Tamar

by Mal Peet

Dart shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He stood up, full of a restless impatience. The room was closing in. It was much smaller now that Koop was in it. Dart’s mind, though, was as clear and sharp as a needle of ice and miles and years away from this claustrophobic space. He walked to the small window and stuffed his trembling hands into his pockets. He watched the rivulets of rain running down the glass, aware of Koop watching him.

  Eventually he spoke. “I have a problem.”

  The sound Koop made was somewhere between a snort and a laugh, which was more or less what Dart had expected. He didn’t turn round.

  “It has to do with you.”

  “Look,” Koop said, “I told you. I’ll be out of here soon. You don’t have to worry your pretty head about me.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. Where would you go, anyway?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  “I think it might be,” Dart said quietly. “You see, my problem is Tamar. What to do about Tamar.”

  Koop said nothing.

  “The fact is, Tamar is my superior officer. He is — or was — my friend. It’s also a fact that he has been acting, well, strange lately. Erratic. He says he’s sick of all this. He has accused me of . . . things. Maybe he’s having a nervous breakdown; we are operating under a lot of stress. But that’s not the point. The point is that when you leave here — if you leave here — you’ll try to kill him. So obviously I shouldn’t let you go.”

  He heard Koop move on the couch now but waited a moment or two before he turned round. Koop had the Luger in his right hand, resting it against his chest, the muzzle pointing directly at Dart. Dart’s own pistol was lying on the bureau, and Koop knew it.

  Dart gazed thoughtfully at the Luger for a couple of seconds and then shook his head, frowning slightly, rather like a schoolmaster deciding to ignore some piece of childish tomfoolery. He spoke in the same level tone of voice as before.

  “My problem is that I believe you.”

  “What?”

  “I believe you. I think Tamar betrayed your group. Is it okay if I sit down?”

  Koop tracked him with the gun, but his harrowed face looked slack and stupefied.

  Dart said, “I want to show you something.” He reached into his pocket and took out the creased and folded sheet of paper. He held it out to Koop. Koop flicked his eyes at it and then back to Dart’s face.

  “What is it?”

  “Have a look at it. Take it. Put the gun down. We both know you’re not going to kill me.”

  Koop eventually lowered the pistol and laid it on his stomach. He took the paper but had trouble unfolding it one-handed, so Dart did it for him. Koop stared at the meaningless sequence of pencilled letters.

  “It’s in code,” Dart said helpfully.

  “I can bloody see that,” Koop spat. “So what’s it supposed to be?”

  “It’s a signal Tamar ordered me to send to London the day after you shot Rauter. We knew more or less what reprisals the Germans were planning by then. We knew about The Hague and Amsterdam and Amersfoort too, but we didn’t know the numbers then, of course.”

  Koop looked at him.

  “Ah,” Dart murmured. “Sorry. You don’t know, do you?”

  “So tell me, damn you.”

  “At least another hundred people. Probably more. Almost certainly more.”

  The paper shook in Koop’s hand, so Dart steadied it for him.

  “That’s basically what the first half of this is about. Down to here, see? Although to tell you the truth, I didn’t understand why Tamar wanted me to send it. We’d already sent more or less the same information a few hours earlier. But he insisted. Said we had to confirm it. He was . . . beside himself. Almost out of control. I’d never seen him like that before.”

  Dart paused thoughtfully, like a man remembering sadness. “But it’s the other part of the signal that matters. I refused to send it at first. Tried to talk him out of it. But like I said, he was out of control. Shouting and swearing and so forth. He said that if I didn’t send it, he’d shoot me for insubordination and send it himself. I don’t think he would have done, though. Shoot me, I mean. As you said, it’s not really his style, is it?”

  Koop was now glaring silently at Dart. His eyes were moist and feverish.

  “The signal goes on to say that your group is a serious and continuing hazard. It says that you personally refuse to obey orders, no matter where they’re from. It says that in his opinion, Tamar’s opinion, your group’s reckless action may well cause deep divisions in the resistance. That much is true, by the way. Delta Centrum was baying for your blood. The last two lines of the signal are his request for authorization to disband your group using ‘extreme emergency procedures’ if necessary. That’s what the two sequences PBUXY and RRGYQ mean.”

  Koop switched his hot gaze to the paper but still didn’t speak. Dart waited.

  “In other words, kill us,” Koop said. “Without the bullshit, that’s what it means, right?”

  Dart nodded. Koop turned the paper over and examined it, as if expecting to find the print of the devil’s thumb in blood. “Why’s it all crumpled up?”

  “I was supposed to burn it,” Dart said.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Dart looked at the floor. “I don’t really know.”

  Koop was breathing deeply and steadily through his nose, making a faint bubbling that Dart found repulsive. “Did London reply to this?”

  “Eventually,” Dart said. “It came in just after four in the morning.”

  “And?”

  “They said no. Authorization denied. They told us to await further instructions.”

  “Did they, by Christ? They said no? And what did pretty boy have to say about that?”

  “Not much, funnily enough. He read the message twice and then burned it.”

  “Come on,” Koop said. “You just told me he was all worked up. It must’ve really pissed him off.”

  “He’d grabbed an hour or two’s sleep by then. He’d calmed down a bit.”

  “So he didn’t say anything?”

  Dart looked Koop in the eyes.

  “He said something like, ‘Well, things happen on the front line that London can’t do anything about.’ I didn’t think much about it until I came down the other night and found you bleeding all over the scullery. Then I knew.”

  Koop stared at the wall for a full minute. There was something resembling a smile on his face when he turned to Dart again. “Veening reckons I might be able to walk unaided in a couple of days. What do you think?”

  Dart thought about it. “He wants you out of here.”

  “I’m happy to oblige.”

  “I don’t know,” Dart said. “Your blood count must be terrible. What you really need is plenty of food. And we don’t have it.”

  Koop grinned. “I eat like a bird,” he said.

  Yes, Dart thought. A vulture.

  In the early afternoon of our fifth day, Yoyo and I found ourselves at the first bridge on the fourth and last map. The Tamar had dwindled to a thin blue line of small kinks and wriggles as if it had been drawn by a mapmaker with a bad case of the shakes or hiccups. Little bridges stepped across it every few miles as though it wasn’t there. This one, like most of the others, was narrow, ancient, made of grey mottled stone, and in the middle of nowhere. Silent level farmland stretched as far as the eye could see, interrupted here and there by small gatherings of trees. My river was now only a stream, and from above you could hardly see it because it was almost smothered by the reeds and slender trees that grew on its banks.

  We stopped only because Grandad had marked the place. Leaning over the parapet, we saw that there was a shady patch of grass just big enough for two people to perch their bums and dangle their feet in the water. We found our way down there and were taking our shoes off when a big grey arrow exploded out of the low darkness beneath the bridge. The shallow water churned beneath it, and when it beat its wings, we fel
t the displaced air against our faces and fell back, alarmed. A heron. It lifted itself so slowly into the air that we thought it would stall, but at last it pulled its trailing legs into its body, folded its long neck, and drifted like a primitive aircraft towards a higher bend in the stream, vanishing into the silvery-green trees.

  When we clambered back up to the road, we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle and pressed ourselves against the hedge to let it pass. It was a dark blue Land Rover coated in reddish dust. Sunlight flashed off its windscreen, making the driver invisible. We turned to walk back to the Saab but stopped and looked when we heard the other vehicle brake, its engine revving hard then falling to a soft chug. It had halted on the far side of the bridge. I thought that maybe it was the farmer who owned the land and felt a little flicker of anxiety. But no one got out. We could see that the driver had turned in his seat to watch us. I looked at Yoyo. He shrugged, and we got into our car. As soon as Yoyo started the engine, the Land Rover pulled away. By the time we’d reached the next turn in the road, it was out of sight.

  Just when you’d expect the Tamar to disappear altogether, it swells, with a sort of ba-boom (if maps had soundtracks), into two big lakes. Lower Tamar Lake is a placid stretch of water where ducks trail ripples towards the bank, expecting picnickers to feed them bits of sandwiches. We left the Saab in the car park and followed the signs to Higher Tamar Lake. The footpath took us over a stile into a field where sheep complained about the heat; their cries were like sad people pretending to laugh. The field sloped upwards, and we’d toiled halfway to the crest when we stopped to gape, amazed. A vast sloping wall of brown-stained concrete reared up out of the valley to our left. It was incredibly, brutally out of place among the low hills and green and tawny fields. It was the dam that blocks the flow of the young river and turns the valley into a reservoir. We climbed the steps up onto it. The grey flagstones were hot beneath our feet. Halfway across we stopped to lean against the steel railings and gaze out onto the lake. The water level was low after those rainless weeks, but a number of small sailing dinghies were out, seeking scraps of breeze.

  “Wow,” Yoyo said, opening his camera case. “What is that weird shit down there?”

  I stood on tiptoe and peered over the railings. Where the wall of the dam vanished into the water, there was a jumble of rocks exactly the colour of milk chocolate. And lapping against these rocks, staining them, was a big slick of astonishingly beautiful scum. Yoyo took three pictures of it at different places along the dam. Looking at them now, they’re like abstract paintings — whorls and coils and long, drifting threads of pale blue, turquoise, white, and bottle green. They look like the grain in marble, swirls of molten glass, the whirling gases of a distant star. At the end of the dam there was a notice telling us what this stuff was, telling us what the photographs do not. The word TOXIC appeared more than once.

  There was a picnic area and a café on the other side of the lake. We bought two tubs of ice cream and sat beneath a parasol in silence. I was happy — we both were — but I was also troubled. There was a question, or rather a small cloud of questions, hanging over the day. We had reached, you see, the last of Grandad’s marks on the map. Just three miles or so north of where we were sitting was the source of the river. At least, what we reckoned was the source. Poring over the map in our room the previous night, we’d found a spring marked just where the hair-thin line of blue finally disappeared. That had to be it. And when we found it — if we found it — that would be the end. But unless something miraculous happened, it wouldn’t mean anything at all. An end that didn’t end anything, a pointless destination. We’d found out nothing. I was sure now that Grandad had made this journey and that it had been very important to him, though God knows why. And it had been important to him that I made the same journey; again, God knows why. Unless it really was for the sentimental reason that Yoyo had suggested. But that just wasn’t good enough. Those damned things in Grandad’s box were all connected in some way, but we’d travelled all these miles without working out how.

  I’d stirred the last of my ice cream into a slush, mulling all this over. I looked up, and Yoyo was watching me. He reached over and laid his hand on mine.

  “Problem?” he asked. “Something is bothering you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m happy, honestly.”

  Which was the truth and a lie at the same time, because my ridiculous happiness was itself part of the problem. I was afraid it would end when the journey ended. The plain fact was that by the evening — or the next day, at the latest — there would be no reason not to go back to London. Then what? The rest of the school holidays, a part-time job, then A levels maybe, then the rest of my life. And no Yoyo. He’d go back to Holland. The End. The future loomed over me like the blank wall of the Tamar dam, and I didn’t fancy it at all. In five days I’d become someone else, and I liked being her.

  I knew that this feeling, the feeling of things coming to an end, was affecting Yoyo as well. I knew it because, without saying anything, we’d agreed not to talk about it. Neither of us had spoken a sentence that began with “When we get back to London . . .” They were the taboo words that would shatter the spell. We were sitting with empty ice-cream tubs in this rather boring place because we didn’t want to say them. Sooner or later, though, one of us would have to say “Shall we go?”

  It was Yoyo.

  “Sure,” I said, as though I’d been waiting for him.

  We gathered up our stuff. I’d gone a few paces before I realized that he hadn’t moved. I looked back at him. “What?”

  He was staring at the car park next to the boathouse. Parked in the shade of a tree was a dusty blue Land Rover.

  “Is that the same one we saw at the bridge?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. No, probably. It’s what farmers drive, I think. There are perhaps hundreds of them around here. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  We walked back over the dam, pausing only briefly to look down at the beautiful gunge that polluted the water.

  I’m not sure what I’d thought the “spring” that was the source of my river would be. Something like a natural fountain, maybe, a bubbling-up of crystal-clear water cupped in a niche of ancient mossy rocks. Needless to say, it isn’t like that at all. It’s in a bog. Not what you’d normally think of as a bog, though. Not a low, swampy place. Quite the opposite. In the summer, that is. It’s a high stretch of moorland covered in tall, sharp-edged yellow grass and prickly stuff. According to the map, the spring itself is snug up against a country lane, but when we stopped there, we realized there was no chance of getting to it. Between the lane and the moor, there’s a dense hedge of thorny wind-tilted trees and spiky yellow gorse. You’d be ripped to shreds if you tried to get through it. So Yoyo reversed the car until we got to a place where there was a gate and a track.

  The sky seemed lower here and was as white as paper. The heat was moist and nasty. We climbed over the gate and walked down the track until we figured we were more or less opposite the place where the spring should be. A small cloud of gnats kept us company, spiralling above our heads. We saw now that the harsh yellow grass and brambles and low spiny bushes concealed a labyrinth of ditches. In winter they’d be little streams, but in that hot dry summer not one of them contained the trickle of water that would guide us to the spring itself. We stood baffled, flapping our hands at the insects zeroing in on us. We looked down at our bare legs and skimpy trainers.

  “Shit,” Yoyo said poetically.

  I can admit, now, that all the way up the river I’d secretly nursed the foolish idea that when we reached its source we’d be given some kind of answer. I can’t remember how I’d pictured it. A magical document, a scroll of time-stained parchment in a lead casket, jammed under a rock? A letter from beyond the grave, sealed in plastic behind a veil of falling water? Something as childish as that, probably. Something from an adventure novel in which everything is revealed and tidied up in the last chapter. A key to the code. B
ut when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn’t care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn’t want an ending, didn’t want to get to the full stop of our story.

  Yoyo put his arm round my shoulders, and I leaned into him and put my hand on his chest.

  After a while I said, “Home, then?”

  And it didn’t seem so terrible a thing to say after all.

  We walked back to the car. I was leaning on the gate, gazing back, when Yoyo nudged my arm and gestured with his head. The blue Land Rover was parked about twenty metres in front of the Saab. The driver’s door swung open, and a man stepped out. He stood and watched us for a long moment and then walked towards us. He was wearing a faded denim shirt. He had the face of an old man but didn’t move like one.

  I heard Yoyo speak my name, but his voice seemed to come from a long distance; I had that thickness inside my ears that you get on aeroplanes. And I couldn’t look at him, because I was watching the other man’s face and he was watching mine. He stopped just beyond the reach of my arms.

  He said, “Tamar?”

  The edges of my world melted.

  I heard myself say, “Dad?”

  Time doesn’t heal, not really. I’m no longer that fifteen-year-old girl whose world changed shape on a desolate country road. Even now, remembering her at that moment, it’s as though something physically shifts inside me, pulling at a wound.

  My father put his arms around me, and I held him, because it was impossible not to. We may have stood like that for some time. I couldn’t get into the Land Rover with him, though. I just couldn’t. So Yoyo and I followed in the Saab. Poor Yoyo; it was hard for him to drive, because I couldn’t let go of his left hand, even when he had to change gear. He must have been searching through his languages, desperately looking for something to say. I could only breathe in long shaky gulps, and there was nothing I could do to stop my tears. They ran down my face like rain down a windowpane. All the tears I’d never shed, all at once. A bloody river.