by David Fraser
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Exactly nine days. It’s 5th December. You had a bad wound in the thigh.’
‘It was a splinter of glass. From a bomb. An air raid. We were at the railway station.’
‘“We”?’
Anthony nodded and then sighed. He supposed in some extraordinary way they were still on different sides and he’d best say the minimum about Robert. Or were they?’
‘My leg doesn’t feel too bad now.’
‘The splinter missed every main nerve and artery. It went through muscle and flesh. You were very lucky. But it started to become infected quickly, and you had a high temperature. Now it’s just a question of getting your strength back, and the tissue’s mending.’
Anthony lifted her hand to his lips and started kissing it gently, lingeringly. She smiled, still a practical smile but, he noted with joy, with the love that he remembered in it and in her eyes. Was it really possible that after years of separation, amidst the chaos of a world war, committed as she was to an opposing side in that war, she could – did – still love him? As he knew, and had never doubted, that he loved her? Or was this a delirious dream?
Anna patted his cheek with her other hand.
‘You’re not going to be fit for – very much – for a little time, you know!’ She bent and kissed him on the lips.
‘Anna, you must be running a terrible risk having me here. I was going to give myself up, you know. I’m an escaped prisoner of war, the worst that would happen to me would be the punishment cells.’
‘I know you’re an escaped prisoner of war.’
He looked at her and he knew with humble and astonished joy that to this woman her human duty had been instantly clear.
‘I knew it at once. That wasn’t difficult to guess, although first seeing you gave me a fearful shock! But now you can’t move – as you are. And if you gave yourself up they’d start asking how you had your wound dressed and so forth. No, my love, you must stay for a little, until you are strong enough to walk properly.’
‘Can I really stay here without being found?’
‘Yes, but you must do exactly what I say. You must never leave this attic – I’ve got a wash basin, I’ll bring water every day, empty it for you. I’ve got an old – what do you call in England, those old-fashioned lavatories one empties by hand?’
‘Commodes.’
‘I’ve found one, and lifted it up here – very heavy! Later, when you are really better, it should be possible for you sometimes to come down, maybe at night.’
‘If there’s nobody but your mother-in-law, bedridden, a girl cook and two cleaning women by day, then there’s no human being to set eyes on me after the end of school, is there? Perhaps I can explore a little more quite soon.’
His hand, still without strength, moved, caressing, from wrist to forearm.
‘It is not so that there is no other human being, not at all,’ said Anna. ‘There is also Franzi. Your son.’
Several weeks went by and the winter grew harder. As Anthony grew stronger so did his restlessness increase, but so also did all his old passion for Anna well up again. She was strict in the régime which she imposed and he obeyed her absolutely. He could imagine what she was risking. She brought him books from the library at Langenbach. Sometimes she brought a newspaper and he tried to deduce from the manifest lies and distortions what was actually happening in the war.
They talked of Marcia. Anna spoke of her with affection.
‘Frido loves her, you know. There was another, a man called Toni Rudberg. Attractive, promiscuous – I think she lost her heart to him. He disappeared, like so many, somewhere in Russia. But Frido has always loved her.’
‘It’s caused us all – my parents – awful pain, her being here. I can’t get used to the idea of Marcia, spending the war – well–’
‘On the other side? And courted by German officers? Your little sister? Is that what you mean?’
‘I suppose that it is.’ But it was both wonderful and poignant to hear that Marcia was well.
On the subject of Franzi, Anna was adamant.
‘He must not see you. Children cannot understand secrets. It is essential that he knows nothing – is in a position to say nothing. He is five years old, very bright. He would ask questions, say something unintentionally to Hans, the garden man, or to one of the cleaning women. Or to Fraülein Wendel, she is always keen to talk to him.’
‘Fraülein Wendel?’
‘She directs the school. A Nazi. She distrusts me.’ It was astonishing how easily they slipped into a sort of normality in conversation, despite their bizarre circumstances, Anthony thought. Franzi, however, complicated life greatly. Anna looked after him entirely herself as well as taking the major part in over-seeing the farm at Langenbach and caring for her mother-in-law. There were a thousand things to be done or to arrange in the old house, trying to maintain its existence under the shadows of war. Anna seemed to do the work of five women. And accompanying her much of the time, it appeared, was Franzi. Sometimes she would appear in the attic by day. Anthony would say.
‘Stay for a little!’
She would explain, Franzi had been promised a story, or a ride in the donkey cart or a game in the snow. She brought Anthony’s food for the day early, with a thermos of ersatz coffee he drank with gratitude and distaste. Then she came in the evening, with something cooked. They ate together then, perched incongruously on collapsed chairs long declared redundant in the Schloss.
‘Couldn’t we go down?’
Anna would shake her head. Franzi was a light sleeper. It would, Anna said firmly, be utterly disastrous if he saw Anthony.
‘So I am not to meet my son!’ Anthony was resigned.
But once, when the school was not in session, on a Sunday, he persuaded a somewhat nervous Anna to take him to one of the first-floor rooms with a window opening on the garden.
‘I’ll be very quiet. I’ll lock the door. I’ll not show myself at the window, I promise. Take him into the garden, let me watch him through the window. I’ll sit on the bed, well back from it.’
‘Franzi’s going to the house of the farm manager – a social call, there’s a four-year-old granddaughter! I’m taking him there and collecting him after an hour or so.’
‘Take him past the window, across the grass there.’
She had done so and Anthony feasted his eyes on his son. Later he heard three taps, their special signal, on the door of the bedroom and unlocked it. Anna was smiling, her eyes shining.
‘You saw him?’
He nodded. Anna came in. Anthony asked himself, ‘What exactly am I feeling?’ But he knew the answer now.
‘So that was Franzi. That was our son.’
Anthony had looked at the little boy at first with disbelief, with a sense of detachment. He could not easily think of Franzi as flesh of his flesh, a son, a Marvell. Suddenly, as he had watched, Franzi had turned and raised his left hand high above his head, small fist clenched in a gesture of triumph or emphasis to something he was shouting to Anna, something Anthony could not hear. And Anthony immediately remembered that his own mother had always reminded them of his, Anthony’s childhood gesture of the raised fist. It was the same! Great God of bequeathed characteristics, of mysterious and inexplicable inheritances, it was the same!
Hilda had often bored them, affectionately –
‘Anthony was a proper little Communist! Clenched fist salute, only it was always his left fist and he raised the arm high so it wasn’t quite correct, I suppose!’
‘Oh, Mother, we’ve all heard about Anthony’s salute!’
Franzi had raised his arm again, shouting, inaudible through the heavy, closed window. Anthony felt weak. He could not now take his eyes from Franzi. He followed every move the child made with fascination. He longed for this moment to last. All too soon, Franzi was away, running, calling, radiant, untroubled.
‘So that was Franzi, that was our son!’
It was, he
told himself, his dreadfully weakened condition that made his eyes swim with such easy tears. Anna understood. She kissed him gently, held his hand firmly in silence. Anna understood well and the understanding brought her contentment.
‘Only Frido knows,’ she whispered. She had explained that she had, some time previously, thought it right to confide in Frido. ‘I hope that does not make you angry?’
‘It makes me proud.’
A little later Anthony said,
‘Who is in the house?’
‘It’s empty except for my mother-in-law. On the other side, off the hall.’
Anthony drew her down beside him on the huge four-poster bed, his arm firm around her.
‘You’ve got much stronger this last week, my darling!’
‘Yes,’ said Anthony, his hands busy, his mouth buried, his heart beating. ‘I think so too. Much stronger.’
After that he used to say, ‘When’s Franzi going to see his little friend again? Next Sunday?’ And she would chuckle and say that something, perhaps, might be arranged.
Sometimes Anna would spend some hours with him in the attic at night, but she was nervous of this, always afraid that Franzi might look for her, find her nowhere and start hunting or even disturb old Frau Langenbach, leading to subsequent questions and complications. Yet in spite of the discomforts, the concealments, the absurdities of their situation, their love-making gained from the dangers with which it was surrounded. Anthony’s physical hunger for Anna grew with what it fed upon. She was like a gazelle, he thought, large-eyed, slender-limbed, desirable, elusive: elusive – yet always and quickly caught if within reach! He could never have enough of the smoothness of her skin, of the way she came to him with such smiling, frank enthusiasm of the body, of the immense pleasure she took in giving pleasure.
One day Anthony whispered,
‘My darling, I’ve never really understood how you came to marry Langenbach. You didn’t love him, and you’re the last woman in the world to marry for money, or position.’
Anna looked solemn.
‘It was a crime. I told you it was wicked of me, long ago, in London. But –’
She told him, caressing him, stroking his hair, that although Kurt Langenbach quickly showed her that she could never love him he was an interesting man, ‘It was impossible to be bored with him! He was quick and original. Interesting!’
And Anthony said, as evenly as he could, ‘He must have touched something in you, darling!’ It was as easy, he found, to be jealous of the dead as of the living. Anna told him, very seriously, that her marriage had been able to help her beloved mother. She had seldom talked of her mother, who had died suddenly only a year after the marriage to Kurt Langenbach.
‘I tried not to let her know I was unhappy. But after she went, it was very lonely.’
He learned more and more of Anna’s early life, loves and recollections.
They made love with ever-increasing urgency and energy. Anthony listened to Anna’s soft tones as she talked, and realized he was seeking to record them on the phonograph of his mind, to be able to play that beloved music over and over, when lovers were separated, all afar.
One evening, Anna said, ‘Listen, it’s Christmas next week. I must spend all my time with Franzi. The school children start their holidays tomorrow.’
Anthony suffered, as he had several times in the last few days, a twinge of bad conscience.
‘When am I going to go?’
‘My darling, your leg can’t be strong enough. You’ve recovered a lot of energy remarkably quickly,’ she squeezed his arm, ‘but the truth is I cannot, I simply cannot allow you to do what you need to do, which is to walk, to strengthen your leg muscles. They will get stronger, and you should walk up and down at night, all you can. But you’re not yet fit to travel in the way you tell me an escaper has to travel.’ For Anthony had talked often of his plans, and although he supposed it was just possible that Jan Vogt could make another train journey without instant discovery, he knew how arduous it was going to be to walk and run, to burrow and hide and somehow make his way through German positions to British or American lines. In mid-winter.
In weaker moments, Anthony thought that perhaps the best plan would be to wait until the Allies crossed the Rhine and entered Germany. It couldn’t be long. Then many of the problems would, surely, solve themselves. But on 19th December, the day after this conversation, Anna brought a newspaper to the attic in the evening. Anthony was feeling particularly restless. There was snow on the ground and a good deal of snow covered the skylights. The atmosphere was close and depressing.
He glanced at the headlines.
‘This must be nonsense!’
He read that the British and Americans ‘Were in full retreat’ in Belgium, and that the victorious Panzer Armies of Generals Dietrich and von Manteuffel were marching through the Ardennes and about to cross the Meuse. The Meuse! Anthony refused to believe it. Nevertheless, something must have happened, and whatever it was didn’t sound as if it had brought nearer the day of a triumphant Allied march into Germany. Or the day when an advancing British Army might find, whatever they made of it, Captain Anthony Marvell in the arms of his mistress: or, perhaps, playing in the garden of Schloss Langenbach with his five-year-old son.
Christmas passed. Anna brought further newspapers to the attic. They told Anthony that the Führer had ordered the troops in the west to pass, temporarily, to the defensive. But one day, during the first week of January, 1945, Anna came to the attic as usual, but looking drawn and wretched. At first she said nothing, gave him a glass of wine, poured one herself and sat down on one of their ancient, battered chairs.
Anthony saw her looking at him with a frown of concentration. ‘I don’t know what exactly to do. You see, your existence depends on me. You’re not yet strong enough to leave. And God! I dread your leaving! But I’ve got to go away for a little, some time soon.’
‘For how long?’
‘Two days perhaps. One night. I shall arrange for one of my cleaning women to sleep in the Schloss to be with my mother-in-law. On the ground floor.’
‘Of course I’ll be all right, don’t be absurd! Will you take Franzi with you?’
‘Yes. I must pay this visit before the school holiday ends. It would be much too dangerous to be away and leave you here with the Wendel woman poking about on her own.’
‘Anna, I’ll be perfectly all right. Give me some apples to eat, whatever you like. I’ll be able to go at night to the first floor for water and so forth. I’ll be careful. Anna will you tell me, what is this visit you must pay?’
‘It’s to Arzfeld, which you know from long ago. I must see my cousin Kaspar von Arzfeld.’ She went on, almost inaudibly. ‘Frido has been arrested. He is to be brought before the court, it seems, in about three weeks’ time. Kaspar is to be allowed to visit him.’
‘Why – arrested?’
Anna looked at him steadily. ‘My love, you can’t hope to understand a lot of things that are happening here and we daren’t ask much ourselves. Just be glad that you have the quite simple task of finding your way, with a wounded leg, through the backdoor of one Army and in at the front door of another! I shall go to Arzfeld for the night, next Tuesday.’
She started crying gently. Anthony had read of the July plot in Oflag XXXIII but knew little of its spread or significance. He supposed Anna was referring to it. These, he reflected, were waters in which it was difficult for an Englishman to swim. He kept his arm round Anna’s shoulders and they sat for a long time in the dark. After a time she said,
‘There’s another thing. There’s an odious man, a Nazi official, quite senior in Himmler’s SS, that sort of thing. He used to be the Party boss here. He’s been for several years with the SS in Poland. He’s a horrible man, called Schwede. There’s a rumour he’s coming back here.’
‘Will he make trouble for you personally?’
‘It is always possible,’ said Anna. She was trembling now. ‘Always possible. He certainly
hates me. He does not know anything against me, against this house, we have always been careful. But now we must be particularly careful. His return here can do us no good.’
‘Is he really as bad as all that?’
‘Yes. Really so bad. He is a type, but as bad of the type as you can imagine. And you do not know what some of these people can do.’
They were quiet for a little, sadness and fear hovering over their love.
‘Anthony, my darling, it is time for sleep. I must leave you.’
‘Do you remember I quoted from a poem of John Donne, soon after I first held you in my arms?’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘Sometimes, Anna, love, he put things better than anybody else. Here’s something he said in a sermon. It’s not a bad thought to take to bed.
‘Every night’s sleep is a Nunc Dimittis;
then the Lord lets his servant depart in peace.
The lying down is a valediction, a parting,
a taking leave (shall I say so?) a shaking hands
with God, and when thou shakest hands with God,
let those hands be clean.’
‘And do you feel that, sweetheart? Do you feel your hands and my hands clean?’
‘Very, very clean.’
Part VI
1945
Chapter 22
‘I was to give you a message of love and strength from Anna Langenbach, our beloved cousin,’ said Colonel Kaspar von Arzfeld. ‘She paid me a visit some days ago.’
He had travelled from home with considerable difficulty through the frozen landscape and shattered cities which constituted Germany in that January of 1945. Destruction was universal. Towns were reduced to deserts of rubble by the weight of Allied bombing. Movement by rail became daily less feasible as the air raids destroyed marshalling yards, rolling stock, stations, signal networks, and in many places picked up and tore into scorched pieces the rails themselves. People lived in cellars beneath the ruins, moving as little as possible, listening always for the shriek of sirens, the menacing roar of aircraft and gunfire, suffering increasingly in the towns from the shortage of all sorts of supplies which the destruction of transport had produced. From the beginning of the war food, in the German cities, had been difficult. Now there was everywhere the stench of hunger and death. Everywhere was grey, cold and empty of hope.
