by Jason Hewitt
When he got back to the hotel, a water mains had burst and the ground floor was three inches under water. He slopped through the hallway as people swept it out in waves on to the street, where it swilled around in the dust and tailed away trying to find a drain. When he reached the attic the door was ajar and he could hear them: the rhythmic pants and the fidget of floorboards.
Against his better judgement, he allowed his gaze to fix on the gap in the door. They were on the floorboards beside the bare mattress, Janek gripping on to it with one hand while he pushed into her, his small buttocks clenching and his dirty toes on the floor, the veins worming in his neck. Irena had him clamped between her knees, her unshaven armpits black and bristling. She made soft gasps, her hands sprawled at his back where his bony spine ran like a mountain ridge. Then she turned her head. She had seen him. Tears rolled down her cheeks but she did not take her eyes from Owen.
They shared the bath water, one after the other so that by the time Owen got in, it was no more than a few inches deep and dirty, but he washed himself in it anyway, picking off the curling hairs of someone else that attached themselves to his skin.
Irena appeared from around the screen, clothed again but her hair still sopping.
‘I found a clean cloth,’ she said. ‘You can have it.’
‘This water is filthy.’
‘I had to wash him out of me.’ She walked over to the side of the tub and stood there looking at him as he covered himself with his hand.
‘Can I have some privacy?’ he said. ‘And the cloth then.’
She still had it in her hand.
‘Do you like watching people fuck?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Her stare was making him self-conscious, sitting in no more than a dirty puddle with only a hand defending his dignity.
‘Look, can I just have five minutes to myself, please?’
‘You did not answer the question.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Do you like people watching?’
‘Sit up.’
She scooted him forward in the tub and then, hoisting up her skirt, she stepped into the bath behind him.
‘What are you doing?’
She perched on the rim of the bath with him sitting between her knees and leant over his shoulder to soak the cloth.
‘Lean back,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to be clean?’
‘I want some time on my own,’ he told her.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
She took the cloth from the water and began to clean his back. And he didn’t stop her. He let her toes nestle under his buttocks. He let her take the cloth over his shoulders, rub at his neck, covering him with all their dirty water. He let her; and he said nothing. He let her run the cloth down one arm and then the next, lifting the hand that covered himself and then the other that had taken its place; and he felt her breath against the side of his neck, the press of her body against him; and when she reached over him once again, she dropped the cloth and it was only her hand that took water down his chest. She leant over him, her fingers sliding down his stomach, down, down . . .
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Don’t.’
She sat back up.
‘Do you wish I was your lover?’ she said.
‘Don’t play games,’ he told her.
‘I’m not.’
‘You’ll get your fingers burnt.’
‘We are all burnt,’ she said. ‘We are past saving. All of us.’
She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it.
‘I said don’t. Please.’
‘Do you really not remember what she looks like?’
He said nothing.
Then she said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Perhaps she looks like me.’
He stood up abruptly and stepped out, the water draining from him, grabbed a blanket for a towel and wrapped it hastily around him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
But it was too late. It was said.
Pushing through the crowd of party revellers, he searched for Connie. Max was missing too. He forced his way out into the hallway and then into the bar, but she wasn’t there and nor were they in the library. How was it that he had got so drunk? He could feel his senses disengaging, masked faces becoming a blur.
He stumbled up the wide staircase, tripping over the lip of a step and gathering himself again, before he pushed against a flow of people all cascading down.
Max! he called. Are you up there?
Then, Connie! Connie! he yelled.
Along the landing he found guest rooms and tried a few at random, but they were all locked. A group of revellers in uniforms and evening gowns were coming down the corridor, arms lolling over each other, giggling. He held himself against the wall as they passed, then called out again, louder, the hubbub of the party below ringing in his ears.
Was that when she had appeared, coming from a doorway or out through an arch? She looked like a fox, her eyes and nose covered beneath the black snout of the mask. She stood midway down the corridor, where one of the light bulbs was blinking, her back to the wall and her eyes fixed on him. He went to her.
Are you all right?
I don’t know you, she said to him. It had almost been a whisper.
He laughed. Of course you do. It’s— He went to lift his mask but she said: No. Don’t.
She rested her hand on his jacket and through the eyeholes of her disguise she looked at him, her lips opening wider and her fingertips curling and closing around his lapel. He knew then that he should pull away. He was aware of the rise and fall of her chest, the quiver of her breath.
Then, with a glance down the corridor, he had kissed her, soft at first and then harder, her hands at the back of his head and around his shoulder, pulling him into her, kissing him hard. Behind those masks, they might later have said, they could have been anyone. They could have been nothing but strangers, caught in a moment’s mistake. But they weren’t, and he kissed that earlobe, that neck, that collarbone. Then he pushed her forcefully against the wall. He would take those lips, that breast.
He woke to the sound of crying. Then he realized that it was not the baby. It was Janek, sitting on the floor with his back to the attic wall and his arms wrapped tight around his knees. In the darkness of the night, he was sobbing like a child.
Owen sat up, the figure across the room like a mound of deeper blackness gathered against the wall, and the other side of the mattress where the boy had been sleeping now cold to the touch. Janek’s crying came in quivering blasts of breath and, as the clouds above them thinned, the moonlight seeping in through the small window and the holes in the ceiling gave a silvery sheen to his face. Owen saw the tears seeping down his cheek like oil.
He crossed the room and sat down beside him, their shoulders almost touching. He didn’t know what to say or do, other than to lightly rest his hand on the boy’s knee so that the boy could be sure he was there. The foliage of darkness drew in around them again as the clouds pulled back over. He could vaguely make out the silhouette of Irena sprawled across her own mattress as if she had been washed up on a raft, carried in on the tide of her breath.
How far they had come, he thought, his hand still resting on Janek’s knee as the boy sniffed and quietly gasped through his tears. And yet, how little he knew of them both. He had no idea how many days he and Janek had travelled, this boy who had appeared out of nowhere and had insisted on being with him as if there was something deeper that had threaded them together; something passing between them even now, in the shared warmth of hand to knee.
And in that hour that they sat, and maybe with that touch, like sand it quietly sifted in and he slowly remembered. Everything, he realized, that the boy had said was true. This boy beside him had pulled him from the river, and now his hand, his thin fingers, the now familiar arm of his jacket were there in Owen’s memory, where maybe
they had always been – two hands that had dragged him out by the armpits, struggling with his sodden weight and the cold rush of water pummelling so hard around them.
He had dragged him out and Owen remembered being hauled up a bank through the trees, the grass pulling away from under him, and the struggle to keep himself conscious, a sunset across his eyes like watery blood eventually fading to black. He had woken again, but only for a moment, to hear the boy’s struggles and shouts of frustration. He had felt an almost debilitating cold spreading through him, and the ebb and flow of consciousness slipping; and as it did – before the darkness closed over him completely – he was vaguely aware of two shots and then another, and in the darkness the boy had run.
He felt the press of a shoulder, his hand still there on a knee. Janek had stopped crying but for some time neither of them moved. They listened to the sounds of Irena and the baby sleeping, while outside across the graveyard of a city, the night was strangely silent and darker than it had ever been.
MARTHA
The plane came and went without him, and he wondered what the hell he had done.
At dawn he had slipped with purpose from the attic and down the narrow stairs, leaving them asleep. No note, no goodbye; he would simply disappear. But at the entrance to the thick-bricked building on the corner of Leibnizstraße, he hesitated and dropped into a crouch, his back to the wall. The early morning sun washed light down the street, casting the receptionist’s shadow as she walked around the front of the building looking for him, her footfall echoing as she complained to the driver who was meant to take him to the airfield. Seven o’clock. I was quite clear. And now here we are, quarter past.
He closed his eyes and tried to decide. This wasn’t about Irena and Janek, he told himself; this was about him. There was the car. Just bloody well go. But in his mind he couldn’t get past them: the boy sobbing in the dark, a boy he had come so far with and to whom he realized now he owed so much; or the weight of his guilt about Irena; or even the feeling of Little Man’s hand around his finger. To leave them now felt like another betrayal, even as he kept telling himself not to be an idiot, to step out with whatever mouthful of apologies he could think of and get into the car.
Two lives. You owe me.
Well, didn’t he owe them both? He needed to protect them. He was a British pilot, for God’s sake. Where was his sense of duty?
Get into that car and drive away and he would never know what happened to them. Could he live with that? Could he be so selfish as to abandon them, and make the same mistake again – just as a voice kept telling him that somehow he had done with Max?
He waited for that instinctive lurch to kick him into action at the last moment, to propel him out from behind the corner with a raised hand and a cheery sorry I’m late, but the kick did not come.
The receptionist said something to the driver. The car door slammed. He heard the engine starting, still wondering why the hell he wasn’t moving, but he didn’t, and the car drove off.
They had to leave the attic room and so there seemed no option but to walk. The road was busy with refugees and took them west towards the city of Halle. They had not walked much more than three miles, the suburbs of Leipzig giving way to fields, when the jeep pulled up.
The woman in the driver seat called to them: ‘Hey! I remember you four. You guys wanna lift?’
It was the American woman. His Loretta Young. And now here she was in an open-topped jeep. She peeled the sunglasses from her eyes and looked them up and down.
‘Jeez, you guys are like the goddamn League of Nations.’
Irena pulled the headscarf tighter over the back of her head and considered the woman with suspicion. Little Man was still bawling, his tiny purple face screwed up in anger and his tight fists flailing.
‘Is this little woodchip all right?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Owen. ‘He’s been like this all morning. He won’t keep anything down,’ he added.
The child had certainly worsened. When you held him in your arms you could feel the heat burning from him, and earlier he had leaked a foul-smelling diarrhoea all over Janek’s arm.
‘You’d better hop in,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t look at all right. Where you troops off to, anyway?’
‘Not sure,’ said Owen. ‘We’re trying to locate a few people. The colonel mentioned some camps.’
‘Ano. Petr Sokol,’ Janek said. He took his wallet from his pocket and pulled out the photograph.
The woman’s glance was cursory. ‘Nice.’
‘His brother,’ explained Owen.
‘Můj bratr.’
‘Yes, and . . .’ Owen looked at Irena. He realized that for all this time he’d thought they had been looking for the baby’s father and now it turned out that he was an American GI.
‘So you’re going where exactly?’ said the woman.
‘North,’ he said.
‘That specific, huh?’ She had a point. ‘Good job I stopped then. I’m on my way to a place near Celle,’ she said, ‘if that helps, and you’ve got the guts for it. It’s not exactly home from home but there’s a hospital and some medical support for the little one, and then perhaps from there –’ she nodded at Irena and Janek – ‘we can maybe see about getting you guys home.’
Other people in the road were beginning to show interest in them and had stopped to look or were sidling closer, eyeing the jeep’s empty seats that could take them anywhere and the boxes piled in the back that might be food or medicine.
‘Well, are you coming or not?’ she said. ‘If it’s not you, it’ll be someone else.’
They clambered in, Owen in the front, the others piling in the back between the boxes, a shovel and an Olivetti typewriter squeezed in on its side. Then the woman parped the horn to clear the road and they pulled out, Janek giving an exclamation of delight as her foot pressed hard to the pedal and the jeep accelerated.
‘So, how did it go with my uncle?’ she yelled, over the sound of the engine and whistling air as they picked up speed.
He didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘The colonel,’ she said.
‘Colonel Hall’s your uncle? I didn’t know.’
She laughed. ‘Why would you? I didn’t tell you. And he sure as hell won’t. Don’t worry – it’s only through marriage. Although for how long, God knows. That will be down to Roger, my husband.’ She glanced at him, both hands at the wheel as they hit a bump and the jeep lurched. In the back Janek whooped. ‘Some of us have been fighting a war on all fronts,’ she said, ‘if you know what I mean.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Ah, heck, don’t be. I’m not. Anyway, I don’t think you rightly answered the question.’
‘Oh, well . . . He was rather nice.’
‘You mean an idiot, right?’ she said.
‘No. He did organize a car and a flight home, actually.’
‘Both of which you’ve turned down by the looks of things,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to be very popular. New loyalties?’ She motioned with her head to the back of the jeep where the infant mewled against the wind.
‘Yes. Something like that,’ he said.
‘You must be a soft touch.’
Her name was Martha, a welfare officer with UNRRA – the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, she explained.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘No one out here’s heard of us. We’re new. It’s some international set-up, sent out to feed the starving, fix the broken, rehouse the homeless and all that.’
‘God,’ he said.
‘Oh, don’t be too impressed,’ she said. ‘Between you and me, we’re making a goddamn mess of it.’
He introduced himself and Irena, who leant forward and said, ‘You are a good lady. Thank you.’
‘Well, we get your kid fixed, that’s good enough for me. Besides, I rarely do a trip out here without someone cadging a lift. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get gasoline in this p
lace.’
Janek insisted on introducing himself with theatrical gusto, standing up in the back of the jeep and throwing his arms open. ‘Janek Věnceslav Sokol,’ he announced, the wind ruffling furiously at his sleeves. ‘I love you, America!’
‘That’s great,’ said Martha, ‘but could I ask you to sit down?’
Before long, Janek had the photograph of his brother out again and was leaning through the gap to show it her. ‘You know? Petr Sokol.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He asks everyone,’ said Owen, not meaning it to sound so much like an apology.
‘Oh, they’re all the same,’ she said. ‘It’s understandable. Half of Europe’s been tipped out across the map. No one knows where the hell anyone is. If you’re a Polish Jew, you could be anywhere from Westerbork to goddamn Janowska. And that’s assuming you’re alive.’
‘You find Petr?’ said Janek, still holding out the photograph.
She laughed. ‘I’m sorry but at the moment getting any information is practically impossible. We’ve got no systems in place yet and besides, there’re too many DPs out there. I might as well be trying to hold Lake Michigan in my hand.’ She leant back over her shoulder as the jeep slowed, held up by a truck. ‘I’ll try to find your brother. I’ll ask. But I can’t make no promises. You understand? To . . . nebýt . . . možný. Too many.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘To je možné! We speak to Czech. Czech people know Petr. Czech people need Petr.’
‘He’s some sort of resistance fighter, I think,’ Owen explained.
‘Well, that’s one thing we sure as hell don’t need,’ Martha told him. ‘Another rookie revolutionary.’
She swerved to avoid a speeding Russian truck that was veering from side to side. Two Red Army soldiers were leaning out of the window, clasping bottles and yelling. She slammed on the brake to let the truck pass and swore at them. ‘Przeklęte dupki!’
‘Russian as well?’ he said. ‘Goodness.’
‘Polish, actually,’ she said, ‘but I think they got the point.’ Then she threw a smile over her shoulder at Irena but Irena did not catch her eye.
