Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  Albrecht watched her small hands deftly searching under the tight leaves and branches. She was wearing a large, shapeless coat, her hair tied back from her face. Putting the basket down, she stood up and arched the small of her back, working the muscles there with the knuckles of her fist. Even then, from this distance, there was little apart from her long hair and the finer bones of her face to mark her out as a woman. The coat hid her shape and her skin was ruddy in the cold of the morning. He felt nothing and was, in some rational part of himself, relieved. But somewhere else, somewhere within him still untouched by the war, the questioning continued. Had that piece of shrapnel numbed him completely? Had it taken not just his taste and his smell but his desire too? He could see why Steiner would be watching her, and yet he felt empty. A lifeless but moving machine, possessed of enough residual knowledge to recognise what he once felt, even if he was no longer capable of sensing it anymore.

  He lowered the binoculars and turned to look at Steiner. The young soldier looked back at him, the embodiment of everything he was not. His face had changed while Albrecht had been looking at Sarah. Albrecht recognised his new expression. Just like he’d recognised the stance of a man looking through binoculars, so he’d seen this look of Steiner’s on the field many times before too. It was a different kind of searching. Steiner knew Albrecht no better than Albrecht knew him. He was waiting for permission, for licence, for the official nod to the unofficial operation. For the blind eye. How many times had a young soldier like Steiner looked in this way at a superior officer before? And how many times had that officer given the slightest of nods, or just turned away, as Albrecht did now. He breathed in deeply, looking out to the distant hills framed in the valley’s broad mouth.

  “Do you have any sisters, Steiner?” he asked.

  The young soldier was wrong-footed. Albrecht couldn’t see his face, but he knew his expectant expression had suddenly dropped.

  “Yes, sir,” Steiner said.

  Good, Albrecht thought, then this will be easier.

  “I had two sisters before the war, sir,” Steiner continued. “Now I have one, Hilda.”

  Of course. That genetic subtraction all of them made these days. Families tapering to single figures, brothers and sisters diminished to the past tense. This would not make it easier.

  “I’m sorry,” Albrecht said, still looking out over the view and wondering how it was you could live with a man for over a month and not know about the death of his sister.

  “It was a British raid,” Steiner said, his voice clipped. “Margaret was always last to the shelter. The sirens were faulty that night. My father looked for days afterwards. For anything. Some hair. A shoe. Just something. But there was nothing.”

  So many stories like this. That’s why he hadn’t known. Because they were no longer unusual. So many ways for someone to leave, to be extinguished. Albrecht lowered his gaze to follow Sarah again, now just a pale patch without the binoculars’ magnification. That would make it easier, he thought. From here, from this distance, it would be easy. And after all, why shouldn’t he let Steiner have his revenge and his pleasure all at once? Give the young man his sympathies, then walk on, stepping over his own prints, edging around the valley back to The Court. Walk on and let Steiner descend the slope behind him, waving casually to the uncertain, unnerved farm woman. Let him hold her face into those wet bushes, one of his hands spread against the back of her head. Let him lift that shapeless coat and the skirt beneath. Let him empty his grief, his anger, and his sadness into her. Let him leave her, alive but with her life suddenly taken. Let him introduce her to the war with which all of them have had to become so intimate these past endless, dragging, unforgiving years.

  Anywhere else and he might have let it be that way. Might have walked on and climbed higher up the slope as he went, so as not to hear her screams. He’d known it to happen so many times before, why shouldn’t it happen again?

  Because he wouldn’t let it. Not here, not now. Because this valley could be different. He’d already begun to feel the faintest of turnings within himself this past week. He knew it was the valley that had engaged this turning and he wanted it to continue, this slow rotation inside him like the tumblers of a lock edging into place. If it went on for long enough, until the end of the war, then who knows? It might just unlock him altogether. It might still not be too late and he could finish his war a victor in every way. Over his enemies and over himself.

  “Why are you here, Steiner?” Albrecht looked away from him again, out over the deep valley before them.

  “I had no choice, sir.”

  “No, here. Now. On this hill.”

  “That house is silent, sir,” Steiner said, jerking a thumb at the radio pack lying on the ground behind them. “The whole valley is. I was looking for a signal.”

  “And did you find one?”

  “Not yet, sir. But I think I will higher up. Up there.” He pointed to above the source of the Olchon at the head of the valley.

  Albrecht followed the line of his finger up to the horizon behind them, its edge dark against the opaque sky.

  “Well, let’s see if you’re right, shall we?” Albrecht said, handing the binoculars back to Steiner and starting to walk up the slope, pressing the heels of his palms into his thighs. Steiner didn’t follow him but just turned and looked back down the valley instead, at the faint shape of Sarah moving between the bilberry bushes. Albrecht stopped his ascent and called down to him.

  “She didn’t drop any bombs, private. None of them did. They’re farmers, that’s all. Let them farm.”

  Steiner looked up the slope at Albrecht. There was something unsettled in his eyes. Albrecht met his stare, one hand resting on the holster of his pistol. A crow cackled from a tree below. A pair of ravens spun, ragged in the wind. Eventually Steiner bent to the radio pack, slipped one of its straps over his shoulder, and began climbing up the hill towards Albrecht.

  “Come on,” Albrecht said when he was nearly with him. “You never know. If we get through maybe they’ll tell us it’s over. That we’ve won already.”

  Steiner gave a resigned smile at the worn joke he’d heard so many times before, a hopeless wish thrown at reluctant radio operators across Europe for the past four years. Albrecht walked on. He felt strange. He knew it was right, in what he remembered of the real world, to be walking away from the farm woman as they were now. And yet he felt wrong, as if he’d denied the war its natural course, disturbed the calibration of events. It reminded him of when, as a boy, he’d taken a still-breathing mouse from the mouth of a hunting cat. He’d intervened in nature, hiding the bruised and bitten rodent in the garden hedge. But he’d known it was only temporary. That he was only keeping at bay, just for a moment, what he knew all too well to be inevitable. The cat would find the mouse, the wolf will find the lamb, and the war, like the river they walked beside now, would always rediscover its course, however much he wished to dam it with the insignificant pebbles of his own intentions.

  November 11th

  They’re still here. Me and Maggie saw two of them today when we were doing her ewes. They were just looking at us and then they were gone. The officer and the tall one. Maggie was having none of it and set to with her shears harder than ever but it shakes me up every time, Tom. And what makes it worse is every time at first I think it’s you or William or Hywel. Still, only a week or two is what they said. Then once they’re gone maybe you can come back.

  It’s still clear. The mornings all start off with mist, but then it burns through until it’s fine all day. The nights are cold, though. Frost every one for the last week. But then I suppose you know all this, don’t you? All the leaves have turned and every morning there’s new spiders’ webs in the grass.

  Menna and Mary have got all their ewes down so they’re tupping too now. The whole valley will be lambing at the same time. Mary’s been hiding Bethan away ever since they came. I understand why she’s done that but I think she’s being too worried as usual
. Apart from like today we see nothing of them.

  I picked bilberries yesterday. I don’t know why. Habit I suppose. It seemed wrong not to. Once I get a moment I’ll try some jam with them. They won’t make much but it’ll be something.

  Things have gone awful quiet, Tom. Reverend Davies was due last Sunday but hasn’t been up since over a month now. Maybe he heard they’re in The Court. Even so, you’d think he’d still come. None of us have had a chance to go into town. Maggie says the radio must have changed its waves or something because she’s getting nothing, not even music.

  I think the old cockerel will have to go. The young one is causing too much trouble. His spurs are long enough. I was waiting for you to come back but I suppose I’ll have to do it. Best be rid of him before winter.

  George pressed himself into the hedge until its thorns and twigs dug into the back of his head, clawed at his neck, and scratched up around his eyes. He felt the sting of a nettle brush across the back of his knuckles. He should have worn gloves. Not because of the nettles but because if they swung those torches this way, his hands would shine up like lanterns out of the dark. Edging the sleeves of his coat over his fingers, he held them there, tightly balled in his fists.

  The patrols kept changing their routine. This was the third time he’d been caught out like this. So much for the Germans’ infamous love of order. That was the one thing Atkins had said he could rely on. Once they’d established a pattern they’d stick to it. But they hadn’t. Atkins had been wrong about so much. George was still here for a start. Still going out every night to check his drop points, to scribble observations on his dwindling supply of rice paper. In Atkins’s world he should be dead by now. Or on a train or in a cattle truck shunting and rattling south. But he wasn’t. He was still here. And he wasn’t the only one. Those messages kept coming and his observations kept going, disappearing from the drop points as if the walls and gateposts were in collusion with him, swallowing his information, digesting it into the landscape, preparing the country for when it would throw off these invaders scurrying across its back.

  The operational units had been at work as well, which is why he was having to press himself into the hedge like this now. Ever since those two guards at the station had been killed, the young lieutenant at Pandy had made it his priority to find the men responsible. That’s why the patrols kept changing, he was sure.

  They’d done a roundup of men in the area the same day they found the guards with their guts spilt over the road. George himself had been pulled out into the farmyard at home. He’d thought that was the end then. Or at least the beginning of the end. The lieutenant barking questions he didn’t understand into his face, the translator repeating them in a bored, irritable tone beside him. Why wasn’t he in the army? Where had he been last Thursday? His mother scrabbling in the drawers of the dresser for that medical report from four years ago. “Acute deafness in left ear.” That, at least, was something Atkins had got right.

  George was sure if they weren’t under orders to keep the farms going they’d have taken him there and then. As it was the lieutenant listened while the translator read the report, eyeballed George for a few long, frozen seconds, then gave his sergeant the nod to clear the soldiers out of the yard. When they’d gone his mother sat against the trough and wept. His father had laid a hand on her back in a way George had never seen before, rubbing gently between her shoulder blades. When he’d looked up at his son, it was in such a way as to make George think perhaps his father knew everything after all. Or perhaps he was asking himself the same questions the lieutenant had asked. Why wasn’t he in the army? Why wasn’t he in the Home Guard? Why wasn’t he doing something, at least?

  Not everyone had been able to give the lieutenant as good a reason as George, and fifteen other men from the area were taken away that day. They never came back. The lieutenant made sure everyone knew it would be the women and children next, the old men, the grandmothers. That next time it would happen here, in their homes and in their fields, not at the end of a journey in a truck.

  Since then any news of operational units’ activity came from far away. Attacks on the railway up towards Hereford, a munitions dump exploded outside Abergavenny. A new newspaper, the Star, distributed by the Germans to replace the papers that had stopped production in the weeks before their arrival, ran reports of these attacks. A vicious insurgency was determined to undermine the freeing of the British people. Funded by self-interested parties, these insurgents were attempting to destabilise the peaceful German occupation. Germany’s war was not against the British people, but against Churchill’s tyrannical democracy, which had insisted on prolonging this conflict for five unnecessary years. The insurgency was the last, sputtering breath of this dying tyranny. The German army would, however, prevail. As they always did. Long live the Führer. Long live the Reich.

  After the killing of the guards at the station, the western edition of the Star had run just one other article about the area. The editors, whoever they were, had chosen to give this article more than the usual amount of space. “Insurgents Murder Local Police Constable.” George wished the headline was just another of the many lies the paper printed every week, but this time he knew it was true. Constable Evans had been shot through the window of his own house as he sat down to a cup of tea before bed. A single bullet, fired from long range. The Star said it was the work of the insurgents, but no one believed that. Except George, for two reasons. First, because Atkins had told him this would happen, that he shouldn’t be alarmed when it did. That it would be necessary. Second, because the calibre and model of the rifle the Star said was used in the killing of Constable Evans was identical to that of the sniper’s rifle George had, just the other night, taken from beneath his bed and buried deep in the manure heap piled in the corner of his father’s farmyard.

  George shifted his head slightly, trying to ease the pressure of a thorn pressing behind his ear. The soldiers were still milling around the idling truck in the middle of the lane. Its headlamps burnt into the hedge, casting a broken glow across the field beyond. The chassis shook gently over its engine and the exhaust fumes turned slowly in the cold air. He thought there were six of them, though he couldn’t be sure. He saw them only when they passed through or near the beams of the headlamps, or when they caught one another’s faces with their torch beams. Ghosts, half-men appearing out of the darkness, hovering above invisible legs. Headless men, the buttons and webbing of their chests illuminated beneath faces and helmets eaten by the night. The cigarettes gave him more of an idea. Five of them now, their tips making slow loops in the air, glowing on and off, rising and falling like amber fireflies. George counted them down as they extinguished. Five, four, three, two. The last one burnt faintly all the way to the truck, hung suspended in the air outside its window, glowed brightly once more, then went spinning to the ground, dying in a little explosion of sparks. Shortly afterwards the truck shuddered down its spine, a grating gear engaged, and the vehicle began turning. Three of them were going, three were staying. If he timed it correctly he could use the noise and the cover of the truck to run along the hedge and slip over the gate further up the lane. He wouldn’t be going any further tonight. Not this way at least. He’d find another way. Because there was always another way, that’s what Atkins had told him. “Always another way, George,” he’d said, his hand on his shoulder. “You’ve just got to keep your eyes open, that’s all, lad. Keep your eyes open.”

  His eyes wouldn’t open. They seemed glued shut. With his own blood? No, not blood. It was a bandage. A tight bandage pressing down on his lids. But there was blood, yes. Dried. He could feel it, pulling on his skin.

  Atkins moved his head. Everything spun inside him. White snow under his closed eyes.

  His hands were tied. And his feet. Yes, he remembered now. Stupid. Stupid to be caught like that. He should have gone north with the rest. Regrouped. But someone had to stay, didn’t they? Stay behind.

  Who told? Who sent them to h
im? No one perhaps. But yes, always someone. Not their fault. What about him? What had he said? No, nothing. Nothing. Yet.

  There’d been no time for the pill. They’d taken him by surprise. He tightened his hands so the base of his fingers touched. Yes, the ring was gone.

  Stupid to be caught like that. Should have kept his eyes open.

  What was that? A door opening. Closing. The click of a latch. Footsteps. They were coming for him again. He listened to their approach. A small room. They came close. He could hear their breathing, smell the fresh smoke on their clothes. Two of them. Why didn’t they speak?

  One set of footsteps now, moving behind him, then hands, hands at the back of his head. Fingers at the back of his head. The bandage coming off, pulling at his eyelashes, peeling the blood from his skin—Oh Christ! Jesus Christ! Burning light. Burning, burning light. Hands at his face now, fingers pulling at his face, holding his head, thick fingers over his eyebrows, thumbs pulling at his lids, drawing them back, keeping his eyes open.

  The snow came to the valley the same way the men had left it: suddenly, silently, and overnight. When Sarah pulled back her curtains the next morning, the day was still half dark, washed out in greys and blues. The only light shining into the room was from an undulating seam of white pressed against the lower panes of the window; a miniature range of bright hills, their contours bisected by the glass. She looked at it, her eyes still grainy with sleep, confused. There had been no warning, no sign this would happen. On going to bed she’d been able to see the stars, but now the sky and the world beneath it were obscured. There was a wind too, wild about the house. She looked out at the branches of the trees. She could just see them, black behind the still-falling snow. Yesterday they’d been upright, motionless, but now they were all swept the same way, like iron filings drawn to a magnet, bowing under the wind that pressed upon them.