A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “And this week we roasted it.”

  “Turned it to glass. Nothing will grow at that spot in Jornada del Muerto for years.”

  “You bugger . . . I knew you got me here just so you could get morbid on me.”

  “Not so . . . but there are things to be said.”

  She finished her martini and held out the glass for more.

  “See if he’s got a slice of lime this time. One more and I’m all ears.”

  Over her second martini, he said, “Leo has got up a petition to the president, urging him not to use the bomb we are making.”

  “Another one?” she said. “He’s doesn’t give up, does he?”

  “No, he doesn’t. But his concerns are our concerns. Everyone at the Chicago lab has signed it.”

  “All of them?”

  “Sixty-nine, seventy with Leo.”

  “But no one here? I mean, Leo didn’t circulate it at Los Alamos? We all had a meeting. Oppy saw off Leo’s last attempt rather easily.”

  “I doubt Leo even tried to circulate it—we’re an army base not a college campus—but I received a copy and so did Edward Teller.”

  “But you didn’t sign?”

  “No. Nor did Teller. We both considered it. Oppy asked us not to, but now I cannot help but wonder how little we might have had to argue to get him to sign, too.”

  “He’s said all along that we will have to use it. He said so at the meeting.”

  “It was more than two weeks ago that we discussed it, but his attitude has not been the same since we tested the bomb. He knows it works now, he knows the power it has . . . and he feels . . . responsible.”

  She swirled her martini, fished out the olive and ate it.

  “Tell me, Charlie Parker, did you and Oppy rehearse that line from the Bhagavad Gita?”

  “No.”

  “There are times I think he rehearses everything he says. Even the one-liners.”

  “An academic practice, perhaps, born of standing up in front of rooms full of students.”

  “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . . I wonder whether he might not have meant it personally. He seems to take everything so damn personally. The weight of the world on those bony shoulders. The power of life and death in those spindly fingers.”

  “It is an ungodly amount of power.”

  “Au contraire. It’s godly in the extreme. A destroyer of worlds. Sounds pretty godlike to me.”

  “I meant—a frightening amount of power to be possessed by a single nation.”

  “Single nation? Well, you might be right. A step on from a single individual, I suppose. But . . . I’m English, Tuck and Chadwick are English, you’re Hungarian, Teller and Leo are Hungarian, so’s Wigner, Fermi’s Italian, Kistiakowsky is Russian, Peierls is German, Bethe’s German, Frisch is Austrian, and most of the others are German or Austrian. Oppy’s American. Serber’s American. There are times they seem to be the only ones. Social nights when you’d think we were all in a café in Vienna rather than stuck in a Sheetrock hut in the middle of the desert in New Mexico.”

  “You think they’ll share it?”

  “With whom?”

  “With our allies.”

  “Our current allies? Don’t be daft. An ally is simply an enemy you haven’t met yet. We’ll be squaring up to Joe Stalin the minute this war’s over. Of course I don’t think they’ll share it. I don’t care if they share it. I just want one dropped on Berlin.”

  “Three months after they surrendered?”

  “I don’t give a toss. Call it insurance. Call it a preemptive strike against the next German war. And you know better than me. Do we have another bomb up our sleeve? You know better than anyone on Earth how much plutonium we have.”

  “Zette, I can’t tell you that.”

  “Of course you bloody can. We’ve earmarked three bombs for the Japs, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. Once we’ve nuked the Nips how many more damn bombs can we make?”

  He hesitated.

  “Come on. Oppy’s first law of the colloquia, there are no secrets. We all know what there is to know. If you don’t tell me, somebody on your team will.”

  “Five, possibly six, by the end of the year.”

  “Then we’ve got a fucking arsenal haven’t we? And you think we won’t use it? We’ll drop the bomb for one simple reason: because we can. Japan can surrender tonight. We’ll still drop the bomb. The army won’t miss the chance to see what it can do. Even Oppy refutes the idea that we can stage a demonstration. He might fear a dud but he knows damn well that the army wants to see a bomb take out an entire city. The generals must be praying Japan doesn’t surrender. I don’t know the target but I do know it’ll be a city the air force hasn’t touched yet. Pristine. Virgin. Just asking for it. Leo has wasted his breath—we’re going to bomb Japan, and when that’s done, as far as I’m concerned, we can drop the rest on Germany.”

  Talking to Zette once she’d lost her temper was close to pointless. He tacked away from Japan, back towards Russia.

  “How about some sense of . . . of . . . of a balance of power?”

  “When has power ever been balanced? Balanced power. That’s the perfect oxymoron.”

  §63

  As they left, she bribed the barman to part with a full bottle of Booth’s gin.

  On the road back to Santa Fe, he asked, “What’s so special? One gin is much the same as another.”

  “No, it’s not. You just take a sniff.”

  She uncorked the bottle and wafted it under his nose as he drove.

  “See? It’s sort of flowery and oily at the same time. Reminds me of home. God knows why. It’s as though they’d mingled summer and autumn—summer scents and autumn drizzle. A bit of England in a bottle.”

  But he wasn’t thinking of England. He wasn’t thinking of Zette. On a rutted, washboard road, rolling into the New Mexico desert under a cobalt sky with the smell of juniper wafting up from the open bottle and the scent of night-blooming jasmine drifting in through the open window, he was thinking of Russia.

  §64

  Poland: July 1945

  The Russians kept her in Poland. She wasn’t sure where. No more than fifty miles from Auschwitz by the time it took to get there. It was a big, ancient country house, remarkably unscathed after five years of total war, on a vast estate far from the sound of anything. A fading dacha in dusty shades of red and green. Once it had been full of servants. Now it was full of soldiers. It didn’t look like a prison. It merely felt like one.

  They told her she needed to build up her strength.

  She watched spring arrive.

  She taught Tosca to speak better German.

  She told them she needed to see Magda.

  Tosca told her this was not possible. Magda was fine; that was all she needed to know.

  There were books in half a dozen languages—enough to keep her occupied in French and English as well as German. She read novels by the English writer Charles Dickens for the first time. And one evening in April, Tosca turned up with a film projector and reel upon reel of prewar Hollywood and they found a common taste in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing across a bedsheet tacked to the drawing room wall.

  And in the absence of a cello she played piano at a concert-sized Bechstein very like the one Viktor Rosen had owned.

  By the summer, she had regained most of the weight she had lost. She had come to terms with mirrors, telling herself they’d never figure much in her life evermore, and dyed her hair blonde.

  She told them she needed to go to Vienna.

  Tosca told her that this was possible.

  Two days later they set off.

  Across Czechoslovakia and into the ruins of Vienna from the east.

  §65

  Her parents’ apartment was now in the French sector of the occupied city. Méret and Tosca stayed in a house in the Russian sector on the far side of the Danube Canal.

  Tosca kept her commissa
r’s uniform but had Méret kitted out in civvies—a two-piece in drab grey, but a good cut.

  “We can go anywhere, it’s joint occupation, but, y’know, the city is patrolled constantly . . .”

  “That’s okay. I wasn’t planning on wearing that uniform forever.”

  “And the natives can be hostile.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Méret said. “You’re treating them like the enemy. There will be many Viennese who regard themselves as among Hitler’s first victims.”

  “Well. Maybe a little token resistance in thirty-eight might have established that fact. You should have seen the bonfire of the swastikas the day we took Vienna. There wasn’t an apartment in the whole goddamn city that hadn’t got a flag or a portrait of the crazy corporal to throw on the pile.”

  Méret let the matter drop.

  “I want to go there alone.”

  “That’s okay. How long do you need?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Fine. I’ll meet you there.”

  In the literal sense the dust had settled. The Russians had taken Vienna in May and only days ago had carved up city and country between the victorious powers.

  It could be worse, she thought. Tosca had brought her newsreels while they were still in Poland, showing the centre of Berlin after the surrender. The Brandenburg Gate was still standing—little else seemed to be. Vienna had taken shelling—here and there a house was reduced to rubble, and occasionally a whole block—but it was still a recognizable city where people tried to live their lives. She wondered that anything larger than rats and mice could live in Berlin.

  Devastation lent a curious intimacy. It turned the inside out. To see the interior of a house, for no other reason than that the exterior no longer existed, was a prurience, almost an espionage—the zigzag line up a bare brick wall where a staircase had once stood; a door halfway up a wall that once led to a child’s bedroom and now opened onto a void; a fireplace, grate still intact, perched in space. It was a glimpse into vanished lives. Into private lives. And it felt like a violation.

  The building was still standing. The ground floor apartment looked as though it was still lived in. The first floor had lost some of its windows and a lace curtain billowed out into the street as the draughts caught it, almost as though it were waving to her.

  The street door was off its hinges. She stepped inside. An old woman she had never seen before was sweeping out the ground floor apartment. The door wobbled as Méret moved it.

  “Russkis,” said the old woman. “They kicked it in. Then they ransacked my rooms. Took my sewing machine. What would they want with a sewing machine?”

  Upstairs, the door was wide open, a breeze eddying in and out of the apartment. As she’d expected, it was empty. All the traces of human habitation, but empty. The shadow line on the wallpaper in the sitting room where her piano had stood for twenty years. The four indentations on the floorboards in the dining room that marked out the position of the table. The brass hook in the wall where her grandfather’s portrait had hung.

  And it smelled empty—she’d no idea empty had its own smell but it had.

  It didn’t feel like home. It felt too big. Stripped of everything, it felt vast. As though the return of all her parents’ possessions, of everything on the list, would never fill the space. She had not thought of re-creation. She had come steeled for a last look but part of her mind had always thought re-creation possible. And now she knew—you can’t go back.

  She walked from room to room, half hoping to find something the Germans had missed. In the bathroom, she did. Above the basin was a mirrored cabinet, and in the cabinet a small blue bottle with a conical silver cap and a gold label:

  It had been her mother’s. It was three-quarters full, so sparingly had it been used since an anniversary trip to Paris in 1929. She had been left with aunts and cried for a whole weekend and when her mother returned she had smelled new, different. Méret unscrewed the cap, dabbed a little of the scent on the back of her right hand and, when the alcohol cleared, smelled the new smell again, smelled her mother fresh from Paris in 1929—and with it the smell of empty vanished.

  She went back downstairs.

  The old woman was still sweeping up.

  “And they took my Franz’s bike!”

  Out in the street a man in a tatty jacket and a cloth cap was wheeling a wooden cart laden with junk and rags up the street. When he drew level with Méret he stopped.

  “Fraulein Voytek?”

  “Herr Knobloch?”

  “Your hair? You used to be so dark . . . like a gypsy . . . I thought you were dead.”

  “A reasonable assumption, Herr Knobloch.”

  “You’re looking for your parents?”

  “No. I know they’re dead.”

  “They came for them. It would be March or perhaps April last year. I . . . I saw . . .”

  Tosca was coming down the street towards them. Knobloch turned his cart around in a swift pivot and pushed it back the way he had come without finishing his sentence.

  Tosca was next to her now.

  “You know him?”

  She might wonder what it was he had to say, she might not be able to stop herself. But she didn’t want to know. If she ever wanted the truth of what fate had fallen to her parents’ lot she could ask Tosca. She felt sure Tosca held a bag of secrets. Every so often she might open the bag and release one, fluttering like a moth to the light.

  “He used to be my father’s barber.”

  “Jack of all trades. He spies for us and I’m pretty damn certain he spies for the British, too. I guess any barber would make a natural spy. They spend their working lives listening.”

  “And if you were to ask him he’d tell you it’s what he has to do to survive.”

  “His type always do. Survive, I mean. Anschluss, the Krauts, the draft, allied bombing, occupation by four armies. He’s survived it all.”

  “His type?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “And me, Major Tosca? What type would you say I was?”

  “I’d say you were the type that needs to shake her ass, or do you want to be standing here when some new family arrives?”

  “New family?”

  “Your folks’ apartment may be missing a few panes of glass and some tiles but it’s habitable. Much of Vienna isn’t. The French have reassigned it to a homeless family, to people bombed out of their own homes by us.”

  “But this is my home.”

  Tosca looked straight into her eyes.

  “Do you really mean that?”

  Méret knew—Tosca would never tell her what type she was, and she herself would never volunteer an answer. But her last question had only one possible answer.

  “No. I don’t. All this happened to someone else. I don’t know what home is. I’ve forgotten. And I lived here less than eighteen months ago.”

  A voice in her head telling her clearly, You can’t go back.

  “Wherever it is you mean to take me . . . take me.”

  “Okay,” said Tosca. “How would you feel about Paris?”

  In her left hand Méret still held the blue bottle of Soir de Paris. She uncurled her fingers, the bottle flat in the palm of her hand for Tosca to see.

  “One of your jokes, right?”

  “No,” said Tosca. “No joke.”

  §66

  Paris: Friday August 3, 1945

  In August 1944, as the Allies advanced, General von Choltitz, the military commander of Paris, had ignored Hitler’s order to leave the city “a smoking ruin” and had surrendered to the shotguns, billy clubs, and bread knives of the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur and to the Sherman tanks of the French Second Armoured Division. This had saved the city from the fate of Vienna or the far worse fate of Berlin. Rumours Méret had heard that the Germans had melted down the Eiffel Tower to make weapons turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.

  On the Left Bank, the Quai Saint-Michel curved with the river pretty well o
pposite the middle of the Île de la Cité. One street below this the Rue de la Huchette ran between the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Rue des Deux Ponts. Before the war, it had housed a boulangerie, a bouchier chevaline, a bookbinder, a draper, a flower shop, a laundry, two hotels, a café and a bordel. After the war, mostly it still did.

  A German tank had blundered down this narrow street in May 1940, but managed to extricate itself with little damage—and in August 1944 some of the fiercest battles of the resistance had taken place at the western end of the street in the Place Saint-Michel and all along the boulevard . . . snipers shooting and shot at . . . tarmac torn up to discover long-lost cobblestones with which to barricade the end of the street . . . and as the Germans left they had been waved on their way to perdition with raised lavatory brushes at every window.

  Two side streets led off the Rue de la Huchette—the Rue Zacharie and the short but wonderfully named Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche. On the latter corner was the gendarmerie and, opposite, on the corner of Rue Zacharie, the bordel, le Panier Fleuri.

  She had been given an address of an apartment that turned out to be over the bordel and had its double, ground-floor doors next to the windows of the florist.

  Tosca had left her at the Gare de l’Est.

  “You’ll be fine on your own, kid.”

  “What if I get lost?”

  “It’s a straight line down to the river, across the island till you hit the Boul Mich. A blind man couldn’t get lost.”

  “What if I just disappear?”

  “You think we wouldn’t look? You think we wouldn’t find you?”

  It was her first taste of freedom. At the dacha in Poland she was never alone. Tosca had been there some of the time, perhaps most of it, but when she wasn’t Gregor was. Sleep had become the approximation of freedom, the surrogate of peace and privacy.

  Now she was walking down the Boulevard de Strasbourg alone. More alone than she could ever remember being in her whole life. Paris was a revelation. And what it revealed was Méret Voytek.