Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  The boy was sleeping, as he used to, in a stretcher beside his mother’s bed. Ava sat next to Emil, closer than necessary, on the bigger bed. The window in the roof was open to the warm night. The river ran beneath them. They spoke in German now that Hannah was not present, though the air was filled with the possibility of her listening on the other side of the wall. ‘You told me she was your wife. You insisted I divorce you so that you could marry her.’

  ‘That’s what I want, but we cannot marry. She would lose her citizenship.’ He looked at the sleeping boy, smiling at something in his dreams. He looked again at Ava. He had never been able to tell what thoughts lay beyond her eyes. ‘Ava, you cannot go back. You must stay. There is room here for you. You are safe.’

  She laughed briefly, gestured at the wall. ‘And she would tolerate this?’

  He paused. ‘Yes. She would. She knows what will happen when you go back.’

  ‘Does she? Perhaps she could tell me.’

  ‘Germany will go to war, you know this. And if the war lasts long enough, he will go. Before that, they will make him a Nazi. They will poison his mind. He will become—’

  ‘We are German. We live in Germany. If we stay here, we are stateless, like you. You think your girlfriend will support us all forever?’

  ‘Hannah would surprise you. You don’t know her. You can help with the hostel. Hannah cannot cook or sew. She does her translations. You would be useful, practical. It’s perfect—we have so much room.’

  If he knew what to say, he would say it, though he could only imagine the difficulty it would bring. If he could just keep Hans here, everything else could be arranged.

  She spoke loudly, not quite shouting. ‘If you are not married, then you can come back. You could prevent me from marrying Karl. It is right, it is decent, for the parents of a child to remain together.’ She dropped her voice, glancing at the boy. ‘We could be a family, live in the country, if this is what you like, the quiet life.’

  He looked down. Her hand was on his thigh. He stared at it for a moment. ‘You’re mad. How can you say this?’

  ‘She is a clever little woman. They are like that. You like her brains. But you will tire of that. I think perhaps you already do.’

  ‘Who is like that? I will not believe you mean such things. I would marry her in a heartbeat. If I return to Germany, they’ll shoot me on sight. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘That was a mistake, what happened to your father. Karl knows people. He said they were no good, those men. They were drunk. It was a tragedy. They have been disciplined. Life is much more orderly now. Those early days, it’s true they were chaotic.’

  He removed her hand from his leg. ‘Ava, please. Please. If you return, there’s nothing I can do for him. And Karl, he has decency I know, but he will do what he needs to do.’

  Her eyes dulled. She looked away. ‘I think it’s time to sleep. Perhaps you shouldn’t be in here, so late at night.’ She gestured towards the wall with her chin. There were lines at the edge of her mouth he had not seen before. He brought his hands to his face, rubbed his forehead, his cheeks. He could not look at the boy, sleeping in the lamplight. He left without another word, descended the stairs, and the second set, down to the millrace, sat beside the dark rushing water, letting the sound flood every corner of his mind.

  A deep bounce at the foot of the bed woke him. He could not open his eyes straightaway. The image of the wolves on the table, ready to descend on something below—it took a moment to shake off. In the bright room the boy was jumping, grinning, watching their faces for the moment they would at last acknowledge him. He laughed as Emil stirred. The sun cast small squares of light on the bouncing boy, the white bed, Hannah, sighing. He smiled, closed his eyes again on the twitching pillow, the mattress reverberating with the weight of the boy flinging himself towards the low, sloping ceiling. ‘Good Lord,’ Hannah murmured, eyes still closed. ‘It’s like living with a chimpanzee.’

  Emil reached up and grabbed the boy, bringing him down mid-jump. The boy giggled and snorted with the effort of trying to contain his laughter. Hot limbs flailed. Hannah edged out of bed. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she said, tying her dressing gown over her nightdress, patched at the elbows. She was off, heavily, down the stairs with the boy careering after her. Emil was left in the quiet on the sunlit pillows. His heart beat quickly, as though he were the one who had been jumping up and down on the bed.

  Down in the common room, he saw that two of the German boys had risen early and filled the enormous china pot with tea. The day before, they had asked Hannah to show them how to do it, having never drunk tea before. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘what could there be to learn? You put in the tea, and then you put in the water.’ She went through the ritual with them. The warming of the pot, the proportion of tea to water, the length of time needed for it to brew. You would have thought she had been packing an opium pipe for the attention they paid, but he saw that their interest charmed her, and now they had repaid her attention by making the tea for her before she came down.

  As he reached the bottom stair the boys were pulling out chairs, whispering to Ava, ‘Setzen Sie sich bitte,’ gesturing for the women and the boy to sit down with exaggerated gallantry, gleeful. Emil had insisted no one speak German at meals and the boys spoke almost no English, so there was this charade of no one being able to communicate in speech. He nodded on his way through to the kitchen. The German group at this hour, in their pyjamas, smelled of milk and biscuits and laundered sheets. He heard from the galley the boys discussing the walk they planned to take this morning and Ava and Hans murmuring to each other in their secret way.

  Hannah followed him into the kitchen and began to bring out the cheese and ham and cold eggs from the day before. She cut up bread, two entire loaves of it. He watched her piling up food onto boards and platters, her hands rough with food, handling bricks of cheese as though she were going to build a wall with them.

  ‘They will not stay,’ he said.

  She paused, ready to take the first platter. ‘Did you really think they would?’

  ‘I think if I can get them here, maybe . . .’

  ‘Is there nothing we can do?’ she said. ‘It is unbearable.’ She left the platter, laid buttery fingers on his forearm. ‘He is a wonderful boy.’

  ‘I asked her. She says no.’

  She studied his face for a moment. ‘Whatever you manage to arrange with her, you have my support. I like him so much. I can get used to anything else, I imagine.’

  ‘Yes. He is a good boy.’

  When everyone had eaten, Emil stood at the door to the kitchen observing in action the precise drill he had taught the boys. On the first evening they were assigned roles, and performed them twice daily with joyful solemnity. He watched as two from each long table cleared the plates, moving down either side of the table and staggering to the kitchen with piles as long as their skinny arms. A scraper at the bin. A washer. A wiper. Two to put away. Two to sweep the floor. Hans played the clown, pretending he was about to drop great piles of plates, but the youths would not be put off course, though they laughed as they swept his feet, put foam from the sink in his hair. At some point in the proceedings Hans tired of the games and wandered into the courtyard. He was often drawn out there by the arrival of the milkman with his dray and immense Shire horse, blinkered and docile in spite of its mass. Or a butterfly, or the unpredictable tide of his blood, carrying him off on some secret errand.

  When the floor was clean, the tables and kitchen sideboards spotless, the boys began to assemble in a row along the wall, trying not to smile as they stood to attention. Lined up like this the differences in their size and physical maturity were stark, though they were all thirteen or fourteen. The tallest was as tall as Emil and much wider around the girth. Next to him, the smallest was only a little taller than Hans and just as thin. There was a little dark boy at one end of the row who held himself apart. How did you slip in with these? Emil wondered as he waited for the boys to still th
emselves.

  ‘Hans!’ he called. ‘Attention!’ He took his position at the centre of the floor beside the rope that hung from the great beam bracing the building.

  The boy burst through the kitchen doorway, realising from the configuration of the room that his moment had arrived. ‘Me first!’ he cried, flinging himself at his father. Emil managed to peel the boy off long enough to pull up a trapdoor at his feet and Hans was immediately yanking off his shirt in such a hurry that he left his cuffs buttoned and his hands became stuck in the sleeves. Undeterred he pulled his shorts down with his shirt still hanging inside out from his wrists. The boys in their row were holding in laughter. Emil bent forward to help him with the last buttons and handed him the rope silently.

  Hans positioned himself at the edge of the square hole in the floor and looked up at Emil, his face open, full of trust. Emil wanted to reach for him, gather him in, and then they would run together, across the fields, until they found some warm, dark barn that smelled of hay and animals. He nodded and the boy jumped, disappearing through the floor. In the same moment came the splash, the whoop, the cheering of the older boys. Through the little square window, black water surged over the dappled marble of the boy’s body, and he gulped and choked and laughed for perhaps a minute before Emil signalled the first two boys forward to haul him up, dripping, laughing, onto the floor of the common room. Hannah had fetched a pile of towels from the line in the courtyard and Ava took one for Hans, came forward to wrap up the shivering boy, kissing his wet forehead as he beamed at her.

  The rest took it in turns, peeling down to their underwear, leaving a little pile of clothes in their place in the line. Hans stayed to watch them all, towel around his shoulders. Some were nervous, but all were more nervous still of being shown to lack the courage to jump. At the end, when the boys had gone off to dry themselves and dress for their hike, and Ava too had slipped away, Emil began to unbutton his shirt. With the others gone he stripped naked.

  ‘You look like you’re wearing a white bathing suit!’ Hans said. Hannah laughed. He looked down. His body was white to his elbows and his knees where it had been covered by clothes on his long walks through the fields or along the towpath. He laughed and stepped out over nothing, hands grazed by the rough rope as his weight threw him downwards. The plunge into icy water, as though his blood was transformed into a cold gas. He might be a boy himself. The lake on Sundays, the river that summer when he was very young. He had simply wanted to swim and so he did. He still remembered Thomas’s face. Later, crossing the Dutch canals, his clothes piled on a tray stolen from the windowsill of a farm kitchen and pushed ahead of him across the water. The water still smelling of the ice of winter, not long thawed, flowing around his body like a tide of chilled fear.

  The cold black water enclosed his face. He let his body run horizontal with the stream. When he opened his eyes, lifted his head, in the square of light above was the dark shape of the boy’s head, glinting in the room. He was looking down at him, his chin resting on crossed wrists on the floor. He saw too that Hannah’s legs hung into the dark space beneath the building. He could make out the fleshy balls of her bare feet, the faint wet sheen of her calves flashing as she swung her legs in the spray.

  He could stay here, flowing in the river, seeing them above whenever he opened his eyes. But when he opened them again the boy had gone. For Hans, to be awake was to be moving. Emil let the water run over his head one last time and began to pull himself up into the sunlit room, the rope scratching between his thighs, boards warm beneath his feet, Hannah bringing a thin dry towel. There were strands of red in her curly dark hair. He pulled her towards him.

  ‘You’re getting me wet.’

  ‘So you will get wet.’ But he released her, began to pull on his clothes from their heap on the floor. She fastened his shirt buttons, having to stretch to reach his collar.

  ‘What will you do? What can I do? Shall I talk to her?’

  ‘Oh no.’ God, no, Hannah. You poke like a child at a clam. It will snap shut on you. ‘No, I walk and think. It is impossible to talk to Ava.’

  The clouds had settled low over the fields by the time he was free of town. The air felt damp but the striking of his boots on the bumpy road made his body feel better, not so restless as in the hostel. He liked these English days where the air wet your skin slowly over the course of a long walk. It was a waste of his hours, to spend them without Hans, but in any case Ava had heard the boy cough after his dip, and would not let him out on this damp day.

  On his walks his brain had always solved his puzzles for him, told him which way to go. Whatever decision had revealed itself to him by the time he returned to the river, the little bridge, would be the one he followed, no matter the difficulties it scattered in its path. Without a plan of one kind or another, you were a strand of a dandelion, drifting across the fields, fetching up wherever the breeze set you down.

  At the far edge of the field beneath the road he caught a streak of white, the German boys in a line at the edge of the pasture, white shirts catching the weak light against the dark green hedge. What must the English make of them in their matching shirts and neckerchiefs? Strange boy scouts perhaps. He remembered being one of such a group, before the war. That feeling of the world opening up to the touch. Their bodies were filled with the near uncontainable urge towards whatever they would do, whatever they would be. They would feel like this, with this degree of purity, until they reached some gore-strewn front. Then never again except as flashes, brief, thrilling urges borne out of the past and quickly lost. If he were king, he’d have them all stay.

  They went through a gap in the hedge he could not see from here. Disappearing one by one, hidden on the other side by an orchard, wandering into the circle of a witch’s spell. A cloud of those leggy flying insects the English called daddy long-legs flew up in his face from the grassy verge beneath his feet. When they cleared he saw the shining rail of the train tracks catch a shaft of sun. Next week he would take Ava and Hans on the train to London and then to Harwich for their ship. It did not seem possible. Some event must intervene. The boy’s room already smelled of the soap with which Ava had always washed him. It was his room now.

  The hiking group reappeared at the top of the field, near the rail lines. He had told them to keep away from the tracks. There were a few spots where you could get stuck at the bottom of a steep cutting and had to go through a blind tunnel to get out. He had found that out the hard way, jogging, chest burning, through a dank blackness towards the arch of light, hoping that was not a train he heard above his ragged breath.

  Having reached the top of a rise he sat on the gnarled roots of a tree and took his water flask from his satchel. He traced the line of the boys, growing smaller along the cutting, the head of the group stopping at a bridge where one rail line passed over another. Emil delved in his satchel for his birdwatching binoculars, lifted them to his eyes. It took a moment to find them, blurred white shapes in the fields. They were gathering in a blob by the bridge. He focused the lenses until they became individual shapes. A couple leaned over a map, rested on another’s back. One handed the other something and he struck it against the map: a pencil, a mark. He stood, keeping his binoculars on them, packed his flask, began to walk quickly down the road, which would meet the bridge half a mile down.

  When he reached the bridge, several minutes later, out of breath, they had gone. He leaned on an oak, resting in its shadow. He took out his binoculars again and scanned the railway line further on. He found them, gathering again, but they had left the train tracks. Now they had climbed the embankment to the A road that led in one direction to London and in the other to the coast, to Southampton. He refocused the lenses. Again they had grouped on a bridge, this time across the Itchen. He cursed. His soldier’s mind was awake. He knew what they were looking for: the bridges, the places where rails and roads crossed. The most efficient positions for explosives, the places you could approach unseen, where interruptions would cost t
he most.

  He turned, retracing his steps towards Winchester. He was in no hurry now. He would go to the police and what would happen would happen. It was not about these boys that he thought. There was nothing to be done for them, about them. His mind was a white iron sheet, cooling into shape. The plan he needed was revealing itself in the only form possible.

  The women were not speaking at dinner. In fact they were sitting at different tables, and it would be possible to miss their antagonism amid the noise of the Germans eating except that the mood had spread. The boy sat at the head of a long table staring into his stew, taking a resentful mouthful every now and then as though his mother were standing at his shoulder, threatening the loss of some privilege if he did not eat the food he had been given. She was at the other table, making a point of speaking in German to the three or four boys around her. She glanced across at Emil every now and then, delivering a blank-faced challenge. Hannah sat beside him, fury evident in each scrape of her spoon against china.

  Before dinner, in the kitchen, she had told him: ‘She as good as called me a Jew.’

  ‘What did she say, truly?’ He took the wooden spoon from the pot and licked it. Dinner was ready.

  ‘She said I was a traveller. That I did not understand her because I had no homeland.’ She slammed down a pile of plates on the sideboard. ‘I was born in this country. You should have heard the way she said it! Oh, she is a Nazi. Why did you ever marry her?’

  ‘Because of course she was not a Nazi. She was a nice girl who liked to dance. She is not a Nazi now. You have been to Germany. You have heard the way they talk. It’s a disease.’

  ‘Oh, I know! I know. Why did I even try to speak to her? I have made it all worse.’

  ‘It makes no difference at all. If you are an angel, she will not listen. This is what I tell you.’

  Now Hannah busied herself by studying the boys who were passing down bowls for dessert, laughing and thrusting their spoons into their food. Emil had just finished making it, rhubarb crumble with custard—a recipe learned from Hannah’s mother—and the common room was filled with the smell of stewing fruit and cinnamon. He finished in moments, like the boys, and watched their faces. They were grimacing at each other, thinking the adults did not notice. For once the boy did not try to get himself included in their games.