by Owen Sheers
“Well done, bach,” Maggie said as she took the ewe from Sarah. “An’ again now.”
Sarah’s back ached, her left ear, which had slipped from under her scarf, tingled in the cold wind. Again she grabbed a sheep and swung it over with a grunt of effort. As she did she let her eyes flick up to the hedge at the edge of the field. They were gone. The two pale faces were no longer there, and once again Sarah found herself wondering if she’d seen them at all. Everything looked so ordinary. There was nothing left in their wake. No mark or sign to point towards their presence. Just the valley itself, as always, shedding and greying towards winter.
This is how it had been for all of them over the past few days. Chance glancings, a rush of the heart beneath the ribs. The soldiers glimpsed like apparitions in familiar places. Cruel echoes of their own missing husbands. And then they were gone, passed on, and everything looked as it always did once more.
None of the women had spoken to the Germans since that first evening when Albrecht conducted his tour of the valley’s farms. None of them except Maggie. Sarah had stayed at hers that night. She’d arrived out of the moonlit yard, Tom’s shotgun held unbroken in her hands. She was shaken, pale, confused. Calming her had calmed Maggie herself, and when she woke the next morning she’d known what she must do. Having seen Sarah back off to Upper Blaen, she set out herself for The Court, her old bitch collie trotting along the lane beside her. As she approached the solid old farmhouse, she became aware of the barrel of Gernot’s rifle tracing her as she made her way up the lane. He held it at his shoulder, his head bent to its sights, one eye closed in aim. As she got nearer he called over his shoulder into the house and Alex appeared from the front door behind him, a submachine gun held at his waist, his finger shadowing the trigger.
Maggie stood in front of the two soldiers where she’d stood talking to Reg and the boys a thousand times before and asked to speak to Captain Wolfram. Alex looked down at her, frowning heavily and understanding nothing until he heard Albrecht’s name, strangely flat in this old woman’s mouth. He went back inside for a moment then appeared at the door again with Albrecht at his shoulder. He was in his shirtsleeves and braces, wiping the last flecks of shaving soap from his face with a towel.
“Please, Mrs. Jones,” he said, pulling the towel over his hands. “Come inside.”
Maggie hesitated, surprised again by his refined accent. She was unsure whether she should cross this old-new threshold of The Court’s front porch, but something in the way the two other soldiers parted for her, like a set of double doors opening to a secret password, seemed to leave her no choice. Telling the dog to “cwtch ci,” she followed Albrecht inside.
She did not sit down. Albrecht and she spoke standing on the flagstones in the front room instead, like two battlefield generals meeting at dawn to negotiate the day’s engagement. The room smelt of solidified fat and old fire, cold ashes shifting under the grate in the breeze from the opened door.
Maggie made herself clear. They would not give the Germans anything. Food, supplies of any kind. The government had forbidden it and she wanted Captain Wolfram to know this now, to avoid any confusion. She would make sure that everyone in the valley stayed away from The Court while the soldiers were here. In return she wanted the captain’s assurance again that he and his men would leave them undisturbed and allow them to get on with their work of running the farms.
Albrecht nodded politely throughout Maggie’s speech, shivering a last drop of foam still suspended behind the lobe of his left ear. When she’d finished he told her he agreed with everything she had said. He appreciated her coming and he understood her position. He and his men had plenty of supplies, both of their own and now from the larder and vegetable garden of The Court. “I would, however, like to remind you, Mrs. Jones,” he said with a tight smile, “that whether your government forbids your cooperation or not is entirely irrelevant. This valley is, after all, like all of this area, under German military control.”
Maggie stiffened before him.
“But that is no matter,” he continued. “You will not be disturbed. I assure you.” He paused, looking her straight in the eye. “In any way.”
Albrecht gave Maggie a short bow. “Now, if you’ll excuse me we too must get on with our work.” He nodded to Alex, who opened the front door and guided Maggie back out onto the lane that ran beside The Court. The old woman walked beside him, two of her strides to one of his, her head level with the scratched buttons on the chest of his tunic. When he stopped, Maggie carried on without a pause, consciously keeping her back straight, her head high. Only when she’d rounded the bend in the lane and was out of sight of Gernot’s trailing rifle did she let her age fall in upon her once more, rounding her shoulders, shortening her stride, and bringing her hand instinctively to the base of her spine to cradle the pain that never left there. As she walked back to her farm, the old collie ran ahead of her, unaware anything had changed other than the arrival of a man scent back into the valley.
The German officer had said nothing about their husbands. She’d given him his chance. Because that’s why she’d really gone to The Court. To invite it, to bring it to a head. Then she might have been able to negotiate. To explain. Or (and is this what she’d really wanted?) the captain would have told her, simply, that he knew exactly where their husbands were. That they’d been captured, weeks ago. That he’d seen them himself, that they were prisoners of war. Maybe even (and at this thought Maggie felt something fall away from behind her eyes, a loosening of her skull) that they were dead. Yes, even that. That is why she’d gone to The Court. To know.
But the captain had said nothing and, in the end, neither had she. The men had been as absent from their conversation as they were from the valley. But the captain knew. She was sure of it. He knew.
On Albrecht’s part he was content with everything Maggie had said to him. This was how he wanted to keep things here. Simple and apart. After so many years and months of movement, after so many days of noise and fear and fighting, he wanted to give himself and his men a rest. So there was no need to impose his authority on these women. Especially with their husbands gone. To do so would just invite retaliation. No, better to have the lightest of touches upon this valley. Complete his work here and relish its silences, its pause in the world while he did. Let the women alone and let their husbands do their killing and being killed elsewhere.
It was never going to be easy for Albrecht to persuade the rest of the patrol to share this approach. They were, after all, young men as well as soldiers, and apart from some distant visits to a French brothel, they’d all spent months beyond the orbit of women. So Albrecht wasn’t entirely surprised when one evening a week after Maggie’s morning visit he’d had to remind them all again that there would be no interfering with these farm women, in any way.
It was Steiner who’d forced the issue. Albrecht had taken to walking out early from The Court each morning. The recent years of army life might have been active, but they had left him unfit. The lack of sleep, the bad food, the nervous smoking, the disruptive pattern of boredom punctuated with moments of intense fear. All of it had taken its toll. Ever since his promotion he’d rarely had to march anywhere. There was always a truck, an armoured vehicle, or a staff car to ride in. Even in Russia, where they’d all become lean through long months in the field, he’d got little exercise beyond walking the perimeter defences.
Since they’d got to Britain, he’d noticed his physical decline more. He’d put on weight but not in a good way and not in the right places. When he sat down there were soft ridges of fat where there hadn’t been before. His chest was tight, gripped in a stubborn cough. His dark hair was shot with silver, his stomach was always unsettled, and now, on top of everything, that piece of shrapnel had left a legacy of regular headaches. The war was taking his best years. He was thirty-three years old, but he felt as if he’d aged much more. The body of a young man about the heart, lungs, and skeleton of an old one.
Albrec
ht had started taking these early morning walks partly to ease himself into his mission in the Olchon, to get a sense of the area, to look over the valley’s intimate places. But they were also for his old-young body. To make it work, to bring the fresh air pumping through it like a purifying draught through the opened windows of a long-abandoned house. Kill or cure, as the English would say. He’d leave by The Court’s back door, leaning into the steep slope that rose directly behind the house. He always went alone, which Alex didn’t approve of despite Albrecht’s assurance there was nothing to worry about. He’d be careful and there was no need for concern. Things were different here from where they’d been before. Maggie’s visit had convinced him of that.
The incline behind The Court was immediate and abrupt and it wasn’t long before his thighs were burning and his weak chest heaving. He often removed his scarf within the first five minutes of the climb, exposing his prickling neck to the November air. On the initial few walks, he stopped regularly, suddenly stilling his body, the brushing and rustling of his clothes giving way to his own heavy breathing and the throbbing of his pulse; a crude, rhythmical beat to the unmoving view beneath him.
Just as the air purged his lungs, so the views purged his sight. The valley was beautiful, there was no denying it. No tanks, no dugouts, no snouts of antiaircraft guns protruding from behind sandbags. The few derelict buildings had fallen under age and weather, not bombs and bullets. It was nature in all its massive certainty, from the crowds of trees running along the valley floor to the barren challenge of its hilltops. He’d never seen anywhere like it before. He was a city man, born and bred in the city’s landscape of streets, buildings on buildings and lone elms and sycamores levering up the pavement slabs with their roots. As a child there’d been outings to the countryside, true, and while at university he’d even taken to walking along the granite ridges and hills of Upper Lusatia with a group of friends. But he’d never seen somewhere quite like the Olchon before. Somewhere so still, so bluntly beautiful and yet possessed, within that same beauty, of such a simple, threatening bareness too.
He’d walk straight up until he was through the fields and on the sheep tracks that cut through the brown expanses of withered bracken. Then, long before he reached the top of the ridge, he’d turn and walk along the slope, the valley falling away to his right. He suspected it was a false horizon anyway, that there’d be more climbing before he’d be able to see the land on the other side of the ridge. Not that he wanted to see that land. That was where the war was, that was where they’d come from, and for now he’d rather just explore the valley itself and know nothing of what lay beyond.
On the day he saw Steiner, Albrecht had followed the same route he’d walked on that first morning of Maggie’s visit. Skirting along the west wall, he passed above the old woman’s farm and worked his way round to the steeper curve at the head of the valley, where the incline became cliff above him and the young river cut a deep crevice, arching from between clusters of rocks. Here, he climbed again, moving above the damp ground where the spring that became the river first surfaced through the thin soil. Using this spring as a pivot, he walked down the slope and swung right again, crossing the river to bring himself back to rejoin his original path, the toe of his boot stepping over the heel of his previous footprints. He never went further around the head of the valley towards the east wall and the ridge of the Black Hill. Even then, on that first morning, he’d somehow sensed the unspoken border that would divide the valley while the patrol was there. The farm women would have the valley east of the Olchon, dark until late in the day, and they, the soldiers, would have the west of the valley, greying to night from the early afternoon onwards. Only Maggie’s farm cut into this silent division of territory, but she kept to her fields and often worked with the others along the eastern wall. Upper Blaen, at the head of the valley, marked the apex of this invisible divide.
Sometimes, if the mood took him, or the view was of particular clarity, Albrecht would pause in his walking and sit on one of the rocks near the source of the Olchon. On the morning he saw Steiner, it was the nature of the mist, lingering low in the valley, that made him stop and look out over the view. The edges of the stones nearest the stream were softened under mouldings of ice, air bubbles suspended like pearls under their transparent skins. The coarse grasses at the edge of the water were also iced, each individual blade encased in a thin tube, as brittle and fragile as the stems of champagne flutes. Albrecht carefully snapped one of these ice rods and drew it off the blade, leaving the pale grass exposed, quivering in the wind. Looking out over the valley clogged with mist, he blew through the delicate ice straw and felt his warm breath cooled against the palm of his hand.
The sun was just over the Black Hill, diffusing its light through the low mist and throwing shadows in unexpected places. Which was why, at first, Albrecht hadn’t seen Steiner standing by a stone wall far down the slope below him. It was only when Steiner removed his radio pack that his movement, unfamiliar in the rhythm of the landscape, caught Albrecht’s eye. The pink semaphore of his hands as he slipped the straps from his shoulders, then the lifting of those hands to his face. And then Steiner was still again, his uniform melding back into the greens, browns, and burnished ambers of the early winter hillside.
It was the first time Albrecht had seen anyone on this walk. Had Steiner left The Court before him? He didn’t think so. He must have taken the lane, the lower route through the valley, while Albrecht made his slower progress along the hillside. Why he was here, Albrecht didn’t know. He thought of calling down to him, but he didn’t think Steiner would hear. He’d already learnt the valley threw visual illusions all the time, that perspective seemed to shrink and shift within its narrow parameters. Steiner was too far away for a voice to reach him. Albrecht watched his motionless back, squinting to sharpen his edges. He was waiting for him to move, to turn, so he could stand and wave to him. But Steiner remained as he was, standing by the broken stone wall, his hands held to his face and his elbows angular on either side of his head. Albrecht recognised that stance. He’d seen it on hillsides all over Europe: officers and generals surveying a battlefield through the intimate distance of a pair of binoculars.
Taking the ice from his lips, Albrecht twirled it once through his fingers, then with a delicate pressure across his thumb, snapped the stem in two. He pushed himself off the stone and began to pick his way down the slope, the broken rod of ice melting in the warmth of his fist. As he neared Steiner he began to drift left, away from the course of the river ricocheting between the rocks. Steiner was armed. He’d spent the last month in constant conflict. Albrecht didn’t want to startle him.
Reaching a buckled thorn tree, he paused and watched Steiner again, one hand resting against its trunk. The young soldier still hadn’t moved, transfixed by whatever filled the figure-eight view of his binoculars. Albrecht found himself mimicking this motionlessness; a hawk hovering above a hunting hawk until eventually Steiner broke their mirrored stillness, unfolding his right elbow, and lowering one hand to his waist, as if looking for something in his pocket.
Albrecht walked on, sweeping his legs through the bracken hoping Steiner would hear his approach. But still he didn’t move, the binoculars held to his eyes with his left hand, the right still searching on the other side of his body. Albrecht moved further down the slope again and it was only then, when he was on a level with Steiner, that he was able to follow the line of his gaze. There, further down the valley below the bracken line, one of the local women was moving through the low-lying heather and bilberry bushes, a wicker basket hung over the crook of her arm.
“Guten tag, Steiner.”
Steiner’s whole body jolted as if shocked with a sudden voltage. Dropping the binoculars he spun towards Albrecht while reaching at the same time for his rifle, his right hand coming up to the stock of the gun, already half off his shoulder.
“Hey! Steady!” Albrecht stepped back, holding both his hands before him and for a fro
zen moment the two men faced each other like that: Albrecht with his hands out and his knees bent as if braced against a boulder, Steiner poised between flight and defence. Slowly Albrecht straightened up again, allowing himself a breathy half-laugh. “I didn’t come all this way to get a German bullet, private. Could have got that at home a long time ago.”
Steiner returned a weak-eyed smile, slipping his rifle back over his shoulder and making a half turn away from Albrecht as he adjusted himself. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You caught me by surprise.”
Albrecht walked up beside the young soldier and looked down the valley.
“It’s so quiet,” Steiner added, as if by way of further explanation.
“Yes it is, isn’t it?” Albrecht said. “Admiring the view?” He raised his eyebrows at the pair of binoculars hung round Steiner’s neck. He was careful to keep his voice light. He still didn’t know Steiner, not like he knew Alex or Sebald. He also had no idea why Steiner was here, out on the hill so early in the morning.
“Yes, sir,” Steiner said, his eyes playing over Albrecht’s face trying to read his expression.
“Mind if I have a look?” Albrecht held out his hand, his palm still dewed with the melted ice. Steiner lifted the strap over his head and handed the binoculars to Albrecht. Albrecht lifted his glasses onto his forehead and looked through the binoculars. They were Russian, the rubber about the eyepieces perished at the edges, cracked like the skin of drying lips. Turning the dial at their centre, he brought the view below into focus, drawing the valley from an Impressionist myopia into flat precision. Making small movements that brought the landscape sweeping across the lenses, he found the woman, still moving and bending among the bushes. He knew who she was before she lifted her face. The young wife he’d met at the last farm on their first night in the valley. He recognised her hair but he’d known it was her before that. When he was standing by the thorn tree, he’d known then. She was picking bilberries, methodically pulling them from the undergrowth and dropping them into the basket. She obviously had no idea she was being observed.
