Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  She was sitting on a grassy hummock, picking berries and listening to the birds when a ray of sunlight shone so brightly into her eyes that she had to look away. She turned her head in the direction of a stand of birches some distance away. Depending on the angle of her vision, their knobbly trunks leaned towards each other or pulled away, fusing design and disorder into an artistic whole. The wonderful anarchy of life, she chuckled to herself as she headed back to the hospital.

  Judith was finishing her paperwork for the day when the sister in charge of Intensive Care knocked on her door. Kathleen was one of the nurses she had trained in London, a cheerful Irish girl who spoke so fast that she sometimes had trouble following her.

  ‘One of the locals just brought a fellow in. He found him unconscious in the forest. Someone didn’t like him, judging by the state he’s in. He’s got some broken ribs and the bruises on his body look like they were made by a boot. And his face! I’ve never seen such a mess in all me born days. He’s still unconscious.’

  Judith put down her pen. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘Doctor thinks he’ll pull through but it looks like some of his broken ribs have perforated the lungs, so he’ll need a lot of nursing. I once had a case like that in London —’

  ‘Do we know who he is? Any papers on him?’

  Kathleen shook her head. ‘No papers at all. I got the girls to go through all his pockets, the ones in his jacket and his trousers and that —’

  Judith nodded impatiently. Kathleen always gave the impression of having all the time in the world to chat and drink endless cups of tea. ‘So we’ll have to wait until he’s conscious to find out who he is,’ Judith said.

  Kathleen nodded. ‘That’s right, so it is. Because the way he looks now, not even his own ma would recognise him.’

  There was no stopping the girl. Judith drummed her fingers on the desk until she rose to leave. She was at the door when, to Judith’s annoyance, she turned around.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘We did find something on him when they brought him in.’

  She put her hand into her apron pocket and held out a slim silver cigarette case.

  Sixty-Three

  When Adam opened his eyes and saw the blurred shape near his bed, he thought he was back in Schaffenburg Castle. He wanted to thank the person leaning over him, but the words came out in a mumble and ended in a groan. His face was bandaged, and, from the difficulty he had breathing, he knew his nose was broken. There was a grinding ache in his right eye, and, when he tried to move, there was hardly a centimetre of his body that didn’t hurt. His head was pounding, his vision was blurred and he could hardly open his jaw.

  ‘There now, love, don’t you try and move, I’ll bring you whatever you need,’ a woman was saying. She spoke English in a soft lilting accent that soothed him. As he began to focus, he saw that she wore a white apron and a little starched cap. This time he really was in a hospital. But where were the Germans?

  Then it came back to him. The war was over. He’d heard the announcement on the baroness’s wireless. Germany had surrendered. Six years of senseless carnage and destruction had finally come to an end.

  As soon as he’d heard the news, he had sprung towards the baroness to hug her but held back in time. Exuberance was not her style.

  ‘Thank God Dr Hermann and I have lived to see the end of this madness,’ was all she said, and continued polishing the furniture.

  That afternoon, Adam heard her discussing the situation with Dr Hermann in tones that sounded like weary relief rather than boundless joy. Over dinner that evening, the baroness looked pensive.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll want to leave as soon as possible but we both think you should stay here until you’re stronger and the situation becomes more stable,’ she’d said. ‘Dr Hermann said there are a lot of angry people in town looking for vengeance. Not a good time for you to be wandering around.’

  ‘What about you? Suppose they find out you’ve been sheltering an enemy airman?’

  She shrugged. ‘Ach, for me I don’t care so much any more. I’ve lived my life. But war has stolen the best years of yours. Find a woman and start living.’

  Her words startled him. Totally consumed by war, he hadn’t made any plans for peace. Although he had come to care more and more for Judith, their trysts had been interludes between missions rather than preludes to the future.

  In the next few weeks, the doctor’s warning was validated by a succession of beatings and murders in the area, but Adam was too restless to remain in this cocoon any longer. He walked with a limp and his shoulder still ached, but the war had ended and he was impatient to find a place for himself in the changing world.

  On the evening before his departure, he sat with the baroness in the chamber where a stag’s head with massive antlers hung above the ornately carved mahogany sideboard, and a balding brown bearskin rug lay on the flagstone floor. On other walls, generations of self-satisfied von Schaffenburgs looked down from elaborate gilt frames, their canvas criss-crossed by cracking paint. There were generals encased in armour and hunters mounted on horseback. The women, stern matriarchs with small eyes and wide hips, were surrounded by children dressed like miniature adults. The lives of this family, like his own, had been interwoven with the history of their nation through the centuries.

  Like him, the baroness was the last of the clan. On the walls of a Warsaw apartment, portraits of his ancestors had once hung just like these, but the walls had probably crumpled and collapsed and the portraits had been buried beneath the rubble.

  Although it was summer, a chill rose from the stone floors. Adam threw more logs into the fireplace and drew their high-backed chairs closer to the crackling fire. The Lenzkirch clock on the marble mantelpiece struck the hour and Maria von Schaffenburg wiped a bottle and placed it on the small oak table between them. ‘I was saving this for the end of the war,’ she said. ‘I had hoped to share it with my sons, but I would like to open it now.’

  Adam looked at the label. It was a vintage riesling Deutschersekt from a local vineyard. The cork popped and catapulted into the fireplace, and, as he poured the foaming wine, he chuckled at the vagaries of life. He had never envisaged toasting the end of the war with sparkling wine in a German castle. Taking a cigarette from his case, he tapped it on the lid, lit it and inhaled, releasing a column of smoke that curled towards the ceiling.

  They clinked glasses without speaking. The significance of the occasion and the depth of their emotion made words unnecessary.

  The fire was dying and he stirred it with the poker until the embers glowed again and sparks flew up. ‘I hope God keeps his side of the bargain you made when you saved me,’ he said.

  She touched her cross. ‘It was God who spared you. I was only his instrument,’ she said.

  ‘But you took the risk. Why?’

  She stared into the fireplace. ‘After Stalingrad, I became completely disillusioned with the Führer. I could see he was willing to sacrifice his people for his own grandiose ambitions. But after Friedrich was murdered, I saw things in a different light. Hitler wasn’t the only one to blame. Our catastrophe was caused by people who followed Satan instead of their conscience.’

  She drained her flute and he leaned forward to refill it.

  ‘You see, our national strength is also our weakness,’ she continued. ‘We’re obedient, industrious and meticulous, but we lack imagination and individuality. With you Poles, it’s the opposite. Your way leads to recklessness and anarchy but leaves room for moral judgment.’

  The following morning, she accompanied him to the gate at the entrance of the estate.

  ‘I want you to know that no matter what happens, I will always be glad I helped you,’ she said.

  He kissed her hand and walked quickly from the castle, into the unknown.

  As Adam strode towards the village, he breathed in the summer scent of ripe corn and sun-warmed flowers. But his cheerful mood faded when he considered the future. As a form
er courier for the AK, returning to Poland would be risky now that the Russian-sponsored communists were in power. Feliks had told him that Stalin referred to members of the exiled Polish government as ‘white Poles,’ and regarded the insurgents as a band of criminals who collaborated with the Nazis. No political satire could match this bitter reality, that those who had fought to free their country from a common enemy were reviled and persecuted by their allies as collaborators.

  But if he didn’t return to Poland, where could he go? He spoke English but was disgusted by the duplicity of the British and American governments. Stewart and Judith enthused about Australia but the prospect of living in a colonial backwater far from the heartbeat of the world was unthinkable. Canada was a possibility. Perhaps he could persuade Judith to go there. Nurses were always in demand, and with his diplomatic background and knowledge of English, he should be able to find work.

  He realised with a shock that about six months had passed since they’d last been in touch. Perhaps she had given him up for dead and found someone else. She might even have gone back to Australia.

  Preoccupied with his thoughts, he didn’t notice two men walking stealthily behind him along the road. One looked like a boxer gone to seed, while the other had the tense watchfulness of an underworld bodyguard.

  The baroness had warned Adam not to take the main road, and he had just turned on to the path that led to the woods when the two men grabbed his arms and pushed him along until they came to a forest clearing. He started explaining in German that he’d come looking for work and had no money, but they laughed and laid into him with staves until he lay moaning on the forest floor. Between blows, one of them panted, ‘This is for Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden.’ He gave Adam’s head one final punch and kicked his ribs. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was a voice snarling, ‘Well, we’ve fixed him. Now let’s pay her a visit.’

  Sunlight was streaming through the open window and Adam was watching motes of light quivering in the air when he heard firm footsteps coming towards him. He turned his head and knew he must be dreaming because Judith was standing there.

  ‘Adam?’ she said in a tremulous voice he hardly recognised. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

  His voice seemed caught so deep inside his throat that he couldn’t get it out. All he could do was nod and grip her hand, as though clinging to the edge of a precipice.

  Judith brushed her hand across her eyes and smeared moisture across her cheek. She cleared her throat several times but it kept clogging up. Her gaze slid from his bandaged face to his splinted arm. ‘You went to an incredible amount of trouble to find me,’ she said. ‘Next time just write.’

  ‘Writing is too easy,’ he rasped. Under his bandages, he was smiling so broadly that his face felt as though it would split in two. He clasped her hand tightly and felt the sun shining down on his head.

  They were sitting like that, not speaking or moving, when Elzunia put her head around the door and drew back. There was the new patient, half-dead and swathed in bandages, holding the hand of Matron, who looked as though she was in a trance.

  Elzunia had been sent by the sister to check on the bandages and the temperature of the patient they all referred to as the Mystery Man, but now she hovered around the door, not wanting to break the spell that bound them. She walked on, intrigued. Improbable as it was, it looked like a love scene.

  When she returned half an hour later, Matron had gone and the patient was lying with his back to her. As she approached the bed, the sunlight streaming through the window lit up the cigarette case on his bedside table.

  Shaking with indignation, Elzunia rushed to find Matron to warn her. She obviously had no idea what kind of man he was.

  ‘I think new patient is thief,’ Elzunia blurted out.

  Judith looked at her in surprise. ‘Why on earth do you think that?’

  Elzunia was tapping herself on the chest to make her meaning clearer. ‘I give that cigarette case to man in 1942. This man is thief.’

  Judith’s fingers tightened around her pen and she took a deep breath. Steady on, she told herself. Take it slowly. Don’t go jumping to conclusions.

  ‘Are you saying that this was your cigarette case and you gave it to someone?’

  Elzunia was nodding. ‘I give father’s cigarette case to Polish man in Ghetto.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Special man for me.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Judith said in a voice she struggled to keep even. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  As Elzunia left the office, she wondered why Matron was staring at her so strangely.

  Sixty-Four

  Judith rose from her chair, picked up a file and opened it, only to close it a moment later. She sat down again, fiddled with her pen and stared out of the window. Three English nurses were walking from their dormitory across the courtyard, and their bright young voices bounced off the walls. Judith stood up and paced up and down her office. How could it happen that just as she’d received the gift she hadn’t even dared to wish for, it was snatched away?

  She slumped in her chair. The night they had met in the kitchen, Elzunia had talked about the man she had been in love with for the past six years whom she knew only by his code name, Eagle. Like a maths student who tries desperately to find a way of making an equation produce the desired answer, Judith considered every possibility in the hope of arriving at a different solution, but each time the basic premise defeated her. If Elzunia had given him the cigarette case, then Eagle was Adam. She knew that he had never parted with the case, that he’d kept it with him even during his aerial missions. The first night they had spent together, he described the girl who had given him the case as extraordinary. She had been fooling herself all along. It was Elzunia he loved.

  The laughing voices of the young nurses in the yard irritated her and she slammed the window shut so hard that the glass rattled. What a fool she’d been, imagining that he cared for her when all the time it was this girl he longed for.

  For the rest of the day, nurses knocked on Judith’s door to ask for instructions, housekeepers requested keys, the chef threatened to resign, and doctors discussed treatment regimes for problem patients, and she dealt with them one by one, hardly aware of what she was doing. Inside she felt as stiff and frozen as an iceberg.

  The only person who noticed the change in her was Kathleen, who came to discuss Adam’s progress, a subject Judith would have preferred to avoid.

  ‘You look worn out, love. Shall I bring you a cup of tea?’ she said in her Irish brogue as she looked searchingly into Matron’s face.

  Judith shook her head. Tea couldn’t solve her problems. But a few minutes later, Kathleen reappeared with a tray.

  ‘Come on, now, it’ll do you the world of good,’ she coaxed as she poured the steaming tea.

  As she settled back and sipped the tea, Judith felt her spirits reviving. Why had she been so quick to give up on the man she wanted so much? Almost three years had passed since he and Elzunia had last met, and in that time everything had changed. He was no longer an Underground courier, Poland was no longer independent, the world had moved on, and Elzunia now had two children to care for. For all she knew, their feelings for each other might have changed as well.

  Judith thought about the night she had spent with Adam in the London hotel and her blood quickened. Why had she assumed he didn’t care for her? Her mind began to concoct a wild scheme. Elzunia didn’t know yet who the patient was. Perhaps she could find some pretext to transfer her before she found out. The British Red Cross was desperate for experienced nurses. With Elzunia out of the picture, nothing would stand in her way. She would give her an excellent reference of course, and recommend her for a senior position. After all, didn’t they say all was fair in love and war?

  Pleased with her solution, Judith sat back and glanced out the window. But as she watched Elzunia walking across the yard with her arms around the children, skipping and singing with them, she felt sick. She couldn’t base her happiness
on deceit. A wave of compassion for Elzunia swept over her. After all she had suffered and all she had lost, she deserved some happiness in her life. And if Adam represented that happiness, she had no right to stand in their way.

  Sitting in Judith’s office, Elzunia’s eyes widened with disbelief. It must be her bad English. She must have misunderstood what Matron was saying. But Matron kept repeating the same words over and over, a little louder each time, as though increased volume might ensure her comprehension.

  ‘The new patient is the man from the Polish Underground.’

  ‘Is not possible,’ Elzunia insisted. ‘He steal cigarette case.’

  Judith stood up. ‘Come with me.’

  As soon as Adam saw Elzunia, he struggled to sit up. She was taller and thinner than he remembered, and her eyes were even larger and more luminous than before, but she had the same defiant tilt of the head and air of unshakeable determination that had impressed him in the Ghetto. What was her name? Ela? Eulalia? Then he remembered.

  ‘Elzunia!’ he cried out. ‘I can’t believe it’s you! What on earth are you doing here? Look, I still have the cigarette case you gave me.’

  She tried to speak but could only stammer. She stared at his bandaged face that bore no resemblance to the man she had dreamed about for so long. How could it possibly be him? And yet he had recognised her.

  ‘I’ve often thought about you,’ he was saying. ‘Especially during the Ghetto Uprising.’

  Although he spoke in Polish, Judith could hear the affection in his tone. It felt as though someone had picked up her heart and hurled it to the ground.

  ‘I’ve thought about you too,’ Elzunia whispered.

  There was so much she wanted to tell him and so many questions she wanted to ask but she couldn’t get her thoughts together.