Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  Max could not be so sure about the third airman at first. His eyes were shut tight and he appeared to have two mouths. Both wide open. One above the other. The first where a mouth should be. The second below it and slightly to the right, a gaping red cavity where the man’s chin should be. He felt for signs of life. It was almost impossible to distinguish the man’s weak pulse beneath his own raging blood thumping through his fingers and booming in his ears. He allowed the monks to arrive anyway, allowed them to drag him onto the cot.

  ‘Maxillo-facial wound,’ he said, more to himself than the untrained monks as he began flicking through the annals of his two-year qualified mind, preparing himself for the surgery to come. If they ever made it back to the bunker alive, that is, let alone the hospital.

  The fourth airman was dead as the first. You didn’t need to be a doctor to know this. Bodies without their heads are universally acknowledged to be kaput. And the fifth? His roars of agony were a good sign. He was very much alive. Max began to haul him towards the bunker, but the guy was a lump. Luckily for both Max and the lump, Edgar and Thomas were back from depositing their first rescue and the three of them carried the lardy loudmouth back to the bunker. He appeared to have a femoral fracture and multiple shrapnel wounds. However, Max couldn’t help but find himself annoyed by this airman. Not by the noise he was making, but by his corpulence. He knew he shouldn’t, but supplies were so low these days Max couldn’t remember the last time he had a decent meal. His trousers were clinging for dear life to his now bony hips and, although the nuns had cultivated some delicious fruit in the garden, both the bombing and the winter had put pay to any more of that. He looked at Edgar – his tall friend who was looking skinnier by the day too – struggling at the other end of the cot and felt a strange desire to laugh.

  ‘And we thought being a student was tough!’ he wanted to blurt out to Edgar, but right then keeping their cargo and themselves in one piece was far more pressing.

  Triage was simple back inside the bunker: the two quiet airmen were seen to first, one by Edgar the other by Max with the monks assisting. Thomas was ordered to reassure the portly pilot that his fracture and wounds would be seen to as soon as possible and that he was going to be just…

  Bullets ricocheted off the side of the bunker and the pilot actually quietened momentarily. Thomas peeked through the spyhole.

  ‘Shit!’ he announced to the rest. ‘They are on the airfield. They are close.’

  All the chaos outside suddenly hushed, which had a calming effect on the chaos inside too, and now only German words spoken in a Russian accent were being fired at the bunker.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Max hissed with his hands still working at packing the gaping wound on his patient’s face.

  ‘They say they’ve got grenades. And they’ll use them on us. Unless we surrender now.’

  The doctors looked to the soldier for military instruction in this matter, but Thomas looked like he might need a doctor soon himself.

  Max waited for as many long seconds as he could for the soldier to spring into action, but he could see it wasn’t going to happen. He saw his own hands were shaking as he pressed on his patient’s face, so welcomed the excuse his idea gave him to use his hands for something else.

  ‘Thomas, come here and apply pressure, as I am.’

  Thomas gladly did as he was told. Max grabbed the portable telephone and tried to keep his voice from quivering as he spoke into it.

  ‘We need artillery support now on the airfield. Fire on the area around the bunker… No, not on the bunker. That is where we are. Around it. That’s where Ivan is.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Max,’ Edgar whispered still splinting his patient’s snapped wrist. ‘Are you sure about that? What if they miss and hit us?’

  ‘What if they do nothing? Then we get blown up by grenades or go out there and surrender and get shot by Ivan anyway.’

  ‘After they’ve tortured us,’ Thomas added.

  Edgar was about to voice his approval of Max’s plan, given this concise but persuasive argument, but the swift arrival of his army’s shells pounding the ground around them silenced him and everyone else. Except the pilot who was convinced now more than ever his life was ending and screamed with every shell that rocked the bunker.

  Max crouched on the ground beside his patient and Thomas. He took strength from the soldier’s manifest fear – his pale face, his cartoon-wide eyes, his shivering frame – just as his aunt had done from him at the theatre when he was sixteen, although to this day he never knew that. (If my nephew is terrified then I have to be strong, Tante Bertel had told herself.) If this soldier is weakening I have to be strong, Max reasoned. He took over packing the facial wound again, but kept low, both knees on the ground to steady himself every time the bunker felt like it would be destroyed. Both knees on the ground in the manner of prayer.

  The ground was rocked ten times in quick succession. Then again and again… and again.

  And again.

  Each time the gap lengthened in between explosions. Like the gap between lightning and thunder Max used to count when he was a child. The gap got longer each time and he knew the thunder was getting further away and it would be safe to come out from under the covers soon.

  The Russians had fled.

  Then Lutz was frantically rapping on the door, their only remaining truck with a puddle of petrol in its fuel tank, waiting outside to rush them all back to the hospital. When everyone was out Max grabbed his bag to follow but was halted by Thomas, waiting at the entrance looking more like a soldier again.

  ‘Sir?’ he said and nodded to one of the dark corners where Max’s backpack of letters had been flung when the glider had crashed.

  Max knew Thomas wanted to appear to be looking out for the chief doctor’s belongings, when in fact he was desperate to have another opportunity to leaf through the contents of the bag, just in case there was something from his Maria to comfort him tonight when he would no doubt be plagued by nightmares of near death and images of terrible wounds and shocking dismemberment, which he could usually blame on an active imagination if he hadn’t seen them for real just now. Why did this bloody doctor have to run out on the airfield in the first place and subject him to all that? So they saved three lives, but they could have all been killed? He was the military representation in the bunker that night, why did he even listen to Dr Portner? Why didn’t Dr Portner listen to him?

  Thomas found the remains of a letter from Maria in the bag that night and caressed the charred paper in his bed as if it were the smooth, clean, white skin on her guitar shaped body.

  My Darling Little Sweetheart,

  Just a few lines, Thomas, hoping that my letter finds you in the best of health. I am very well myself at present and so is my family.

  Well, Lovey, you see your Maria is faithfully thinking of you, no one else, only you. You know I love you so much, my Little Husband and I’ll never love anybody else. If you get killed I’ll stay with no one but our little baby, when you give me one.

  I dreamt about you last night. I dreamt you got married to someone else. I hope to see you very

  Erika smoothed her dress over her pregnant belly. Six months pregnant, but she felt nearly full term, her slim body heavy with the new life inside her; her slim body weighed down by the absence of her soulmate Max, by the chaos of her country and now by the fact that she must leave her mother behind in Neurode. As Max’s father struggled to unload the last of the luggage from the sledge, Erika held onto her zaftig mother in a final embrace. Mother held mother who held baby inside her. Erika the daughter, felt she was being ripped from her mother’s womb all over again, but Erika the doctor told herself not to be so silly. Told herself to banish all those thoughts of turning Herr Portner away and staying here in Neurode with her own family. Told herself that it made sense to go with him to Bernried, where the support and facilities for her new baby would be so much better. Told herself to go now before it was too late, before the authorities cla
mped down even further on the movements of civilians.

  Despite it being the logical balm to both women’s sadness at parting, there was no chance of her mother coming too.

  ‘The only way I’ll be leaving that factory is in a coffin,’ Erika’s mother had declared – valiantly enough, but it did nothing for Erika’s fear that that was exactly how her mother would be leaving the place. Yet she could also understand the extent to which her mama was invested in the business both her parents had worked so hard to build up from nothing. Together. Erika got it. She got it now she had Max in her life. Now they were building a life together too. Or they were, until the Nazis embroiled him in their futile war and broke up her happy home.

  The news was changing by the hour, they had to leave now, Herr Portner urged her. So she stretched out these seconds in her mother’s fleshy grasp as impossibly as her own skin had stretched to accommodate her growing child, which, despite her scientific knowledge of the elasticity of the epidermis and the stages of development of the human foetus, never ceased to fill her with a visceral wonder. And, as they boarded the 06:16 to Mittelsteine, Erika toyed with the notion that although every metre of this journey took her further from her mother it would also bring her closer to the possibility of seeing Max again and the blossoming of their new little family.

  Should Max ever make it back to Bernried, that is.

  Erika allowed the slamming of the train door to chop that rogue thought out of the carriage; to leave it shivering on the platform and let it freeze to death in the black sleety mess where boots trampled over it – the boots of those desperate to find a place on this train, since the next wouldn’t be for twelve hours at least.

  She hardly noticed the others in the carriage, despite being elbow to elbow, toe to toe, nose to nose almost, with them. Her field of vision was hazy with longing, fatigue and loss; as hazy as the morning light trying to reach her through the icy windows dripping with the condensed breath of nervous passengers. She hardly noticed after a while how slow the train was, how often it ground to a halt so that it was two hours late getting into Mittelsteine. She allowed herself to be ushered off the train by Max’s father. Heard him asking someone about the train to Braunau and heard the reply:

  ‘It’s already gone, sir. But there’s another.’

  ‘Oh good. When?’ The brighter note in Karl’s voice fired Erika’s eyes back into focus, but only to see his face droop when doused with the news:

  ‘16:25, sir.’

  It was now 08:45.

  Bless Karl Portner, Erika thought. He was a pinball there on the platform, bouncing between their luggage, the station staff and her, trying to look after everything, trying to keep her from harm. She had to pull herself together. She had to help him. Help herself. She might be pregnant but she wasn’t hopeless. She was a doctor, for God’s sake! The textbook on how to assist with birth was not stuffed in her rucksack for her information. She knew very well what to do if someone was giving birth, but she also knew how she’d be in no position to assist when the baby was pushing itself unstoppably out of her.

  ‘The NSV.’ She lay her hand gently on Karl’s which seemed to be permanently clasped to the sleeve of her coat no matter what he was doing; no matter even if he was hauling their heavy suitcases about the station, he seemed to be under strict orders not to let her go. She imagined those orders were Max’s and a smile almost thawed her face. But Karl’s response was surprisingly frosty.

  ‘The NSV? What use have they been so far? People’s Welfare, my foot!’

  He continued to fuss over the luggage, very occasionally using both hands on the big cases. She could see how the wrist of his left hand was giving him some pain, but there wasn’t much even she could do to remedy that. It would always be weaker than the other since he shot it to avoid military service. His cynicism for the NSV matched his disdain for anything Hitler’s government proposed. And then more rogue thoughts buffeted her about with the crowds in the station. There was no strict order from Max to his father to keep a hand on her at all times. Karl was simply keeping his weak wrist out of harm’s way when lugging about the cases. He probably didn’t even care for Erika that much either, she was just the vessel, the thing carrying the cargo that was truly precious to him – his soon to be born grandchild.

  Erika allowed a shiver to shoot up her spine and shake those absurd thoughts from her head. ‘Let’s go to the NSV office. There must be one nearby. And let’s demand some help, Karl.’

  Her father-in-law seemed to appreciate this more belligerent tack and it wasn’t long before they found the office and indeed demanded some assistance under the terms of the Mother and Child Care Programme the NSV purported to promote.

  ‘We have to wait for over seven hours until the next train out of here.’ Karl leant over the desk, the little fog which he made as he spoke (which everyone made in this weather) was fired in the face of the non-administering and un-assisting administrative assistant. ‘The least you can do is give her a place to lie down while she waits.’ He thought about banging his right fist on the table for emphasis, to wake up this feckless robot, but then he thought better of it. He didn’t need two damaged wrists when trying to haul Erika and her ridiculous amounts of luggage across the country.

  The door to the street opened behind them.

  ‘Where would you propose she lay down?’ the robot monotonised, gesturing around the tiny office.

  ‘A woman in her condition…’ Karl began, but was stopped in his tracks by a deep and surprisingly calm voice speaking to Erika.

  ‘A woman in your condition should be lying down indeed!’ said the nurse examining Erika with crystalline eyes. ‘Unfortunately, you can see we are rather limited on resources here, to say the least.’

  Erika almost collapsed with relief at the sight of the nurse. Not really because she was in the presence of another health care professional, but because this woman reminded her, physically at least, of her own mother. It was all she could to do not to wrap herself in the nurse’s beautiful marshmallow arms right there in the draughty little office with the secretary looking blankly on. Especially when she cooed:

  ‘But my apartment is just around the corner. Literally two minutes’ walk. You are welcome to lay down there until your train leaves.’

  The nurse sang everything she said. Her words came like lullabies and Erika knew she would be well rested wherever this woman called home.

  The apartment was simple, sparsely furnished, but immaculate, just as Erika had predicted. When Karl was sure she was comfortable, he went off to find a church that was holding High Mass. Erika marvelled at his devotion, even now after her own conversion, but it seemed his faith was more likely to get them through this odyssey now than the crumbling infrastructure of the country whose government she had put her own conviction in with such surety for so long.

  ‘Now,’ said the nurse, tucking Erika into her own bed where the sheets smelled as if they had just been laundered, ‘I have to go back to work, but I’ll come back later and check up on you, OK?’ She smiled, smoothing a lock of Erika’s black hair behind her ear, which made Erika feel like a little girl again. She loved it.

  The nurse chattered on in a whisper for a minute and Erika dropped quickly and gently into the space between reality and dream, where the nurse’s voice became that of Fräulein Toni, her nanny when she was four.

  And then she was with Fräulein Toni slowly walking the length of her parents’ living room in the fading light. Sometimes hand in hand. Sometimes Fräulein Toni carried her. But she was getting too big to be carried by anyone, so her nanny only did it if she wanted to whisper a story right into her ear or for the extra dramatic effect a squeeze in her strong arms could make. To have a living room where they could walk in this way made Erika think it must have been a very large living room in a very big house. Or perhaps it was just that she was a little girl and so everything seemed enormous – even a cupboard could take on the gigantic proportions of a mountain in the fairy ta
les Fräulein Toni told so well. As they trod the floorboards on which this cupboard-mountain stood it shook a little and the Chinese vases which adorned it clinked together adding a perfectly eerie accompaniment to the tales of evil queens and poison apples in Schneewittchen, of cannibalistic old ladies in Hänsel und Gretel and of cruel-hearted stepsisters and golden slippers in Aschenputtel.

  Erika loved Aschenputtel more than any other story Fräulein Toni told her. She loved the love story. She could endure all the abuse and hardships along with poor ‘Ash Fool’ because she knew Ash Fool’s mother was watching over her from heaven, dropping beautiful gowns and slippers in her lap and making sure that eventually, no matter how unlikely it seemed, the prince would find her and they’d live happily ever after.

  Adolf Hitler loved Aschenputtel too. He loved the story of racial purity. A story which could show children how the aliens will never succeed in crushing the pure blooded heroine. And how the prince, with an unspoilt instinct could distinguish between the repellent intruders and the true unadulterated beauty – no matter what dirty tricks and grotesque acts the aliens employ to try and avoid detection. Cutting off their toes and slicing at their heels to try and fit into the golden slipper! Their evil ways will find them out and their eyes will be plucked out by the beaks of the same white doves that gently dropped the sumptuous gowns and footwear into our heroine’s lap.

  Erika woke as her baby kicked her insides. Her heart was racing and she found herself muttering, ‘I loved the love story, I just loved the love story,’ as she blinked images of toes being sliced off and eyes being plucked out from her cloudy mind.