by Owen Sheers
Sarah stared back at the bucket, trembling slightly on its hook, the heating snow tapping against its sides. She didn’t want to know about his name. She didn’t want to know anything about him.
Alex had stopped working on the sheep and was looking up at Albrecht. He’d heard him tell Sarah his name, as clear in the flow of incomprehensible English as a stone within a stream. Why was the captain talking so much to this woman? Why was he telling her his name again?
Albrecht returned Alex’s stare. “Alex is from Bavaria,” he said before continuing in German to his sergeant. Alex laughed. His voice was deep, welling from some far place inside him. “But Alex is not a poet,” Albrecht said in English, shaking his head and smiling. Then suddenly, without warning, he saw Alex in Russia again, locked in a struggling embrace with a Red Army soldier. Alex losing his rifle, the Russian lifting his knife. Alex biting at the man’s throat, tearing out his windpipe with his teeth. The man falling at his feet, bubbles of blood popping under his chin, spreading through his greying stubble like ink through blotting paper.
Albrecht’s smile left him and he looked out the window to try and ease the rush of panic this vision always brought. Alex went back to tending the sheep, still smiling at Albrecht’s joke.
Sarah fetched a shallow bowl and, taking the bucket off its hook with a teacloth wrapped about her hand, poured some of the heated water into it before laying it before the two ewes. Then she walked out of the kitchen into the yard without saying anything or looking at Albrecht.
When she came back inside, she tipped a handful of calf nuts into the water. Alex nodded in approval and smiled at her. She ignored him and sat back at the table.
“This will make it hard for you,” Albrecht said, studying the thick folds of snow over the shed’s slate roof.
Sarah felt another shudder of fear. There, again, he knew. This will make it hard for you. Because you’re on your own. You all are. Because there isn’t a man in the valley to help you. That’s what he meant.
She traced the whorls of wood in the surface of the table, her mind racing, searching for a way to lead his talk away from her own situation. Fingerprints of those gone before. She let the wood’s smooth whirlpools lead her.
“I knew a poet once,” she said quietly. “When I was a girl.”
Albrecht turned to face Sarah, frowning. “A poet?”
“Yes. You said your family took their name from a poet. I knew a poet. He lived up at the monastery above our farm. He’d been a soldier before, but he was a poet when I knew him. And a painter.”
Albrecht looked at her blankly. What was she talking about? How did she know a poet out here? Why was she telling him this? Perhaps the snow, the exhaustion, had got to her. Or maybe that light in her eye he’d thought the glimmer of intelligence was, after all, no more than the glint of rural insanity.
“Really?” Albrecht said, strolling over to the dresser again. He stood with his back to her, studying the certificate once more but not reading it. He could hear the sound of the sheep lapping at the mix of water and nuts behind him. Leaning against the dresser his hand knocked something over and he found himself picking up Sarah’s wedding photo again. There she was on her wedding day. With her husband. Thick-shouldered, a farmer in any language. She was smiling, her dark hair pinned up under her veil to expose her neck, fine and slender in the light. She looked like a different woman, and he wished he’d known her then. He hated her for changing. He looked up from the sepia image and caught her eye.
“When did they leave?” he said flatly.
Sarah made a sound as if she’d been punched in the stomach, a long empty gasp. Her eyes welled and her mouth worked like a fish gulping the air for water.
Albrecht felt ashamed. And he felt satisfied. “Your husband and the others,” he continued, his voice colder than before. “When did they leave you?”
Sarah looked at the floor. She felt sick. Her head spun. One of the sheep made a weak groaning bleat and she snatched at the sound like a drowning swimmer grabbing for a lifeline. Dropping to her knees she took its head in her hands, found her own reflection in the brown convex pool of its eye.
“You can go now,” she said, not looking up from the sheep’s face. Her voice grated in her throat.
She pushed the bowl nearer to the ewe’s muzzle and waited. Waited for him to ask her again, for him to order his sergeant out of the room, for his hand to grab her from behind. But instead he just spoke quickly in German to Alex, who got up off the floor and began putting on his gloves as they exchanged a few more words.
“Alex says the sheep in the field will need feeding. They can’t eat the grass.”
She didn’t answer him. Silence. Silence was all she would give him now. Keeping her head bowed to the ewe she listened to their footsteps over the flagstones, then felt the cold blast as they opened the door onto the porch and then the front door. She didn’t lift her head or turn round. He was still there, she could feel him. She could feel his eyes. The silence of his presence pressed at her back, pulled the air taut around her for what felt like minutes.
“Why do they do it?” he said at last from the open doorway, his voice half taken by the wind. “Why do they let themselves be covered like that?”
Sarah stroked the ewe between its ears, felt the animal’s skin warming under her touch.
“Because they give up easy,” she said quietly, not lifting her eyes from the ewe below her. “They let go too easy.”
The cold wind blew at her back. In the corner of her eye snow swirled in across the stone floor. The flames of the fire beside her guttered and flagged. Then the door closed. The turning snow settled, the wind died, and the flames burnt taller once more. She waited for a minute until she could no longer hear them, then got up off her knees. Her wedding photograph was lying on the table, facedown. She picked it up and placed it back on the dresser, then slid the Bible back onto its shelf. She should never have left it out. Taking a broom from the corner of the room, she began sweeping the snow back towards the door. One of the ewes, scraping a hoof over the flagstones, shifted its weight and stood up.
That evening the clouds cleared and Sarah was able to stand at the back of Upper Blaen and look down the simplified valley, illuminated under moonlight. The snow-thickened ground had risen within feet of the trees’ lower branches. The trees themselves wore a foliage of frost and half a foot of white on every limb. Every hedge and every fence was covered, their presence reduced to long undulations like the banks and ridges of Tom’s body carved into the horsehair mattress by the weight of his sleeping.
For two months now the women had lived alone. It had been a gradual shedding of company. First, at the outbreak of war, the sons and farmhands had left, drawn from the valley by the faraway conflict. Then, years later, their husbands had followed, swallowed overnight by the hills. Now, with the advance of the German army, what few visitors to the valley there ever had been had stopped coming. Reverend Davies, the Baptist minister who held their fortnightly services at The Court, the doctor, the district nurse, the blacksmith. Even the Ministry men with their clipboards and pamphlets. Finally, Maggie’s radio, their one intermittent contact with the outside world, had been defeated. Maggie still switched it on, but only to hear it tune hopelessly through static, listening to nothing but the white noise of its silence.
No road had ever run through the Olchon, and now it was as if no road had ever run into it either. Absorbed in their work, in thoughts of their husbands, the women had become amputated from the world beyond. It was as if it had forgotten they ever existed. And now the snow had perfected their isolation. If the silence, the absence of their situation, could have been made corporeal, it would have looked like this. A thick shroud over the fields, the farms, the river. A great white dust sheet laid over the entire contents of a locked and abandoned house.
And yet they were not alone, as Maggie proved in more ways than one when she came knocking at Upper Blaen later that evening. Sarah had been expecti
ng her. She knew she’d come in the end, Maggie always did. She also knew that she should have gone down to see Maggie first. That she shouldn’t have let the older woman struggle up through the snow to Upper Blaen. And she would have gone too, if she hadn’t had to take hay to the sheep, smash the ice in the troughs, settle the two ewes in the shed, dig a hole over the submerged hen house and lean over it to listen for the warm, buried clucking of the hens as she tipped in their feed. Even then Sarah would have gone to see Maggie, but only if she hadn’t spent so much time sitting in the kitchen watching the snow fall and fall and fall, wondering whether to curse or bless its coming. Only if she hadn’t sat for an hour beside the fire staring at her wedding photograph, aching her brain trying to remember what Tom felt like, smelt like, sounded like. Trying to remember what it was to love him as him, and not as her missing husband. Trying to remember what it was to love him at all. Because her anger had not subsided with the cold in her fingers. She still didn’t understand. How a man could leave his wife to all this; to the war, to those soldiers, to herself for so long.
And then the sharp pangs of guilt and worry. Perhaps Tom had no power over his missing. What if he was lying months dead in the hills or, worse she somehow thought, languishing in a German camp somewhere on the continent? She just didn’t know. And it was killing her. All she did know was this. The falling snow. The glowing and cracking coals. The wind, funnelling down the chute of the valley. The simple smells, sounds, lives, and deaths of her animals. And, of course, Maggie and the others, all enduring their own versions of this left-behind limbo. Each so unique and yet so much the same.
When Maggie came through the door her face was red with effort and cold. She sat by the range, unwrapping herself and stamping her boots, dislodging threads of snow from their treads.
“Well, better this than a green one, bach,” she said, massaging her hands back to life. “Tha’s all I can say. Better than a green one.”
A green winter. Sarah’s mother had always had the same fear. A winter without snow. It was bad luck. The old people would die. Maggie was the oldest in the valley.
Sarah looked out at the Hatterall ridge, a dark curve between the stars and the snow-plump fields. “No, Maggie,” she said. “I think you’ll be safe with this one.”
Maggie looked up at her and Sarah saw the uncertainty moving under the old woman’s features, like a submerged brook running under fragile ground. The soldiers had come to her too. Or at least one of them had.
“I didn’t know what to do when he held out that note,” Maggie said, warming her hands on a mug and studying the still-swirling tea within. “ ‘Medic,’ he kept sayin’. ‘Medic.’ Well, I thought he wanted one, not that he was one. But then I read the note, see. ‘OK,’ I says, ‘well, follow me then, Medic.’ ” Maggie looked up from the mug. “An’ he was good as gold after that.”
Between them Maggie and Sebald had freed her lambing ewes from an upper field and brought them down to the meadows beside the farmhouse. Then Sebald had cleared the snow from her front door and path and carried bushels of hay to the sheep. Maggie spoke no German and Sebald no English, but Maggie recognised the language of hard work and was quietly grateful for his assistance.
“And what about Menna and Mary?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, they’re fine,” Maggie said. “Another couple of the Germans went to them as well. Only thing is they must have seen Bethan, I s’pose.”
“And have you seen them, then?” Sarah knew there was no way Maggie could have battled her way over to the other side of the valley through this much snow, but she needed to believe that somehow she had.
“No,” Maggie said, looking back down into her tea. “No, I haven’t seen them myself, but I know they’re all right. The captain told me.”
“He came to see you?” Sarah had known he would. That he wouldn’t leave them alone anymore.
“Yes.”
“An’ you believe him, do you, Maggie? That they’re safe?”
Maggie met Sarah’s stare. “Yes,” she said, “I do, Sarah. Why would he lie to me?”
Ever since that first morning meeting, Maggie had felt instinctively that she and Albrecht understood each other; that there was an echo in their positions, their situations, which was slight but still significant.
Sarah knelt to the fire and stoked the hot coals, releasing a breath of sparks from their breaking hearts. “He knows,” she said, looking into the flames. “He knows, Maggie. About Tom. And the others.”
She couldn’t look the old woman in the face, but she heard Maggie sigh behind her.
“Yes, bach,” Maggie said, “I know he does. He told me too.”
Sarah sat back down opposite her. The night outside was still and quiet after the hours of endless wind. The temperature was dropping. Sarah was sure she could hear the ice forming over the house, crystal by crystal. “So what do we do now?” she asked.
Maggie took a gulp of her tea and stared into the broken coals and glowing embers.
“Oh, nothing for now, bach,” she said. “Not while it’s like this.” She carried on staring into the fire, a glaze forming over her eyes. “Nothing ’til the snow’s cleared. ’Til then I reckon we’ll need them as much we can.”
That night Sarah couldn’t sleep, her mind restless between the memories of two men no longer with her: Tom, her missing husband, and the poet she’d once known as a girl. Sarah hadn’t thought of the poet for years. Every now and then after he and his colleagues had left the old monastery, they’d been mentioned in whispered tones by her mother and father. Soon, however, they were not, and the poet became no more than a faint summer memory, surfacing just once again in the month she’d left school when she was fourteen years old. Mrs. Thomas, her teacher, had also known about the poet. She’d never met him, although she’d met the others living up at the old monastery, the artist and his daughters. When she discovered Sarah had seen the poet, and even spoken to him, she’d sat her down and questioned her about the time they’d spent together. Sarah had answered her as best she could. It seemed the poet, a man called David Jones, was also a famous artist, and this was why Mrs. Thomas was so interested. He’d recently had an exhibition of his paintings in London. Mrs. Thomas showed Sarah a newspaper cutting, a review of this exhibition. Because of this review, this exhibition, the questions were very important to Mrs. Thomas. She wanted to know everything Sarah knew about the poet. It was as if, just briefly, Sarah was the teacher and she was the pupil. Mrs. Thomas had promised to show Sarah a book with some of the poet’s work in it, but when she’d left Llanthony shortly after Sarah had finished school, she took her talk of the poet with her, so as Sarah grew older she’d left him and his stories behind her. But now, with the wild scattering of her mind, with the German captain’s questions, with his mention of a poet of his own, and most strange of all, with her memory of those diagrams from “The Countryman’s Diary,” she had thought of him again. And now she couldn’t not think of him.
A rumpled man perched on a rock in front of an easel, shrunken within a heavy greatcoat lashed at his waist with a thick leather belt. This was how she’d first seen him. She was nine years old and her mother had trusted her with delivering the butter and milk herself. The people at the old monastery had been making their own milk and butter, but now they’d stopped.
“Thought that wouldn’ last long,” her mother had said to her father when he’d come in and told her. “They’re only playing at farmin’ up there.”
She was speaking from the kitchen, and Sarah’s father, safely out of sight in the living room, rolled his eyes in response, making Sarah giggle in the chair where she sat playing with the kitten. Ever since her brothers had left, he’d been more like this. Gentler where once he’d been hard. More fun where once he’d been serious. It was as if the wound opened by his sons’ leaving had shown him where he’d been wrong inside, and now he was trying to fix himself, however late he’d left it.
“I’m not goin’ up there twice a week, mi
nd!” Her mother’s voice had risen above the sound of her clattering at the sink. “However much you pays me!”
“Well, you won’ ’ave to,” her father had answered, winking at Sarah. “The littl’un cun take it up to ’em. Can’t you, bach?”
This was before the stories of what went on in the monastery filtered out into the valley, after which her parents forbade her ever to go near the place again. But in those early weeks of summer, before those stories had leaked beyond the monastery’s thick walls, Sarah relished this twice-a-week chore. She felt as if she’d crossed an invisible boundary and passed over into a new, adult world. The sombre sense of responsibility, the excursions beyond her familiar orbit, the robust, imposing building of the old monastery growing before her as she walked up the hill.
Usually one of the daughters would take the milk and butter at the front door. Once a week, on every second trip, they’d give her some coins in return, which she carefully tipped into her coat pocket. She never saw any of the men. Just once or twice she heard a man’s voice from within or from above; snatches of conversation through an open window between the sawing and hammering of carpentry or the lighter taps of a chisel against wood. So it came as a surprise to her, when, one day after three weeks of this routine, she’d crested the hill on the way home and seen the poet perched on his rock in front of his easel. He was facing away from her looking up at Y Twmpa, the steep flanked hill rising at the end of the valley. Sarah crept closer, trying to see what he was painting, but all she could make out was a wash of faint colours, vaguely echoing the shape of the landscape in front of him. Suddenly he turned round. He looked straight at her with no hint of surprise, his tufted blond brown hair lifted off his forehead in the light wind. He was small. A boyish face. Dark eyes with heavy lids behind a pair of round-framed spectacles. Then he’d turned away again and returned to his easel in the way the wild ponies on the hill would fix her for a moment, then drop their heads to graze again. But the turn away had also seemed like an offer; to come closer, to watch him work. Which is what Sarah did.
