Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  He left the dunes and returned to the road. He remembered the desert foxes he had seen in Libya and Egypt, scavenging among the mounds of empty cans, scarcely bigger than cats, and with thin, erect ears the size of small plates. He had seen the animals for sale in the town markets, in cages scarcely large enough to hold them. He had known a man in the Seventh Motor Brigade who had bought one of the creatures for a mascot, and who had then flung it away from him when it had bitten his hand.

  A few days later, he had arrived at Sidi Rezegh and had seen the same tanks and support vehicles scattered across the road, all of them smashed and useless, most without either their turrets or their tracks, and some of them still burning, or smoking, two days after they had been caught in the open and destroyed. He had been warned by the men retrieving the bodies not to get too close to the hulks. Unexploded ammunition, they told him. They all wore cloths over their faces against the smell of burning. On the forward horizon lay a second group of tanks, more recently destroyed, and the smoke rising from these was thicker and billowed into the pale blue sky like ink spilled in water. He remembered the line at which it gathered and thickened, and above which it did not rise. He had asked the medical orderlies about the man who had owned the fox, but none of them knew him. It was clear by the way they avoided him that there had been few, if any, survivors of the engagement.

  He stopped now at the road and looked out over the water. He knew there was no way of preventing these sudden, powerful and painful memories from returning to him unbidden, and he wondered how long they would remain with him. He waited for a further call from the fox, but nothing came. He identified the solitary bright light of Venus in the western sky.

  Returning to the tower, he sat at his desk until three in the morning.

  As a boy, he had always had a pet dog, and he surprised himself by remembering and then listing the names of eight of these in the order in which he had owned them. Some of the animals had been shared between himself and his brother, and some had attached themselves to him alone. He chose his favourites. A letter from his mother had reached him in Naples telling him of the death of the last of these pets. She said the dog had died in its sleep, but it had been a young animal, a terrier, and he had guessed otherwise. She had enclosed a photograph of the dog sitting on the arm of a chair. He had remembered every detail of the room in which the chair stood, and this, he now remembered, rather than the death of the animal itself, had left him speechless with sadness.

  Part II

  20

  He was woken again the following night, this time by the sound of a man shouting. He went to the window. It was half past two and a light rain was falling. He could see nothing beyond the land immediately surrounding the tower. A solitary light showed far along the beach. The line of houses stood in darkness.

  The man called again. Mercer did not recognize the voice, but knew immediately that this was Elizabeth Lynch’s husband finally returned.

  He had been expected all through the previous day, but had not showed. No word had come to explain this delay, and both Mary and Elizabeth Lynch had taken turns waiting at the road’s end, looking out for him. Mercer had explained to his workers what was expected to happen there at some point during the day, but most already knew this and considered the event of little consequence.

  A light came on in one of the windows, followed by another in the adjoining house. A silhouette appeared at an upper window. The man below fell silent briefly, and then called out again to whoever was above him. The silhouette belonged to Elizabeth Lynch. She withdrew and was immediately replaced by the lesser outlines of her children. Mercer saw Mary as she opened the window wider and leaned out. Her brother struggled to push himself into the space beside her.

  A further light came on downstairs and the door opened, revealing the man in the darkness. His wife had gone down alone to let him in. Yet another light came on further along the row of houses, its occupants woken by the shouting. It was by then clear to Mercer that the man was drunk, that this had been the cause of his late arrival, and that because he was drunk he felt no compunction to keep his voice low, or to ensure that his long-awaited return was the private occasion his wife had been hoping for. Elizabeth Lynch beckoned him to her, but he remained where he stood and continued calling up to Mary at the window above him. Elizabeth Lynch returned inside. She must have called up the stairs to her daughter, because a moment later Mary withdrew from the window and closed it, leaving only her brother looking down and waving. The man approached the doorway and stood there without entering for several minutes longer.

  Mercer studied him now that he was fully revealed in the light, albeit distantly. He was shorter and slighter than Mercer had imagined from the solitary photograph he had seen. He held his arm across the doorway, and though Mercer could not see her, a shadow on the ground indicated to him where Elizabeth Lynch stood immediately inside.

  He watched closely, convinced that the man would soon go indoors and that the unwelcome public part of this small drama would soon be over. But rather than enter the house, he then backed away from it to the outer edge of the block of yellow light falling through the doorway, where he resumed his shouting, waving his arms at the boy in the window above. Mercer grew concerned at the extent of the man’s drunkenness, and of the humiliating spectacle he seemed intent on creating. Though no more lights showed, others would undoubtedly now be watching in the darkness.

  Despite what he had said to Mary, Mercer had anticipated that Lynch might have been brought home by the Military Police, or if not brought, then at least have been met from a train and given a lift over this final, difficult part of his journey. What he now believed was that the man had come by bus to the town, and that he had stayed there, celebrating his release, until it was too late to do anything except walk those final few miles of his journey home through the darkness.

  Lynch then left his own home and turned his attention to those other houses showing a light. He left his watching wife and children to walk back and forth in front of these and to shout in at their occupants. No one came out to confront him, though Mercer saw the fleeting shapes of the people inside come and go from their windows.

  Eventually, a door towards the end of the row opened and a second man appeared. He carried something which might have been a length of timber, but which might just as easily have been a rifle or a shotgun, and at first Mercer thought that this was Daniels, who had gone out to confront Lynch and to end his noisy provocation. But then the man revealed himself more clearly and Mercer saw that it was one of the others – an older man, to whom he had spoken only once, and then only to be ignored. A woman appeared in the doorway behind him. He said something to Lynch, and Lynch fell silent and approached him. The two men stood a short distance apart and spoke to each other. Then the older man propped the stick or rifle in his doorway and returned to Lynch with his arms extended. His wife followed him out. They both wore coats over their night-clothes. The fine rain showed in flecks against the lights of the houses.

  Lynch appeared to calm down, and he and this other man stood together in conversation for several minutes, watched by the man’s wife. Further along the row, Mary and her mother now stood together in the doorway of their own home, neither of them making any effort to attract the attention of Lynch or the man to whom he spoke.

  Eventually, the two men parted, and the older man and his wife returned indoors.

  Mercer watched as Lynch came slowly back along the houses to where the woman and the girl awaited him. Neither left the doorway at his approach. The man stumbled as he came, almost falling. Regaining his balance, he called out to them. They were the first words Mercer heard clearly. Lynch asked them what they were looking at. Neither answered him. Mary, Mercer saw, took a step forward to stand in front of her mother, and in a reciprocal gesture of defiance and defence, Elizabeth Lynch put an arm across her daughter’s shoulders. She said something to her husband and he shouted back at her. And then, in the dying echo of his voic
e, Mary herself spoke to him, and hearing her voice for the first time in all those years, the man fell silent, eventually answering her calmly and quietly. He moved closer to his wife and daughter, and the three of them stood together in a group in the brightly lit doorway for a few moments longer, after which they finally went indoors and the door was closed and the light lost.

  Mercer returned to his bed, but could not sleep. He wondered why the man had insisted on announcing his return in this way, and why, even as drunk as he clearly was, all discretion and all consideration of his waiting wife and children had been beyond him.

  The wind grew stronger, and the rain blew against the dry panes of his own windows, gathering in lines along the corroded frames.

  21

  ‘We were taken first to the camp at Papenburg, just inside Germany, south of Emden.’

  Mercer had not heard of the place. He tried to imagine where Emden might be. He saw only the coast running west to east, from the diminishing Dutch islands to the Danish peninsula.

  Jacob considered him for a moment. They sat together at the edge of Bail’s Yard, the perimeter drain immediately behind them. He picked up a metal rod and drew a simple map in the dirt at their feet. ‘That was the start of our journey, although it hardly matters to know where we were.’

  ‘Except, perhaps, that you were still close to Holland,’ Mercer said.

  ‘Why do you believe that mattered? Do you think those millions upon millions of journeys ever had anything but a single direction? The only thing to know is that we were all still together then, Anna, my mother and father, myself. Papenburg was basic, cold, but there was still some semblance of order there, still some suggestion that all the lies we had been told over the previous years might have been built around a solitary, and perhaps believable, grain of truth. Do as you are ordered to do, they told us, and you will stay together. Simple as that. There were many other families there, some of whom we knew. Two of my mother’s sisters had been taken there with their own husbands and children ten months earlier. We arrived in July, nineteen forty-three.’ He scribbled the map between his feet back into dirt.

  ‘Were you there long?’ Mercer was distracted. Two days had passed since the night of Lynch’s return, and neither he nor anyone else at Fleet Point had seen the man or his wife and children. He regretted this distraction. It had been his intention, upon visiting Jacob, to ask him what he had heard in the town concerning the man’s return, but instead Jacob had started unexpectedly on this very different story. ‘Forget him,’ he had said dismissively, upon Lynch’s name being mentioned. ‘He’ll come to you when he’s ready – when he’s worked out what use you are to him, what he might get or take from you.’ The words and all they implied concerning his understanding of the man had surprised Mercer, but he had not responded to them. Shortly afterwards, Jacob had started his own tale.

  ‘Long? Less than three months. When the place filled, or when word came from dear old Otto, whole rows of barracks were emptied and the trains came and went.’

  ‘Otto?’

  ‘Otto Bene. Consul-General. He lived in a palace in The Hague. It was his job to ensure that Holland was cleared of its Jews. The first deportation had taken place a year earlier. We had been invited to go and wave off all those people who had been only too willing to leave – the ones who believed all the promises. My Aunt Clara had wanted to go then. She thought that by agreeing to go she would gain some benefit. My mother and father persuaded her otherwise; her husband, too. She railed against my mother, saying that we were making things worse for ourselves by delaying, by resisting. Her husband, my Uncle Solomon, worked alongside my father. I imagine the two of them heard a great deal which they repeated to no one. My mother told her sister that we were safe because of the glassworks – even the Germans needed glass, especially with all those newly broken windows. Clara’s son – he was three or four when the war started – was also called Otto. We tried not to call him by it, but his mother insisted. After those first deportations, though they were never called that then, things did not go so smoothly for the other Otto. In August of that year, the hottest days of a hot summer, two thousand more were called for, but only two or three hundred turned up ready to leave. I remember reading in a newspaper about how inconvenienced the Germans felt because they had provided so many trains and crews, most of which were no longer required.’

  ‘Had you realized by then what was happening?’

  ‘Some had. Most preferred to believe the contradictory rumours they heard. My aunt showed us the postcards and letters she had received from some of her own long-gone neighbours telling her of the wonderful homes they now lived in, the worthwhile jobs they did.’

  ‘All of which—’

  ‘All of which convinced my father that the glassworks provided our greatest hope. It was where we hid, eleven of us, in an underground room which had once been part of a giant old kiln, but which was long out of use. We were taken there one or two at a time. My father, of course, and his brother, could not hide. He told the authorities that my mother, Anna and I had gone to Rotterdam, and that he had not heard from us since our arrival there. He said he was concerned for our safety.’

  ‘Was he believed?’ It seemed a transparent lie.

  ‘I doubt it. But there was no hurry, then – so what if we weren’t sent away for a few months longer? I daresay there were a dozen men in the works who would happily have betrayed us all for the price of a bottle of drink.’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Eventually. I don’t know. Perhaps Otto and the authorities knew we were there all along and thought it best to go looking first for all those others whose whereabouts they did not know of. We stayed from August to the following June in that old kiln, and when the factory worked through the night, which happened frequently in those days, we were stuck in that underground room for days on end. Afterwards, when the place was deserted, we went up into the empty workshops and yards and we were able to wander as freely as we had done before. My father paid for the food and clothes that were brought to us. Almost everything we needed, we were able to get. My cousin Otto was too young to be any real company for me, and my only true companion was Anna. She was eight years my junior. My parents never made any secret of the fact that she had come as something of a surprise to them. Following my own birth, my mother miscarried three times in four years. Her sister came to live with us to help care for her. She never left. I think my mother resented this intrusion, but she was in no position to refuse her help.’

  In front of them, Bail crossed from one side of his property to the other on a small tractor which possessed few of its body panels. He waved to them and they returned the gesture.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Mercer said.

  ‘What he always does. Trying to appear busy.’

  ‘Was no one able or prepared to speak out for you, to protect you?’

  ‘We were a conquered nation; our Government was in exile. Our ministers issued proclamations, veiled threats of retribution, but there was no sense then that they would ever be in a position to carry these out. Besides, we lived from day to day, week to week. I read once in a newspaper that nine Dutchmen had been imprisoned and then deported for harbouring a single Jewish child. The time had come, I suppose, when the Germans no longer felt the need to hide these things from us. Everything they did trumpeted their invincibility. Too many of us came to believe their lies.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘I would be lying if I told you I understood better than anyone else in that cellar what was happening. What I do remember is being told by my mother to be careful what I said or repeated in front of Anna. She saw how close we had become during those months. She told me that my sister looked to me for guidance and reassurance. I doubt that was precisely how Anna saw it, but they were my mother’s words, and I never forgot them.’

  ‘And once you arrived in—’ Mercer had forgotten the name of the place, remembering only that it was close to Emden.
>
  ‘Papenburg,’ Jacob said. ‘Strangely, after all those months of hiding and of uncertainty, and because we had remained together on the train and in the place itself, I felt a perverse sense of relief.’

  ‘Relief?’

  ‘I know. Perhaps that is the wrong word. But we had lived with our fears for so long, our nightmares of what lay ahead of us, that to arrive in Papenburg and to be still living together – I don’t know – I suppose I even believed – at least for the weeks we were to remain there – that we had once again gained some control over our – what would you call it? – destiny?’

  ‘Presumably, your father and uncle were replaced.’

  ‘At a day’s notice. And, presumably, for having lied about our whereabouts. They had considered themselves so indispensable, as though no other two men in the whole world knew how to make glass like they made it. They were lucky not to have been more severely punished. Behind one of the warehouses there was a pyramid of broken glass ten feet high, breakages, dumped there ready to be melted down when the need arose. Anna and I were warned to stay away from it, of course, and, of course, being so warned we were drawn to it even more. A single stone thrown to the top of that mound would cause a landslide of glass of every colour. We went there in the winter months when the factory was empty. It was our place. We sat at the foot of that glass mountain and made our plans together for the future. She wanted me to tell her what our parents would not. She wanted to know why we were being treated and humiliated like that.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  Jacob paused before answering. ‘Lies,’ he said. ‘I told her lies. I started then, and I never stopped. Lie after lie after lie.’

  ‘You gave her hope,’ Mercer said.

  ‘Is that what I did?’