A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  In the bay, the searchlights continued to carve spectral, vigilant beams.

  ‘I hope you get away,’ said Julia, who had once been rescued from confinement in a place she had been certain would habour her grave. She shut the blind, took a last look at her sleeping daughter in her crib and went back to bed.

  In the limited, contingent manner of the survivor, Julia came to enjoy her life in California. She lived in a beautiful city and the people were more generous in their welcoming of strangers than she ever could have imagined or wished. She got a job as the librarian at a large and lavishly equipped co-educational college.

  Natasha grew into a clever and demanding girl, first at kindergarten and then at infant school. The Californians had an endless appetite for recreation. There were sailing and rowing clubs and people played tennis. Julia had been a member of a cycling club before the war and she bought herself a bicycle and rode the deserted lanes of the Nappa Valley when a neighbour she had befriended could babysit. Cycling was a European sport and the only Americans she saw on bikes were boys in the mornings hurling newspapers from the saddle at suburban porches. But if her cycling was considered eccentric, nobody commented on it. She learned to drive a car. She began to save, so that one day she would be able to pay back Bill the money he had so generously lent her. Berlin fell. America won the war in the Pacific. With everyone else, Julia Smollen celebrated in the streets. Many young American men had lost their lives in the war. But it seemed to her that they celebrated peace more than they celebrated victory. She sensed no gloating with the end of war in the celebrations on the streets of San Francisco.

  She thought she came to understand the reason for this attitude to victory a few months after the peace when she was asked to help supervise a history trip the school at which she worked took to the battlefield of Gettysburg. She was asked only because a flu bug had left the history department short-staffed. But she agreed happily enough to a change of routine that would show her some more of the country she now called home.

  Watching the teenage students tour the battlefield under caps and hats and sunshades, it was impossible not to think of the soldiers of both opposing armies, clothed in rough wool uniforms, bearing the weight of clumsy rifles, toiling in their thousands in the stifling July heat. Murderous courage and the tactics of attrition had made this an engagement in which more men died than had before or since on American soil. But it wasn’t the casualty figures that distinguished Gettysburg from other Civil War battles, appalling though the losses were. It was what Gettysburg had come to represent as the word itself resonated through the tender history of this still youthful nation.

  Julia watched their young history teacher talk to his students. He didn’t look much older than they did, with his swatch of reddish-blond hair and spread of freckles and suit of blue and white seersucker. Enthusiasm for his subject seemed to energize him in the wilting humidity as he pointed to features in the distance on the heat-glazed landscape and worked to bring the conflict back to life.

  Julia knew about the power of myth. Already the exploits of the exiled Polish pilots in the war just ended were becoming mythic. Their lunatic courage as they fought the Battle of Britain over the chalk hills of sedate counties called Kent and Sussex. Their suicidal raids launched over the English Channel on the German fortified French ports before the Normandy landings. Poles were not strangers to martial legend. Theirs was a history that demanded and craved the consolation of glory.

  But this was different. Flies plagued their party and the contours of the land sagged in the dripping heat. The children, though, remained respectfully attentive, the way children might at some solemn ceremony in a great building or at a service in a church. And Julia listened at Gettysburg to the litany of place names and the deeds they represented: Cemetery Hill, Seminary Ridge, Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield and Plum Run. And the names of the commanders: Meade, Sickles, Longstreet, Warren. And Pickett, of course. And Pickett’s Charge. And there was a stir as one of the students found something and approached the teacher and showed him a thin, rust-mottled fragment of what Julia thought was probably bayonet blade. And the teacher calculated the battlefield disposition and speculated that here, on this spot, the bayonet might have belonged to a soldier of the 6th Wisconsin, mustered into the United States Army in the early part of 1861 and under the command, at Gettysburg, of Captain Rufus Dawes. Dawes had arrived at the field from Mauston with two companies composed entirely of Italians and Germans from Milwaukee. Then the teacher told the boy to put the relic back exactly where he had discovered it on the hallowed ground.

  Julia understood, then, something about the Americans. She understood why they had not crowed in their street celebrations after the surrender of Japan. This was a nation birthed in blood, in Revolution and Civil War. Its freedoms had been hard won at intimate cost. Victory in war was not something to gloat over. And at that moment, on that sweltering field, she felt, for the first time, that she could come to love America and to be an American and to call this country home.

  It was a feeling from which she was not remotely deflected that evening, when the freckled teacher turned up at her motel room door, having swapped the seersucker for a double-breasted blazer with a jaunty crest sewn onto the pocket. He wore a cravat and carried a pack of Pall Malls. She declined his offer of dinner, not wanting to give him a misleading impression. But he looked so crestfallen at her refusal that she softened, saying that the heat had tired her but she would join him for a single drink. In the event she drank three glasses of beer and, to his evident delight, smoked two of his cigarettes. She mentioned his apparent reverence earlier in the day for the battlefield relic.

  ‘The war dead are deserving of our respect,’ he told her, a grave look on his young face. She wondered was it some patriotic value instilled in him at college. It transpired he had served under Patton, had commanded a tank and fought in the war in the forests of France and Germany. And he hadn’t just meant the American dead.

  Julia Smollen did not date in this period of her life. She did not establish, discounting Bill, any authentic, lasting friendships. She raised her infant child and she assimilated herself into the patterns and rhythms and lesser intricacies of American life.

  She dreamed, often, of Martin Hamer.

  He had been sent to the camp where she was held, apparently to recover from a wound suffered in the German counter-offensive in the East, after the retreat from Stalingrad. The medal ceremony in which he had been decorated for his valour in that action had been turned into a propaganda coup. He had been given a nominal job in the camp outside Poznan, it transpired, for two reasons. One was to encourage, by example, German pioneers to settle in the conquered territory they termed the General Government. The other was to avoid the risk of his being killed back at the front. Germany had plenty of dead heroes to remind its people of the mortality rate in the East. What they needed were some live ones whose valour they could less morosely celebrate.

  The first time she saw Hamer, she was measuring out what she was certain were the last days or even hours of her three years of incarceration. Forced to join the camp’s small Joy Division, she had tolerated the attentions of the guards until driven beyond endurance by a sexual sadist called Hans Rolfe, an NCO who treated the camp as his fiefdom. She insulted Rolfe, goading him before an audience of his comrades. She saw Hamer for the first time moments after, as she pegged washing out. He was walking the perimeter of the camp. She noticed him because he looked so out of place amid the combat dodgers and Party die-hards, the thugs and carpetbaggers of Germany’s new empire. He was one of the breed that had done the conquering that brought the scum that fucked her nightly in his wake. A moment after Hamer had passed, Rolfe let slip an attack dog trained to rip out groins and armpits and throats. She was losing the fight to keep it off her when Martin Hamer ran back and wrestled off and shot the beast. She looked into his eyes for the first time, then. And she saw that he would shoot Hans Rolfe with the same total absence of co
mpunction.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ she wanted to say to him, to scream and spit into his handsome, troubled face. ‘You did it,’ she wanted to say. Because he and his type had turned her country, and her life with it, into a kind of hell.

  Sometimes, she dreamed of that first encounter. And as the Dobermann tore muscle and tendons and wrenched her defending arm from its socket, Hamer walked blithely on. His hands were linked loosely at his back and his head was tilted to examine the wire in its dense coil at the top of the perimeter fence. And as the teeth of the dog ripped her neck in a spray of arterial blood, she saw his wedding band glint dully under the light of the Polish winter.

  Sometimes she dreamed of his death. In this dream he perished in the snow, in his uniform, the snowflakes falling mournfully around him and gathering in his lap as he sat and died, his face sad and uncomprehending; she pulling at his epaulettes and tugging fistfuls of his hair as though he were some petulant child she could bait back into indignant, obstreperous life.

  Waking was always the same. She would climb out of bed and creep over to Natasha’s cot and touch her daughter’s cheek with the back of her hand and then bend and smell her hair and kiss her head. Then she would make herself tea and sit and drink it, black, watching the night bay through her window. She would weep, which she had trained herself to do too quietly to awaken her little girl. And she would wait for the pain and despondency of missing him to become once again something she could accommodate well enough for sleep to return to her. Sometimes it did.

  She told Bill over the telephone about the visit to Gettysburg.

  ‘And then that fellow from the Superman comic books knocked on my motel room door.’

  ‘Clark Kent?’

  ‘No. Not Clark Kent.’

  ‘Lex Luther? Julia, honey. Jesus. You should have called the cops.’

  She was laughing. ‘Jimmy Olsen. He was Jimmy Olsen,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you were suitably underwhelmed.’

  She held the receiver close to her face. It was always so good to talk to Bill when he sounded this sober and well. When he sounded this happy.

  The fugitive from Alcatraz had not escaped the cold clutches of the bay. She read about him. His failed bid for freedom made page three of the San Francisco Chronicle. That was the headline: ‘Rock Lifer in Fatal Freedom Bid’. She read the story on a Saturday morning at a table outside a coffee shop near the harbour. She chose places with seats outside because other patrons objected to the presence of a baby. It was one of the differences between here and Europe. Between here and the Europe she remembered, anyway. Poland was a part of Russia now. And ’Tasha wasn’t crying and spoiling the customers’ coffee and pastries. She was gurgling and staring at the sky, at the silver fuselage of a passenger aircraft rumbling through the blue air.

  Cold had killed the Alcatraz fugitive. Cold had guaranteed, also, that the poor man hadn’t been a fugitive for very long. His blood had stopped circulating, the story said, as he clung to a wooden pallet in the water. He’d been twenty-three, two years into a life sentence earned when he carried out an armed robbery on a liquor store. The storeowner suffered a stroke in the attack and his inept assailant used a payphone on the liquor store wall to call an ambulance before running away. The victim died on his way to hospital and the man the paper called the perpetrator was caught cowering in an unfamiliar doorway a few blocks away from the scene of the crime.

  ‘The kid was an amateur,’ the arresting officer recalled. ‘He didn’t know the neighbourhood, had no modus operandi. Typical street punk.’

  An editorial in the paper wondered what America was coming to. The streets weren’t safe from acts of banditry. Organized crime was spreading its tentacles from New York and Chicago to Nevada and New Orleans. There were protection rackets and something called numbers running. There was an organization called the Cosa Nostra, or the Mafia. It was a secret brotherhood of Sicilians, driven out before the war by Mussolini only to resurface in the United States. The country was caught between the crime wave and the Red Peril, warned the San Francisco Chronicle. Now a hapless street punk had breached security at Frank Lloyd Wright’s impregnable island prison. The outlook was decidedly bleak.

  ‘Not so bleak as for that boy who died of cold,’ Julia said, surprising herself, because she’d said the words in her own half-forgotten tongue. She was so fluent in this version of English America spoke and wrote, she even thought in the language now.

  Shading her eyes with her hand, she peered out over the bay, where the outlook was decidedly sunny. Her stomach was filled with coffee and Danish pastry. In her pram, her baby gurgled with infant glee. But Julia felt troubled, somehow. She felt, obscurely, that there had to be some point to all the trauma and the sacrifice that had delivered her here. It was Hamer’s sacrifice, Hamer’s life, which had delivered her. That had been the true cost of her own escape. And her own life could not be just about bringing up the child he had fathered, no matter how loving and conscientious a mother she wanted to be. Her freedom had not been earned, she felt. She needed to find its justification. It wasn’t so much that she felt guilty or indebted. It was more that she felt the compunction to live a life she could respect.

  ‘What am I doing?’ she asked rhetorically, once, of Bill in a phone conversation during her San Francisco interlude.

  Bill was silent. Until finally, he spoke. ‘You’re convalescing,’ he said. And later, when she thought about it, she realized that this must have been true. Because one day in 1950, everything began to change for Julia Smollen.

  It was Easter. Natasha was a bright six-year-old, a slender, serious girl who had read fluently from the age of three. It was the school holidays and it was coming up to Bill’s birthday. Julia booked vacation time from the college and Bill took them up to Yosemite, where they camped and he taught Natasha his boy scout survival skills.

  ‘Your boy scout survival skills must be somewhat rusty,’ Julia said. ‘You’d probably survive about ten minutes in a real wilderness before gibbering for room service.’

  ‘Kid,’ Bill said, ‘I’m obliged to correct you, there. It so happens I’ve read every story Jack London ever wrote.’

  ‘Have you read The Call of the Wild?’ Natasha asked, and her mother could see she was impressed.

  ‘Read it? I can recite it,’ Bill said.

  And despite the jokes, he was a skilled outdoorsman. He taught Natasha how to tie a fly and cast for trout. He taught her how to make fire without matches and when her kindling finally caught, on a wet day after much painstaking effort, she squealed in pure delight.

  ‘She adores you,’ Julia said, as her daughter slept on the cot between theirs one night in their tent.

  ‘I’m having a party at my house and I want you to come,’ Bill said. ‘A grown-ups party. It wouldn’t do for Natasha.’

  ‘Heavy-hitters?’

  ‘Heavy-hitters.’

  It was what he called the important people in Hollywood.

  ‘I’ll be out of place.’

  ‘Of course you will. As the most beautiful and best educated woman there—’

  ‘I’m serious, Bill.’

  ‘—and as my escort, you’re bound to feel conspicuous. And envied.’

  But this was important to him. Rain began to patter on the taut canvas over their heads. Their trip had been pestered by rain.

  ‘Good for the fishing, though,’ said Bill, who could sometimes read her thoughts.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘I’ve booked you into the Montmorency,’ Bill said. ‘They have a babysitting service that comes highly recommended. The girls are trained and vetted. You can meet the sitter and have Natasha meet her and play with her all afternoon, if you wish.’

  ‘I’ll do it on two conditions,’ Julia said.

  Bill’s weight creaked on his cot. ‘Only the two?’

  ‘You’re forbidden to buy me a ludicrously expensive dress. And I won’t wear rented jewellery.’ />
  ‘Done,’ Bill said.

  She would buy herself a new dress. She wanted to look her best. She wanted the evening to be a success for him. Rain began to drum heavier between squalls of wind on the fabric roof. Bill’s breaths deepened and regulated as he descended into sleep. It had been a happy trip. She heard wind soughing between the wet leaves and branches of trees. They had camped close to a scree slope and high above she thought she heard the bellow and crash of a bear. She heard his cot creak as Bill tensed at the sound in his sleep and then relaxed again when it was not repeated. Out here, his was a vigilant sort of sleep. In the little time Martin had had to tell her about his friend, he had mentioned that Bill was a skilled and lethal hunter. They had hunted together before the war. He was a formidable man in the wild, his Jack London joke being exactly that. Apparently he was an expert rifle shot. He had made another joke, when the two of them were tying fishing flies, about teaching Natasha to shoot.

  ‘She’s too young,’ Julia protested.

  ‘Annie Oakley probably started young,’ Bill said.

  Julia shuddered and shook her head. She wanted her daughter to have nothing to do with rifles and the bullets fired from them.

  But she felt safe, in the tent, in this wilderness, with Bill. And she felt Natasha was safe. He was a bear himself, a man of colossal, wasting strength, absurdly constructed, really, for someone whose occupation was the law. She didn’t doubt the courtroom could be a bear pit. America was a country ferocious for litigation. But most of Bill’s work seemed to be done behind the scenes, over the telephone, in bars and across secluded tables in the lush country clubs of Southern California. Maybe it was to his advantage that he looked built like a prizefighter when he squeezed himself into a suit. Maybe it lulled adversaries into thinking they were dealing with a brain full of brawn. They weren’t. When he was sober, Bill’s intelligence was rumoured to be as deadly as his instinct for the pursuit of prey. Certainly he made a very comfortable living at the law.