The Soldier's Wife

by Margaret Leroy

He holds out his injured, shaking hands. I see again that part of his right index finger is missing, see the stump of mutilated flesh. A thrill of loss goes through me. I don’t say anything.

  Chapter 63

  I MAKE SOME SOUP from leeks and peas and boil a joint of ham. When the soup is thoroughly cooked, I will add some meat from the joint, cutting it wafer-thin so it will be easy to eat.

  While the soup is simmering, I take an old globe from the kitchen cupboard. I bought it for Blanche, to try to help her with geography lessons at school; she always hated geography. I peer at the globe, at the tangle of countries with unpronounceable names that all seem to be part of Russia now.

  Millie comes up with her rag doll, dragging the doll by the hair.

  “Mummy, are you looking for Kirill’s country?” she says.

  “Yes. I’ve found it. Look . . .”

  It’s much bigger than I thought, at least as big as the British Isles. This surprises me. It has no coast, and looks empty, with hardly any cities or towns.

  Millie peers at the globe.

  “Where’s St. Peter Port?” she asks me.

  I show her.

  “England is here, and Guernsey is here, but it’s far too small to see clearly. . . .”

  I put my finger over the place.

  She frowns.

  “You’re wrong, Mummy. It can’t be. Guernsey is really big,” she tells me, very definitely.

  I remember those moments from childhood—the moments when you begin to get the measure of the world, to have some fleeting sense of its vastness. How that vastness takes your breath away.

  “If you look really close you can see it,” I tell her. “It’s just that tiny pink speck.”

  She lets the rag doll fall to the floor. She touches Guernsey, her finger also covering half of France. She stretches out her hand, encompassing the distance from here to Belorussia in a handspan.

  “Kirill’s country isn’t really very far away,” she says.

  “It is, though, Millie. It’s a very long way. His home must seem as remote now as the moon and stars to him.”

  “Will he ever get back there?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  She cups the globe in her hands, then sends it spinning. The colors bleed together, the whole world a dizzying whirl of color, a vivid, giddy kaleidoscope of greens and browns and pinks. It moves so fast you feel all the lands of the world might spin right off it—flying up high in the air, then settling again as it slows, all shaken about and landing each in a different place. A wrong place.

  The door is flung open: Blanche is home from Mrs. Sebire’s. She walks crisply into the house. She pulls off her chiffony headscarf, runs her hand through her toffee-blond hair.

  “Mmm.”

  She sniffs the air with relish and goes to peer in the pot on the stove.

  “That’s a really nice soup,” she says. “I’m looking forward to that.”

  I see how she swallows as her mouth waters. I feel a flicker of guilt.

  “Blanche, I’m sorry, but I’m keeping the soup for someone else,” I tell her.

  “But I’m really hungry, Mum.” Her voice is tight with protest.

  “I know you must be. I’m sorry, sweetheart. There’s macaroni for tea.”

  “You know I don’t like macaroni. . . . So who is this special someone who gets the nicest soup?”

  “A visitor,” I say.

  “And why is this someone else more important than Millie and me?” she says, aggrieved.

  “It’s not someone more important than you, it’s just someone who needs it more than you. . . . Look, you can have some if there’s any left, when you come back from Celeste’s.”

  “But why all the mystery?” she says.

  “It’s just someone who’s coming by. You don’t know the person,” I tell her.

  She studies my face for a moment, trying to read me.

  There’s a small, awkward silence between us. Her blue eyes narrow, harden. I feel my mouth turn to blotting paper. I wonder if she thinks this person is my lover: I wonder if she suspects about Gunther and me, and this soup kept for someone special serves to confirm all her suspicions. I’ve always protected her from knowing how unhappy we were, her father and me—from her father’s long love affair, from Monica Charles. I think how she must hate me, if she suspects me. Yet it’s safer for her to think this soup is for my lover, than to know the truth—that I am feeding Kirill.

  Then she turns away from me, shrugging slightly. I let myself breathe out. The moment has passed, and I wonder if I misread her.

  “Honestly, Mum, you’re starting to sound like Millie,” she says. “You’re always clamming up, both of you.”

  She puts her handbag down on the table; her gaze falls on the globe.

  “And why on earth have you got that thing out? Millie doesn’t need to bother with all that yet,” she says. There’s an edge of outrage in her voice. “Miss Delaney can’t be teaching her geography already. She can’t be that cruel.”

  “We’re looking for a country,” says Millie, very solemn and important.

  “It’s awful being a child,” says Blanche. “One day you’re having a nice time catching sticklebacks, and the next you’re having to learn all about tornados and things.”

  “It’s a secret,” says Millie. “It’s nothing to do with school.” She presses her lips tight together.

  “You and your secrets,” says Blanche.

  She turns to me, raising her eyebrows, as though to say, She’s off again.

  Millie puts the globe away in the cupboard. She shuts the cupboard door with a small significant crack, like the sound ice makes splintering.

  Chapter 64

  KIRILL SITS AT my table and drinks the last drops from the bowl.

  “Thank you, Vivienne. Thank you.”

  I light our cigarettes. He leans back in his chair with a sigh.

  There’s a question I feel a little frightened to ask, yet something in me knows he wants to tell his story.

  “How did you come here, Kirill? Tell us what happened,” I say.

  For a moment he is quiet. The liquid whistle of birds floats in through my open window, and the languorous scent of my roses, which smell so sweet you can never smell them enough.

  He clears his throat.

  “I lived in a village in the forest, as I told you,” he says slowly, in his high, starved voice.

  “Yes.”

  Millie pulls her chair closer to mine and presses up against me, as she does when I’m reading to her: it sounds like the start of a story from one of our fairy-tale books.

  Kirill’s gaze is on us, but I’m not sure how clearly he sees us. His eyes burn, as though with a fever.

  “One morning in the darkness, the Germans broke down our door. It was four o’clock. They shook me and Danya, my wife, awake. They dragged us outside, and onto the road that led to the next village. Then we were tied together like this.”

  He reaches out and presses the back of his hand against mine. His skin is so cold, his touch startles me.

  “Hand to hand?” I say.

  He nods.

  “We were tied together hand to hand, and they made us spread out in a line across the width of the road. We were told to start walking, taking very small steps. . . . My wife, who came there after me, was at the end of the line.”

  I hear the rawness in his voice. A judder of fear goes through me. I know this matters somehow, that his wife was walking at the end of the line.

  I glance at Millie. Her eyes are fixed on his face. I wonder if I should tell her to leave us, if I should protect her from hearing this. But something stops me, some sense of the strength of their friendship—a sense that Millie has the right to hear the story he tells.

  “We walked, and the Germans followed some distance behind,” he tells us.

  I can picture it, but I don’t understand, don’t know what causes the horror I see in his face.

  “The Red Army parti
sans were fighting the Germans,” he tells us. “They lived in the woods around us. The partisans had been planting mines.”

  Millie frowns.

  “I don’t know what a mine is,” she whispers to me.

  Kirill answers her. “A mine is a secret weapon that is hidden under the earth. If you step on a mine . . .” He throws his hands in the air, to mime an explosion. “If you do that, it is over for you,” he says.

  Millie’s eyes widen.

  “The Germans were using us to search for mines,” he tells us. “Whatever we did, we would die. We would die if we stepped on a mine. And if we stepped over a mine, and the German behind us blew up, they would shoot us because we had missed the mine. So we walked without hope, because either way you would die.

  “We did the little we could. We walked in the tracks of horses. We tried to avoid those places where the earth had been disturbed, because death by explosion seemed worse than death by shooting. From fear, my mouth dried up. I was weeping, all of us wept. Our tears falling half blinded us. That was what it was like. . . .”

  He is silent for a moment. I can feel my heart pounding. Millie sits quite still, very pale, her wide eyes on his face.

  “I remember the sudden shake, the noise. I had never heard such a sound. We were thrown to the earth,” he tells us. “Then afterward, the silence. For a little while, our ears were stopped; we could hear nothing at all. There was blood and soil all over us. I knew even before I turned, I knew that Danya was dead. She lay still, her body torn open. The Germans cut the rope on her hands that tied her to the next person. They left her lying there. They made those of us who were still alive walk on along the road. . . .”

  His voice fades.

  I look at him, but I can’t see his face anymore. While he has been talking, dusk has come to my room, and the shape of him is black against the window. Behind him, the sky is a profound blue, and in the Blancs Bois a nightingale is singing its rapturous song. I don’t understand how these things can exist in the same universe: the nightingale, the soft blue of dusk—and the pain that drenches his voice.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, but my words sound all wrong, too loud for the small quiet room. “I’m so sorry about Danya.”

  He nods slightly.

  “That night,” he says, “they locked us in a storeroom in the village. I wept for my wife. I thought that it should have been me at the end of the line, that I should have died, not Danya. That it was my fault. That if I had let her join the line first, then she would not have died. I still think this. . . .”

  I open my mouth. I’m about to say, It’s not your fault, you couldn’t have stopped any of it. . . . But I know that wouldn’t comfort him. There is no comfort for him.

  “The night before she died, we had quarreled. She said that I was always working and had no time for her.” There’s a choke in his voice—I have to lean forward to hear. “I was not always a good husband to her. I was not a good man. My last words to her had been angry words.”

  I can tell from the anguish in his voice that this torments him above everything, all the brokenness, the unfinished business of their parting.

  “I would have died to save her,” he says. “But I wasn’t given the choice.”

  I have heard how people will blame themselves, if others die around them and they are left alive. Of the guilt you can feel for having lived. I see this written in his face.

  “There was nothing you could do,” I say. “Nothing.”

  My words are empty.

  He sits there for a long while, his cigarette held in front of his face, not speaking.

  Millie pulls my head down toward her and whispers to me.

  “I want to know what happened next.”

  As though, after what she has heard, she’s become suddenly frightened of him, afraid to speak to him directly.

  He hears her and stirs.

  “I will tell you the rest now,” he says. “The next day we were taken by lorry to Minsk. That is our capital city. From Minsk we were sent to Germany. There was a big center at Wuppertal, where there were many prisoners. The old and the weak were led outside, and we never saw them again.”

  Millie looks up at me. A question floats in her eye.

  “What happened to them? To all the old people. What happened?”

  “Ssh.” I put my arm around her. “Ssh.”

  “Then we were taken to a place by the sea. We were put on a ship to come here. I had never seen the sea before,” he tells us.

  Millie murmurs to me, amazed.

  “But the sea is everywhere.”

  I hold her close against me.

  “The ship did not sail for a very long time,” he says. “We had no food, and many died. The Germans poured water into the hold for the prisoners. We had to do this to catch the drops. . . .”

  He shows us—holding his mouth open, tilting back his head, cupping his hands as though to catch water.

  “Then we sailed here,” he tells me. “That is how I came here.”

  He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray. He leans forward on the table, resting his head in his hands. He is exhausted: telling his story has used up what little strength he had.

  We sit quietly for a long time. The clock ticks, the shadows reach out toward us. All words are taken from me.

  “You should go back now,” I say at last.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I take him through the back door and out through the garden to the lane.

  “Come to the barn tomorrow,” I say.

  “Yes, Vivienne. Thank you.”

  He vanishes into the blue dusk.

  When I get back to the house, Millie is still sitting in the twilight of the kitchen.

  “You need to go to bed now, sweetheart,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  I turn on the lamp.

  She looks up at me, blinks in the sudden light. She’s been crying; her pale face gleams with the shiny tracks of her tears.

  I put my arms around her. I hold her so close I can feel the fizz of her heart.

  I’m expecting questions to tumble out of her. Why did these things happen to him? Why were they so cruel to him? Why did his wife have to die? So many questions to which there are no answers.

  But she presses into me and says nothing.

  Chapter 65

  IT’S THE DAY before Gunther is due back from leave. A storm is brewing: the sky is dark as a bruise. As I walk through the fields, a sudden wind pushes my hair in my mouth, and makes quick, small whirlwinds of the dust and dry leaves on the track.

  Today Kirill has something for me—some hedgerow flowers he has picked, herb Robert and toadflax tied together with wire to make a posy.

  He holds the flowers out to me, with a small, courteous bow.

  “For you,” he says. “I have no other way to say thank you.”

  “They’re lovely.”

  I press the flowers to my face. They have a green polleny smell. I’m so touched—that out of all his poverty, he has found a way to give me a gift. And I know that this will matter to him—that he is a proud man. That his terrible neediness is hateful to him.

  I take him back to my house, and Millie joins us in the kitchen. I feed him the soup I have made. As he eats, I put the flowers in a glass tumbler on the windowsill. They’re so pretty, but fading already, their pinks and purples browning at the edges. Once picked, hedgerow flowers have only a short time to live.

  When he has eaten, I sit with him at the table. Millie has her chair pushed close to mine; I put my arm around her.

  Tonight, he talks again about his birthplace—the birch forest, the gentle rivers; the workshop where he made his violins. I imagine him—younger, his face not yet marked by suffering, his head bowed over his work, intent. I think of the complexity, the delicacy, of that work. As I imagine it, his hands are whole and healed again.

  “I will go back one day,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, you will, of cou
rse you will.”

  And then we sit in the quiet—companionable, as though we have known one another a very long time.

  As we leave, he glances at the picture that hangs on the wall of my kitchen, the Margaret Tarrant devotional print—the Christ Child in his crib, with angels all around, their wings vast and intricate, and colored the soft, matte blue of bluebells.

  “Do you believe in all this?” he asks me, pointing to the picture.

  “In a way,” I tell him. “Some of it.”

  “My mother still believes—she keeps the family icons secretly in her attic,” he tells me. “But I don’t believe anymore.” His voice is weary. “None of us in the camp believe. None of us. None who have seen what we have seen. You cannot suffer as we have suffered and still have faith,” he says.

  There’s nothing I can say to that.

  “I don’t believe in God, but I still feel angry with him,” he says. He smiles slightly. “That makes no sense, does it, Vivienne?”

  I take him out through my garden. A few brown leaves are falling, and the sound of the wind in the trees is like the sea, like the surge of shingle: the sound that Angie has told me presages rain.

  In the shadow of the hedgebank, I put my hand on his arm.

  “Kirill, there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t want to say this in front of Millie. But after today, it won’t be safe for you to come here anymore.” It hurts, telling him this—knowing what it must mean to him, to come and sit in our home. “One of the Germans at the house next door is coming back from leave. He comes to this house sometimes.”

  I wonder if Kirill will be appalled—that a German visits my house. If he will question me. If he will doubt me. But he just nods.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “But I’ll bring you food in the barn, like Millie and Simon used to do. If you aren’t there, I will leave it under the tractor.”

  “Thank you, Vivienne,” he says.

  “Take care,” I tell him.

  “And you, Vivienne.” He bows a little. “I am so grateful,” he says.

  He turns from me, passes into my darkening orchard. The bruised cloud presses down on the land. Soon the rain will begin.