Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  ‘And then, when the singing was done, the hut leader applauded her singers. She put her arms round Rosa’s shoulders and round the shoulders of the old woman – as though she were about to have her photograph taken with them. She even told them to smile, to be happy for her. I imagine you never saw such broad smiles. And then this woman released her grip on these other two and announced to the watching crowd that someone new was coming into their hut and that a space needed clearing for this newcomer. They all understood this for the lie it was, of course – the newcomers came in their hundreds, not individually. Just as the huts were cleared wholesale. Someone had to go, the woman repeated, and the choice had to be made between the women on either side of her – Rosa and the old woman. Some in the crowd started shouting the old woman’s name, a few even called out for Rosa to be chosen. I suppose there was still envy, jealousy, even in that place. I asked Anna what she had shouted, and at first she denied having called out anything. But then she confessed that she had called out the name of the old woman.

  ‘Eventually, the hut leader called for silence. The sergeant waved his pistol. It was clear, the leader shouted, that the preferred choice was the old woman. She took Rosa’s arm and led her to one side of where the old woman stood. The sergeant came forward and said something to her. The old woman bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. The man raised his pistol and held it close to the side of her head. And then, as everyone tensed themselves against the shot, he turned abruptly, aimed the pistol at Rosa, and shot her instead. The hut leader applauded him and the two of them embraced. They had been in it together from the very start. Women in the crowd screamed and called out when they saw what had happened, how they had been used, and the man waved his weapon at them, his other arm still around the hut leader’s waist.’

  Jacob paused after this, and closed his eyes.

  Mercer felt his own throat constrict. Even if he had wanted to speak, the words would have been no more than a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Anna, of course, watched only Rosa,’ Jacob said. ‘She said she fell first to her knees and then forward onto her face. She, Anna, had been the last thing Rosa had seen before she died.’

  Mercer shook his head.

  ‘The old woman, too, fell to the ground. Perhaps she even imagined that she, and not Rosa, had been shot. The hut leader went to help her to her feet, caressing her face, wiping the dirt from her, holding her and reassuring her that everything was going to be all right, that she would soon be well and strong again. She pointed out the nearby corpse, telling her loudly that Rosa had deserved to die, that she had been vain and conceited, whereas the old woman was kind and wise and well-respected in the hut. Then she led her back into the crowd, among whom were the women who, only a minute earlier, had been calling for her to be killed instead of Rosa. The sergeant shouted for four of them to pick up the corpse and to follow him. There were places throughout the camp where these “incidental” corpses were gathered together ready for collection at the end of each day.’

  ‘Was Anna one of the four?’

  ‘Thankfully, she had more sense. It wasn’t unknown for the guards to choose the weak or the sickly to carry the bodies and then for them too to be shot at the collection points. It saved time and unnecessary labour. No – Anna did not volunteer to carry her friend. The sergeant picked the four women nearest to him and then led them away with Rosa swinging between them. They returned a few minutes later.’

  ‘And the old woman?’

  ‘She died later that same night. Perhaps she woke from a nightmare of all those voices calling her name. Who knows? I didn’t learn any of this until a week later, when I was next able to see Anna. It occurred to me immediately that she, and not Rosa, might just as easily have been chosen. I warned her against attracting the attention of the hut leader, but she said that the woman had already spoken to her, that she had commiserated with Anna at the unfortunate death of her friend. Anna said she had held her, and that she, Anna, had cried in this woman’s arms. She said the last time she had been held like that, it had been by our mother.’

  ‘Did you know for certain that your parents were dead by then?’

  ‘And our aunts and uncles and all our cousins. I did.’

  ‘But not Anna?’

  ‘How hard would you have tried to convince her of that particular fact if she had been your sister? I told her that it was what I believed.’

  ‘But that there was still some doubt?’

  ‘Yes. It would have been too much for her. She was so vulnerable.’

  ‘To the attentions of others?’

  ‘To everything. She needed to have a better understanding of all that was happening to us.’

  ‘And being separated from her, you weren’t able to help her see things as clearly as you yourself now saw them?’

  ‘I was in a trap of my own making. Who would want his fourteen-year-old sister to see those things so clearly?’

  Jacob picked up the book which contained the leaflet and returned it to a shelf of others, pushing it into them so that its spine was flush with those others, and so that its secret was completely hidden.

  He came back to Mercer and asked him how the work at the tower was progressing. Mercer told him, grateful that they had come so swiftly, albeit contrivedly, on to this new course. Grateful, too, that Jacob had been able to tell him this awful story. And even though it was a third-hand telling, the course of the story’s progress served once again to emphasize to Mercer the indivisibility between Jacob and his lost sister.

  Later, when it was time for Mercer to leave, and as he and Jacob walked slowly towards the town together, Jacob remarked that he did not envy those survivors who now lived into old age with their own memories of what they had seen and what had happened to them.

  ‘Because they will not diminish?’ Mercer said.

  ‘No – precisely because they will diminish,’ Jacob said. ‘And because those people will live in a world where everyone else might learn of what happened, and all these others, these onlookers, will have their own ideas and opinions about what happened.’

  ‘You think the tales of the survivors will not be believed?’

  ‘They will swim in a sea of concern and false understanding, and they will drown in that sea. Not at present, of course. Faces are still turned away, but eventually, one way or another.’

  Mercer did not agree with this unthinkable prediction, but again he said nothing.

  They parted soon afterwards at the first of the houses.

  28

  The removal of the bombs began the following day. Early in the morning, two hours before the arrival of his own workers, Mercer was approached by the men in charge of the airfield and told that the Disposal Unit considered it necessary to take the bombs away using the coast road, this being now the least irregular way out of the airfield. The use of this route, they explained, would mean that work on the Station and the surrounding land would need to be suspended for the day, and Mercer’s own workforce kept as far as possible from the bomb-laden vehicles. They made it clear to him that he had no alternative but to comply with these demands. Bombs with a combined weight of a hundred and eighty tons had been discovered. He asked them if the bombs were armed and they became evasive, convincing him that they were not and that these excessive precautions were unnecessary. They insisted it made no difference. They looked around them at the seeming disarray of the site. Disposal and demolition, two different things entirely, one of them said to Mercer, taking back the documents which proved their authority over him, and causing his companions to smile.

  Mercer was angry at being given such short notice of all this activity, but he knew better than to prolong his useless arguments. All the Disposal men continued to serve in the Regular Army. His own lost rank would count for nothing.

  He walked with them back to the perimeter and watched the teams preparing for the removal of the bombs. He asked the airfield men what was likely to happen, but none of them knew for certai
n. The most logical course, one said, would be to detonate the bombs somewhere in the surrounding open land, but none of the others considered this likely. Another man told Mercer that he had served on the airfield when it was operational and that the unarmed bombs were being treated with ten times more caution now than they ever were then. He said he had seen bombs roll from their tractor carriages and that men had simply rolled them back across the concrete. Mercer told the man he had seen the same thing in Italy, at an American base where a squadron of Mitchell light bombers had been stationed.

  They separated after that, and later, when his own workforce arrived, Mercer explained to them what was happening. The road would have to be cleared of the lorries; these were to be driven on to the ground between the houses and the Light. He had expected the men to welcome this additional break from their work, but instead they complained that if they had been informed earlier, then they might have stayed away completely, either in the town or in their camp.

  Later in the morning, several of the airfield men returned to the site and sought Mercer out. They sat with him in the tower and compared their work. They told him to ignore the man who had insisted on showing Mercer the forms of authorization. He was still missing the war, they said; it was a common enough complaint.

  Once the lorries were parked, most of the workers returned to gather in groups close to the houses. The inhabitants went out to them and the removal of the bombs was endlessly discussed.

  Later still, more men from the airfield came in a body to stand at the perimeter, and Mercer saw Mathias and his companions among these. They had been sent away while the work of winching the bombs to ground level was carried out.

  ‘Good workers,’ one of the longer-serving airfield contractors said to Mercer, indicating where the prisoners congregated apart from the others, and out of sight of Mercer’s own men, who remained close to the houses. ‘Shame, though,’ the man added.

  ‘About what?’ Mercer asked him.

  ‘Half of them have applied to stay here,’ the man said. ‘Word came at the weekend that most of them have been denied and that they’re going to be sent home.’

  Mercer looked back to where Mathias stood watching the distant work.

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Who knows? Some who want to go are staying, and some who want to stay are going. You know how these things work. Think of a perfectly rational, logical answer to a problem, and then work out how to complicate it and how to get as many pen-pushers as possible involved.’

  ‘Like the bombs?’

  ‘Like the bombs.’

  ‘Do you know if Mathias Weisz is being allowed to stay?’

  ‘Mathias? Not sure. Does he want to? The boss has written to whoever sent the order saying that they’re all engaged on vital work and that he can’t spare any of them until it’s finished.’

  ‘Will it work?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Apparently, there’s some kind of appeal process. It takes thirty days, so they’ll be here for at least that.’

  ‘And the ones who want to go, and who can?’

  ‘They’ll be stuck with the others until it’s sorted. They won’t be too happy about it, obviously, but what are they going to do?’

  ‘His parents were killed in an air-raid,’ Mercer said.

  ‘What difference does that make?’ the man beside him said, then pointed and added, ‘They’ve started.’

  Mercer looked to where the first of the bombs were being removed.

  ‘This’ll be happening all over the country,’ the man said. ‘They’re going to be finding those things for the next fifty years. You mark my words. The guns in half the planes are still stuffed full of live rounds. All supposed to have been stripped out. We caught a little kid playing with a flare the other day.’

  ‘Someone from here?’

  ‘I imagine so. When he saw us he dropped it and ran off. A phosphor flare. I once spent a day trying to get what was left of a wireless-operator out of his hole after one of those things had been set off by a piece of flak. A dozen wet, black pieces of him, that’s all we got.’

  Looking down, Mercer saw Mary and both her mother and father come out of their home and approach the men gathered outside. Then the three of them, now in the company of some of the others, crossed the road and climbed a raised bank to look out over the airfield. Someone gave Lynch a pair of binoculars, and he used these, first to study the airfield, and then to look all around him, finally spotting where Mathias and the other prisoners stood and watched. He remained focused on the men for several minutes before turning away. There were no other women present, and even at that distance it was clear to Mercer that Lynch had insisted on his wife and daughter accompanying him. He held Elizabeth Lynch by her arm, as though she might fall from the bank. Mary stood several paces from them. Lynch gave his daughter the binoculars, but the man to whom they belonged immediately took them back from her.

  ‘We lose the Germans, it’ll set us back two months,’ the man beside Mercer said.

  It encouraged Mercer to hear this, knowing that if the work was likely to suffer, then everything possible would be done by those in charge of the site to keep them there for as long as possible.

  ‘Bureaucracy versus brawn,’ he said to the man.

  ‘Something like that.’ The man concentrated now on the distant work, counting aloud the number of bombs that had already been lifted from their forgotten store.

  Mercer left the tower and, avoiding Lynch and his family, he made his way to where Mathias and the others now sat amid the rubble. He recognized some of the men from his afternoon among them in the bunker. They greeted him and asked him what he knew about the removal of the bombs. It was their opinion that they ought to be detonated where they were, that this could only speed up the destruction of the runway.

  Mercer told them he thought this was unlikely.

  ‘No one tells us anything,’ the man called Roland said to him. ‘Perhaps they think we might sabotage the work.’

  The men around him laughed, but the laughter was short-lived, and Mercer sensed something of the despondency which now lay over them following the news of their applications.

  ‘I heard about the repatriation notices,’ he said to Mathias at the first opportunity, and knew immediately from Mathias’s response to this that his own request to remain had been denied. ‘What will happen?’ he said.

  Mathias shrugged. ‘I imagine there is a right of appeal.’

  ‘There is,’ Mercer said.

  ‘And that this appeal process will be fairly, meticulously and rigidly observed.’

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ Mercer told him, but with little conviction. ‘You have nothing to lose.’

  ‘Your Authorities are not renowned for changing a decision once it is made,’ Mathias said.

  ‘The contractor in charge at the airfield will appeal on your behalf. He needs you here.’

  ‘We know all about that. Thirty days. The end of September. Roland here has his wife and family waiting for him – though God knows where – and he has been told that at least a further six months will pass before he is eligible for reconsideration. He is a fieldcook. He cooks stew.’

  Mercer remembered the distant footballer from a month earlier.

  ‘I must have done some terrible things,’ Roland said, and held up his arm in a rigid salute, a gesture which shocked Mathias as much as it did Mercer. The man’s disappointment and anger had made him reckless.

  ‘He was a field-cook,’ Mathias repeated, and knocked the man’s arm down. He looked quickly around them. ‘He is also, it often occurs to me, his own worst enemy.’ No one else beyond the group of prisoners had witnessed the gesture.

  Roland signalled his sullen apology to both Mathias and Mercer. ‘Perhaps the men in charge here tasted my food,’ he said, and those around him laughed again.

  Mercer was careful to avoid all mention of Jacob in front of these others. He knew that Mathias was as concerned for Jacob as for himself rega
rding his enforced repatriation.

  ‘Perhaps, once you’ve returned home, you’ll be able to come back here later.’

  Mathias smiled at the suggestion.

  Before Mercer could say any more, several men appeared around the side of the tower and came towards them. Mercer recognized them as one of his own crews. These men, a dozen of them, talked among themselves – now clearly enjoying their own unexpected idleness – and then fell silent as they approached where Mercer and the Germans sat together. They stopped a short distance away. One of them carried a length of wood, and seeing the Germans he held it ahead of himself as though it were a rifle. He looked ridiculous and several of the Germans commented on the gesture.

  Roland made his hand into a gun, pointed it and said, ‘Bang, bang.’ There was more laughter.

  Mercer rose and stepped forward to ensure that he was seen by these newcomers.

  ‘What do you want?’ he called to the men.

  ‘Want? Nothing. It’s a free country.’

  ‘“A free country”,’ Roland repeated. He blew on his fingers and then slowly opened them.

  ‘Join us,’ Mercer said.

  ‘Join them?’ one of the men said.

  Mathias came forward to stand beside Mercer.

  ‘They’ve been sent away from the airfield while the bombs are removed,’ Mercer said to the men.

  ‘We know why they’re here.’

  ‘Pity the bombs were left there at all,’ another of the men said. ‘They should have been used and then—’ He stopped speaking as several of the other Germans, those who understood what was being said, rose to their feet.

  ‘Go on,’ Mathias said.

  But the men on the road appeared to lose conviction. They were outnumbered by the Germans by at least two to one. Someone whispered something, and the man who had made the remark about the bombs told Mercer that he was wanted at the lorries.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ he said. ‘Looking for you. Everybody’s telling us what to do, and some of us aren’t happy about it. First they want the lorries past the houses, now they want us to park up two hundred yards down the road. We said we’d find you and see what you said.’