by Jason Hewitt
The professor had laughed and taken a folded piece of paper from his pocket. If you are ever back and need somewhere… He handed Heiden the address. You never know how these things pan out. The cottage is empty most of the time—too cut off for me so I never use it myself, but you might find it to your liking. I suspect it’s a cottage that likes visitors, and unfortunately I’ve rather neglected it on that front.
He remembered the watercolor of a cottage hanging from a bent nail at the end of Professor Aritz’s hallway. Lightly dabbed flowers growing up a trellis, window boxes at every sill, caramel-colored stone, the thatched roof and lead-lined windows, the peaked top of the red, slatted front door.
He got another bottle of wine and a box of chocolates from the larder in the kitchen. They’d been hidden on the top shelf in a sleek black and red box. The professor had been right. He could have been a musician, but never one as talented as Eva. It was hard to admit, but he was jealous of her for that.
He took the bottle of wine and chocolates into the sitting room. He opened the box. Around them Mahler’s Adagietto from Symphony no. 5 was simmering, the slow swell of strings sifting through the air.
“Here,” he said. “Have one.”
The girl hesitated and then nervously picked out one of the chocolates and put it into her mouth. He looked at the inlay card and chose one himself with a swirl on the top. He bit into its soft shell. The chocolate coating was rich and dark. Inside was a sickly sweet fondant that tasted vaguely of orange.
“Black Magic,” said the girl. “They’re my mother’s favorites. We’re not really allowed them. They’re for emergencies.”
“Emergencies?” He laughed. She leaned over and took another. “Do you think this is not an emergency?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “I like the caramel ones best.”
He uncorked the second bottle of wine—he’d gone for the Merlot this time—and he poured a glass and took a sip, then picked out another chocolate. Already it was soft and tacky in his fingers.
He looked at the girl. “We can’t stay here, you know, like this; not for much longer.”
“Why not?”
“People will come. We’ve already had someone snooping about.”
He put the chocolate in his mouth and licked the melted smears from his fingers. It reminded him of Norway, that peace offering of sorts that he had made to Pendell.
“Will you promise me something?” the girl said. “If you leave, don’t leave me here on my own. I don’t want to be on my own.”
He could feel the chocolate liquefying, spreading out over his tongue as it melted and spread between his teeth.
“I’m sorry we’re not outside,” he said. “It’s not a real picnic unless it is outside. I told Eva that.”
“Will you promise, what I said?”
“No. I can’t,” he told her.
“Why not?”
He stood up. “Why don’t you play something on the piano for me?” He went over to it and lifted the dust sheet from it. “I’d like to hear you play. What was it you said you knew?” He opened the lid and pulled out the stool, but she shook her head.
“Why not?”
The girl said nothing.
“Then I shall have to play for you.”
He sat down on the stool and theatrically flexed his fingers, then started to play all the wrong notes, a dreadful racket, so that she had to laugh and he laughed as well.
He turned on his stool and lifted one finger to her—a wait—then disappeared from the room. She heard him leave the house, going across the gravel to the garage and opening the doors. She sat waiting on the floor, suddenly feeling awkward, as if she shouldn’t be there, living with a strange man who wouldn’t even tell her his Christian name.
When he came back he had her father’s long saw and Alfie’s violin bow that she realized, with a brief wave of anger, he must have taken from Alfie’s room. He perched on the piano stool facing her, holding the handle of the saw between his legs and the other end in his hand. He looked up at her as if to see if she was ready. He surely wasn’t going to play it. You couldn’t play a saw.
Then, as if to prove her wrong, he rested the bow against the side of it and gently pulled out a note that was long and slow and seemed to wobble in the air. He bent the blade into a curve, shaping it like an S, then pulled out another note that seemed to vibrate. As it sounded he bent the saw more and the note traveled up the blade, rising higher and higher in pitch and then down again. His eyes glanced at her, seeing the amazement in her face. He smiled. Then he pulled the bow across again, bending the saw this way and that and wobbling the end of the blade a little so that the note quivered, swelling high and then low, rising up and down as if on air currents.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, “but sad.”
“My grandfather said it was the sound of tears, but they don’t have to be sad.”
He repositioned himself, getting himself comfortable. “Massenet’s ‘Méditation’ from Thaïs,” he announced quietly under his breath. “Performed on bow and saw.”
Lydia giggled, and he started to play again.
Whole days and weeks now he could not account for. Somehow though he had marched and fought and clawed his way across Europe. Everything he had since become had grown out of one moment—a hole blown into a body that might just as well have been his. He had tried to shut himself down, to not allow himself to think or feel or reason or rage. But now, in this house and with this girl, he did feel and he did hurt and he did remember, every memory leading him back to that point, that shot, that day that had started so simply: a line of trucks being stopped at a junction west of Berlin on their way back to the barracks, and Metzger’s head appearing at the back.
I want volunteers. They’d been ordered to send a truck out to a medical institute. Near Brandenburg, he told them.
Heiden’s chest had tightened. I know that place, he said. I’ll go. His heartbeat had quickened at the thought of seeing Eva.
He had scrambled out, regrouping in another truck with a handful of others. Then, as the rest of the convoy had set off again, they had turned off the main road on a new course heading north.
The truck had sped away along the narrow road through the fields, the soldiers in the back jolting around inside as it splashed through the puddles and lurched over the bumps, the rain blowing in through the open back and hammering against the canvas.
When they eventually pulled off the road and started down a short drive, he looked out of the back and saw the familiar-looking lawn. As the truck pulled up he could hear footsteps crunching through the gravel and voices nearby, barely audible over the thrum of rain on the roof.
He ushered a soldier out of his corner seat at the front so that he could pull the canvas roof away enough from its fastening to stare out and try to see her. Through the narrow gap he saw the dented side of the truck, Major Metzger’s jawline in the wing mirror, the thick rolls of his neck barely contained within the collar of his uniform. There were scuffed arcs in the gravel where a car had skidded or something had been dragged. He recognized the long line of windows. The fanned brickwork at the top of each, and the Grecian pillars and part of a double door. A nurse hurried past, almost running; but it was not Eva. He strained to look but he couldn’t see her anywhere.
As if in response Metzger appeared at the back of the truck. Spread out, and make yourselves seen. He stood aside as they clambered down and fanned out across the grounds in front of the building. The rain fell steadily.
Two gray postbuses were parked over by the west wing, where the drive turned in on itself and fed back up to the road. Their windows were blackened out, but he could see the vague outlines of people inside the first one, sitting in the seats or standing in the aisle. A ragged line of women were being held in a queue alongside the second bus. They were still in their hospital gowns despite the downpour. Most of them were thin and their hair was stuck damp to their skulls. Some of the women fidgeted and fingered thei
r gowns, pulling them up at the front so that their pale legs showed, whispering to each other or themselves. Others were silent. Something about the sight of them made Heiden’s stomach tighten. Why didn’t they get them out of the rain, or at least put them in some clothes? He glanced about trying to catch the eye of another comrade, but none of them seemed bothered by what they were seeing, or if they were they didn’t show it. Surely Nurse Hartmann or Eva, if they came, would do something about it.
A medical practitioner walked down the line and checked his clipboard. He lifted the page and looked at the gaggle of patients, then wiped a raindrop from the paper with the sleeve of his white uniform. The line jostled.
Heiden turned his attention to the building, but although there were a lot of staff milling about, he could not see her. Metzger watched from the lawn, frowning as the rain slapped against his face. Foerster, a bald-headed factory worker from Mannheim, and Eberhardt—who in another lifetime, before the war, had been a prodigious accordion player—strolled up and down along the line of women, their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. Aachen and Rosenheim, two farming boys from Eberswalde, stood near the double doors of the entrance. The rest of the men were spaced out along the length of the building and around the drive. Nurse Hartmann came out, and he instinctively lowered his head and glanced furtively across at the buses. Foerster was making deranged faces at the women, trying to antagonize them. He grimaced at them and yapped like a dog. Stop it, you idiot, Heiden said under his breath, but Foerster did not stop.
The man with the clipboard called Nurse Hartmann and one of the doctors over. He scratched the back of his head with his pen and spoke quickly to them, seemingly agitated. Nurse Hartmann rubbed at her forehead and called two nurses over, who she sent running in opposite directions. The man with the clipboard approached Metzger and showed him the list, running his pen up and down it and pointing at the line of women. Heiden saw a familiar deepening in the Major’s frown. Metzger pursed his lips and sucked his cheek in, and then with a raised arm and a commanding glare, he summoned the men over.
Sometimes it felt like a dream, endless corridors and endless doors. Their heavy boots echoing. The half-lit wards, the terrified faces. We’ve done nothing! Please. Please, don’t shoot!
We appear to have misplaced six retards, Major Metzger had explained. And our good doctor thinks they might have got wind of where the buses are taking them, and that perhaps they don’t want to go. I want them found. And quickly. I don’t care how.
The familiar entrance hall. The marbled floor and wide staircase. The brass light fittings hanging from the ceiling on long rusty chains and portraits lining the stairwell. It wasn’t much more than six months since he had last been there. Eberhardt and Rosenheim sprinted up the main staircase, leaving Heiden and Aachen, one of the boys from Eberswalde, and the bald-headed Foerster, who had wasted no time charging into the main ward to the right of the entrance, waving his gun at the patients and yelling. Heiden and Aachen followed.
We’ve done nothing! Please. Please, don’t shoot!
It was the same ward he’d walked through with Nurse Hartmann and Eva, although it looked smaller and darker now that the sky outside was thick with rain. Pale-white faces peered out from within each bed, fingers clasping at white sheets.
They went through a doorway into another ward, hurrying through it almost at a run, and then into a third, with more beds and more wide-eyed men. As they passed, Foerster yelled Boo! at one of them and the man started shrieking. There were cupboards, cabinets, small empty offices, a tiled bathroom with a single bathtub and nothing else but a chair and a towel; another corridor, and more doors, two nurses pressing themselves against the wall as they passed. They can’t be far. A handful of retards… said Foerster. But Heiden didn’t care about the missing women. He just needed to find Eva.
They pushed into offices and surged through another ward of men. Upstairs, children were crying. One of the soldiers was yelling, Shut up! Fucking shut up!
They found their way into the dining room and then into the orangery. There were wicker chairs around small wooden tables which Foerster kicked aside. At one of the tables on the end an elderly doctor in a white lab coat and another man in a suit stared blankly at them.
Six women, said Foerster as they hurried through. Have you seen them?
N-no, said the doctor.
You? He pointed at the other man, who quickly shook his head.
They piled out through the far door; at the end of the corridor in front of them was the main entrance again. Through the open doors, Metzger was out on the lawn firmly holding a nurse by her elbow.
This is useless, said Aachen.
Up above, the heavy feet of jackboots thundered across the ceiling. People running. Shouting. Somewhere a woman was wailing.
Heiden could feel a sickness sweeping through him, a sudden emptying inside. Was this what they had been reduced to? What the hell was it they were doing?
Then Foerster found a door to a set of narrow steps that lead them down into the dark. Perhaps she was down there. A dampness pervaded the air below in the endless corridors and dimly lit storage rooms full of cupboards with paint pots and petrol cans, and piles of blankets caked in clods of earth. They kicked them about to see if anyone was hiding within them. Foerster kept walking into the light bulbs, which hung low from a sinewy cord, and the dim light slapped and splashed across the dank walls.
They made their way through another door and down an unlit corridor.
Come out, come out! Aachen muttered to himself. We know you’re down here somewhere.
They found themselves in a laundry room. Everything was dark. There were two wooden tubs and a sink, a mangle nailed to the wall, and a bucket of grubby water. He remembered Eva’s complaints about not being allowed to send clothes to the laundry until they’d tried to scrub the dirt from the clothes themselves. Now here on a shelf an opened box of washing powder was still spilling its contents. He could hear the hush of the powder emptying. Someone had left in a hurry.
They went down a corridor. Aachen took the lead and Heiden turned every now and again to see if anyone was following them. He had lost sight of Foerster and could hear only his voice somewhere down another corridor. Above him, from the wards, came shouts and muffled sobbing. Come on, he said. We have to hurry.
The corridor opened out into a large room whose walls were lined with pipes.
Then above them came feet pounding across the ceiling, and trails of dust issued down through the cracks. There were shouts and a shriek; more footsteps running.
They must have found them, said Aachen. Come on then. Let’s go.
At the far end of the room was another door that looked heavy and made of iron, and when they reached it they felt a bitter draft blowing in from under it; outside they could hear the rain.
Let’s go this way, said Heiden. He was desperate now to get out.
The bolts were stiff and it took both of them to haul the top one across. He kicked the bottom one back with his boot. The door was warped and swollen, but after several attempts they managed to push it open.
She had put a clip in her hair at first, then changed it for an Alice band, then to a red ribbon knotted around her head, and then knotted around a ponytail instead but her hair wasn’t long enough. Now she was trying to fasten the hair clip back in again and wishing that she had never taken it out in the first place. Her hands shook and the clip kept sliding out of place.
She tried fixing the clip one last time until finally it clicked, and she looked at herself in the mirror of her mother’s dressing table. It had three sides to it, and there was no hiding from her reddened eyes and the nervous pallor of her skin. She had never considered herself pretty. She opened the drawer and rummaged around, pulling out a lipstick. She took off the top. Salmon pink? Perhaps not. She pulled another one out, taking the lid off and winding it up. That was better: a bright scarlet. She leaned in closer to the glass and opened her mouth. She had watched
her mother countless times and yet now she wasn’t sure how to apply it. Straight along the lip or in little dabs? She tried the former but it was rather wobbly and she couldn’t keep her hand still. She then dabbed in the gaps, but she was only making it worse. She sat back and tried to calm herself, and then turned her attention to her bottom lip, this time with more courage. When she was finished, she pressed her lips together as her mother always did.
She opened up the jewelry box and wound it up. With a click, the three porcelain fairies inside pirouetted and turned to the whirr of the mechanism and its rickety chime.
As she listened to the music she slumped back in the chair. The white summer dress was not wholly appropriate, but she liked the lace flowers around the cuffs, the collar, and the hem. She had tied a long white ribbon around the waist to give her some shape. Just dressing up. Nothing more than that.
She shut the lid of the jewelry box and took out the rouge and opened it up. A soft rose pink. She dabbed some onto her right cheek with a pad. She added some more and then some more. Then she did the other cheek. With every passing moment she looked less and less “Lydia.” She tried a smile that almost worked. She wished she didn’t feel so hot. She wished she could stop her heart from bumping so hard against her chest.
This is what happens in a war. These are the things that need to be done.
She listened. He was still in the sitting room. The picnic had been tidied away. He was perhaps in the chair or on the floor studying the maps, or watching through the window. It was dark outside. Quiet. Beside her the oil lamp flickered.
She remembered her and Rosie and a handful of others once running through the fields, shrieking as they ran across the lane, laughing and shouting. Quick! Quick! They’re coming! They’re coming! The Germans are coming! Up the drive and across the lawn and into the house, hot and sweating and barefooted.
You’ll make them come, you will, her mother said. All that hollering and blazing. You go running around crying wolf, and no one’s going to believe you if one day they’re really here.
