Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘You’re scaring me,’ Gary said. ‘Ben was scared. I’ve never seen such terror, and Ben was a Jew in Nazi hands. He had a lot to be scared about. I promised to get Ben out when he was taken from the stalag. I failed. I’ll have to go back.’

  ‘Well, you could get the chance, old bean, although it might be a while,’ Mackie murmured. ‘And while this Menologium may be a busted flush, they’ll no doubt start off on some new history-bothering project altogether, and we’ll have to start from scratch too. More research on your agenda, Mary. What a bloody show this all is, what a show. We really have got to put a stop to it.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘But that’s for tomorrow. Soon be at the ship. Hot cup of tea, that’s what we need.’ He pulled out a pipe and began to fill it.

  His mother grabbed Gary and buried her face in his collar. He put his arms around her. She was trembling. But even now he didn’t understand what she was so scared of.

  The motor boat forged on through the fading afternoon light.

  III

  WEAVER

  MAY-JULY 1943

  I

  13 May 1943

  The air in the farmhouse kitchen was a mass of cigarette smoke and steamy cooking smells.

  ‘I’m telling you you’re not going out again dressed like a bloody little tart.’

  I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.What are you going to do, Dad, thump me again?’

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Ernst sighed. He was tired tonight, tired from the rounds of combat training. His ears rang from the gunfire. Not enough, however, to shut out the raised voices.

  Irma worked listlessly at the range. Little Myrtle, now nearly two years old, was bundled-up skin and bone on the floor at her mother’s feet, playing with worn wooden blocks. Fred and Heinz sat together at the table, two shapeless lumps hunched in their grimy shirts, smoke curling up to the ceiling from their cigarettes. Glasses and a half-empty vodka bottle sat on the table between them. The television set was on, its screen a lens showing indistinct figures, walking, smiling, shaking hands, while jolly martial music played.

  Viv was before the mirror. She wore one of her smarter dresses, the powder-blue, much let out with her mother’s help. She was working at her lips with her little finger. Seventeen years old now, she had blossomed into an attractive young woman - if a slim one, but everybody was skinny nowadays. Ernst knew how much of her glamour was faked, tricks learned from the girls in town: a pencil line to mimic a stocking seam, a bit of beetroot juice and Vaseline smeared on the mouth in lieu of lipstick.

  As usual she was the centre of the arguments.

  Heinz took a drag on the cigarette he held between the stumps of the fingers of his right hand. ‘Can’t say I blame the father,’ he said to Ernst. I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.She really is a Jerrybag now, that one.’ He used the English word amid his guttural German. He had come back from the east with his voice shot, whether by gas or Russian cigarettes he wouldn’t say.

  I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.And how long have you two been at the stuff?’

  Heinz shrugged. ‘An hour, maybe more. Ever since the feldgendarmerie called again.’ The military police were trying to get Fred to train with the Volkssturm militia. ‘He told them where to shove their helmets, and they cut the rations again, and that was that.’

  Viv turned to the door. ‘Right, Mum, I’m off.’

  Irma asked, ‘What time will you be back, love?’

  I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.Now don’t you encourage her,’ Fred said. ‘Don’t you bloody make it seem as if this is all normal.’ Fred’s voice was heavy. He was a stubborn old man who could defy the German military police, but he had no control over his daughter.

  I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.Oh, Fred, what am I supposed to do? She’s seventeen, she can do what she wants.’

  I’m sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what’s problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what’s the problem.Well, thank you very much,’ Viv said heavily. She fixed her hat on her head; it was a small trilby. ‘I’m glad somebody in this house treats me like an adult and not a criminal.’

  ‘Just be careful, love.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Viv walked past Ernst, not even looking at him.

  When she slammed the kitchen door behind her Ernst winced. He felt guilty; he felt that the kindness he had tried to show the girl when he had first been billeted here had somehow gone wrong, that she had at last become what her father had feared. But what else could he have done?

  Heinz topped up Fred’s glass.

  Ernst crossed to the sink, and stood with Irma before the open window. As the English midsummer approached the days were long; it was after seven in the evening, but the sun was still above the horizon, the sky a deep but brilliant blue, the world green and full of birdsong. It often struck him how resilient nature was. It took only days for weeds to colonise a bomb site, far faster than any human agency could clear debris and rebuild. And some men did not recover at all. Look at Heinz. He had come back from his winter on the eastern front wounded in body and mind - come back aged.

  Irma handed Ernst a glass of cold water. When she took a step her clogs clattered on the stone floor. The clogs were made by Fred from wood and a bit of old leather; shoes were another item the civilian population found ever harder to replace. ‘You can’t blame Viv. Poor girl! It’s not much of a time to be growing up, is it? No wonder she goes after a bit of glamour. You can’t blame her.’

  He sipped his water. ‘Any news of the boys today?’

  She shook her head. It had been a month since they had had a letter from Alfie, now sixteen, who had been working on a bombed-out airfield in Kent. But now there were rumours that anybody who had been involved with the Hitler Jugend was to be drafted into the Volkssturm or even the British units of the Wehrmacht, and trained to fight the expected counter-invasion. As for Jack, three years after he had been taken as a POW, there had been no word at all of him for months and months, not even through the Red Cross.

  ‘Fred always gets worse after the post comes. In a way he frets more about Alfie than about Viv, or even Jack. Alfie’s so young, you see. He can probably barely remember a time before the Germans came. It might be hard for him to shake it all off, when the Americans come.’ She glanced over. ‘They’re starting in on the vodka earlier every day.’

  Ernst forced a smile. ‘Well, Heinz says he lost the fingers of his right hand at Stalingrad, but came back with a bottle of vodka in his left.’

  ‘I hope you ate we
ll today, Herr Obergefreiter.’ She stirred the watery stew. ‘Potatoes and turnip again I’m afraid. Not even any whale meat tonight! They cut our ration again, the feldgendarmerie.’

  ‘Heinz told me.’

  ‘Fred’s a war veteran. They can’t expect him to take up arms against his own countrymen. You’d think they’d have the respect not even to ask. I know he’s heading for trouble. I mean, the way he swears at them! Well, maybe the Americans will be here before it all comes to a head.’

  ‘I am sure we will cope,’ Ernst said vaguely, hoping to reassure her.

  She smiled and pushed hair out of her eyes. She too had lost weight; the bones of her temples were prominent, her hair thinning. ‘You’re always so kind, Herr Obergefreiter. It’s a strange thing - I never thought I’d feel this way in that time after the invasion - I miss those old days, ever so. When it was just you. I know Heinz is your friend, but with him here, and the other soldiers in the towns, you know ...’

  He understood. The movement of troops in anticipation of the counter-invasion had upset the web of obligations and compromises that had grown up among the local people and the troops stationed among them. He himself had been irritated to have Heinz foisted on his billet, after the business over Claudine. But Claudine was long dead, and Heinz was damaged by his own war; it didn’t seem to matter any more. ‘Heinz isn’t so bad,’ he said gently. ‘There are worse.’ Some of the men had been brutalised by their time in the east.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘In fact he’s company for Fred, in a way.’ But her voice was flat, a sign that she was hiding something from him, as she often did. She shooed him away so she could finish her cooking.

  Ernst sat with the men and grudgingly accepted a small shot of vodka.

  The television showed a newsreel, a Nazi grandee in a long leather coat touring an armaments factory. He could have been anywhere in Albion, as it seemed the whole protectorate was given over to such industries.

  ‘Herr Goebbels,’ Fred told Ernst. He pronounced the name the comical way Churchill did, ‘Gobbles’. ‘Poking his nose around Canterbury.’

  ‘We are honoured,’ Heinz said mockingly. He raised his glass. ‘To the Reichsminister!’

  ‘At least he’s here,’ Fred said. ‘It’s a bloody long time since Hitler showed up.’

  ‘It is not Goebbels we need,’ Heinz growled. ‘Not him and his speeches and his slogans. It is tanks and guns and shells and bullets we need to face the Americans.’

  ‘You’ve got reinforcements,’ Fred said. ‘You’re a bloody reinforcement, man.’

  Heinz laughed. ‘Yes, and I still have one hand left that I can shoot with! God save the Fuhrer.’

  But Ernst knew that Heinz’s tanks and guns were unlikely to come any time soon. Despite the rumoured Allied build-up on the other side of the First Objective the Reich’s resources were increasingly being diverted to the astonishing battles being fought out in the east.

  Now Goebbels calmly watched a row of blindfolded auxiliaries being executed by firing squad. The music swelled to a brittle climax as the bodies shivered and fell.

  ‘I will tell you one thing,’ Heinz said. ‘I would not want to be a British partisan in the hands of the SS. From the Fuhrer down, they are saying it’s all your fault, you British, the troubles we are having.’

  Fred laughed. ‘What, even Stalingrad? Uncle Joe and his T-34 tanks might have had a bit to do with that.’

  ‘Yes, but if you buggers had not been so stubborn, if you had made peace as any sensible person would have done, we would not have so many men tied down on this absurd little island.’

  Buggers. Ernst suppressed a smile. Heinz had picked up a good deal of English from Fred. Fred said, ‘And so those bloody SS thugs take it out on English children, while they hide from the Russians like the cowards they are.’

  ‘You won’t hear me defending the SS, that’s for sure.’

  Ernst stood, downed his vodka and picked up his jacket. ‘I probably ought to pack before dinner. The truck’s coming for me at midnight.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Heinz asked.

  ‘I have a posting on the coast in Kent. Richborough. Five days.’

  Heinz eyed Ernst. ‘Is this your brother pulling strings again?’ Even before his return from Stalingrad Heinz had always been a hugely suspicious soldier, endlessly perceiving favours done and postings manipulated. He got up unsteadily and lurched over to Irma at the range. ‘Where’s that blessed stew, woman?’

  ‘Coming,’ Irma said without emotion.

  Seeing Ernst was leaving, Myrtle gurgled and raised her little arms to him. With his jacket slung over his shoulder, he squatted down. He picked up her Mickey Mouse gas-mask from where it sat on the floor and waggled it. When she grabbed for it he picked her up, his hands under her armpits. She laughed when he bounced her gently, and plucked at the buttons on his shirt. He could feel her ribs, her elbows and knees were lumps of bone, and he could make out the shape of her little skull as she smiled at him. He knew little about the development of children, but it seemed to him she was behind with her walking and talking. It was strange to think that this child had always been hungry, every minute of every day of her short life.

  Heinz’s shadow fell over him. And when he looked up, he saw Heinz’s left hand, his good hand, rake upwards over Irma’s hip and settle on her breast. She elbowed him away, with a nervous glance at Fred. Heinz just laughed and staggered back to the table.

  Irma saw that Ernst had seen all this. She glanced again at Fred, and hissed, ‘You won’t tell him, will you? It’s not what you think. I mean - it’s just for the rations. Heinz brings me extra, you know, I need it for the child.’

  He stood, keeping his face blank. ‘I could have helped you. There was no need.’

  She shook her head. ‘I would never beg favours of you. I have my pride, Herr Obergefreiter.’ She began to ladle out the stew.

  II

  14 May

  Ben Kamen heard voices. Trojan, the monstrous woman Fiveash, another he did not recognise. He struggled to wake, to focus on their words.

  ‘Vril,’ Trojan was saying. ‘Vril is the power which underlies the universe, Ernst. So it is written. And it is vril that has woven history. In the greatest age of Atlantis, the first building that ever stood upon the face of the earth housed a vril time lens. It was a calendar, but it did not record time; it created time. I believe my petty Loom is a poor imitation of that mighty lens - and yet it is surely vril essence that I have captured here!’

  ‘You actually believe all this, don’t you?’ A young man’s voice. ‘And you, Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash?’

  ‘Of course,’ came Fiveash’s silky, hateful tone, her German mildly accented with the tight vowels of the English. ‘I would not work here at your brother’s side without that faith, Obergefreiter. I would not have brought him the Loom technology from America otherwise.’

  But she did not believe, Ben thought, lying there, eyes closed. She spouted this dreary hotchpotch rubbish merely to control the fool Trojan, for she, English-born, needed a German puppet to exert full influence within the SS. In Ben’s opinion all Nazis were either fools or in the thrall of fools. But could none of them see what a menace this woman was?

  Their voices murmured, meaningless, falling away. He listened, his eyes closed. He longed to be anywhere but this place. He longed even to be back in the solitary-confinement cell in which he had been kept for month after month, while Fiveash and Trojan rebuilt their devilish machinery, until they were ready to bring him back to this hell of drugs and artificial sleep. He longed even to escape into sleep, and yet he dreaded it for the damage his dreams might do.

  Trojan was talking again, boasting to his brother. ‘The new calculating equipment is remarkable, isn’t it? Much of it is British, frankly; this is one technological area where they seem to be ahead of us. They are building powerful electronic machines, clearly intended for some such purpose as code-breaking, or command and control. We have r
aided a country house called Bletchley Park, for example, where they call their machine the Colossus“. And the British Post Office has a research establishment at a place called Dollis Hill north-west of London. Such gadgets as this are manufactured there.’

  ‘The Post Office?’

  ‘They are used to handling this kind of equipment in their telephone exchanges. Look here, Ernst - see the valves, the glass tubes? We have over two thousand in this machine alone, each capable of switching from one state to another in just a millionth of a second. It is this speed of switching, you see, which enables the machine to carry through its computations so rapidly.’

  ‘And how do you express your problems to it?’

  ‘Ah, good question. You speak“ to this beast in a physical language. It is a question of setting switches and plugging in cables, as if reordering its very brain. These are the most advanced thinking machines in the world! And with such devices the computation of Gödel trajectories becomes trivial.’

  ‘Trivial.“ You mean that in the academic sense, don’t you? Not an intellectual challenge.” But perhaps one should apply the word to your whole enterprise, Josef.’

  Fiveash laughed. ‘Your muddy foot-soldier of a brother has a brain in there, Josef.’

  ‘Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash, yes, I am a muddy infantryman, and proud of it. That is the reality of the war to me. Mud and guns and blood, hunger and death. All this talk of ancient powers and time travel is so much claptrap. You already failed once - that nonsense over Hastings!’

  ‘But we will not fail again.’ And can you not see,’ said Josef Trojan earnestly, ‘that if we succeed we will transform the fortunes of the war at a stroke? For we will cut down our most powerful opponent—’