Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  “You want to tell me about advice in leaflets, bach? Then how’s this for some advice?” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out the rolled poster Albrecht had given her. Taking her glasses from the other pocket, she flattened the piece of paper over her lap, lowered her head, and read in a slow, careful voice.

  “ ‘If the population initiates active operations after the completed conquest of a locality, or in places behind the fighting front, the inhabitants involved in the fighting will be regarded as armed insurgents. When taking hostages, those persons should if possible be selected in whom the active enemy elements have an interest.’ ”

  Maggie looked up at the faces of the three women.

  “He knows about William an’ the others, see,” she said. “He isn’t stupid. So those persons are us, isn’t it? Now, if they wants to stay here an’ carry on with a bit of farming ’stead of going off an’ wagging their tongues to their superiors, I reckon that’s fine by me. And if they want to help us through this,” she waved a hand at the frozen window, “that’s fine too. Because if they don’t, I reckon it’s the Germans’ll be coming for us, never mind no Constable Evans. And not ones like this lot either.”

  Sarah looked into the fire. Maggie was jumping ahead again, as if she knew what their husbands were doing, where they were. “But William an’ the rest,” she said, still staring into the flames, “we don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, that book, we don’t …”

  “We don’t know nothing, bach,” Maggie interrupted, her face set hard again, “we don’t know nothing about anything. But he does, see. He does. They got a radio, haven’t they?” Her face softened, sagging under her age and the weight of the moment. “So he knows. He knows what’s going on out there, and believe me, bach, you don’t want to hear the half of it.”

  Over the rest of that winter, the longest and harshest any of them had ever known, the women’s lives in the valley resembled one of the landscape watercolours Sarah used to watch the poet paint down by the two streams of the old monastery. They were the same as they’d always been and yet were also entirely different; recognisable as their lives, but dramatically altered at the edges. Their days existed of well-worn routines of feeding, fixing, cutting, making, all turning around many of the same concerns and chores they always had. And yet each day was also another unreal awakening into a world they didn’t know.

  Over the weeks following Albrecht’s visit to Maggie, the patrol managed to gather the rest of The Court’s flock from the other farms, although many were lost up on the higher reaches of the hills. With this source of fresh meat along with the provisions they’d found in the house and their own dwindling supplies, they remained self-sufficient within the valley. Now and then they assisted the women, trying to keep certain pathways and tracks clear, drying and cutting wood when stocks became low. Alex regularly helped Maggie with the feeding and handling of her cob mare and foal and sometimes with the early milking of her cows, the only source of milk in the valley. In return she’d let him take back a jug of fresh milk, which he’d have boiling on the range in The Court as the others began to wake. Gernot took on the cooking responsibilities while, under Alex’s guidance, Steiner helped manage the flock. Sebald began to take an interest in the vegetable garden, carefully clearing the blanket of snow and tipping hot water over the frozen soil to uproot the parsnips and carrots, hard as steel. Otto helped Edith move down to Maggie’s, clearing a path from The Gaer and then carrying her battered leather case behind her as she slowly picked her way down the hill muffled against the cold with one of Roderick’s old jumpers wrapped about her head.

  The women, meanwhile, all found their own ways of coping with the isolation, fear, and missing their husbands. Mary increasingly found solace in the Bible, reading and rereading the Book of Job. She took it upon herself to fill the vacuum left by the absence of Reverend Davies, reading to the others in a voice not her own when they came to her front room on a Sunday: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return hither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Lord.” She focused her worries where she could see them, on Bethan, rather than upon Hywel or her sons, both of whom she’d had no word of since the invasion.

  Bethan herself kept up a sullen doggedness, spending most of her time helping Menna with her two children. She missed her father badly and mistook her mother’s distractions as a lack of love for her husband. She was painfully aware of her youth, precious and wasting inside her, and felt increasingly suffocated by the other women, by the whining and crying of Menna’s two children. Before the winter she’d found some rare moments of solitude riding her pony through the sheep tracks up on the hills. The snow had put a stop to that, and now, on the rare occasions when she could sneak away from her mother and Menna, she crossed the valley instead, walking beside the hedges to hide her tracks, and climbed the facing slope, skirting around to higher ground above The Court. From here, crouching behind a thorn tree, she’d spy on the Germans. When she saw one of them, either through The Court’s large back windows or when they came outside, she’d try out curses under her breath: “Fritz bastard, Nazi scum, fucking fascists,” and once even the old-fashioned “dirty Hun” she’d heard her father mutter when listening to reports of the bombing of Swansea on Maggie’s radio. None of her curses was charged with real venom, and by the third or fourth time she’d crouched behind the thorn tree they had faded to a half-silent instinctive chant, dislocated from any meaning and increasingly obscured by her growing fascination with these men, some of them young, as young as her perhaps, who washed, talked, pissed, and yawned below her. One of them, particularly, had begun to draw her attention beyond mere curiosity or interest. There was something about his laugh, so natural, so open, that it seemed to belong to another time, long before this war. Bethan felt herself lighten every time she heard it, and she often waited until she’d caught a glimpse of Gernot before making her way back to the other side of the valley.

  Maggie worked on, faithful to the two standards of her new existence: to continue as they always had and to keep the other women in the valley alive, both physically and mentally. She missed William more each day and saw him in every nook and corner of the farm they’d shared for over thirty years. She saw him in the loose slates he’d never fixed, in the snow collected like piled white books on the iron cleats of the silent tractor, in the space on the dresser where his pipe and folded pocketknife once lay, waiting for his return from the field at the end of the day. She saw him most of all, though, in the young colt, not yet a year old, they’d foaled together at the end of last summer.

  Maggie never spoke of the depth of her grief to any of the others, and she only ever spoke to William when she was alone with the mare and her foal in the cramped stable in the corner of the yard. Standing in the warmth of this stable, icicles hanging from the guttering above the half-door, she’d stroke the foal’s new mane as his mother pulled and chewed from the rack of fresh hay.

  “Comin’ up lovely, isn’t he, Will?” she’d say under her breath as she ran her hand over the swirls of hair above the colt’s shoulders. “Going to be a beaut, mun. A good colt for us, Will. Imagine that, eh? Running a yearlin’ like this come the summer.”

  And it was only then, when she thought of the days and seasons to come that she would have to endure without her husband, that Maggie cried. Silently and to herself while the mare tore at the hay and the colt nuzzled her pocket for a treat of oats, she shed private tears. For all the years they’d lived together, for the sons they’d raised, for the son they’d lost, and for the way their shared lives had been extinguished overnight, so suddenly and certainly by a faraway war that had only now, at the very end, come calling at their door.

  Sarah did not cry to herself like Maggie because, unlike the older woman, Sarah still believed. She believed that even if what “The Countryman’s Diary” suggested was true, the men were still coming back, one day. This is why, of all the women, Sarah resist
ed the assistance of the patrol the most. Since the morning of the first snowfall, she’d been especially wary of Albrecht and wanted no more contact with him and his men than was absolutely necessary. Once they’d helped her clear a path down to her lower fields, she’d had little need of any further help anyway. But even if she had, she’d rather have coped on her own despite the harshness of the winter, which became so cold she often couldn’t go into the parts of Upper Blaen unreached by the warmth of the fire without layering herself with her and Tom’s coats. Every morning she woke with a headache brought on by the bitter nights, and she spent two whole afternoons filling the gaps in the larder wall with mud, scraped up from down by the stream below. It was too late for most of the vegetables stored there. The potatoes had blackened in the frost and when she sliced an onion its layers were seamed with crystals of ice. She sunk into routine, hibernating the parts of herself unnecessary for the day-to-day survival of her mind and body. She worked hard, fixing, mending, and feeding as best she could the chickens, the pig, the sheep. Every day she threw Bess larger armfuls of hay than she should, determined to reverse the shedding of the pony’s flesh that had left her ribs showing sharper each morning through her ragged coat. In this way Sarah kept up a solid resistance to the siege of snow and ice that pressed upon her as if to drown her, as it had already a third of her flock. In between her chores she wrote to Tom in the back of their accounts book, held their wedding photograph trying to remember, and in her evenings alone, when she felt she could spare the oil and wicks for the lamp, she read, either from the Bible or from the few books that Mrs. Thomas had given her when she left school: The Mill on the Floss, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

  Although she vaguely remembered the brush strokes of these stories, she read them as if for the first time. The night after she read of Henchard selling his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge, she dreamt that Tom was selling her at the market. A crowd of German soldiers were raising their hands and nodding in response to the auctioneer’s rhythmical chant. She’d woken in a cold sweat to find the tether at her neck was just the sheet wrapped about her throat, but the anger she’d dreamt was real, still burning in her chest and flushing over her cheeks.

  It was a bleak Christmas. In the absence of Reverend Davies, on Christmas morning the women met at Maggie’s, where Mary read to them from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, giving special emphasis to the angel’s visit to the shepherds and glancing at Maggie when she read. “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” They sang carols around the fire and Maggie uncorked the stone flagons of last year’s cider that William kept under the pig-killing bench in their larder. Edith didn’t speak much, Christmas always being when her talking turned more to Roderick than those who were with her, but she sang the loudest, asking for “the Bread of Heaven” so strong and sure that it made Mary shake her head and Bethan laugh out loud. Mary had brought some wheat wine, and for the first year, despite her giggling at Edith, she let Bethan take a glass. Maggie gave them all a small wrapped parcel of cheese she’d made that week, and for Menna’s two children some of her own boys’ soft toys that she’d kept all these years.

  Sarah found herself often looking out of Maggie’s front window, just as she had on that first morning after the men’s going. Again, she half expected to see the Germans coming into the yard, but this time in the way the poet’s Germans had come over the trenches into no-man’s-land on Christmas day 1914; offering presents, cigarettes, and company rather than occupation and fear. But they never came. The week before, Gernot and Steiner had called at all their houses to give them wreaths they’d made from holly, evergreen leaves, and long strands of ivy. Only Maggie and Menna had hung them on their doors, but now Sarah wished she had too. Somehow she’d thought she’d see them on this morning, and somehow, it being Christmas, that it would have been all right when she did. But they stayed away and for Christmas Day the valley remained another kind of no-man’s-land, vacated of their husbands and filled with nothing but the ghosts of their memories haunting the lanes, fields, and beds they’d once shared with their wives.

  The winter clung on, stubborn and freezing into the new year. For all of them, the women and the patrol, the silence it brought was the worst. Not the silence of the valley itself, of the stilled brook, of an empty field under heavy snow, but the silence of beyond the valley, the silence of the rest of the world.

  By this stage of the war, Albrecht, Alex, and Sebald had no one left to write to, but for the younger three soldiers this was not the case. For Otto it was his mother in Hamburg, for Steiner and Gernot their parents, school friends, and sweethearts back home. No army postal service could have reached them in the valley, even if they’d known they were there, and it was futile trying to free the staff car or the motorbike to ride into any of the surrounding towns. So they lived on, deprived of the distant voices that had, at irregular intervals, kept them connected with their homes.

  For the women too there had been no mail since a week or so after the invasion. Mary had family over the hill down in Hay-on-Wye, Menna a sister and cousins in the mining valleys, and all of them except Sarah had brothers, sons, uncles in the war. But there was no word from any of them, and every morning they woke to nothing more than the snow’s blank page, written across with a filigree of bird prints, a daily reminder of the letters that remained unwritten and unsent from the world beyond.

  Apart from the occasional red glow in the night sky from the steelworks over in the mining valleys (working for whom, the British government or the Germans, they didn’t know), the patrol’s radio remained the valley’s only connection with the rest of the country. Despite the difficulty of climbing through the snow, Albrecht and Steiner kept up regular walks to higher ground, searching for a signal and the news transmissions that would tell them how the war was turning without them.

  In this way Albrecht witnessed the gradual ending of the war; the violence, the disruption of the conflict that had shaped their lives for the last five years translated into a montage of reports, speeches, and announcements, all played out against the silence and stillness of the winter mountains. When the German announcer read out the impossibly large figures of sunk merchant ships, Albrecht was studying a striking red moss he’d uncovered with the toe of his boot. When the fainter voice of the BBC condemned the cowardly onslaught of V1 and V2 rockets upon London, he was holding a kestrel’s frozen feather in the palm of his hand, staring intently into its intricate frosted structure. When, two weeks later, the German service described how Nelson’s Column had been sliced in two and tipped onto the loading platforms of a transport lorry to be taken as a trophy back to Berlin, Albrecht was watching the intimate torture of an insect, impaled by a shrike on the thorns of a nearby bush. And when he listened, two weeks later again, to the description of the Führer’s surprise visit to London, he had, once more, been slipping fragile sheaths of ice from the blades of coarse grass at his feet. He let the ice melt in his hand as he listened to the announcer describe how Hitler had stood on Parliament Hill promising “to bring peace at last to this nation, misguided for so long by the corrupt democracy that once sat in those shattered buildings beneath us.”

  And yet the ever fainter voice of the BBC still broadcast, hinting that perhaps the optimism of the German reports was not entirely true, that the whole country was not yet under the Nazis’ iron heel. The BBC did admit, however, that Churchill had, along with many of his Cabinet, followed King George and sailed for Canada. Despite assurances that he would die in his bunker at Neasden, armed with just a pistol and his motto, “You can always take one with you,” the Prime Minister had left these shores “to better continue the fight against the evil of fascism,” until that day when he would return “to rout the invaders from our land.”

  Through it all, over those fragmented weeks of listening to the fall of London, Albrecht became acutely aware of the multitude of hinges in events that had brought about this
unfolding present. Of how easily, given the alternative tipping of countless moments of chance, he could have found himself sitting on another hillside, somewhere else, listening to a parallel description of the fall of Berlin. Had Stalin not boarded his train and abandoned Moscow; had the British arctic convoys been successful in supplying what was left of the confused Russian defence; had America answered Churchill’s call sooner; had the Führer himself not overseen the resurrection of the Luftwaffe.

  And even after all of these factors had played into the war’s script, still it could have been so different. What if the Allies’ attempted invasion of mainland Europe had not been delayed by bad weather? If their giant floating harbours had not listed and sunk? If their floating Shermans had made it to shore and broken the beachheads, destroying the bunkers in which he and the others had crouched. What then? Would they have rolled back the relentless Nazi advance?

  One piece of information repeated within his mind more than any other. Something he’d been told by one of the few contacts he still had in Wehrmacht Intelligence. That maybe all this, a German victory, the end of the war, was down to one man. Not a general or a chief-of-staff, but a long-term sleeper agent who’d discovered the Allies’ elaborate deception plans: a massive fake army of inflatable tanks, cardboard bombers, and plywood landing craft stationed at Dover facing Calais. A dummy invasion force, complete with rows of speakers broadcasting the sound of a mobilising army across the narrowest point of the Channel. It had almost worked. The elite Panzer divisions had been ordered to remain in Calais. Thousands of crack SS and Wehrmacht troops poured into the area to await the false invasion. But then one man, who had for the past ten years gone about his business as a bank clerk in Brighton, discovered indisputable proof of the charade and broadcast the truth to Berlin just moments before the British picked up his signal and broke down the door of his bedsit.