Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  “Stop, please.” The order felt strange, unfamiliar on Albrecht’s tongue.

  The man was almost level with him and clearly hadn’t been intending to even pause as he passed him. Now he pulled up, panting from the effort of the hill behind.

  “Your papers?”

  The young man took off a glove and pulled a booklet from the inside pocket of his jacket. He was in his early twenties, if that. A sullen look to him, blond hair, clean-shaven, small and thin.

  “Where are you going?” Albrecht asked, inspecting the pages of the booklet.

  “Up the Olchon,” the man replied. “Got some letters t’deliver.”

  “You are a postman?” Albrecht said, looking at his jacket, the dirt under his nails, his rough corduroy trousers, and worker’s boots.

  “No.” He looked at Albrecht for the first time. “Post office has a backlog from the winter. Said I’d help out.”

  “Let me see them,” Albrecht said, passing back the booklet and holding out his hand.

  The man drew out a thin bundle of letters from another pocket and gave them to Albrecht. Albrecht untied the string and leafed through the envelopes, reading the addresses. Hywel and Mary Griffiths. William and Margaret Jones. Tom and Sarah Lewis.

  Taking a pen from his own pocket he wrote across the front of each envelope, as clearly as he could. Deceased. Return to Sender. He handed them back to the young man, who read what Albrecht had written then looked back up at him, his sullen expression slipping.

  “There is no one left in that valley,” Albrecht said simply. “Tell the postmaster he needn’t send any more letters there.”

  The man looked at Albrecht, straight in the face, a muscle twitching at his jaw. For a second it seemed as if he might speak, but he didn’t. Slipping the letters back into his jacket, he put on his glove and slowly, still looking at Albrecht, turned his bicycle to freewheel back down the lane. Albrecht watched as the young man’s back shrunk down the hill and around the corner of the lane. His heart was beating hard. It was the right thing to have done. By killing the women he had saved them. By inscribing death across their names he had given them life. This is what he told himself as he dismounted the motorbike, crouched by the side of the lane, and put a match to the corner of his own men’s letters, turning the bundle slowly in the air until he felt the heat of the flames against his hand. He dropped the sheaves of paper, still burning, into the long grass. A light wind rose up the lane. Albrecht stood and watched as it lifted the ashes of his men’s words, printing them across the unthawed patches of snow.

  George cycled back down the lanes, his mind spinning as fast as the wheels of his bicycle. Deceased. Return to Sender. It was true then. What old Bob Kelly had told him was true. The railway man had been working up the line when he’d seen a body carried through. The dead man wore dull khaki dungarees over a thick woollen jumper. An insurgent, he’d been told by one of the guards, caught the night before laying charges on the line. Although Bob hadn’t seen the man’s face, he’d sworn it was William Jones of the Olchon. This was why George had offered to help out with the backlog post when the thaw set in. Although he’d never knowingly met William Jones, he’d told the postmaster he had to visit him, so he could take the letters for the Olchon, seeing as he was going there anyway. But he hadn’t even had to enter the valley to discover that what Bob had said was true. The German officer had made that clear enough. William’s family, and all the other families in the Olchon it seemed, had paid the price for his, and probably others’, involvement with the Auxiliary Units.

  George couldn’t remember recording any recent troop movements in this direction and the lanes had been impassable for months. The soldiers must have come into the valley over the Black Hill instead, a pack of them descending on horseback, just as they had elsewhere throughout the winter.

  What was most shocking to George was not what the German officer had written across those letters, but his own lack of surprise. He’d heard enough similar stories over the last three months to half expect this, to cycle into a deserted valley. The Germans had been true to their word. Ten civilians executed for every German soldier killed. That was what it said on the posters signed by Field Marschal Walther von Brauchitsch, the newly appointed Reichsprotektor of Occupied Britain. The “insurgency,” as the Germans called it, hadn’t faltered in the face of this threat and had left a trail of massacred villages in its wake. Von Brauchitsch had ordered the confiscation of all private wirelesses, so it was hard for George to tell for certain, but from the muted reports in the Star and other Nazibacked newspapers, he thought the insurgency was still causing the Germans trouble. Although most of the Americans had been shipped back to defend their homeland against the Japanese he knew that many British regular fighting units had melted into the civilian population and were also taking part in guerrilla activities. Ever since the BBC had moved to Worcestershire, the railway up to Hereford had sustained regular attacks.

  But the tide was turning. Again, the new press couldn’t be trusted but George had heard for himself the inauguration speech of R. A. Butler, the German-appointed Prime Minister of the new British government in Harrogate. The Germans played it from loudspeakers strapped on the roofs of trucks and printed the full speech in the Star. Butler, an undersecretary at the Foreign Office during the war, assured the British people that he came to power reluctantly, but as a patriot, thinking only of their welfare. “Common sense,” he told them, “and not bravado must govern our actions in negotiating with the German authorities.” Shored up by the credibility of support from Lloyd George, the country’s victorious leader in the last war, Butler’s administration had already won a muttering allegiance, especially in areas of the country he’d saved from direct Nazi rule.

  There were also rumours of a return by the Duke of Windsor. In the wake of the king and queen’s sailing for Canada accompanied by Lord Halifax and other members of the Free British government, there was a vacuum left in the country which many thought would be filled by Edward VIII. The Star had been busy for the past few weeks recasting his prewar abdication as an act of deposition, thus preparing the way for his return, no doubt under the same patriotic banner as Butler. To heal a wounded nation. To bridge the differences between Britain and Germany and build towards a united Europe, standing strong against the capitalist Americans in the West and the Bolsheviks in the East.

  Most worrying for George, however, were the widely reported actions of Sir Will Spenser, Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence for the Eastern Region. Spenser had been the first British official to openly turn against the Auxiliary Units, promising to “arrest any members operating in the Eastern Region.” George knew this was an attempt to stem the tide of vicious German reprisals, but how long would it be before Spenser’s sentiment took over the rest of the nation? Before a desire for peace, for safety, for some kind of future, outweighed the desire for independence from the Nazis?

  George had already seen this kind of slippage closer to home. It appalled him more than the actions of the official collaborators, who could perhaps have been forgiven for acting with genuine patriotic ideals. This easy slide towards a kind of normality, however, was unforgivable in his eyes. In the towns the shops were trading again and all the banks back in business. People were returning to what could be described as their normal lives. The long winter had tightened the focus of their concerns from a national to a personal level. The Germans had capitalised upon this, fulfilling their role as providers of food and warmth with one hand, while deporting men of military age, resettling thousands of Jewish families and killing women and children in acts of reprisal with the other.

  And yet relations between the local population and their occupiers had been steadily improving. His own sister served German soldiers when helping at the village shop in Pandy. Hotel owners laid out their dishes in front of Wehrmacht officers and lieutenants. In return the occupying soldiers were, on the whole, polite and even considerate. After the brutality of the first wave
of fighting troops, followed by the fanaticism of the young Arbeits Dienst detachments brought in to work on the railway and destroyed bridges, the older and calmer occupation troops were a relief. There were already toddlers in the area whose earliest memories would be of sitting on the knee of an avuncular German sergeant as he bounced them up and down while telling their mother about his own little boy or girl at home in Stuttgart, Berlin, or Munich.

  For George it felt like the most personal of betrayals. Four years ago Atkins’s approach across that field, the flies on his hat winking in the sun, had initiated George into the war. In the space of half an hour he was involved, one of its millions of intimates. Atkins’s prophecies had not come true that summer of 1940, but when they did last autumn, George tasted once more the potency of his secret duty. But then he survived. Atkins’s fourteen days passed and turned into fourteen weeks. Atkins himself disappeared, the flow of messages dried up, and after a brief period of activity, the war moved on, leaving George behind to his usual existence of daily farmwork and long evenings reading the newspaper after his father had finished flicking through its pages. He should have been pleased, but he wasn’t. Once inside, he now felt outside again. With only the Nazi press to rely upon he had to make do with a diet of rumour and hearsay. The sieges of cities happened far away from him. Even the activities of operational Auxiliary Units only ever reached him as echoes from Hereford, the mining valleys, or even further afield in Worcester and Salisbury. The drop points were always empty and he had long given up leaving his own observations to rot in the damp holes of walls and fence posts.

  As he freewheeled down the hill towards his father’s farm, he knew he was cycling back to nothing more than the drudgery of his work and a family who saw him as an ineffectual coward, “too clever by half,” who’d jinxed his way out of the army and even his Home Guard duties. This same family now sold eggs and milk to the soldiers of an occupying force that were, elsewhere, enacting their revenge upon the nation they blamed for prolonging the war.

  He wanted never to stop cycling. To let the bike go whizzing past the entrance to his father’s yard and cycle madly on through the village, through Abergavenny and on and on, never having to stop again; never having to come to rest in a country and a life he no longer recognised.

  March 4th

  We’ve been getting low on meat these past weeks so Mary killed her sow yesterday. How is it they always know? It took three of us to pull her to the bench. She screamed all the way, and as we lashed her down too. Mary stuck her. I couldn’t watch after that. I’ve never been good with pigs, you know that. They sound too human. Mary did it all just as if she’s always been doing it. Maggie took the gouting blood then we put her up on a ladder for the scalding. Mary says as she’ll do the butchering tomorrow.

  Maybe it was seeing the sow strung up, but I had a nightmare again last night. Same as before, about Jeffreys and the rebels down at the Skirrid. Only this time, when he came to hang them the rebels was you and William and Hywel instead. I was six when my brothers told me that story but it’s been coming back all the time, Tom. All the time.

  The river is back down again and its warmer too. I saw a raven with nesting twigs this morning and a couple of hares, fighting in the meadow.

  Maybe now the snow’s gone they’ll go too. I heard their motorbike the other day, so perhaps they’re getting ready to leave. I hope so. Then maybe you can come back.

  Sarah laid the book and the pen on the table and went to stir the cawl simmering on the range. They hadn’t been able to kill the sow on their own, she was too strong. It was Alex who had got her onto the bench. And Alex who had strung her up afterwards. But Sarah couldn’t write that to Tom. She had no way of telling him without it sounding wrong. So she left it out instead, as if it had never happened.

  Sarah’s eyes were immediately drawn to the thick, square leather case Albrecht carried in his right hand. It was a blustery spring day. His fringe blew about his face as Seren strained on her chain and barked behind him.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Lewis,” Albrecht said simply with a smile. “May I come in?”

  Since the thawing of the winter the women had seen more of the German soldiers. Once Maggie’s explanation of their mutual dependence had sunk in, some of them had even relaxed enough to call upon the patrol for help with heavy work. Mary had begun to let Bethan walk over to The Firs to look after Menna’s children on her own. Only Sarah still kept her distance. But they could not be avoided entirely. She often saw Alex ushering Maggie’s four cows up the lane early in the morning and several times now she’d been sitting at Maggie’s table when Albrecht called to give her an update of the situation in the world beyond. She didn’t like the way the two of them talked. Like confidants almost, with an air of assumed greater knowledge. Whenever Albrecht mentioned the insurgency, he did so as if it had no personal bearing upon the women of the valley. The men, their husbands, missing from their lives, remained missing from the conversation too. And yet it was also around this time the women began confiding to one another that they had seen the departure of their husbands coming. Small signs. The way they spoke, the way they didn’t. The way they touched them, the way they didn’t. Sarah meanwhile kept up a vigilant watch for small signs of her own. Unspoken messages from Tom like the new tooth in the hay rake or the ewe she’d found in the yard that day. But there were none and she wondered again if she’d imagined these signs in the first place. That Tom had, after all, just gone and left nothing other than a fading scent on his clothes and the ghost of his impression in their mattress.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the case. It was a rigid box covered in dark leather, battered and scratched with use. Her mind raced to wild possibilities as to what it might contain. This was the first time the captain had called on her since he’d carried those ewes back from the field with his sergeant at the start of the winter.

  She looked up at his face. He seemed lighter, younger than he’d appeared on that day.

  “Cwtch ci!” she shouted at Seren over his shoulder. The bitch sank back on her haunches, the links of her chain playing a brief scale on the cobblestones of the yard.

  She looked back at Albrecht. “I s’pose so,” she said and stepped back from the door to let him in.

  Albrecht walked through into the kitchen. He still wore his uniform, threadbare at the elbows and knees. The collar of his shirt was broken and frayed. Over the winter some of the other members of the patrol had begun mixing their uniforms with clothing they’d found in The Court. At first Albrecht was worried about this, thinking it would offend the women’s memories of their husbands. But Maggie had put his mind at rest. “Jus’ clothes, aren’t they?” she’d said. “Jus’ clothes. An’ your boys need to keep warm, fair enough.” Then she’d snorted a strange half-laugh. “I saw them the other day, mind,” she said, shaking her head. “Looked like a bloody bunch of refugees, they did. Right old mishmash of stuff they had on.”

  Albrecht had laughed with her, relieved and relaxed by her response. “Well, maybe that’s just what we are, Mrs. Jones,” he’d said, “all of us here. Refugees.”

  Her look had cut him dead. “Oh no, Captain Wolfram,” she’d said, all humour pared from her tone. “This is our home. This is where we live. We’re not refugees from anything, an’ don’t you forget that.”

  Albrecht placed the leather case on the kitchen table. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, flicking two steel latches and lifting the lid. “But I wanted to bring you this.”

  Sarah looked down at the gramophone on the table. “Why?”

  “Because it is your birthday today.”

  It was true. It was her birthday, however much she’d tried to forget it. She hadn’t mentioned it to any of the other women and she’d tried not to even mention it to herself. There was, she felt, nothing to celebrate. Twenty-seven years old. Childless. Abandoned in a world gone sour. Just the afternoon before she’d ridden Bess up on the hill and watched a pair of crows circle and dance
about each other in the air. When they’d landed they’d rubbed shoulders and Sarah had felt again, as if for the first time, the pain of her solitude. Even the carrion crows who ate the eyes of her dead ewes had companionship, while she, as ever, had just the blood pulse of the wind in her ears and the heat of Bess’s neck to keep her company. Not for the first time, she’d wanted Tom dead. Not because of what he’d done, but instead of what he’d done. In death he would have given her an answer. She would have known where he was. As it was, she just had nothing. Even the women whose husbands had gone to war, they’d always had something: letters, days of leave.

  She’d once seen a crowd of these women down at the station in Pandy. They were wearing their best dresses, their cheeks rouged and their lips bright red, waiting for a train to take them into Newport. There, they would wait on the platform for the fast train carrying troops from the training fields of west Wales up to London and the ports of the south coast. The train didn’t stop at Newport, just gave a couple of blasts on its whistle and steamed on through. But these women always went to watch it pass, dressed as if for a dance. Just for the chance of seeing the faces of their husbands, their lovers, as the long line of carriages clattered and rushed past them trailing its heavy plume of steam. It was often a hopeless journey, but the women still went, just for that chance, that glimpse. But Sarah didn’t even have that. There was nowhere she could go in the hope of seeing Tom. No reports she could read with her heart in her mouth. And no letters she could wait for. Just an empty vigilance for some sign, some hidden message, and her long rides up on the hills, forever facing up to their blank answer.