by Jo Baker
He watches blunt fingers manage surprisingly delicate operations, tweak and twist bright copper strands, fiddle in tiny screws. The work is deft and precise and there is a clear logic to it, a followable flow.
“I see.”
The prisoner inclines his head, still squinting at the work.
“My gaffer always said,” he says, “gas light’s kinder on the ladies, but electricity’s sharper, electricity’s the thing.”
“He was right.”
“He was always right. At least, he was until he wasn’t.”
Then the prisoner clips the casing closed and twists in another screw to hold the whole thing shut. He flips the heavy switch. Light leaps; it scatters itself through the maze of shelving and slaps itself on to the stacked packing crates. It casts the prisoner’s thin face in deep shadow.
“Job’s a good one.”
He proffers his cigarettes. The two of them sink down, side by side, backs against a packing crate. He strikes a match; they lean in. The electric light is a brilliant cone over them.
“Only use the lamps when you really need them,” the German says, gesturing upward. “Or you’ll run out of diesel in no time.”
“Good point.”
The refrigerators hum and the lights fizz and the generator rattles and the boards are hard beneath him, and the lamp burns down on them like a spotlight, and he’s aware too of the sweat-and-tobacco stink of the man beside him and the heave of smoke into his lungs, and its slow spool out of him, and the reality of all of it is insistent, demanding to be noticed. He wants, oh God, he needs. Time, a locked door at his back, and time. Pen and paper and an empty notebook and no concern as to what the end will be, but the means, please God, he needs the means, he needs to write, he needs to shuffle the cards, tamp down the pack. He needs the quietude that it brings. He needs to learn.
He heaves himself up, pads over to switch off the light.
He hears the puck of cigarette from lips. “It used to be beautiful,” the fellow says. “Where I’m from, I mean. My town. But it’s all been bombed to shit like this place too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thorough, your lot, when it comes to that kind of thing.”
“They’re not my lot.”
“Which lot are your lot, then?”
He shrugs. “I don’t have a lot.”
The other says, “I’m not going back.”
“You mean, home?”
“I wrote to my wife, I always did since I was conscripted, but the moment that I heard about the bombing I wrote. I’ve written to her thirty-two times since. After the first three letters and nothing back, I started writing to my mother-in-law too, and when nothing came of that either, I sent notes to friends, the neighbours, and to my daughters’ schoolteachers, and then to the priest, and then the doctor. I sent a postcard to the grocer, asking how business was, letting him know how things were going here.”
He rolls his cigarette along his middle finger with his thumb. He looks at the fellow sidelong, waiting.
“They don’t reply. But I keep on writing, and I’m never going back. So. There we are.”
He gets to his feet, leaves the other fellow sitting. Through the maze of the stores, he makes his way to where a box is tucked in behind a bigger box, and he fishes out the bottle of Jameson’s and two enamel mugs. He brings them back, sinks down and pours large measures for them both. They sit in the shadows, and they drink.
—
At the outpatients’ department, people queue for half the day. They bring scabies, bronchitis, arthritis and tuberculosis from their damp and overcrowded dwellings. They bring burns, scalds, contusions and raw open wounds wrapped in grubby tea-towels and handkerchiefs. Tired people are clumsy, and everybody’s tired here: who can sleep with the rain dripping in on them, with their stomachs growling, with the kids coughing all night long? And everything is botched together, provisional, unsteady here, and so accidents happen: there is nowhere safe to cut up a potato, or put a hot pan down.
And children play in the ruins, since there is nowhere else to play. Masonry falls in showers on them. Cellars cave in underneath their feet. They pick up detonators in a grubby palm and call their friends to see. They get caught up in twisted rusty wire, and fall on broken glass.
Even in the countryside, people are not safe. Farm labourers are rushed in from the fields, only a tourniquet and their own cussedness to keep them from bleeding out in the back of their neighbour’s car. There are landmines everywhere, and all sorts of unexploded ordnance, and there is not another hospital for a hundred miles.
As well as blood and flesh and phlegm and parasites and bacteria and shattered bone, the people bring flowers, fruit, eggs, bottles of Calvados and live chickens. They press these on the staff. Treatment is free, but there is a need to express gratitude, to offer some kind of payment. And so they give chickens, and Calvados, and fruit, and often tears.
He signs out the streptomycin, the syringes and suspensions and suture-silk and dressings and tea and cigarettes and sugar and marmalade and tinned ham. Others manage their application. He hands the packages over to the practised hands of nurses, orderlies and caterers, and ticks the items off his list, and when the new stocks arrive he shelves them, and notes them down, and hands over the receipt. What he is managing here, he likes to think, is the flow of decency. That it flows in this direction is long overdue.
Suzanne’s letter is slow in coming too, and when it arrives it is slight and strange and he reads more between the lines than is written on the paper. She thanks him for the biscuits and the coffee and the milk. She is surprised that he could so easily spare them. She wonders when he will next be in Paris. He will see how things really are for everybody there. But paper is scarce, and the sheets are small, and slight as tracing paper, and he’ll forgive her if she doesn’t squander a second sheet on this. But then she doesn’t even fill the first one.
—
He takes his turn to patrol the stores at night. For all the work that has been done to secure the place, it’s still vulnerable. And so he paces out the old vaulted attics with a flashlight, the lights left off to conserve fuel, listening to the scratch and squeak of rats in the stalls below, and the horses as they step and blow and huff, and the clatter of the generator that keeps the refrigerators humming even when the lights are out. A loaded revolver is strapped against his ribs; it lies hard and it makes his skin twitch like a horse’s. If someone breaks in, and isn’t scared off by his mere presence and a flashlight, he is expected to fire.
Between patrols, he sits under one light, his back to a tea-chest, his coat buttoned to his chin, feet drawn up towards him. He sets the gun aside. He opens a book. A quick choice from the crate supplied along with the cigarettes and whiskey, the Scrabble set and table-tennis, for the leisure hours of the Irish volunteers. He turns pages. The words skim by and do not settle. Instead, he feels the press of his own thoughts, the swell of the dark space at the back of the head from where the images start to spill. He’s lost: the broken boots, the stiffening limbs, the sun sinking, rising, sinking; a country road, a tree. This is a waterfall that he is falling with, these are dream-thoughts on the edge of sleep; they slip away and turn to mist when he looks at them directly.
A noise. His head jerks up; he sets the book aside. A thud—something fell. And then a metallic clattering, scuffling and rummaging: someone has broken into the stores. He reaches for the gun. The darkness stretches out across the countryside from here. The hospital is more than a yell away. He is all by himself with this. The scuffling continues.
He unfolds up from the floor.
All is as black as backstage; his torch picks out patches as he moves through the stores. He clicks the safety off. He must defend a million cigarettes. A ton of jam. Fifteen crates of whiskey. And sterile dressings, bottles of stinking yellow iodine, and those milky, opalescent little ampoules of penicillin, snugly packed into their boxes, the boxes stacked in their humming refrigerators. In pure
ly utilitarian terms, penicillin, perhaps, is worth shooting someone for. His hand is sweaty—he switches the gun into his left, wipes his palm down his trouser-leg, swaps the pistol back again, fumbling the torch. He treads softly down between the crates.
He slides round the corner. A carton lies sideways on the floor, tins tumbled out, the lids burst off some of them. Something dark writhes over the pale spillage. He doesn’t fire. He reaches for the light switch, flicks it. And the rats scatter. He lets a breath go. Then he goes to fetch a dustpan and brush. He sweeps up the powdered milk that has been spilt and pours it into the bin. He rights the remaining tins and sorts through them, and puts the untainted ones back on the shelf. There is, after all, no point crying over it.
Later, the gun handed over to the next watch, he walks back to the barracks through the blue pre-dawn, smoking a cigarette, not knowing quite where to put his feet, since the path itself seems to be heaving. A whisk of tail, a dart, a flash of eye; dozens of them, scores, bold as you like. Their usual runs and haunts have been blown out of existence in the bombing; the warehouses and stables and farmyards are no longer there—and so the rats spill everywhere, and seek out new shelter and new sources of food. Just like anybody would.
To the east the sky is paling, and soon another day is going to happen to him, but first there must be sleep. He toes off his boots outside the door, carries them along the row of sleeping men. At his own bed, he flops his greatcoat across the low cross-tie of the roof. He unbuttons his tunic, steps out of his trousers, clambers into bed. He lies, blinking in the darkness, his tongue exploring the spaces in his mouth, the remaining teeth like monoliths, the smooth bald gum. Out there in the darkness there is a scratching and a scuttling, and the almost-too-high-to-hear squeaking of the rats, and something must be done about that, before they taint everything and take over the place entirely. In his mind, he assembles another package, composes another letter. He thinks, a tin of butter, a tin of ham, a tin of peaches. What else can he glean, for Mania and the boys? He blinks. He blinks. And then he’s gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
PARIS
October 1945
They’re rattling down a boulevard in a Red Cross car. He has brought a bag of pears with him from Normandy; it sits on the parcel shelf. And this, oh God, this is Paris again, look at it, and there’s money in his pocket, look, there are people on the terraces, a tram swings round the corner. He’s driving through the city. His uniform-issue boots are sound and sturdy; he has a bag full of sweet and bulging pears. The war is over and so things should be good, but there is still so much that is lacking now. And this is an uneasy anticipation, seeing her again.
He spins past the Arc de Triomphe, along the Champs-Élysées and through the Place de la Concorde, so that his passengers can see the city. The open spaces of it, spinning with bicycles, rattling with buses and even a few official cars. And, what is more—and is more striking—an absence of German Army vehicles. There are no big fair men in grey-green, no bunches of Green Beans on the terraces or clusters strolling down the streets in civvies with their cameras. This is not somebody else’s city any more. The bunkers and the checkpoints have been dismantled or turned to other use. Pigeons flutter upward. He follows their flight past a broken window patched with a board, and a spray of bullet holes in a pale stone wall. There are scars left here too. Marks of harm. His eyes follow the pigeons up into the wide clear sky.
“Watch the road, eh?”
He swerves on to the Pont de la Concorde, and they are rattling along through the Left Bank. He drops his passengers at their lodging on rue Jacob—the quiet loveliness of the rue Jacob—and then he goes—well, he goes home, he supposes. This is the nearest thing there is to home. Back through these narrower streets, where an occasional bicycle wobbles aside, and a pram is bumped up on to the pavement, and a few commercial vans are loading and unloading. And as the moment of return approaches, things slow and become thick with apprehension.
The lift is hors de service. Trudging up seven storeys, breathless, to the apartment, and she is there—he knows it instantly. Though it is not warm, nor lit, she is there, her presence filling up the space like water. And he is gooseflesh and unease with it, not knowing even now what kind of return this will be.
“Suzanne?”
—
Her belly contracts. She drops her sewing aside, gets to her feet. Because coming in through the apartment door, there he is, out of nowhere, like a magic trick, and just as exasperating. All this time his world has been expanding, and has become busy and bustling and full to overflowing, while hers has contracted to a pinprick. She is hunger, body, tiredness, the slog of simply scraping by. She has nothing left for him.
And now he is looking around the flat, and then looking at her, as though it were something and nothing. As though it were inevitable he’d be there, now, this minute, and why would it be a surprise to her at all?
“Well,” he says.
“Well.”
And in uniform! Trust him to spend the war in hand-me-downs and hedgerows and then deck himself out in conspicuous uniform just as everybody else is shedding it. The new gear—greatcoat, cap, trousers, puttees, tunic—is it that that makes him seem all the more contained, unknowable, and just—different?
She stands up, takes a step closer, looks him over, trying to read this new iteration of him. He has a kitbag hanging from his shoulder; the other holds a small calico sack. It bulges with something, with lots of somethings, small and rounded and smooth somethings.
“How are you,” he asks, “my flea?”
“Oh,” she says, unsettled by the endearment. “You know, it goes.”
He drops his kitbag and reaches out an arm and she steps into the space. He holds her there a moment, the both of them like boards. One arm is wrapped around her.
“You’re thin,” he says.
She can hear the rumble of his voice in his chest. She nods, her head sliding up and down against serge. Everyone in Paris is thin. His flesh, though, has filled itself out. He is more solid than he used to be. She wants to say, I am happy to see you, but the truth of it is not quite as clear as happy. There has been too much wear and tear for there to be straightforward happiness now. There is not the substance, the structure left for that.
Now, he pushes her gently away and goes to unbutton his coat, which makes him remember the calico sack.
“Here,” he says. “I brought something for you.”
She swipes at her eyes. More bounty from his better life; it makes her feel sour. But the mouth of the bag opens on a clutch of pears and offers up a cloud of scent, floral, sweet; her mouth floods.
“Oh, the cow,” she says.
She dips in a hand and lifts out a fruit and hands the bag back to him. The pear is heavy with juice; between her fingertips the skin is grained and toad-like. She presses her mouth into the soft flesh, her eyes closing. She eats, wordless, the wet sweetness of it astonishing, while he sets the bag down and slides off his coat and hangs it up and looks around the scant little apartment, and twists his head to peer up at the sleeping loft above. She sucks the last of the flesh from the strands of the core and drops what’s left into the wastepaper basket. Juice has gathered under her lower lip and she wipes it upward with the flank of her hand. Then she notices him, noticing her.
“Excuse me,” she says.
“You’re hungry. Have another.”
“I’m sorry.”
She dips her hand in again. Her cheeks flush. She bites carefully. Little fractions of wet flesh and grainy skin. Turned and lingering on the tongue, while he climbs the stairs to the little sleeping loft and looks around. Like a dog circling its bed.
He calls down to her. “We’ll go out for lunch,” he says. “If you’d like to.”
She pauses, swallows. “Can we?”
“Yes,” he says. “Why not?”
She tilts her head, unseen, considering the new authority in his voice. This is having money, she supposes. A salary
that just happens to him every month. This is having more than enough, rather than substantially less.
“I’d like that,” she says.
She drops the threads of the second pear into the wastepaper basket. She fetches her shoes and sits down to put them on. Her hands are cold and sticky with juice. He clumps back down the stairs. She does not look at him. You have brought me pears, she thinks, but this is what I have brought for you: this is all that I have in abundance. We have had a glut of horrors here.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“About our friends,” she says, and then she pauses and has to clear her throat, because after all there is scant satisfaction in sharing this.
“What do you know?”
“Different stories.”
He looks away; she follows his gaze across to his bookshelves, his desk.
“Not yet,” he says.
“What?”
“Later,” he says. “Just not yet.”
She stares at him. Unseen, she shrugs. “Well.”
He can do as he pleases. He always will. She is too worn out with it all to care.
—
They eat lunch in a little local bistro, where they used to eat before. Frayed cuffs on the waiters, who are men he doesn’t know; washed-thin dresses on the ladies, bare legs. He recognizes the sisters who used to run the hairdresser’s. There is bread, since bread is no longer rationed, and he has rillettes and cornichons, and they have a pichet of wine to share. They are quiet; the whole place is quiet. Life goes on, after all. It insists on it.
The meal is expensive. It is three times what they would have paid for something rather better before the war. But it is welcome. And the coffee, when it comes, is real, and strong, and good. It makes her shudder.
“Will you be back,” she asks, “do you think?”
“To Paris?”
“Yes.”
He casts his gaze around the restaurant, taking in the scuffed tiles, the thin faces, the empty mirrored shelves where there had once been bottled spirits and liqueurs.
