by Owen Sheers
The next time he saw her he was ready. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he rested his elbows on the bedside table and lifted the binoculars up to his eyes. The magnification of their lenses shut out whatever light the snow emitted, so although they brought Bethan closer to him, they also hid her further in the gathering night. The fading light became grainy and her face no more than an oval of shading, her features merely suggested by pools of black and grey, all framed in the deepening darkness of her hair. Even then, though, he could see her lips moving. Not all the time, just intermittently. A dark crease in her face mouthing silent words. He wanted to know what she was saying. He wanted to understand. And even then, through the opaque shreds of the dying daylight, he wanted to kiss those moving, then still, then moving lips.
He never caught her there again. When working in the vegetable garden or out the back of the kitchen, or even in the further-away fields, he’d look up at the slope, find the thorn tree, and search for her shape behind it. Although he never saw her, that didn’t stop him planning what he’d do if he did. How he would walk up the slope towards her, how he would speak the few words of English Albrecht had taught him. How he would take her in his arms and kiss her. Lying in his bed at night he re-created her shadowed face behind his closed lids, shedding light over it to illuminate her skin, her eyes, and those two moving lips.
A couple of times over the first weeks of the thaw Gernot had seen Bethan in the distance, riding out on her pony on the other side of the valley, but he’d had to wait until the first full weeks of spring before he saw her properly again. He’d worked at the women’s farms several times over the winter, and at her mother’s farm more than once, but Bethan had never been there. Then one day Albrecht ordered him and Alex to help Mary plough and plant a small field of potatoes down beside the river.
Alex worked the single-blade plough, his big arms floating it above the turning soil. Gernot and Mary followed in his wake, pushing the seed potatoes into the freshly exposed earth. There had never been much ploughing in the valley so Mary’s old cart horse was unfamiliar with the harness and the movement, with the weight of the yoke at his shoulders. This was why Bethan was with them. To walk at the horse’s head, one hand hooked in the rope halter as she talked softly into his ear or encouraged him on with short clicks of her tongue against her teeth.
Gernot watched her, eclipsed and then revealed over Alex’s shoulder as the plough rode its own furrow like the needle of the gramophone in the grooves of the records they’d listened to over the winter. Once again he saw her lips moving and again he could not hear what she was saying. As they repeated their gradual procession, up the field, turning, then back, he put words to her moving mouth. He imagined she was talking to him. First in English and then in German, but always words just for him, whispered into the crook of his neck.
On each turn their eyes met. It was a silent connection, a wordless thread spun through the clamour of each turn; the cart horse sucking his big hooves from the wet earth at the field’s edge, Alex ushering him on, the chains and hinges of the plough clattering and creaking. And yet for Gernot each glance drowned out the noise around him and seemed possessed of such a resonance that he couldn’t believe either Alex or her mother hadn’t heard them.
For the next two days, whenever he could, Gernot watched the slope behind The Court from his bedroom window. He was convinced those brief moments on the turn of each furrow had been enough. On the evening of the second day his belief was rewarded when he saw Bethan appear through the new bracken and crouch behind the trunk of the thorn tree. Leaving himself no time to question, he walked out of the room, down the narrow stone stairs, and out of the farmhouse, his head light above his body and the skin across his temples throbbing with his pulse.
The lowering sun had not quite set behind the Hatterall ridge, the last sliver of its disc flaring from over the silhouetted horizon. Gernot walked into a kaleidoscope of transparent orange and yellow spheres and hexagrams, long streams of light playing through the branches of the trees. He knew where the thorn tree stood, however, and he made his way steadily up the hill in its direction, painfully aware that the light blinding him would illuminate his face for Bethan as he walked towards her.
When he reached the thorn tree, she was still there. He’d somehow thought she would not be, that like a deer spotted in the woods, or a fox paused in a garden, he would arrive to find nothing more than the imprint of her feet and a branch still quivering from where she’d passed.
She did not seem afraid when she looked up at him. As she did, Gernot clearly saw the last ebbing of the girl still within her, and it made him aware of the shadow of the boy still in him, the boy who had been submerged so rapidly with his entry into the army.
“Hello,” he said, the English word thick on his tongue. “I am Gernot.”
She smiled. “I know.”
Gernot sat down beside her. So far this was all as he had forecast, as he had planned a hundred times before in his mind. But now he seemed unable to follow the script he’d written for himself. He tried to picture it, reaching out an arm about her shoulder, drawing her close, then both of them slowly tipping back against the bracken behind them. But it was no good, so instead he just sat beside her and looked out over the valley as she did.
Opposite them, on the other side of the valley, the setting sun had cast a broad band of amber along the ridge and upper slopes of the Black Hill. The sky behind the hill was lit an impossible blue. Together they watched this strip of evening light tighten, a seam of burnished earth compressed between the land and sky, deepening in colour as it narrowed until just the hill’s long spine shone bronze and everything below it was night.
“It is beautiful,” Gernot said, struggling with the last word.
She turned to look at him. This time she did not smile.
“You are beautiful,” he said, still looking out at the darkening valley.
She kept looking at him, so when he turned to her she was there, her face near his. And that was when he’d leant in and kissed her. That was when he’d felt her breath on his mouth, when he’d brushed her lips with his.
But then she was pulling away from him, frowning, shaking her dropped head. “No,” she said, the word no more than a breath on her lips.
And then she left. Suddenly, she stood up and left. Gernot turned in time to see the herringbone pattern of her coat disappearing into the bracken out of which she’d emerged just minutes before. He heard her brushing through the stiff stems and leaves. And then she was gone. It was as if in kissing her he had banished her. As if she had been just a reflection and the lightest touch of their mouths had shattered the mirror between them.
Sitting there, alone on the hillside, Gernot thought he’d see Bethan again the next day. That they would look out over the valley once more tomorrow. But she hadn’t come back, and now he’d learnt that her mother had sent her away. For how long he didn’t know. Why had she done this? Was it really because he’d kissed her? How could her mother have known? What trace of him had Bethan carried with her back to that dark farmhouse on the other side of the valley?
Whatever it was he wished he could retrieve it, take that kiss back, if it meant she would return to him. Now, with her gone, he’d rather live with the promise of those moving lips than with the knowledge of their brief taste. But he would wait, that is what he would do. He had waited before, through the longest of winters, just to see her, and he could wait again. He’d entered this war expecting to die, expecting each day to be his last. But he’d been wrong. The war had led him not to death, but to her, and to life. So he would wait for her and then, when she returned, when she came back to him from over the hills, his waiting would be done and they would leave. Leave this valley, the patrol, the other women, and walk out into a new world together, as young and unknown as their love.
May 16th
Maggie’s radio says as it’s over, Tom. Here at least. Butler is working with the Germans. It’s over. So why don’t y
ou come back? I know you’re still there. I feel it. But it’s been so long, Tom. I’m twenty-seven. I’ll never be twenty-seven again. It’s not just you that’s been gone these months, Tom. It’s me too.
I wish we’d said more when you were here.
We’ll have to dip soon, and shear. And then there’s the hay. I see the meadows growing and I remember last year. You working with Reg and the boys. How hot it was. Will it ever be like that again, Tom?
I don’t think Mary should have sent Bethan away. It’s going bad with her being so alone. But then it’s bad for all of us.
The radio says it’s over, but there’s still trouble with insurgents. That’s what they call them, Tom. They say as no one wants them anymore. That it’s time to move on.
The elder’s flowered, and the laburnum. I found a nest dropped out of the hedge yesterday. There were three eggs still in it. Two sparrow and one cuckoo.
Albrecht and Sarah were walking back from the Red Darren, picking their way through the dark landslides of broken scree and sandstone. Sarah had wanted to see the map again. Although surprised by her request, Albrecht had been pleased too, so he agreed to meet her early in the morning at the mouth of the crevice. Inside he shone his torch over the dappled canvas for her once more, illuminating and translating the handwritten texts and illustrations. He showed her the mapmaker’s impression of the Magi’s journey, an almost comical series of sepia loops and diversions across Asia and the Middle East. In return Sarah had mentioned the poet again. She said the traced wanderings of the Magi reminded her of an afternoon she’d spent with him as he recounted the story of Percival and his own wandering journey in search of the grail.
Now, back in the morning light, silence had settled upon them once more as they walked down the slope, dislodging fragments of rock from under the larger slabs they used as stepping-stones. Albrecht stopped to prise out one of these fragments from the broken sole of his boot. “There is a book I have been reading,” he said, his voice sudden and unfamiliar on the air. “About another poet who lived here.”
Sarah stopped and turned to look back at him.
“Well, not here in this valley,” he continued. “But over there. Where you lived as a girl. Landor. This is his name.”
“Squire Landor?” Sarah said, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the low sun. “My father used t’tell me stories about him. My grandfather rented a farm off his estate. Wanted t’plant the whole valley with cedars, he did. An’ he tried bringing in a Spanish flock.” She half smiled and shook her head. “From what my father said, the valley gave him a hard time of it.”
Albrecht smiled back at her, nodding. “Yes, it seems they did.”
“I didn’t know he was a poet, though,” Sarah said, frowning.
“I think he was many things, from what I can tell.”
They walked on in silence, testing their footing before trusting their weight to each piece of broken rock. The valley below them was waking. The bleats of lambs pestering their mothers for milk filtered up from the fields below.
“His house is still there you know,” Sarah said, pausing again between two slabs of sandstone, one of them rocking slightly under her foot. “Landor’s. Just ruins, but I could show you if you wanted.”
Albrecht looked her in the eye for a moment. He wanted her to smile again. The few times he’d seen her do so were like the gift of light to this valley. The slightest lifting of the corners of her mouth transformed her features, making her face at all other times seem like a mask. But if anything, Sarah looked scared now, timid in the wake of her offer to show him Landor’s house. Even so, as he looked at her for that brief moment, Albrecht could not believe he’d once felt numb to her. Roughly attired though she was he knew that given the same cut of clothes, lipstick, hairstyles as women he’d known in Dresden, London, and Oxford, her broad face, green and gold eyes, delicate lips, would eclipse them all. Maybe even Ebbe, whose memory he still considered more seductive than most women he’d met in the flesh.
He drew his eyes away from her face and looked over her shoulder towards the mouth of the valley. From here, in the clear morning, the country was laid out before them. He could even make out the clusters of hamlets and villages in the distance. It all looked so close and yet so impossibly far away. But it was there, that couldn’t be denied, waiting like a long-postponed tide on the verge of breaching the coast once more.
He looked back at Sarah, but it was she who spoke next. “If we went early no one would see us,” she said. “It’d be safe.”
Albrecht felt the muscles across his brow ease. She understood. This was a choice beyond just his own. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I’m sure it would. Thank you.”
Bethan’s leaving the valley had caught Albrecht off guard. At first he couldn’t understand why her mother would commit such a self-harming act. He knew she was concerned by Bethan’s attraction to Gernot, but she’d already lost all contact with both her sons and her husband, and now she was depriving herself of her daughter too. And at what cost? She knew as well as the others the consequences of their being linked to the insurgency in any way. His concern, however, was not just for Mary. Bethan’s leaving had endangered them all.
Since the onset of spring the valley had found a strange harmony, more settled than Albrecht could ever have hoped. Alex spent much of his time rediscovering the farming of his boyhood, and therefore himself. He worked with Maggie’s cows and horses, helped her halter-train the colt, built fences and, when needed, handled the plough. Otto had also stumbled upon his own kind of peace, finding an understanding in Edith’s ragged world, confused at its edges but possessed, for him, of a clarity at its centre. The others, meanwhile, even Steiner, had come to accept the valley as a refuge in which to bide their time and wait for what would happen once the dust of the war had settled. For Sebald, it was perhaps even more than this. “As good a place to end up as any,” is what he’d once said to Albrecht when they’d paused in a walk to take in the full view of the valley’s length. “And better by far than most.”
The women too appeared to be more accepting of the situation. At times Albrecht even thought he detected a genuine gratitude for their presence. When Maggie looked to the tasks waiting in the months ahead, for example; to the shearing, dipping, and hay-making, the old woman seemed relieved to think they would not be facing these alone.
At first Albrecht had been careful to limit the contact as much as he could, but now the dependence between the women and the patrol had developed its own rhythm and metre. He was no more the conductor of events, but merely an observer of what he’d created. Slowly, despite the language barriers, he felt the patrol were becoming less German in the women’s eyes and more just men. Men who’d been washed up on their doorsteps, carrying with them their own losses, just as the women did the loss of their husbands.
This shadow of their missing husbands was, of course, always there, and made darker by the intermittent wireless reports of the ongoing insurgency. But even this was now woven into the everyday fabric; an unseen and mostly unspoken weight of absence, which, together with the war, worked as a counterbalance to their lives in the valley. Reminders of why all of them were still here, sharing this slice of isolated land between the thumb and forefinger of the Black Mountains Hand.
When Albrecht noticed the change in Gernot’s behaviour after Bethan had left, he knew why Mary had sent her daughter away, but it did little to ease his concern. The balance they’d achieved in the valley was just that: a calibration that kept their fragile vessel upright but that might be tipped at any moment. In leaving the valley Bethan had punctured the hull of this vessel. She’d left behind a hole in the shape of herself through which Albrecht feared they would be contaminated. Just like the sandstone out of which the valley was made, they would all, once exposed to the realities of the outside world, be forced to calcify and harden.
Bethan’s leaving, however, still worried Albrecht far less than her return. When he’d asked Maggie abo
ut this the old woman had been unclear as to when the girl might come back. His only hope was that when she did, she would bring with her nothing more harmful than confirmation of the news reports that kept them here. The reports that still spoke of the war in the present tense. That hinted at a Russian resurgence behind the Urals threatening to break out into the west. The reports that suggested the war was not dead, just dormant, and it could still kill them all, given half the chance.
Albrecht was perhaps most affected by the ease with which Bethan had left. A packed lunch, a walk to the valley’s head, a thousand yards across the plateau, and she’d been gone. That was all it had taken for her to leave their world. Still six miles or so from her destination of Hay-on-Wye, but gone. The simplicity of it stirred something within him. A desire, despite all his better judgment, to see outside the valley walls himself. Not to leave them, but to see, just for a moment, the outside world close to his face and not from the distance of a view. But this desire, this sudden need in him triggered by Bethan’s leaving, was not the only reason he accepted Sarah’s offer to show him the ruins of Landor’s house. It was the first time she’d ever given him anything, any possibility beyond the present. As a consequence it was also the first time since he’d taken her the gramophone and played her the cello suite that Albrecht could allow himself some hope.
“There, see that path? Where it goes in the dingle? That’s where it is.”
Albrecht followed the line of Sarah’s pointing finger. He could see nothing but a clump of trees, thick with new foliage. But the position would have been right. According to the biography he’d read Landor had been at pains to build up the slope, away from the ruins of the priory beneath.
