The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

  She looked down into the garden, thinking for a moment that she might see Jeremiah’s white tail bobbing up and down somewhere among the undergrowth. If she had managed to get out, if the man had let her go, Lydia would have run away through the woods, to the village or the railway line, or just out across the marshes. But then where, she wondered. Who would she go to? What would she do?

  As she padded back to the wardrobe, she had an idea. She hurriedly folded the pamphlets around her calves and pulled her socks up over them. She went to her mother’s dressing table and checked the drawers, but nothing there needed to be hidden from him.

  In her own bedroom she took her identity card from her suitcase and went to search through her books. Her A History of England had a number of maps of the country and of the local area, and she carefully folded the relevant pages, making the crease good and sharp, then tore the pages out and returned the book to its shelf. She gathered her own stories from the shoebox beneath her bed—she didn’t want him reading them—and pushed them all up inside her dress, along with the pages of maps. When she was done she stepped out onto the landing. Looking down the corridor at the closed door at the end, she took a deep breath and slowly walked towards it. She stood outside for a moment and leaned in so that her ear was almost against the door. She thought she could feel the wood breathing. Something inside. She took a step back. Not now. Not today. But if no one else came back to Greyfriars, she would have to go in.

  She could hear him in the hallway, then the front door opened and shut, followed by the sound of footsteps crunching across the drive. She went to the top of the stairs and leaned over the banisters, listening. More footsteps, stones crackling under boots, then a dull twack; something fell to the ground. She would have to be quick. She clung to the edges of the steps where they were less likely to squeak as she carefully made her way down. Creeping to the front door, she squinted through the keyhole. She couldn’t see much, but the garage doors were open; her father’s rusty lock and chain were lying broken in the gravel. She turned the handle and pulled but the door wouldn’t budge. She tugged furiously at it, then felt in her pocket for the key, but it wasn’t there. Had she left it on the little side table when she’d first come in? She must have done, but now it was gone.

  She ran into the kitchen and tried the back door, pulling at the handle, and then twisting it and pushing at it. The bolt was pushed across at the top and she reached up on her tiptoes to pull it back. She tried the handle again, but the door still wouldn’t open. Studying it more closely, she felt her stomach suddenly turn. The door was nailed into its frame.

  She ran out of the kitchen and hurried from room to room, desperately now, trying to push open the shutters at the windows one by one—but the planks were still in place, nailed across them on the outside, so that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t push them open. She stumbled back into the middle of the sitting room and saw the telephone on the side table. She’d call someone. Anyone. Get somebody to come. But when she lifted the receiver and listened, the line was dead. She heard nothing but the sound of her own breathlessness and then her sudden, sobbing tears.

  The motorcar was a Crossley Torquay Saloon with a sliding roof. He remembered them from when he’d been in London; his music tutor, Professor Aritz, had owned one too, although this was older, a ’33 model. Still, it looked in good condition, and while the wheels’ spokes were grubby, it had only a few dents and hardly any sign of rust. He walked around the garage admiring the vehicle and occasionally giving one of the wheels a nudge with his boot. Even in the dimness of the garage the front lights gave him a bug-eyed stare. He had never had a motorcar of his own, and this was a particularly fine one; the bottom half a milky cream, while the top half and the sliding roof were a smart jet black. Inside were brown leather seats, and the woodwork was so beautifully finished that even through the murky windows he could see the polished grain.

  He opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, resting the pistol in his lap, then looked in the mirror at the garage doors behind him, slightly ajar, and the hot afternoon sun burning through the gap. He ran his hands around the steering wheel and across the polished dashboard. The seat was surprisingly comfortable, and he inhaled the slight tang of leather and polish. He studied the dials and pedals, familiarizing himself with them. There was no radio. He had tried tuning in the wireless in the sitting room to find German broadcasts, but all he could pick up with any clarity was the BBC Home Service.

  On the back seat was a neatly folded picnic blanket of green and blue tartan. He imagined driving to picnics in this car, along the twisting, turning English roads. Out of London into the heart of the country. Henley, Oxford, and then, perhaps, on into the Cotswolds…

  Eva had enjoyed picnics. Their first afternoon on their own together had been a picnic in the Tiergarten during the May Day celebration and parade. The day had been unseasonably warm, full of people enjoying the sunshine, kicking balls about and playing games, drinking and laughing. He could see them now, past the duck pond, more and more people joining the line along the parade route, shuffling about as they tried to find the best spot to take up their positions. Fathers carrying sons or daughters on their shoulders, wives and mothers with woolen blankets, children with paper windmills and footballs, bunting swinging from the trees and lampposts. And all the flags, hundreds of flags; everybody holding one. They had found a quiet spot beneath a couple of trees and laid out a picnic blanket along with the food they’d picked up from Hertie’s department store on Dönhoffplatz. He had surprised her with a bottle of wine, pulling a couple of glasses from his pockets. She had looked so pretty in her summer dress with the sun dappled on her skin through the leaves. The light fluttered like butterfly wings across her face.

  He pulled the starting control out to its fullest extent and turned it, then switched on the ignition and operated the starter. The car choked and spluttered, the whole vehicle juddering under him with the effort and then puttering out. He tried the starter again and the engine coughed and died. He sat for a moment, waiting. He didn’t want to flood it.

  He remembered the conversations. Even back then there had been the vague talk of war. Eva had a brother, Bernhard, who worked in the new Air Ministry building on Wilhelmstraße. He said the rumors were all unfounded. There weren’t any plans to expand Germany beyond what it had already reclaimed in the Rhineland and Austria, and those had both been rightly theirs. Eva said she didn’t believe a word of it. What does silly old Bernhard know anyway? He’s just a pen pusher.

  They were late joining the throng of people lining the parade route through the park. Although they ran along the line with their picnic hamper and flags, they had caught only the briefest sight of the official cars through the mass of excitable bodies. The noise—claxons, cheers, and music—had been almost deafening. And as the crowds dispersed again, he thought for a moment that he had lost her, among all the hundreds of faces.

  They took a walk around the park in search of ice cream and stopped on what he now considered to be “their bridge,” asking a passing couple to take a photograph of them. It was an act that he would soon learn Eva would insist upon, on every afternoon stroll they took there, on every future picnic and parade, as if this bridge was a reminder of that first delicate and quivering flush of romance, and each photograph taken in their usual spot and pose—half-turned towards each other with an elbow on the rail—fastened them just a little tighter together.

  In the garage he tried to start the car again, but the engine wouldn’t take and the air filled with fumes. He cranked down the window and sat, thinking. Then he tapped on the fuel gauge. Empty, of course. Not even the English would be stupid enough to abandon a car full of petrol.

  If there is a war, Eva had said, I mean another one, what will we do?

  The comment had come quite out of nowhere.

  Do? What do you mean?

  Well, we’ll all get dragged into it somehow, I suppose. I can’t just play in an orchestra.
What good will that do? I’ll have to turn my hand to something useful, something good.

  Her mother, she had said, thought getting married and having children was useful.

  And then she had stopped herself and laughed, thinking maybe that talk of marriage and children on their first turn together around the park was perhaps a little presumptuous.

  But he hadn’t minded at all. And, in time, that had been their plan, he thought as he sat in the Crossley, staring at the empty petrol gauge. After the war.

  In the study she pulled out a road map of England, and another of East Anglia, a walking map of Suffolk, and another, barely used, of the nearby Fens. She took down her father’s leather-bound atlas from its shelf and, with barely a thought, hurriedly ripped out several of the pages. She opened up the desk drawers. They were all in a mess as if someone had already been rummaging, the identity cards, ration cards, and her father’s bank statements gone.

  She could hear the car’s engine coughing several times and stopping, then coughing again as he tried to start it. She gathered the maps and torn pages up inside her dress and hurried across the hallway into the sitting room. DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS. She pushed the piano stool aside and scrambled under the piano; then, taking a hair clip and bending it open, she got down on her hands and knees and slid it along the edge of one of the floorboards until she felt some resistance. She could hear him still in the garage, the car coughing and choking. She fumbled with the clip but it kept flicking out of the crack. She straightened it and tried again. Her mother had twenty pounds in cash hidden. I know it’s daft, she had said, but it makes me feel better, if anything should happen…

  Outside now, it had gone quiet. He’d give up with the car before long and come back in. She fiddled desperately with the hair clip, but her palms were sweaty and the clip kept slipping from her hand. Then, with a delicate click, the tiny catch her father had fastened unhooked, and with the tips of her fingers she managed to prize the broken floorboard up. She lifted a few folded bits of paper out of the hole and checked, but her mother’s money was gone.

  Before marriage and a family, there was Eva’s father to contend with. His daughter being a musician was something to be proud of. But a future son-in-law? Pah! He had made it quite clear that music was a profession delicate enough for women, but any man participating in it must surely be of questionable character. Germany hadn’t been made in the music halls after all, but in the trenches, in the thunder of battle. With the exception of Wagner and a few traditional folk songs, he pronounced, music had done nothing to cajole the German people and was, at best, a passable distraction on a Sunday afternoon—and only then when there was nothing better with which to occupy the soul. It would certainly not make Germany great. Or a son-in-law worthy.

  He had only recently signed up again, feeling like so many others that it was his duty and privilege. In those first few weeks of the training he had felt a camaraderie with other men that he had never experienced before—the sense that together they were on the cusp of something great, something worth fighting for. And in the months preceding the war he proved himself to be an elite soldier. He had a level of awareness matched by few and could tune his ears to the slightest sound, while his ability to remain undetected out in the field had brought him to the attention of the NCOs. None of this mattered to Eva’s father though, who still branded him a “musician”—and no amount of hobnail boots or cross-fire action, or even his later Brandenburg training, was likely to change that.

  He climbed out of the car and looked around the garage for a petrol can. In the corner, piles of black sheeting lolled about on a workbench, cloth sacks sagged against the wall, pot-bellied with potatoes, and tatty spiderwebs drooped and dripped from the overhanging beams. He dragged aside cans of paint, a toolbox, a scuffed water bucket, and the sleeping coils of a hose, but there was no petrol.

  That first afternoon, they had walked about the Tiergarten and eventually found themselves back at the same picnic spot. She had lain on her back, her hand drifting across the grass and picking the heads off daisies, casually flicking them at him. He had lain beside her, propped on an elbow and swigging the last remnants of wine, and had told her about his childhood in Bavaria. How his grandfather had taken him hunting almost every day and poaching most evenings, so that he had learned not only the skills of stalking, he said, but also of survival; and then how, as an older boy, he had joined an Outward Bound group, refining his skills on weekend treks in the Rhön Mountains and the Black Forest and even Austria, where they’d spent a week walking the Eastern Alps and catching marmots and mountain hares.

  She had laughed. Do boys never grow out of hunting? That, and playing at wars.

  What do you girls like to do then? he asked.

  We like to lie on our backs in the warm sun and pick daisies and look up at the clouds and find things in them.

  And she had shown him: a bear with a frown, a plump bunch of grapes, the underside of a fluffy sailing ship as it passed slowly over them.

  At some stage that afternoon they had watched a couple of Brownshirts grasping each other in a drunken headlock and staggering around in circles, trying to pull each other to the ground. Later the same pair would drag a young Jewish man out onto the lawn and, forcing him onto his hands and knees, make him eat the grass.

  God, look at us, Eva had said. We’re turning into animals. The sudden change in her had quite surprised him. People everywhere, sitting around having their picnics, and no one does a thing. We all just turn our heads and carry on as if nothing is happening.

  He hadn’t known how to respond at first, and then had said that there wasn’t much they could do—not unless she wanted the Brownshirts to turn on them instead.

  That’s just an excuse, she said to him.

  Is it?

  Yes, she said, and that is why things won’t ever change. No one takes a stand.

  He walked around the car to the driver’s seat and clambered back in, pulling the door shut behind him with a click. He needed petrol, damn it—it was the first thing that they had been told to do: attain a reliable mode of transport.

  If he shut his eyes he could still see Eva, feel the weight of her head in his lap. A smile flickering across her face. Two dimples no larger than pinpricks appearing in her cheeks and then just as quickly disappearing. We should spend all summer sunbathing and having picnics. You’re too pale. Then she reached up and wrapped her arm around his neck and pulled him gently down to her, rising from his lap so that their lips touched for the first time. He felt her through the thin wrap of her skin, her flesh, her delicate warmth.

  He got out of the car, leaned against the bonnet and rubbed at his eyes, then wearily turned his attention to the shelves, pushing aside jars of nails, screws, and bits of wire, tins of varnish, and offcuts of wood. Beside his feet a sack of potatoes fell and scattered across the floor. He picked one up and rubbed his fingers across its nubbed surface, then lifted it to his face and smelled its dry and earthy skin.

  After sitting for a few moments beneath the piano, pressing her hand over her mouth to stifle any tears, she took some deep breaths and tried to pull herself together. From under her dress and within her socks, she emptied the maps, the torn pages, her identity card, her stories, all the bits and pieces she’d gathered, hurriedly stuffing them into the hole. She pushed the board back, hearing the click of the catch snapping into place. Outside, the garage door grated over the gravel as the soldier pulled it shut. She crawled out from under the piano and slid the stool back into position, then ran into the kitchen and jumped up onto the work surface as if she had been there all the time.

  The front door opened and shut again, and he came down the hallway towards the kitchen, clumping in his boots. He stopped in the doorway and caught her for a moment in his stare.

  “You’ve been running,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I can hear
it on your breath. Don’t lie. What were you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” she said.

  “Listen to me. I can hear every sound, every breath, every single beat of your heart,” he said. “So, some advice. Do not creep about. You will only make me nervous.” He took hold of her by the chin, his fingers pressing gently. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  He turned and walked back along the hall and up the stairs. She heard his footsteps passing over her head, just the gentle give of wood.

  She let out a held breath.

  On the windowsill was her mother’s mint plant in a cracked terra-cotta pot. She poked her finger into the soil. She wondered how long her mother had been gone. Long enough for the soil to become as dry as dust, but the plant was still alive, the leaves limp but not yet dead. She lifted it and held it under the tap, letting the water drizzle slowly into the earth. Then she returned it to the sill, turning it so that when the light was finally allowed back into the house again, a new set of leaves would feel the sun upon them.

  He was intent on making a first aid kit, supplementing the field dressing, needles and thread, and iodine he had already with what he could find in the bathroom cabinet and a small drawer in the kitchen. He found plasters, more dressing, arnica, and a tin of pink cream called Germolene, which he took to be some kind of antiseptic.

  He was aware of the girl creeping down the stairs after he had gone up to the bathroom and then of her going back up once he had come back down. It was as if they had the same magnetic charge, keeping to opposing corners and pushing each other around the edges of the house. All the while, he sensed her listening to him as he listened to her. Feet padding over floorboards, groaning giveaways, and telltale squeaks, her eyes watching him from behind a door or a chair.