn’t bring himself to approach the table. Albert Veening looked at him curiously.
Dart said, “I don’t understand. What’s he doing here? How did he get here?”
Agatha said, “We don’t know. Hendrika heard a noise and came down. She found him slumped outside the back door. He’d smashed a pane of glass with his elbow; I assume he hadn’t the strength to get to his feet and ring the bell. Now, we’ll need morphine, Ernst. And dressings and disinfectant.”
“Yes, I . . . Of course. I’ve brought my things.”
Dart turned and closed the door. When he looked back at the table, Koop’s eyes were open, staring at him. The bloodless lips pulled back from the teeth and let out a groan of pain, or perhaps recognition. Koop’s right arm moved, his hand groping at the pocket of the filthy trench coat that hung down towards the floor.
“He’s awake,” Albert said.
“You must lie still,” Agatha murmured. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
Koop lifted his face from the table and mumbled som
ething, his speech too slurred to be understood. His hand came out of the pocket with the Luger in it. His arm rose, shaking, to aim the gun at Dart, who could neither move nor speak.
“Christ Almighty!” Albert cried out.
Sister Agatha seized Koop’s arm and slammed it down onto her raised thigh like someone breaking firewood. His body lifted slightly from the table as he screamed. The pistol clattered across the floor and spun, twice, at the edge of the lamplight. Koop’s face made an awful damp-sounding slap as it fell back onto the table. Then he was motionless.
The others stood frozen too: Veening, open-mouthed, the blood-smeared scissors in his hand, staring at Dart; Sister Agatha with her hand pressed to her heart; Dart hypnotized by the gun. It was Sister Agatha who moved first. She pressed her fingers to the side of Koop’s neck, then lifted one of his eyelids.
“God forgive me,” she said. “I thought I’d killed him.”
Albert said, “He’ll be half out of his mind, of course. Exhaustion, loss of blood, pain. He must have thought you were the Gestapo or something.”
“I suppose so,” Dart said, not believing it.
He picked up the Luger and put it on the draining board next to the sink. Then he crossed to the table. The smell that arose from Koop was very bad. The slaughterhouse stink of congealed blood was mixed with something sharp and sour, like the scent a fierce animal might leave in the night to mark its territory.
When they had cut Koop’s clothes away and washed his wounds, Albert said, “He may not look it, but this is a very lucky man. The bullet that sliced across his back tore some muscle and chipped the shoulder blade, but that’s all. It looks worse than it is. The one in his thigh must have missed the femoral artery by less than a centimetre. If the person who shot him had aimed a little more to the left, Mr. de Vries would be dead twice over.”
There were so many dark calculations happening in Dart’s head that he could not think of anything sensible to say. He managed to nod, as if in agreement.
Koop’s shallow breathing changed. He sighed like someone dreaming something sad.
“His eyelids are moving,” Agatha said. “He’s regaining consciousness.”
Albert Veening said, “The bullet’s still in his leg, and it’s deep. It’ll have to come out. Do you have any surgical experience, Ernst?”
“No.”
“I thought not.” Veening sounded unhappy but not surprised. “I haven’t done any surgery for more than twenty years. I still have my old instruments somewhere, though.” He didn’t move.
Sister Agatha looked at him for perhaps three seconds before she said, “So, Albert? Go and get the damn things.”
When Veening returned, Koop was shaking and mumbling even though his eyes were not open.
Agatha said, “He’s lost a lot of blood and is dehydrated. I don’t know if he can take enough morphine. It might well kill him.”
Albert opened his leather case and took out a pair of long forceps. “I’m going to have to dig around with these,” he said, “and I need new glasses. Ernst, give the poor bastard a shot, and make it a big one.”
“Are you asleep, or are you pretending?”
“I’m asleep.”
Marijke laughed softly, then slid her hand up his chest and nipped the lobe of his ear. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she said.
“I don’t care. I’m still asleep anyway.”
“You’d make a lousy farmer. You like your bed too much.”
“Mmm . . . no. I like our bed too much.”
Tamar stirred at last. He stretched, arching his back, lifting her. “Is that what I’ll be? A farmer?”
She found that she could not answer. They had arrived too quickly at the checkpoint between now and the future. She didn’t dare think about what might be on the other side. She didn’t yet know if they would be let through.
He placed his hand on her belly. “Anyway,” he said, “I think that what you’re growing in here will soon put a stop to us sleeping late, don’t you?”
The first time Koop woke up, there was the shape of a man against a square of painful light.
The second time Koop woke up, he thought he remembered who the man was, but it was like dreaming the answer to a question. Then the man turned into a black-and-white woman, a nun, looming over him.
The third time, he knew who the man was and that he had done something to his arm. He’d made the pain float away on a glossy white cloud. But now, when he struggled to sit up, the pain came back, like knives everywhere. His friends had died, and he’d been tortured on a metal table, that was it. There was a gun somewhere, but when he tried to feel for it his hand wouldn’t move.
The man stood up and came towards him, speaking.
“Koop? Koop, why did you want to kill me?”
He looked different, Koop thought, when he could think. When the bugger had dropped out of the sky, he’d been like other agents he’d collected: well fed, excited, self-important, scared shitless. Something had happened to his face.
It took Koop some time to unglue his tongue. When he managed to speak, it was like a rook croaking. “What day is it?”
“Friday. It’s, er . . . four o’clock. In the afternoon. You got here the night before last.”
“I can’t stay here.”
Dart said, “Why did you try to shoot me?”
“You know damn well.”
“I don’t, as a matter of fact. Do you want to sit up?”
Koop rasped, “Don’t you bloody touch me.”
Dart sat down on the hard little chair next to the door. “The others? Eddy and the others. Are they dead?”
Koop’s eyes filled with tears. It made him furious, and he turned his face to the wall. When he had control of himself he looked the other man in the eye. “It was you, you and that boyfriend of yours. I know it, you know it. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll finish me now. Because if I live, I’ll kill you both for what you’ve done, so help me God.”
He tried to muster up enough saliva to spit at Dart, but all he could manage was a thick dribble that stuck to his lips. “Traitor,” he gasped. “Filth. Damn you to hell.” His rage seemed to exhaust him. His eyes closed.
Dart sat for almost half an hour, gazing at the unconscious man, thinking, working things out. Then he left, turning the key in the lock. In his own room, he opened the little cupboard below the washstand and took out the towel in which he’d wrapped Koop’s Luger. He put the weapon in his coat pocket and went downstairs.
In the dayroom, Sister Juliana was playing her five-stringed guitar to half a dozen patients. One of them was Sidona. As he walked to the door, he heard Juliana say, soothingly, “No, no, dear. That’s not Trago. That’s Dr. Lubbers. You know Dr. Lubbers. He’s nice.”
He went out through the conservatory. In the west, beyond the skeletal trees, the sky was lemon yellow, but darkness was gathering in the air. He turned right towards the kitchen garden and stopped when he saw Albert Veening and Sister Agatha. They were both staring vacantly at the ground. She had been digging but was now resting on the handle of her spade. The lower part of Albert’s face was buried in a woollen scarf, and he leaned forward inside his oversized coat, his shoulders hunched up. He looked like an ancient bird waiting for something edible to emerge from the soil. Dart walked down to them. He lit a cigarette and gave it to Albert, who took two drags before handing it back.
“How is our patient?” Albert asked.
Dart shrugged. “Still feverish. He won’t let me touch him. His wounds will need fresh dressings. I think you or Agatha will have to do it.”
Albert reached out, and Dart gave him the remains of the cigarette.
Albert said, “Sister Agatha thinks it is unwise to keep him here. We do not have the resources. The food.”
Agatha gave him a look full of impatience. “It’s not that,” she said. “He is a danger to us.”
“Just as I am,” Dart said.
“Not in the same way,” the nun said. “Mr. de V
ries is full of hate. Poison. I can smell it on the air. And I’m not the only one. Several of the patients have been noticeably more disturbed since he arrived, even though none of them have seen him. Sidona is very distressed, for example. She cannot understand why none of her good angels have visited for the last couple of days.”
“Oh, come on, Agatha,” Albert protested.
“Don’t ‘oh come on’ me, Albert. Sidona may be crazy, but she has a good nose for evil.”
Albert withdrew a little farther into his scarf and coat, like a careful tortoise. For several moments there was no sound in the garden other than the harsh calls of the rooks. Against the fading light their nests looked like blood clots in a web of black veins.
Dart said, “How long before he’s mobile, do you think?”
Albert sighed. “Hard to tell. The wounds aren’t the main problem, as long as they don’t get infected. It’ll be very painful for him to walk, but he could do it. He’ll be extremely weak, for obvious reasons. He needs a quiet place to rest. And good food.”
“Which we can’t provide,” Agatha said.
Dart watched the rooks. The elms were filling with their restless black shapes. “Can you think of anywhere else he could go?”
“We all know what he has done,” Albert said quietly. “As a result, the poor man has become a plague virus. He delivers a death warrant to anyone who shelters him.”
“Exactly,” Sister Agatha said. “If the Nazis find him here, you know what will happen to us. And if they take us, what do you think will happen to our patients? They’ll be sent to a place worse than hell and die there.”
After a pause, Dart said, “What about the Maartens place?”
When the garden was half filled with shadows, Tamar straightened and let the handle of the spade rest against his thigh. Close to his feet the four surviving hens dragged and stabbed at the upturned soil. The cockerel patrolled some distance away, warily twitching his head and groaning. Tamar stood watching the edge of the sky deepen from yellow to amber. He knew Marijke was there before she spoke.
