Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  “It would have had more colour when it was first made.” Albrecht came up beside Sarah and ran his fingers along one of the long brown channels penetrating the lighter parchment like roots through soil. “These rivers were blue,” he said. “Bright blue.” He moved his hand down to a larger patch of brown. “And the seas were green.” His hand went to the top right-hand corner of the frame. “Except for the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. These were red. You can still see traces of the original colour.”

  Sarah nodded slightly in reply.

  “The lettering of the continents and the compass points were in gold leaf,” Albrecht continued. “And of course the whole parchment would have been white. Bright white. It must have been beautiful.”

  Albrecht seemed to be no longer talking to Sarah but to himself. He stood close to the glass of the frame, moving his fingers over its surface as he studied details of the map.

  “How old is it?” Sarah’s voice was hoarse, lowered in deference to what she didn’t understand.

  “Medieval,” Albrecht said. “Late thirteenth century most probably.” He crouched down and pointed at an island in the bottom left-hand corner. “See here?” he said. “These castles were built by Edward the First in the north of Wales. In …” he paused, bringing the torch closer to this corner of the map, “Conway? Is this how you say it?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, kneeling beside him.

  “And here, in Car … Car …?”

  “Caernarfon.”

  “Yes, Caernarfon. Well, this one was begun in 1283, so the map must have been made after that date.”

  Sarah thought of the poet’s stories. How he’d creased his face in disgust when he’d told his tales of Edward I’s occupation of Wales. How the English king had killed the bards to silence their voices of dissent. She bent closer to where Albrecht had pointed on the map.

  “Why is England an’ Wales down there? That’s not right, is it?”

  “I did say it was only an idea of the world,” Albrecht replied. “And an early one too. But this, around Europe, is actually where the map is most accurate. The whole thing is tilted you see, so east is up here,” he shone the torch to the top of the map, illuminating the circle of paradise beneath its apex. “And west is down here. But this is as much a mythical and religious map as a geographical one. Look,” Albrecht shone the torch at a faded illustration of two men hacking away at the limbs of a body. “These are the Essodenes of northern Asia. They were said to eat their parents rather than bury them. And here, beside them, you see that? That is the golden fleece.” His voice had taken on an unfamiliar charge, a tone of impassioned instruction.

  They both studied the illustration in silence for a moment, kneeling in the powdery earth on the floor of the hollow. Then Sarah stood up, as if suddenly remembering where she was and with whom.

  “What’s it doing here? Why’s it here?”

  Albrecht stood up beside her and leant back against one of the wooden struts. “It is being hidden.”

  “From you?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I suppose so, yes. Or at least from the SS.”

  The SS. Even Sarah, living out the war in her relative isolation, had heard enough about the SS for those two letters to quicken her pulse again.

  “What do they want it for?” she said.

  Albrecht shone his torch over the Mappa Mundi as if he’d discover the answer to her question somewhere in its inscriptions, cities, and sea monsters. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t really know. But they do want it. Himmler. You know who he is?”

  Sarah thought for a moment. “The small one? With the spectacles?”

  Albrecht laughed. “Yes, him. The small one with the spectacles. Well it’s he who wants this map so much.”

  How much else should he tell her? It all seemed too fantastical now, after his months in this valley. Would she even believe him? If he told her the famously frugal Himmler had, according to intelligence reports, spent $3.7 million building a castle at Wewelsburg. That inside this castle there was an Arthurian round table at which the “knights” of the SS sat, a silver disc with their names inscribed on the back of each pigskin-covered chair. That alongside Himmler’s museums of weapons and Masonic regalia, the castle was packed with treasures like this Mappa Mundi, looted from occupied territories across the globe. It was of no coincidence, Albrecht thought, that Himmler had chosen Wewelsburg as the site for his castle. The town had, after all, been named after Wewel von Buren, an infamous robber-knight.

  But as for Sarah’s question; what did he want the Hereford map for? He still couldn’t answer her because he didn’t know himself. He could only guess that the map played some part in the ritualistic jigsaw of the occult and the ancient that Himmler had constructed as the background for his racial ideology. That somewhere within the legends and Roman topography of its mythic world, the small man with spectacles had located yet another justification for the destruction he and the Nazis had unleashed upon the real one.

  In the end he gave her just the simplest facts. “The Nazis are more cultured than you might think, Mrs. Lewis. It could be argued that Adolf Hitler is currently the world’s greatest collector of art.” English may have been Albrecht’s second language, but he was fluent enough for Sarah to catch the note of sarcasm in his tone. “All over this country,” he continued, “art treasures like this map were hidden from the bombing. This was very wise of your government.” He thought of the Ebstorf World Map, which he’d lovingly studied for two whole years. A contemporary of this Hereford map, it had been destroyed in a second by a British bomb. “The entire collection of your National Gallery, for example, is, as we speak, stored inside a mountain in North Wales.” He shone the torch to the bottom of the map, illuminating the crude illustrations of Conway and Caernarfon castles once more. “But now these treasures are hiding from the Reich itself, and not just their bombs anymore.”

  “From you.”

  “Yes,” Albrecht admitted with a resigned nod of his head. “From me.”

  “An’ they sent you because of your studies?”

  “I suppose so. And because I was here, nearby. And because of my English.”

  “So how d’you know it was here? In the valley?”

  Albrecht moved closer to the map again, which now seemed to glow dully in the dark, possessed of its own light. “At the start of the war, the map was evacuated from Hereford Cathedral and stored in the wine cellar of Hampton Court outside London. This was when the finial was removed.” He passed his hand across the top of the dark wood frame. “Later in the war, probably during the Blitz, it was evacuated again, this time to a coal mine in Bradford-on-Avon near Bath. Then, shortly after the German counterattack reached British shores, it was moved again and brought here. I can only assume its original keeper at the cathedral came for it, as a mother might come for her child, and brought it home. Or as near to home as was safe, which was here, Mrs. Lewis, in your valley.”

  He held her stare for a moment then placed his finger directly at the centre of the parchment upon what looked like a round cog. “This,” he said, “is Jerusalem. Right in the middle of the map.”

  Sarah came and stood beside him. “ ‘Thus says the Lord,’ ” she said quietly. “ ‘This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries round her.’ ”

  Albrecht smiled to himself, remembering Sarah’s school certificate: The best of all books is the Bible.

  “The book of Ezekiel,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  Again they stood in silence, letting their eyes wander over the map’s most intricate details.

  “How d’you know all this?” Sarah eventually said.

  “My studies,” Albrecht replied, not taking his eyes off the map. “In Dresden and Oxford.”

  “No,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “I meant about where the map’s been. How it was here.”

  Albrecht kept moving his fingers over the glass of the frame, leaving slight imprints where he
pressed over a certain inscription or illustration. “They have their methods,” was all he said, a darker expression briefly clouding his face before turning back to his explanations of the map. “You see this heavy scoring? Especially over Paris? Why do you think that is? Some say it was a sign of anti-French feeling in these parts in the later fourteenth century.” He bent down and, removing his glasses, leant his face closer to the crosshatch of long, straight marks over the multiple-towered illustration of Paris. “I’m not sure, though,” he said, almost under his breath. “In the early nineteenth century some glass lanterns were leant against the map when it was out of its case. I think these are from those lanterns, perhaps.”

  “What are these?” Sarah’s voice came from above him. She was peering at something at the edge of the frame, dimly lit in the faint spillage of light from his torch. He straightened up and shone the beam where she was looking. “This,” she said, laying her finger beside an O encased in a roundel outside the main boundary of the map. “An’ this one too.” She bent to touch the glass over an R in a similar position lower down. Both letters still bore traces of their original gold leaf. The flakes caught the torchlight and shimmered against the sepia parchment like fool’s gold in base rock.

  “Everything within this boundary,” Albrecht said, running his fingers around the outer circle of the map. “Is God’s creation. This is the world. These letters,” he said, pointing to the two letters and another pair that faced them in the same positions on the opposite side of the map, “spell ‘MORS’. They represent death, which dwells outside God’s realm.”

  Again they were silent, but in a different way than before. It was a deeper silence, the silence of waking, as if that one word had made them remember everything again. Everything that they had, for the briefest of moments, been allowed to forget.

  “You do understand why I wanted to show you this, don’t you, Mrs. Lewis?”

  Sarah couldn’t see his face, but his voice had changed again, returned to the voice she’d always known.

  “This map is why I came here, into your valley. And it is why I am still here too. This map.” He turned towards it once more. “It deserves more than a castle in Wewelsburg. It deserves light, not darkness.”

  Sarah shifted her feet in the dry earth. She felt afraid again but this time she didn’t know why. “I should get back,” she said at last.

  “Yes,” Albrecht said. “Of course.”

  He lifted the sacking cloth and tarpaulin from the floor and pulled them across the packing crate, obscuring the world within. Then, taking the lead but shining the torch behind him so Sarah might see her footing, he led her out of the cavity into the natural crevice, and then out of the Red Darren altogether onto the hillside and its steep slopes of scree. Outside, Seren and Fly were on their feet, stretching their backs. The blustery day had pushed what few clouds there’d been over the Black Hill and as Sarah emerged from the crevice she had to squint in the brightness left in their wake. She looked down the valley, and for the second time in her life saw everything held within its steep walls cast in an unfamiliar light.

  It was a week after Albrecht had shown Sarah the map when Atkins, half-blind and missing all the fingernails on his right hand, came stumbling down the valley’s west wall towards The Court. Stopping at an outcrop of rock he crouched behind it and peered down at the moss-covered slates of the farmhouse below him. His vision rose and fell with his heavy breath. There was a milky cloud always drifting across his left eye, the watermark of a blow from one of those unseen hands that had, for months now, assaulted him every day.

  Atkins was exhausted but still energised by the ebbing adrenalin of his escape. By the sheer luck of it. The bullet in the back had never come, however much he’d expected it as he’d scrambled down the railway embankment and rushed headlong into the trees at the edge of the siding. He’d lain in the drainage ditch for the rest of the day, motionless but for his shivering, the water making his joints ache with cold.

  A toolshed in a cottage garden on the edge of the village had supplied him with the file with which he’d spent most of the night, running the chain of his cuffs across it as slowly as he could for fear of the noise it made. The cuffs themselves he’d had less luck with. He’d never been much good at picking locks and so he still wore them on each wrist, a few links of chain hanging from each one, still tarnished with the blood of the guard from the train.

  Just before dawn he’d set out for the valleys. There were Auxiliary Units out there, or so he hoped. He didn’t know for certain. The Special Duties Section had always been his only responsibility, but he thought it was likely that somewhere in those remote hills there’d be a bunker and men who could help him. Or at least, if not a unit, then this, a local farmhouse so isolated even the Germans had left it alone. And inside, people like this young boy coming out to feed the chickens. People who could also help him. Who could feed him, hide him, until he made contact with the units.

  Atkins watched the boy scatter the mash inside the chicken pen then stand still in the midst of the stabbing of the birds’ beaks at his feet. Slowly, the boy crouched lower until he was almost at their level. Then, just as slowly, he reached out an arm to stroke the oil-spill feathers of one of the cockerels. The bird let him do this, tame to human hands, and only gave the lightest of resistance when he picked it up and carried it out of sight around the corner of the house.

  The boy didn’t come back and Atkins had to wait for over an hour before he saw another person. This time it was an older man, dressed in a similar way to the boy, in a farmer’s way, clothes that Atkins had come to know and trust. An old tweed jacket, a flannel waistcoat beneath, and heavy corduroy trousers pulled tight at the waist with a thick leather belt. The boy’s father perhaps. Atkins watched the man pull a fork from where it was stuck in the ground and begin working over the soil of a vegetable patch. He felt a wave of tiredness wash over him. These were the people he was fighting for, for whom he’d endured these months of pain. Men of the earth, men who knew their landscape as intimately as they might a lover. This man, he would understand.

  Standing from behind the rock, Atkins began walking down the slope, the chain of each cuff held in his palms so as not to alarm the farmer. He felt as if he was walking towards the gates of Eden. A rare sanctuary just when he thought the game had been up. The man continued with his work, absorbed in his digging. Atkins walked on, the dew from the longer blades of grass soaking the bottoms of his trousers. He filled his lungs with the fresh mountain air, with freedom, with life. When he was near enough, he paused in his descent, took a deeper breath, and called down to the man below him.

  “Hello there! Good morning!”

  Sebald looked up from his digging to see a tall man standing on the slope above him, raising one hand in the air. He was speaking English. Any soldiering instinct still silting somewhere within him failed to show itself. Dropping the fork, he ran back inside The Court, clattering through the back door into the kitchen and on into the front room where Alex and Albrecht were eating their breakfast.

  “A man,” Sebald said to them, the air gulping in his throat. “An Englishman. Outside on the hill.”

  Atkins knew he’d made a terrible mistake the moment he saw Alex’s boots. Surprised by the farmer’s reaction, he’d walked a little further down the slope hoping to put him at his ease and so was closer to the house when Alex came round the corner. Even through the cloudy patch of his left eye he saw immediately that the man’s boots were not those of a farmer’s but regular Wehrmacht issue. It was all Atkins needed to know and he was already turning to run when Alex swung a machine gun from behind his back and aimed it up the hill.

  Atkins felt a sudden burn of energy flooding through him as he half ran, half fell up the slope, grasping at roots, branches, rocks, anything that would propel him up and away from that gun behind him. As he ran he once more waited for the crack, for the momentary bumblebee whine of the bullet as it sped towards his back. But it never came. J
ust the scramble of loose stones and soil falling away behind him and the panting breath of another man, drawing closer and closer. Suddenly the breath became touch as he felt a grab at his trailing ankle that brought him smashing into the ground and sliding backwards. Then another hand on his other leg. He kicked out, made contact, then felt his ankle gripped again as he was dragged down the slope. Then more hands on his back, pinning his arms, on his head, pushing his face into the sweet smell of the young bracken, its fronds still curled like the fists of a foetus in the womb.

  Albrecht paced back and forth before the range in the front room of The Court, the heel of his boots scuffing over the flagstones. Atkins sat in a chair with Alex standing behind him pressing the muzzle of his gun into his neck. A bruise was deepening under the sergeant’s eye where Atkins’s boot had caught him. Albrecht kept his hands in his pockets because they were shaking. With rage, with fear, with sadness.

  He hated this Englishman sitting before him, his head bowed, his hair matted and stinking. Not because he was English. Not because of those defiant, hard blue eyes. Not even because he was his enemy, but simply because he had come here from there. He had brought the war back into the valley and so had also brought with him the choices Albrecht so hated and the parts of himself he so wanted to forget.

  Albrecht stopped pacing and looked down at Atkins. The man was obviously British Intelligence, otherwise he’d no longer be alive. He bore the marks of the Gestapo all over him; those denuded, bloodied fingers. He must have something they wanted, otherwise they would have shot him by now. He must have held out, somehow. That was why he was still alive and still here. So it was no use questioning him further. If he’d stuck out the Gestapo’s interrogation then anything Albrecht might try would be child’s play in comparison.