Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  The banging and the shouting started around midnight. She had been asleep, or at least lying in bed with her eyes screwed shut, for more than an hour. It was Rodrick’s voice moaning and wailing in the quiet street outside. It was his big fist pounding at their front door.

  ‘I love you, Erika,’ his words were slurred with boozing. ‘You cannot do this! You come back to me this instant! Open this door! Open this door!’

  Erika scrambled from her bed and out of her room in a bid to quieten him down before not only her in-laws and her daughter, but the whole street heard. Karl and Martha were already stood on the landing. The looks on their faces! Erika didn’t know what was worse: Martha’s disgust or Karl’s sadness.

  ‘It’s over. It’s finished,’ she hissed at them both in a tone which suggested she was not responsible for the lunatic making a scene at their front door.

  ‘Does that sound like something that’s finished, Erika?’ Karl winced as he massaged his wrist.

  The clumsy thunderous clanging of trucks driving into camp was a sound so alien to the prisoners they were out of their bunks and puffing clouds of vapour into the early morning gloom even before they had to. So many trucks could only mean one thing. A new cohort of prisoners, freighted in from another Siberian camp no doubt. One that was ailing as much as this one. One that had lost as many inmates as Gegesha. It made economic sense to combine the two dwindling populations on one site and close the other. At least that was what the ex-engineer from Heidelberg was saying through chattering teeth to Max as the doctor quietly hugged himself and looked into the back of the first truck to swing around on the parade ground honking its horn festively before grinding to a halt.

  The truck was empty. And so were all the others.

  Max hugged himself a little tighter and stroked the quilted jacket he had been bequeathed by a dying patient, with his fingertips. It was much more preferable than the fox fur coat which he’d traded for a lot of cigarettes and a horse blanket stolen from the stables now sewn into his new jacket as a lining to help him through the winter.

  ‘Perhaps it’s us that are being taken to another camp,’ he muttered to the ex-engineer with a sudden flush of concern for all the relationships he’d forged here in Gegesha (what if he was separated from the ex-engineer? Who would make his vascular clamps and surgical instruments then?) and the supplies they’d amassed under the hospital beds (they could hardly load the trucks up with all that contraband right here under the guards’ noses). He gripped his coat so tightly now he pinched his own skin beneath all the layers. His heartrate was up, his breathing faster. He should have stayed in bed like Edgar, who was convinced there was no good reason to get up whatever the racket outside. When was there ever a good reason to get up before you had to? But as the guards ran to meet the drivers descending from the cabs and the backs of the trucks were dropped opened with a bass drum boom, Max felt inexplicably protective of Gegesha and everything about it. The idea of going to another camp, even one in more clement latitudes, was to him unsettling.

  The open ends of some of the trucks now revealed the vehicles to not be completely empty, but rather carrying a number of crates in which were bottles that the drivers and the guards began handing out to the prisoners who had drifted, in the shadowy way all of them moved these days, closer to the trucks.

  ‘This is how we treat you,’ cackled one of the drivers. ‘You get a bottle of champagne to take home.’

  Fifteen words. Some of which might have made sense in another time or another place, but right now, even though they held the meaning Max had ached to hear for so long, he did not hear the last word. Or if he did his body, having consumed it, could not keep it down and vomited it into the snow. Instead he held a bottle of Ukrainian sparkling wine in his hands.

  This is how we treat you?

  Indeed this is how they had treated him for four years. That hideously cosy fur coat. Those agonisingly brief letters home. A skull bashing followed by a cuddle from his captors. The wonder of electricity with all its burns and electrocutions. Should he be so surprised that they were now handing out bottles of Krim Sekt? They’d probably be smashing him over the head with them in a minute. Or, if they all started glugging down gallons of this stuff now, he’d have more patients with gastric problems than he knew what to do with tomorrow. Then his nine per cent quota would surely be surpassed and he’d be back in the hole for another six weeks.

  ‘We’re going home, we’re going home!’ The ex-engineer from Heidelberg, soon to be simply an engineer from Heidelberg again, danced weakly about brandishing his bottle of plonk.

  ‘We’re going home, we’re going home!’ Others joined in the chant until it reached the timbre of a football crowd, despite there being only a few hundred prisoners left in the whole camp from the thousands that had been captured.

  Max backed away and shuffled inside. He knelt by Edgar’s bunk. His friend had one eye open, clearly irritated by the commotion outside, but by now curious about what he thought he was hearing.

  ‘What’s going on, buddy?’ his words were muffled by his pillow.

  ‘We’re going home,’ Max’s words were muffled by his doubt.

  Not doubt that what the guards said was true, but doubt that he could really go home. That he could handle the transition. After all this time. He could barely believe his own emotions, but he was scared to leave Gegesha. Scared to go to Mengede. Back to his Mama and Papa. To his wife and child. That was it! Some part of his brain argued with another as his body got on with gathering his belongings and shoving them into his bag. That was it: he wouldn’t be going back to his child. He had never even met her, so had never even left. He had spent virtually no time with his wife too since they had been married, so the concept of going back to a wife was a false one too. OK, OK – one thought buffeted another – so you’re not going back to your wife and child if you want to indulge in such semantics, but you’re going back to Erika. The love of your life, remember? The Dorothea to your Max, the person you couldn’t bear to be without throughout your student life. Joined at the hip, as some said. And he felt his hip pressing with delightful discomfort against hers as he wedged himself in that tattered armchair under his blanket in her digs. In fact it was the hip of Edgar on one side and the ex-engineer’s from Heidelberg on the other as they crammed themselves in the back of one of the trucks. The ex-engineer from Heidelberg, soon to be simply an engineer from Heidelberg again – until, that is, his tremors lose him his job and his mood swings lose him his wife, and he becomes just an ex-POW in Dossenheim.

  Funny how, as the last of the gaunt men hauled their light bodies into the truck, Max was thinking about going home to Erika at all. He never for a moment stopped to think that she might not be waiting for him anymore. And he never once thought about Jenny and whether they had a life together beyond Gegesha.

  The truck rattled out of the camp and shook a terrible thought to the forefront of Max’s teeming mind.

  ‘Oh God,’ Max said.

  ‘What is it, buddy?’ Edgar said.

  ‘The letter I sent Erika.’

  ‘The what?’ Edgar shouted over the noise of the engine.

  ‘The letter,’ Max raised his voice too. ‘The last letter I wrote to her told her to forget me, forget her faith… Oh my, what if she believed me?’

  ‘Impossible,’ Edgar said with more surety than Max had heard from his friend in a long time.

  ‘She might have done. It’s been so—’

  ‘It’s impossible, because she hasn’t read the letter,’ Edgar grinned.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because,’ Edgar sighed dramatically, ‘I knew you would one day regret what you’d written so that’s why I took the liberty of intercepting Christoph before he took the mail into town. I destroyed the letter. So no need to worry.’

  Whilst feelings of indignation at his privacy being invaded brawled with his gratitude to Edgar, another far more pragmatic thought was allowed to articulate itself:
/>   ‘How did you persuade Christoph to give you the letter? He takes his duty as postman very seriously. Took his duty as postman very seriously.’

  ‘Everyone has their price.’

  ‘How many cigarettes did that cost you?’

  ‘Oh, no cigarettes at all. Seems the dirty little monk had other predilections and I was only too happy to oblige,’ Edgar winked. ‘Anything for my buddy, eh!’

  Bubi, who had been both shocked and entertained by this little story, giggled, a sound that reminded both doctors of the boy he had been when they had met.

  ‘If you need somewhere to stay, Bubi,’ Edgar said what Max would have, had he been more sure of his own domestic arrangements in Mengede, ‘you know you’ve always got a place with me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Bubi looked as uncertain as Max felt, ‘but I’ll be going back to Poland. Mama and Papa will be waiting’.

  There weren’t many years between the two, but Max felt so envious of Bubi then for having such a simple, youthful life waiting for him; despite being in his twenties now, and despite not knowing yet how his time as a POW would affect both him and his parents, Bubi clearly had every intention of picking up his childhood exactly from where it had been so rudely interrupted.

  Max smiled warmly at the boy until his attention was caught by the view beyond Edgar’s beaming profile of Gegesha receding so unceremoniously from view as Germany had from the back of that train that took him through Romania. It had been a train full of wounded and sick soldiers he’d been charged with transporting from the Eastern Front before his posting in Breslau. The train had to pass so close to the Southern Front the Romanian driver and his stoker were petrified that they’d be attacked and they were threatening to jump off leaving the Germans to the mercy of the Russians. That was when Max had pulled his gun on them and ordered them to keep going. He never had any intention of using it, but luckily the Romanians didn’t know that. So throughout the entire duration of the war he had never used it and then it was taken from him as he stood with a mouthful of brick dust in the rubble that once was the monastery before the Soviets began to herd them like cattle around Breslau.

  As the truck swung past the path that led to his hospital out on the Barents Sea he was suddenly furious at the Russians for taking his gun because right now he wanted to shoot every single one of them. In the face, just like they did to the one-legged soldier in pyjamas outside the bombed monastery. He wanted to see them suffer, see the fear in their eyes as he held the barrel to their foreheads, because he was furious that they had taken his burgeoning adulthood from him, enraged that they had taken his daughter’s early years from him, but what he was more incensed about than anything else was the bewildering yearning he had for Gegesha as it disappeared among the pine trees.

  ‘It’s over,’ Edgar was saying tearfully. ‘It’s finished.’

  And all Max could think of was the guard prodding them into the isolation truck when news had reached them all of the end of the war. Max had said the same thing to that guard back then in ’45: ‘But it’s over!’ And the guard had just replied, ‘So?’ because he knew, as Max did now, that this was far from finished.

  The truck was soon lumbering slowly through the potholed roads in town. Jenny and Isabel, who were chatting by the road, had to hop onto the grass bank to avoid the slaloming vehicle. They looked into the back as it passed and, among the excited faces there, Max’s morose one stood out for her. She shrieked his name and ran after the truck.

  ‘Where are they taking you? Max! Where are you going?’

  He suddenly found himself on his feet, hanging on to the steel skeleton of the roof and shouting with no great enthusiasm, ‘Home! We’re being released! We’re going home!’

  ‘Where’s home?’ she was barely able to keep up now.

  She saw him shrug and the last thing she heard was, ‘Mengede? I’ll be in Mengede, Dortmund. Look me up!’

  Even Edgar had to raise an eyebrow at the recklessness of that. The thought of the fireworks, which would ensue should she ever take Max up on his offer and turn up at the front door of the house he shared with his parents and his wife, both thrilled and alarmed Edgar, and set him tapping out a frenetic swing beat on his long bony thighs.

  Netta was playing the piano when the man arrived. There was a commotion outside on the doorstep. Her mother and grandparents all rushing out with whoops and cries to meet him. Although the doorstep was only a few metres away from her across the living room, Netta allowed the chords her little fingers stretched to play and the gentle roar of flames from the stove, which the piano was snuggled against, to muffle the little riot outside.

  She couldn’t make out if her mother was crying or laughing. The same for Opa and Oma. And this confusion told her to stay at the piano where everything made sense: the fairy dust sound her right hand produced on the high keys; the unblemished perfectly polished black of the instrument before her; the warmth from the green tiles of the stove which towered over her all the way to the ceiling; a carapace of comfort and familiarity.

  Yet in no time curiosity had her using the reflection in the glassy wood, just above the lid where the word Blüthner was etched in gold flowing letters, to peek at the scene behind her. The adults were silhouettes in the square of ghostly white light the open door shone onto the piano. Sometimes the silhouettes were separate, but mostly they merged into one or two bigger ones and Netta knew this meant there was a lot of hugging going on. People hugged when they were happy or in love. But they also hugged when someone was upset, so this didn’t help at all. And then her mother called out to her:

  ‘Netta, Netta! Come and see who has arrived!’

  She turned on the piano stool to see her mother’s face, almost unrecognisable – she hadn’t smiled so broadly in a very long time. But she was trembling too as she presented the man to Netta and Netta to the man.

  ‘Darling, this is Netta.’ Erika’s hands hovered at his arm as he carefully stepped over the threshold, as if she expected him to fall at any moment. ‘Netta, this is your father.’

  Erika heard her own voice quivering, saw her own hands fluttering, but it wasn’t for fear that Max might fall. She was afraid of him for the first time in her life. Afraid of who he might be now. Afraid in case he had heard from Babyface about the distant past, or heard from anyone in the town about the recent past. But also she was afraid that her husband wouldn’t be proud of the part of him she had nurtured and crafted over the last four years; she was desperate for him to love Netta. As desperate as Max was that his parents were enchanted with Erika the first time he introduced her to them all those years ago, in the world before the war.

  Netta slipped down from the piano stool and assessed the stranger before her.

  Max marvelled at the little human before him.

  Netta saw a man who looked like he may be sharp to the touch for his collar bones stood out through his open jacket and his hands looked more like the skeleton’s in her mother’s medical books than those of a person with skin and muscles on top. His jacket was quilted and seemed to sit oddly on his frame, as if it had been made by a very bad seamstress. The inner lining looked to Netta more like part of a horse blanket than the usual material. He held a relatively new looking ushanka (relative to everything else about him) and wrung the furry hat in his bony hands as he knelt in front of her.

  Max smiled at the little girl who had lived so long already in this world without him; who could stand up on her own two little feet without his support; who it seemed had even started to play the piano without his tutorage. It would have been hard enough for him, even with all his medical knowledge, to have come to terms with the miracle of holding his own new-born child in his arms. But to have missed that and be faced now with this new miracle sent his soul grieving and celebrating in a fusion of emotions that was more than his scientific brain could handle – the only physiological result of which could be, apparently, tears.

  Max hugged his daughter though she kept her arms firmly by he
r sides, flinching as those collar bones and equally dangerous looking cheekbones came hurtling towards her like spears. He smelt funny. She couldn’t say what he smelt like, but she knew for sure he didn’t smell like Mama, or Opa, or Oma, or even like Tante Bertel. He didn’t smell like family. And he didn’t look like the wonderful man her mother had told her all about. He didn’t look as strong or as clever. He didn’t even look like the photographs she had seen of her father, so how could this be him? Father was in a land far far away. And could never be reached. This had been the way things were for her whole life. To try and change that now seemed mean, a cruel joke.

  She wriggled free from the man’s embrace and cried, ‘Mama, Mama!’

  Erika instinctively wrapped her distressed daughter in protective arms, all the while fighting an equally powerful urge to push her back into her father’s. She has to love him, Erika thought. She does love him. He’s her father. She must! I must mend this broken picture, Erika told herself. This was not how it was meant to be. Not what she had envisioned every night when Netta had fallen asleep, photo in her little hand of the strong jawed, high foreheaded gentleman, his bright eyes magnified by his round glasses, leaving Erika to doze with the dream that they would be reunited as a family one day.

  Netta unburied her face from her mother’s shoulder and looked back at Max. This is it, Erika thought, this is the moment all is mended. It was understandable. The poor little girl. Her first reaction was bound to be one of fear. I mean, she had never actually met the man before in person and here we are insisting she accept him as her father. She felt Netta’s tiny lungs inflate against her breast and knew it signified she was about to say something. Erika was all ears:

  ‘She’s my mama,’ the little girl yapped at Max with surprising venom. ‘She’s not yours!’

  Erika let out a rather limp laugh to let Max know that it was just one of those silly things children say sometimes, and jiggled her daughter about in her arms as if to expel any more silly things lurking in her throat the way she used to burp her after breast feeding. Karl and Martha added their own unconvincing giggles to the accompaniment of this excruciating moment and Max could not seem to find a place or person in the entire room to rest his hollow eyes on.