Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  There was no answer. Volkov was gone. And Max had the feeling that even if he was right outside the door, the Russian wouldn’t deign to furnish him with an answer to that question.

  Summer had finally clawed its way up to the Arctic Circle. That was the only way Max could have any idea how long he’d been inside. For a few hours every day in March, light – not moonlight, not lamplight, not candlelight, not light from the fire – but real strong sunlight made the gaps in the roof of the cell glow. The first sunlight he’d seen for almost five months. Despite his new environment, it brought such an overwhelming shift in the atmosphere at first he couldn’t quite believe it. He feared the camp had been set ablaze and it was the light from flames gorging on the wooden buildings that burnished the air, but the slowly rising realisation that it was sunshine transported him to his boyhood playing on the farm, squinting up at the bright sky.

  ‘I’ll be Old Shatterhand and you be Winnetou,’ he said to Horst reclining next to him in the hay.

  ‘Why can’t I be the cowboy?’ Horst grumbled.

  ‘Because Winnetou is the big Apache chief. The hero of the story. And you’re much stronger than me.’

  Horst contemplated this for a moment. The hero? Big and strong? Sounded good. But he could have sworn Old Shatterhand got his name because he could knock any opponent unconscious with a single punch to the head. Surely that was big and strong and more like him!

  ‘Come on!’ Max jumped up and the rustling of the hay beneath his feet was the swish of his horse’s tail as he raced off across the range.

  He mounted the cart outside the stables and balanced there on the shaft as if he was perched on a precipice looking out heroically over the Wild West with his blood brother Winnetou by his side.

  And then he fell. Landed awkwardly and screamed in a most unheroic fashion. Horst ran to help but was nearly sick when he saw his friend’s forearm bent in a way forearms should never bend. One of the farm workers rushed from the stables and hurried little Max to the doctor’s surgery, only a stone’s throw from the farm.

  Dr Acker offered no pain relief to the boy, but instead, after pronouncing his diagnosis of a broken arm, he gruffly ordered Max to remove the leather braces holding up his shorts, which he tied around the boy’s broken arm at one end fastening the other to the door handle of his room.

  ‘OK, deep breath, young man,’ Dr Acker squinted at Max and promptly slammed the open door.

  ‘Old Shatterhand all right,’ Horst mumbled with a giggling guilt, glad he had taken the role of the Apache after all.

  The pain for Max from this improvised traction was indescribable but the results were quite astounding. He was back playing out with Horst and running errands for his Papa in no time, despite the cast.

  ‘Go to the hairdressers and get your old man twenty Eckstein, there’s a good boy,’ Karl said handing him the money.

  ‘You’ll have to cut down on those cigarettes if we keep getting bills like this one from the doctor,’ Martha huffed dropping the invoice into his lap for services rendered to one Max Portner Jnr.

  Max scuttled off as Karl took in the figures on the bill and, though he was already halfway down the street in seconds he could still hear his father cry, ‘A hundred and twenty deutschmarks?!’ as he raced towards the bakers.

  The bakers was where he always paused on his errand because it was in the window of that shop that dangled little sacks of Bruchwaffeln, broken waffles, sweet and golden and only five Pfennigs a bag. But when your Papa always gave you exactly the right money for his cigarettes there would never be any change from which you could ask to buy a treat like that.

  ‘When I grow up,’ he said to one of the tantalising bags, one palm flat against the window that might as well have been six inches thick for all the chance he had of ever feeling those scrumptious chunks in his hand – and even less chance now with that enormous doctor’s bill lolling in his Papa’s lap like a vicious cat, ‘I’m going to earn so much money that I’ll be able to buy a lorry load of you whenever I want.’

  He slouched off, head down, to the hairdressers and just outside, his nose full of the odour of Brilliantine hair oil so he knew he was there, he got it: the solution to all his problems.

  ‘If the doctor charges that much just for fixing my arm, just think how much he earns every day. Every week.’ Max’s eyes bulged. ‘That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up. I’m going to be a doctor. And I’ll be rich.’

  As with all little boys, the vow was soon forgotten in the eternity of a few summer days, until he was sixteen and faced with that carnage outside the theatre.

  Max chuckled weakly at his six-year-old self. Twenty-five and a doctor now and yet still he would give anything for a bag of Bruchwaffeln because a piece of bread, three hundred and fifty grams of watery soup, and a cup of water was all that was shoved into his cell every day, although, since he was an officer, he was also treated to twelve cigarettes per day too. Never a big smoker he decided to save most of these – valuable currency in a prison camp.

  Thanks to the arrival of the sun, Max saw the days turn into a week. Without it he wouldn’t have known how long he had been in there. With just his watches to rely on it could have been four in the morning or four in the afternoon. How would you know in the polar night?

  Tick tick tick tick.

  And then when the sun went down he started to see things in the shadowy corners of his cell. Things moving, crouching, lurching, crawling, slithering. His mouth hurt for wanting. Wanting food – even some of his patient’s stolen porridge or a handful of juicy cranberries from the barrel. And wanting a kiss.

  It hadn’t occurred to him until now with nothing to do but focus on his senses just how parched his lips were, not from lack of hydration, but from lack of affection. He closed his eyes, licked his lips, trying to ignore the cracks a recurrence of scurvy was making since he had been in the cell without cranberries and pine needle water, and rolled them together as he had watched Erika do so many times after applying some lipstick before they headed out for the evening. She said she hated him watching her, scrutinising her like that, but she always said it with a flushed giggle that made him think otherwise. He loved examining her, her deliberate confident actions at home, her careful uncertain ones in the laboratory. Alone in his digs whilst doing something as mundane as slicing a tomato he found himself imagining how she would painstakingly remove all the seeds and pulp from hers before she judged them ready to eat. Sometimes he tried to do that too. Most times he couldn’t be bothered and wolfed it down seeds and all, but just imagining her there doing things her way was narcotic to him as much then as now.

  He was watching her eating the perfectly prepared red fruit. He was watching her prepare her perfectly painted red lips. And he was kissing them. Kissing her. And it wasn’t perfectly prepared or perfectly painted, it wasn’t perfectly executed or perfectly finished. It was clumsy and slightly off target sometimes, occasionally there were too many teeth or too much saliva, but it was an elegant awkwardness, just like that ballet by the banister after the summer ball. And each time thereafter that he had to inhale sharply through his nose because her lips were still passionately sealed around his, always felt like the first breath he’d ever taken on an alien planet with a superior atmosphere.

  Tick tick tick tick.

  He stroked the damp crumbly earth he sat on as if it were her hair.

  Tick tick tick tick.

  He heard her voice outside the door, over his head coming through the gaps in the roof.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  ‘Nighty-night, Portner.’ Now her voice was ricocheting inside the bucket and it sounded awfully like Volkov’s.

  And then there was silence. Silence except, as ever, for that bloody watch.

  Tick tick tick tick.

  He ripped the cheap timepiece from his pocket and threw it at the wall.

  TICK TICK TICK TICK.

  He groped aro
und till he found it again, still quite intact, and he beat the ground with it, stamped his heel into it. And eventually the irritating thing shut up and he threw the pieces into the bucket where all the other shit goes.

  Six weeks Max spent in solitary. Volkov was the one who released him. He wouldn’t have missed the sight of Dr Portner emerging from that cell blinking in the sun for anything. Max felt like he had 100lb weights strapped to his feet. His face was swollen, his feet and ankles too. Standing should have been a joy after all that time in a box, but having to report immediately for rollcall, where the men swayed like crops in the breeze, being counted and recounted and herded and re-herded, he soon longed to lie down again.

  In the mess-hut the sight of Horst and Bubi was more nourishing to Max than the skilly could ever be, but he bolted it down nonetheless as they filled him in on the missing weeks.

  ‘We’re losing so many every week,’ Horst sighed, ‘there won’t be any prisoners left in the camp soon’.

  ‘And that’s why, with the population going down, I was even surer that we couldn’t have exceeded our nine per cent quota when Volkov put me in the hole.’

  ‘We hadn’t exceeded it. Volkov knew that. He ordered me to show him the figures the morning you’d gone off to town to deliver that baby. And then the next thing I knew we had two new admissions. Both shot in the foot. Both had no idea why.’

  ‘And guess who shot them?’ Bubi said running his finger round his bowl to get every last drop of broth from it.

  ‘Volkov?’ Max said, doing the same.

  Bubi nodded. Horst and Max shared a furiously helpless glance.

  ‘How long did you spend in the hole, doc?’ The ex-engineer from Heidelberg shoved his shoulder into Max’s to get his attention though their elbows had already been vying for space at the long crowded table since he sat down.

  ‘Six weeks,’ he muttered

  ‘Six weeks! That’s tough. But you know what I hear? I hear that Ivan intends to keep all German POWs here in Gegesha for ten years.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘They can’t do that!’

  ‘I’ll go off my head.’

  Max had heard gossip like this before. They all had, so they took it with a pinch of salt, but the truth was none of them had any idea how long they might be here for. And right now ten years was as likely as one, so he merely said to his engineering comrade, ‘Could you take a look at my glasses sometime today. I think they need a new arm on the right. Could you work some of your magic?’

  ‘Sure,’ the man from Heidelberg said, picking at his teeth with a long yellow fingernail.

  ‘We better get to work then, boys,’ he said to Bubi and Horst.

  ‘We better had,’ Horst said in warmly reproachful tones. ‘But you are being admitted as a patient today, my friend.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are clearly suffering from oedema,’ he said gesturing to Max’s swelling face, ‘and so it’ll be bed rest for you today. OK?’ He rose in a way that brooked no discussion of the matter and Max loved his brother more than ever for it.

  Within a day Max was up and about despite the oedema still partially present, but Horst knew it would be impossible to make his brother lie there and watch his patients suffer around him without lifting a finger so he allowed him to work.

  As Bubi brought his attention to Christoph limping onto the bridge to the hospital, Max felt a flush of guilt at not being around for the past six weeks since he had told the monk to come have his injuries tended to the afternoon after they had last gone into town together, the afternoon Max was thrown in the hole.

  Christoph’s limp was more pronounced than it had been on their last meeting – no doubt exacerbated by the punishing walk he had to do every day – and it took him so long to cross the fifteen metre gangway Max marvelled at how he still walked six kilometres to town and back every day too. But he did. He could tell by the handful of mail he had for the patients today. And that was when Max realised that Christoph, in his ridiculously contrite way, was not here for treatment at all, but just, as usual, to deliver the mail.

  He held three letters in his hand. Including the doctors on shift there were thirty-one men in the hospital out in the Barents Sea that day; the little infirm island of freedom where Ivan wouldn’t dare to tread, with its icy spaces under beds crammed with contraband. In short, a kind of haven, and yet twenty-eight men would shortly feel like the unluckiest men on earth as yet again the letters from their loved ones didn’t get through. And then their injuries would smart more than ever, the infections gnaw at their insides with renewed intensity, they would feel the cold throbbing in their bones more than usual, all accompanied tauntingly by the ravenous ripping of letters from envelopes already opened by Ivan, the satisfied rustling of paper being read and the contented coos of the readers. Max studied the faces of this majority of men in his hospital that afternoon and realised that despite them all being crammed in here together these men were as much in solitary confinement right then as he had been for those infernal six weeks.

  ‘And last, but by no means least: Dr Portner.’

  Max registered his name being spoken and shook himself from his musing to see Christoph’s perpetual smile and his thin hand holding out an envelope to him.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Max said still groggy from pondering.

  ‘This one’s for you, sir,’ the monk extended his arm from its cement bag sleeve until the letter almost touched Max’s sternum, at which he could feel his heart pounding as if it was trying to get at the letter itself.

  But still he wouldn’t take it. Just in case there had been some mistake and then the disappointment would be even greater than that of the rest of the men looking enviously in his direction. He looked down first and saw the address handwritten on the envelope. It was his own handwriting. His own and not his own. It was Erika’s handwriting.

  ‘Oh,’ he said eventually and gently took the letter with a trembling hand. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Christoph chirped and hobbled out over the bridge, back to shore.

  After examining the envelope for so long as if the address on the outside was all Erika had written to him he heard Horst call out, ‘Well, are you going to read it or not?’

  Max looked up and saw his brother grinning as much goodwill towards him as he could muster through his envy.

  Poor Horst, Max thought as he flopped onto the chair by his desk. But hopefully he’ll hear from Eva soon. I mean, look how long it took for me to hear from Erika. I’m sure Eva’s letter is just a few days behind hers.

  His sympathy for Horst was endless, but his empathy was about to be obliterated. He had delayed long enough. He eased the pages from their torn wrapping, making sure to ignore the sense of violation which attended the notion that Ivan had read his wife’s words to him before he had, and began.

  Dear Max,

  My husband! I have rarely had the occasion to call you that since our wonderful wedding day and loving wedding night. I miss you and I am so sorry to hear that you have been taken prisoner, but don’t worry, your friend Paul told me all about it so at least I know where you are and that you are alive.

  I hope you got my letter about travelling to Bernried with your father. He was such a great help on that harrowing journey and, although we lived happily in Bernried for a couple of months, we were evicted by the Americans soon after the war ended. But we found a new house in Mengede, where your father is teaching at the primary school. The house came with the job. It’s a three-storey red-brick terrace where we live now with your Aunt Bertel. I have the attic room which has the most beautiful Tiffany window. It reminds me of the rose window in Freiburg Cathedral when the light shines through it. Oh, I know you’ll love it as much as I do. And at last we are slowly able to furnish the house since the Americans confiscated most of our possessions.

  I will be applying for a license to set up as a practising doctor with the National Health Service when the time is right. Which brings me
to the most important and exciting piece of news. Right now I am not able to work as I am very busy looking after our new baby daughter Netta. She is only a few weeks old as I write this (perhaps she will be a few months older by the time you read this if Paul was correct about the length of time things take to find you up there in the North), but she is beautiful and healthy despite me having to give birth without a midwife and just a doddering old quack and a newly qualified orthopaedic surgeon to assist me! But don’t worry, Stöckel was there to offer his guidance too!

  I hope it is not long before you are allowed to come home and see her. I show her photos of you every day and tell her all about you. She has your blonde hair and your green eyes. Your father spoils her rotten. He dotes on her of course and I know you will too.

  I will write again soon. I do hope Edgar and Horst are still with you and that they are well. Please send them my love and send me a letter soon if you are allowed.

  Love always,

  ‘Dorothea’

  He was a father. Yet he’d had no idea Erika was even pregnant. Her sickness in the fragment of letter he’d retrieved from the monastery garden in Breslau, the symptoms he’d assumed were due to her persistently low blood pressure, the reason for her schlepping across the country with his father, all made sense now and during the following months those missing pages would often write themselves in the frost on the floor of the hospital, in the mildew on the roof of the barracks, in the wisps of cirrus cloud as he walked into town, on the back of the prisoner in front of him at roll call as he sat on the stool he had fashioned for himself from three off-cuts of wood he found discarded in the street. Bending over patients on low non-adjustable beds all day and the occasional relapse of oedema was starting to take its toll on his back and legs.

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to those Germans for their ingenuity,’ he understood one of the guards saying, as the others fumbled over counting heads at the front as ever. ‘If you throw a hundred empty tins at them they will come back with a tank.’