The Forgotten

by Mary Chamberlain

  They were too large, but with the braces they would do. It didn’t matter anyway. All the children wore clothes that were too big or too small, the fabric frayed and faded.

  ‘What’s this for?’ Bette asked.

  ‘Your safety,’ Lieselotte said.

  ‘How?’ She pulled at the braces. ‘What good will this do me?’

  ‘If they think you’re a young boy,’ Mutti said, ‘they might not touch you.’ She turned away, coughed into her hand, tapped the arc of cigarette ash into a saucer.

  ‘Everyone can see I’m a girl.’ Bette flicked her long plait. ‘And everyone round here knows who I am anyway. Besides,’ she added, ‘the Russians promised they wouldn’t hurt us, I saw the leaflets, and there’s posters everywhere.’ She hadn’t noticed the comb on the table, nor her mother’s dressmaking shears, until Mutti reached over for them.

  ‘No,’ Bette shouted. ‘No.’ She held her plaits and ran to the door but Lieselotte was there before her, barring her way.

  ‘Why don’t you dress up then?’ Bette shouted.

  ‘Because if they think I’m a man, I’ll be shot as a deserter,’ Lieselotte said, adding, ‘Either by the Russians, or the Gestapo.’ Her voice was calm and confident and Bette looked from her mother to her sister and knew they had discussed it, and decided. ‘Sit down.’

  She pulled a chair into the centre of the room and, taking Bette by the shoulders, steered her towards it and pushed her down onto the seat. Her mother undid her apron and pinned it round Bette’s neck. The smoked curled from the saucer and Mutti stubbed the cigarette out.

  ‘Please,’ Bette said. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Keep still.’

  Bette felt the shears mouthing her plait, then gripping and biting at the hair, crunching it again and again until the braid came away in her mother’s hands. Her head was lighter, and Bette ran her hand across the back of her neck. It felt cool but her mother was combing through and cutting, combing and cutting.

  ‘Move your hand.’

  Bette could feel the cold of the blades against her skull, the sharp edge of the comb as it parted her hair at the side, the snip of the scissors as they trimmed closer and closer. Bette put her hand to her temple. She breathed in sharply.

  ‘Let me look.’ She pushed herself up and ran into the bathroom. A shaft of sun was illuminating the cracked mirror, reflecting on the floor. She climbed on the bathroom stool. Someone else was in that mirror, with shaved temples and a flopping fringe. She saw her mother’s face emerge next to hers, her long hair pulled back into a bun. She’d always thought her mother’s hair was thick, but in the bright sunlight of the mirror she saw a bald spot above her ear where Mutti twisted the hair and pulled it every evening. Worry lines had etched deep valleys into her forehead.

  ‘Come,’ her mother said, placing her arms round Bette’s tummy and swinging her free from the stool. ‘I have to finish.’

  Bette sat, her lips quivering until the snapping stopped.

  ‘Let’s look at you.’

  The sides of her head, and the back, were shorn.

  ‘Will it grow again?’

  ‘Once the war is over, of course.’

  ‘Must I always be a boy?’

  ‘Except when we sleep,’ Lieselotte said. ‘You can wear a nightdress. We don’t have boys’ pyjamas.’

  She shared a bed with Lieselotte. They did exercises every morning, lying on their backs, cycling in the air, counting the rotations. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Mutti did exercises too, one hand on the door jamb for balance as she lifted her leg and touched the lintel. She’d been a dancer before she married, in the corps de ballet at the Lindenoper. They all took it in turns to empty the chamber pots, carrying the slops downstairs and throwing them into the gutter. It had to be done first thing. The soldiers caroused at night, lay senseless in the dawn. Mutti always lit a cigarette. Takes away the smell.

  The Russians had put up a standpipe in the street and turned on the water for two hours in the morning and afternoon. Mutti took the deep pan that she used for making jam and Lieselotte two buckets, one for Frau Weber. Bette took the big kettle.

  ‘What’s my name?’ Bette said, as she emptied the last of the water from the kettle into a jug. ‘I mean, my boy’s name?’

  ‘Bert,’ Lieselotte said, without missing a beat. ‘It sounds like Bette, so your ear is half tuned to it.’

  ‘It’s a horrid name,’ Bette said. ‘And it doesn’t sound anything like Bette.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Why can’t I be something heroic and heimatlich, like Heinz?’

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ Lieselotte said. ‘You’re really getting on my nerves.’

  ‘Girls. Please. Bette, put on your shoes.’ Her mother pointed to a pair of battered boys’ boots, and a pair of darned grey socks.

  ‘I can’t wear those.’

  ‘You can’t wear your girls’ shoes, so put them on.’

  Bette scowled and sunk to the floor, pulling at the socks so they stretched beyond her knee. The toes and heels had been darned in a thicker ply and lumped as she shoved her feet into the boots and laced them up. She stood up, grabbed the kettle and stomped out of the door.

  Old Herr Baumann was standing on the landing, leaning on his walking stick, as if he was waiting for them. Bette didn’t know what was wrong with him, but Mutti said whatever it was had got him out of the Volkssturm, who seemed to take anyone these days. Better not to ask, she’d added. Young Herr Baumann, Otto’s father, had died on the Russian front.

  ‘Well, little man,’ he said, patting Bette on the head. ‘You make a handsome young fellow.’ He chuckled, picked up a jug with his free hand, and set off.

  ‘How does he know?’ Bette said, tipping her head towards the stairs, where Herr Baumann’s lopsided tread echoed up through the well.

  ‘Of course he knows,’ Mutti said.

  ‘But what if he tells?’

  ‘Tells who, mein Liebling?’ Mutti said. ‘Who can he tell? Who is in charge now?’

  ‘The Russians,’ Bette said. ‘He could tell the Russians.’

  ‘There’s no danger of that.’

  ‘The Führer. The Gestapo.’

  ‘That man?’ Her mother snorted. ‘Too busy rounding up the white flag wavers to bother about us.’

  They joined the queue for water, shuffling forward, one after the other. It was a slow business. Bette knew not to complain. The routine was the same every day. First the water, then to forage, a turnip or two in exchange for a saucepan, or a pair of Vati’s shoes. They had to eat the vegetables raw. There was no fuel for cooking. The soldier who took Waltraud was standing by the water pipe marking the tally. Bette froze, but her mother pushed her forward. She went to place the kettle under the tap but the soldier took it from her, held it in place.

  Bette bit her lip and hoped he couldn’t see her shaking. He was very young, the soldier, and brown, with slit eyes and bowed legs. He patted her head and smiled at her. She couldn’t understand how a man could be kind and cruel at the same time.

  Lieselotte followed. She kept her head down, staring at the ground, her hair over her face, not looking at the soldier as she placed her pail under the tap and waited, watching it splutter and splash the sides of the bucket.

  ‘Enough,’ the soldier said. It wasn’t even full.

  The days were getting longer now so it didn’t matter too much that they couldn’t turn on the lights in the evenings, but she’d have liked a light in the cellar for when they had to go down there. It was spooky enough as it was.

  The soldiers were drunk at night, bottles of schnapps from busted distilleries or methyl alcohol from God knows where. The rifle shots were the first warning, then the shouting and the singing.

  ‘It drives them a little mad,’ Old Herr Baumann said, tapping his head.

  Bette needed the lavatory, right now. She began to shuffle herself up. The bucket was in the far corner but Mutti was pulling her down. The soldiers were in the street outside, cheering, whistling. She coul
d see their boots. One of them started to piss, aiming the urine through the shot-out cellar window. She heard them laugh, then thudding boots on the steps down to where they cowered in the underground gloom. The soldiers knew they were there, knew how to round them up in their shelter, line them up like skittles to be knocked down, one by one. The door smacked against the wall as the Russians flung it aside, the beam of their torches searching, dazzling. Three of them, guns and torches, left, right, left, right. Different soldiers from last night. Bette held her breath. Tante Winkler sat with her linen napkin and knife and fork. One of the soldiers pulled the napkin, waved it like a flag.

  ‘You surrender? Why don’t you Germans surrender?’

  Tante Winkler was old and doolally but she sprang like a young woman and snatched back the napkin. She fell as Bette heard the shot. Lay on the ground with a hole in her head, blood across the floor and on the stiff white napkin. Bette’s trousers grew wet and warm, she couldn’t stop herself.

  Lieselotte crouched in the shadows, at the back.

  ‘You.’ The torchlight went above Bette’s head. Bette dared not turn to track its arc.

  ‘You.’ A soldier pushed his boot against Bette, shoved past her, his gun jabbing at the air, at anyone. At someone behind her. ‘You.’

  She could hear Mutti stifle a cry, saw her eyes screw tight, her lips pucker. She sat in silence, trying not to cough, and Bette stared at her as Lieselotte was pulled forward. Was Mutti going to let her go, just like that? Without a cry or a struggle? No. This was her sister. Bette wriggled but her mother’s hand was on her shoulder keeping her still. She was shaking her head, her finger on her lips. They had planned this, Mutti and Lieselotte, what they would do if…

  The two other soldiers had their guns poised. Nobody said a word. Nobody shifted a limb, rustled a skirt, coughed. Swallowed. Frau Winkler’s body lay where it had fallen, the stained napkin in her hand. The silence hung heavy as dirt. Lieselotte tossed her head and braced her shoulders. She shook her arm free of the soldier, gave the same smile Bette had seen earlier. She saw its meaning now, its defiant strength. I will fight my way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  North Germany: late April 1945

  The truck jolted over a pothole, threw John against the side so he hit his hip. He winced. The sergeant, a Londoner with freckles and ginger hair, smirked. He’s all we bloody need written across his face, letters sky-high. Fucking translator. The sergeant was battle-hardened and toughened up, John almost half his age, a spoilt schoolboy, wet behind the ears. John pretended not to notice, stared out of the back of the truck. It was his fifth day on the road. France, Belgium, Germany. Nothing but the stumps of war and the stench of death.

  ‘Don’t know why they don’t just pack it in,’ the sergeant said. ‘Hitler and that lot. These buggers have given up.’ He nodded towards a farmhouse window, where a threadbare pillowcase was being waved.

  ‘It’s just a matter of time,’ John said. That’s what they all said, and John said it too, like a mantra, a matter of time. It gave him comfort, put bone in his spine.

  ‘Will we make it to Berlin before the Russians?’ John said.

  ‘With all due respect, sir,’ the sergeant said, ‘not a chance in hell.’

  Besides, they were on a different mission, so John had been told. To beat the Russians to a different target. Orders from the Admiralty. They called it something fancy like reparations. But it was plunder, when all was said and done. Get there first, before the Russkies. And don’t trust the Yanks or the French. Two-faced, they were. And keep our lads out of it while you’re at it, don’t want them rampaging through, destroying evidence. They’d vandalise as soon as look at it. Or loot it. Common or garden looting, not the poncy stuff his lot were up to.

  All those secrets. Target Force. T-Force, a giant ‘T’ plastered on the bonnet of the truck.

  The truck swerved, jolted, potholes as deep as craters filled with oily black water, bulbous grey clouds reflected in the surface. A few isolated houses began to appear, to cluster, become a street, a village with a cobblestone square and high-pitched wooden frame houses, not a tile out of place, not a mortared road, not a blackened ruin. A fairy-tale village, like the picture of one in the Baedeker guide to Northern Germany he’d found in the school library. How had this place been spared the war? There were spring flowers in the window boxes, narcissus and primroses, and some of the windows were open, their white lace curtains blowing in the breeze, the shutters secured to the walls. People must have been living in the houses, hiding inside, the streets and the square deserted save for a thin, mangy brown dog that sniffed the gutter, limping.

  John sat in the back of the truck, its canvas cover taut at the sides. It was damp to the touch, spat their musty breath back to them in cold, hard droplets, let in the wind through the webbing. He was next to a private with dusty ankle gaiters and shining boots, sitting at the end of the bench closest to the opening, his rifle across his knees, his hand poised over the trigger, looking out. Private Nash, 5th King’s. John hardly knew him. He didn’t talk much.

  ‘I like dogs,’ he said. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. ‘Here, boy.’ The dog looked up, pricked its ears and Private Nash clicked his fingers. ‘Here, boy.’

  Opposite John was his sergeant and the other men, a ragbag of regimental leftovers in John’s charge. Second Lieutenant John Harris. Six weeks at Pirbright brushing up his school German, six weeks square-bashing at Caterham. Commission. What the fuck did he know? He was eighteen years old. The sergeant was twice his age.

  ‘With a bit of luck,’ his father had said, ‘this bally war will be over and you’ll never hear a shot fired in anger.’

  Only it wasn’t over, was it? John pulled out his cigarettes and, leaning forward, offered one to the sergeant. Arthur. His name was Arthur. Sergeant Arthur Gambol. North Africa. Normandy. Now Nordhausen, with a bit of luck. Pushing his way across Germany with this motley crew. He must have a guardian angel, John thought, some high-up with God’s ear because John couldn’t see for the life of him how he’d survived all of that. He was married to an infant teacher, John knew, with a son conceived when he was on leave. Arthur took a cigarette, lit it, and sat with it in his mouth, smoke curling into his eyes. They must have developed a second lid, John thought, they never watered once. The other soldiers sat holding their rifles, faces blank, tense.

  The dog cocked its leg against the kerb, its ribs and vertebrae jutting out beneath its threadbare fur. The private whistled again, and the dog began to run after them, dragging its back leg.

  ‘I miss my dog,’ Private Nash said. ‘Bits.’

  ‘Bits?’ John said. ‘Is that his name?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The private whistled for the dog again.

  ‘Why Bits?’

  ‘It’s what went into him, isn’t it?’ He shrugged, grinned. ‘Bits of this, bits of that.’

  He looked away from the dog and turned to John, smiling. He had a gap tooth. His eyes had brimmed up. ‘I miss him. I really do.’

  He wiped his eye, stared back at the dog running after them as fast as its lame leg would allow.

  ‘Don’t like it,’ Arthur said, leaning forward and peering out of the back.

  ‘Orders.’

  Arthur gave him a look, don’t ‘orders’ me, sonny. John never pulled rank, nor did Arthur parade his savvy, but John knew that in Arthur’s eyes he wasn’t just green, he wasn’t a proper soldier either. He should be in the other truck, with all the scientists whingeing about unpressed trousers and dusty billets, not here with the men, bringing up the rear.

  ‘Bloody liabilities,’ one of the squaddies had said to Arthur when they first saw the scientists. ‘Reserved occupations, my arse.’ Arthur pinched the tip of his cigarette to put it out, then ground it into the earth. He’d nodded. They didn’t think John had heard. He should have tackled them on it, there and then. They knew what this mission was about as well as he did, brought together, an army within an army. Top secret and all t
hat. But he hadn’t liked to. These were grown men with more battle scars than John could ever count. He needed them far more than they needed him. His job was to translate but till then he was in the army, and don’t you forget it, Second Lieutenant, sonny.

  ‘You know,’ Arthur said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and looking over the jolting floor at John, ‘you never hear the bullet that hits you. You hear the one that misses you. The hiss as it passes, then the crack—’

  The hiss. The crack-a-tat-tat.

  ‘Down,’ Arthur yelled, throwing himself on the floor. Private Nash had fallen against John, blood pumping from his perforated neck, his slumped head pinning John to the bench. John vomited down his battledress, yellow bile mixing with the thick black blood, dribbling on the squaddie’s dusty gaiters. He felt someone pull him free, push him back into the far corner of the truck. He heard the thud of Private Nash’s body as it fell to the floor, watched the head tumble free.

  Arthur had crawled to the tailgate, pointed his rifle, squinting into its sights. John shuddered, retching, heart pummelling, hard, heavy thumps, but he followed the angle, saw the machine gun draped in the white window lace, watched as it lifted and aimed. And fell. Arthur’s shot caught the sniper square on. The squaddies were crouched next to him and John could hear their short, sharp breaths, smell their iron sweat. He could taste the metal in his own mouth. The truck had picked up speed, rattling and jolting them as it sped over the cobbles, around the corner, out of the village, onto the open road. And stopped. In front of them was the first truck, with the major and the scientists.

  John wasn’t sure he hadn’t messed himself. His gut cramped and curdled and his underpants felt warm. That bullet was a hair’s breadth away from his own neck. He knew his hand was trembling, but the men were looking at him. Second Lieutenant. He had to take charge. These seasoned men knew the ropes better than he. But no revenge, no revenge. This was not their target, not their destination. The men were clambering off the lorry, leaving him alone with the dead body and its severed head. He had to get up, walk past.