Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘Not sure. Someone from the other unit, I suppose.’

  Edgar was close enough to hear the question and was already devouring the letter over Max’s shoulder.

  ‘I know who that is. The sergeant. Over there.’ Edgar pointed subtly to the other side of the wagon.

  Max examined the epaulettes on the man’s shoulder to confirm he was looking at a sergeant.

  ‘Poor fool.’ Edgar felt genuinely sorry for the man, but he couldn’t help but feel it was the universe corroborating his own belief yet again that there was only one type of lover: a foolish one.

  Max felt a surprising embryo of rage developing in his solar plexus for this bloody woman who was being unfaithful to Tim. He hoped Tim’s mother found out very soon and gave her hell for it. She sounded like she’d be a formidable and protective mother if the writer hadn’t had the courage to tell her yet. But courage clearly wasn’t the writer’s strong point. Max despised her weakness. It wasn’t just because Charlie was “first”, as she so immaturely put it, it was because he was there. At home for some reason. Instead of being at the front risking life and limb for his country like Tim, Max thought with an unusual level of patriotism. Her inability to wait for him disgusted him. Or more accurately her inability to wait for Tim made Max wonder if Erika would ever get tired of waiting for him. He could have gone home on leave in a month or two and seen her but, now he was a POW, how long would it be? What if Erika met a nice man back in Kunzendorf? A nice man like Charlie (who Max hated as inexplicably as he hated Tim’s girlfriend).

  Max looked at Tim across the heads of the forty or so men between them. Some of those heads had lice, some the signs of ringworm. Tim looked to be one of the healthiest soldiers among them all. His eyes looked bright, hopeful. The love of a woman could do that, Max thought, as he recalled the first time he had kissed Erika.

  It wasn’t until the leaving ball in July. Three months after that first conversation in the Kakadu Bar. Max was so desperate to kiss her by then, but he struggled to find the courage. Erika was never backwards in coming forwards, he thought, so why doesn’t she initiate it? If he only knew how the butterflies swarmed in Erika’s stomach he might have taken more confidence from that. She was as paralysed as he was because none of those other flirtations had ever meant as much to her has Max. At the end of the ball they walked back to the house and he sat on the stairs outside her door, the stairs that led to his room above. She stood in front of him, leaning her knees on his, exploring his hand with hers as they chatted about their friends, about the ball, the dancing. Neither of them could tell you what was said then, but both could recall the sensuous ballet their hands performed like it was yesterday.

  ‘Kiss me kiss me kiss me!’ she thought.

  ‘Kiss me kiss me kiss me!’ he thought.

  But it was too important for both of them. They were petrified that the physical manifestation of their love would somehow contaminate the spiritual and intellectual elements which had served them so well until now; which they were afraid could not be surpassed. They were both doctors – well, they would be one day soon – and the biochemical mechanics of attraction held no mystery for them anymore. But this connection between them was evidently more than physical. Beyond any of their scientific knowledge, and therefore to be venerated.

  But the evening had finally run its course. Short of a kiss, there was nothing more to be said or done.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  She sloped off down the short corridor between the stairs and her door, allowing her hand to linger on the banister as she went. He watched her go. Watched the hand begin to trail off behind her too.

  Then he grabbed it.

  She froze. Looking in the direction of her room. Her hand held out behind her like a ballerina.

  And he found himself kissing her palm.

  She melted. Feeling anything but as balanced as a ballerina, she turned back, steadied herself with her free hand and watched him through the banister. Once, twice he kissed her hand then held her palm to his face and inhaled, clamping it to his mouth with his own trembling hand on top. She moved back to stand in front of him, and stroked his hair, kissed his head. They were now a wonderful pile of hands and heads. Bowed heads, like supplicants. Praying for a future together.

  Give me all the medicines in the world, Max thought, but none of them can do what love can do, and he slowly folded Tim’s letter and pushed it into his pocket.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Edgar said with a perverse hint of disappointment in his voice.

  ‘Nothing,’ Max said although inwardly he told himself he was acting as a doctor in the best interests of a patient.

  Horst whispered, ‘He should know. I’d want to know.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t,’ Max mumbled. ‘Not here. Not yet.’

  Horst didn’t argue. He just began leafing through the pile again. Calling out names, perhaps before Max could intercept any more.

  Max turned to his ration instead and was just about to attempt to sink his teeth into the bread they were given each day – dipped in boiling fat and left to dry so that when it finally reached them it was like eating a stone – when his adopted brother uttered words of ambrosia for him to feast on instead.

  ‘Are there letters that you’ve written too in here?’ Horst said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Max said, though he knew the answer. At least he prayed that he knew what was coming.

  ‘Isn’t that your handwriting?’ Horst handed some pages over with a shivering hand.

  Max tried not to snatch. ‘No,’ he gasped weakly. ‘It’s Erika’s. We have the same handwriting.’

  ‘Max and Dorothea,’ Edgar piped up. He and Horst grinned at each other, watching as Max devoured the words on the page as any one of them would have done a plate full of wurst and potatoes right then.

  She felt herself fall.

  She felt hands claw into her aching forearms. She felt a strong grip hoist her into the compartment. She heard a woman scream as the tunnel smacked the open door from its hinges.

  ‘Erika!’ Karl was beside her, but he was beside himself too.

  ‘My God! That was close, eh, Miss?’ the chap was smiling down at her as he offered a hand and offered her his seat.

  There was a mixture of excitement and indignation from the other passengers in the compartment after the drama of Karl and Erika’s entrance. Excitement first for the obvious reasons which soon settled into quiet indignation at the fact that they all now had to sit in a compartment with no door on it with the January air whipping their legs and faces as the train hurtled on obliviously.

  ‘Could be worse,’ said the chap who had introduced himself as Benjamin. ‘Could be raining or snowing.’

  Erika giggled at Benjamin’s apparently unquenchable optimism. Karl was snoring away in the seat next to him, exhausted, his nerves frayed somewhat, as he had put it before dozing off.

  Erika should have been exhausted too and no doubt she would ache tomorrow after using muscles she hadn’t known she still possessed, but the fresh breeze, to use one of Benjamin’s positive adjectives, rushing through the carriage kept her alert.

  ‘Where are you travelling from, Erika?’ he asked.

  ‘From Kunzendorf in Neurode. It’s where I grew up. Where my parents still live, but we all thought it would be better for me to spend some time with my husband’s parents,’ she nodded at Karl, ‘in Bernried, since the baby is coming soon’.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m travelling from Freiburg. Trying to get to my family in Berlin.’

  ‘Freiburg?’ Erika was so excited to hear about the town she had so many fond memories of. It was, after all, where she had grown to love Max. ‘I went to university there.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I only went back to Neurode a couple of years ago.’

  ‘How funny to think we may have passed in the street there or sat in the same café i
nches away from each other before today and yet we only properly meet when you’re hanging on to the outside of a speeding train somewhere outside Reichenberg.’

  Erika blushed. She wasn’t sure why. At how ridiculous she must have looked clinging on to the train like that? Or at the romantic way Benjamin painted their missed meetings in Freiburg? She tried to distract them both from her blushes by asking about the university town. It worked. For the first time since he’d helped her off the floor of the carriage she saw the cold breeze threaten to blow out the candle of optimism which shone from behind Benjamin’s eyes.

  ‘It’s a bit of a mess I’m afraid, which is why I left. It was bombed in November. The 27th to be precise.’

  Erika was stunned. Benjamin noted her reaction.

  ‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘Why Freiburg? We thought it was safe from the French with the Black Forest to the east. And it was. But we also thought, what with there being no industry in the town to speak of, the British planes would leave it alone. But it seems nowhere is safe any longer. They are even bombing civilians too now.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Erika said.

  ‘It was a bit foggy on the 27th,’ Benjamin explained, ‘but it had cleared by the evening and the town was all silver in the moonlight. That helped the bombers no end. I heard the bells on the cathedral chime eight o’clock. I was reading in my room. Two minutes later the early warning sirens sounded, but so did the crashing of the first bombs. I went down into the cellar with the rest of the people who lived in my house. It was what I always imagined it would be like in an earthquake. The cellar shifted about and rattled in ghostly ways. Then there was this banshee wail above us, all the ladies began to scream, there was a shattering and hissing and sweeping of air from the southern basement windows which deafened us all and left us groping about blind in a cloud of dust. The neighbours broke open the hole in the cellar wall to find out if we were still alive. I wasn’t sure at first. We all looked like windswept trees on a hillside, all twisted in the same direction from the blast. Twenty-five minutes later and it was all over. Except for the time delay bombs which kept going off through the night. The city was in flames. We eventually headed for the caves on Schlossberg hill for protection from the bombers and from the raging fires. You were taking your life in your hands to work your way through Kaiserstrasse; we had to climb over high piles of stone, beams, iron, wire mesh. It was like a new world, a desert of debris, if you like. Brick and splinters covered the cathedral square ankle deep, but guess what?’

  ‘What?’ Erika could barely speak through her sadness.

  ‘The cathedral was completely intact. The house behind it swept away. The entire ring of buildings around the square collapsed, but the cathedral was totally untouched. How wonderful is that?’ he smiled, his buoyancy back. Perhaps that was the genesis of Benjamin’s positivism, Erika thought, if he didn’t have it already, because the sight of the cathedral towering over the destruction might just be enough to instil such an attitude in her too.

  ‘That’s really wonderful,’ she agreed, but then found herself adding greedily, ‘And the university?’

  ‘Ah.’ He put a consoling hand on her arm in advance of the news. ‘Not so intact I’m afraid. I remember passing the Medical Centre there. It was engulfed in black smoke. Doctors and nurses rushing about outside spreading blankets on the ground. I heard women screaming and men groaning and I just wanted to get away from there. But then I remember hearing the crying of babies. The sound of new-borns, you know? And it made me linger a while. Because, I know this might sound weird to say, but it was a pleasant sound. Because that’s what babies are meant to do, isn’t it. Cry, I mean. It’s when they’re quiet that you should worry.’

  Erika nodded and Benjamin’s hand, which had slowly retracted to a more modest distance, was now back clasping her forearm.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. I hope I’m not upsetting you talking about babies when…’

  ‘No, no, you’re right. I’m sure it was a good thing to hear.’

  ‘It was, but I’m afraid I was moving on again soon. I had to try and walk in the middle of the street because flames were shooting out of every window on both sides of the road and joining together overhead. Trees were throwing down their glowing branches at you as if they were alive, but then the tarmac was getting soft and made walking slow going like one of those dreams where you run and run but don’t get anywhere.’

  ‘But you weren’t hurt yourself, were you?’ Erika began to look her new friend over with a doctor’s eye.

  ‘I wasn’t, no, but so many were. I heard of people trapped in the swimming pool who kept jumping in the water with their clothes on to escape the intense heat as the ceramic tiles all around them heated up like an oven, until the roof collapsed on them. I saw someone being dragged out of the river, half their body was one giant wound with shreds of clothing stuck to it. And then I walked passed the cinema where the wall had collapsed. Inside I could see all these moviegoers sitting in their seats, all looking quite calm, as if they’d just fallen asleep watching a very boring film, but I keep remembering their faces, just their faces because they were all cherry red. It was quite a sight.’

  ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning,’ Erika said recalling her studies.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They were all poisoned by carbon monoxide, I suppose. The red colour of their faces is a sure sign.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked, amused and intrigued by her knowledge, rather than threatened by it as some men might be.

  ‘I’m a doctor. That’s what I was studying at Freiburg.’

  ‘A doctor, eh? Beautiful and clever! Wow!’

  That hand was there again. Erika patted it with her own as she laughed modestly at Benjamin’s compliments. She didn’t feel it was anything to be ashamed of. Who would not enjoy such compliments, she told herself, especially when they felt as bloated and unattractive as she had these past few weeks, though her eyes kept bouncing around the compartment making sure Karl was still very much asleep.

  Horst, Lutz and Edgar watched as Max poured over the fragments of Erika’s letter. A letter which he had carried with him all this time without even knowing it. A link to his beloved he didn’t know he had, which is why he savoured each word, each phrase, each linguistic mannerism of hers even more than he would have done if it was delivered intact in that air drop all those weeks ago. He lamented each missing page, each singed edge. Not only was it a tantalising gap in the drama of her own story, but as ever he was desperate to feel he knew what she felt about him one hundred per cent. The good and the bad. He hated it when there was bad, but he always made it his mission to try and put it right, after he had recovered from the knife which, knowing there was bad, drove into his guts. Then, when he knew she was head over heels in love with him again, unreservedly so, he could luxuriate in the good, feel Rhett Butler bold and Mr Darcy dashing like the other boys at the Rheinterrassen, fizzing with the confidence he only usually had in the classroom or on the ward.

  What if she met a Charlie, like Tim’s lover had? The thought bubbled up again like gastric reflux.

  At least Papa was with her, he reassured himself as he read on. She wasn’t likely to go off with another man right under Papa’s nose. And she’s on her way to my folks for some reason, he thought, smiling at the picture of his wife living with them like their very own daughter. Perhaps something had happened to her home in Kunzendorf. To her parents. God, please make them OK, he prayed.

  The cattle train shuddered over some uneven rails as if trying to shake Max back to his current reality. For a moment it succeeded. He found nothing bad in the letter, nothing to concern him about her feelings for him, but if he did… he started to panic about how he could possibly put things right. He couldn’t go down to her room with his blanket and snuggle up on the armchair, he couldn’t revise Latin with her in her bed, they couldn’t go hiking or skiing, or go out dancing, or just have a cathartic argument, as she called it, or a debate as he prefe
rred to describe it. All he could do was write her a letter. He‘d done that before. She loved literature, she loved words, letters worked a treat, but this time he had no idea if the letter would ever get to her. If the Russians had any intention of providing a postal service for their POWs. Somehow he doubted it. He read on.

  He read about his father, who must have gone to get her from Neurode. The first page was missing so he had to assume that. About their arduous journey by train. About his father bribing the guards with cigarettes and chocolate. About her feeling ill for some reason. Probably her blood pressure, he thought. About the crowds and the conditions on the trains. He looked up at the faces of filth and famine around him, breathed in the stench and tried very hard not to think of Erika as being a little overdramatic. At least she could get off whenever she wanted!

  The cattle train stopped as he read about his father and her hanging on to the outside of a moving train near Reichenberg when the pages ran out. He began sorting through the rest of the pages in the backpack. At first in an orderly way then gradually more and more frantically, creating an autumn of paper over his knees and the knees of his colleagues who were crammed up next to him.

  ‘Woh, woh there, brother,’ Horst put a hand on Max’s flailing arms. ‘Let us help you.’

  ‘There must be more, there must be,’ he said to no one in particular.

  Edgar looked at his distracted buddy with pity. There but by the grace of God go I, his bachelor’s face said. He tried to share his pity with Horst. But Horst wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘Let’s just try and help him, eh!’ Horst snapped at Edgar and handed him a pile of letters to look through.

  Edgar handed some to Lutz with a gesture that said: for God’s sake, Lutz, let’s just try and help him, eh!

  ‘Do you think I could have a look through when you’re done?’ a soldier called out.