The Escape Page 13

  ‘Gwen found an old postcard of yours,’ I say. ‘Of a place called Lossen – she thinks it’s where you grew up, is that right? I’ll bring it back with me when I come home. And maybe I could . . .’ An idea has begun to form in my head, about finding this village and taking some photographs for her, even before my grandmother interrupts.

  ‘The postcard! That’s where it went. I’ve been looking for it. But now you have it, it makes things easier, perhaps.’

  ‘Makes what easier, Gran?’

  ‘Could you go there for me? You see I left something behind, something very precious to me.’ She tells me then about a silver locket, hidden inside a tree trunk. She says the locket contains a photograph of her own mother, secreted when she fled. She doesn’t tell me why she left it behind, just that she’d like me to look, see if it’s still there. ‘It’s all that’s left,’ she says. ‘That, and the postcard – the only connection I have with the girl I used to be.’

  I see the woman in the doorway has stopped speaking and is staring at me, head tilted, like a dog watching its supper bowl being filled, even as Gwen begins to close the door in her face.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, picking up the postcard. I hear the front door slam shut. ‘I can do that.’ There is a draught of lavender water and bonfire-scented air as Gwen walks behind me along the hallway.

  After I’ve hung up I go through to the kitchen, where Gwen is whisking batter in a bowl. She has switched on the radio on the windowsill. The newscaster talks in dry tones about the temporary changes to border controls in Berlin, and how there is no truth in the rumours that the Wall will be demolished. I tell Gwen that I just took photos of young men with sledgehammers, that the hole they made in the Wall is the one I came through today.

  ‘Thank God Karl-Heinz isn’t alive,’ Gwen says. ‘It would kill him, this destruction of everything he believed in.’ The expression in her eyes makes me feel uncomfortable, so I look away, at the family photographs still scattered on the table.

  I clear my throat. ‘I owe you for the call to England,’ I say, rummaging in my jeans pockets for Ostmarks.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re family,’ Gwen says, putting down her whisk and wiping her hands on her slacks. ‘And I’m sorry Frau Vetter interrupted your call. She was offering to send her husband round to help with clearing the leaves, but I know she really just wanted to find out who my visitor was. She is so nosey that woman, honestly – Karl-Heinz used to say she was probably a Stasi informer, the way she’s always twitching her curtains and inviting herself in.’ Gwen laughs a little. ‘Poison dwarf,’ he used to call her. ‘And she wouldn’t have found anything out about Karl-Heinz, in any case. He was utterly beyond reproach, ideologically, at least.’ She sighs, looking past me to the fading light outside. Then, as if remembering I’m there, she looks across at me and smiles. ‘Your grandmother asked me to look after you, so I’m making my special potato pancakes for supper.’ She goes over to the table, collects the photos and taps them together into a neat pile. ‘Then we can have a couple of glasses of plum brandy and set the world to rights. Although,’ she gives a nod in the direction of the chuntering radio, ‘it sounds as if others may have beaten us to it.’

  I thank her but say I’ve decided to get on my way. It would be pleasant to stay and get to know Gwen, to eat pancakes, drink brandy and get some sleep. But now I know about Lossen, and the lost necklace, I want to keep moving. I put the postcard in my Filofax at the top of my rucksack, pull on my denim jacket, and sling my Leica back round my neck. When I hug Gwen goodbye, it feels like I’ve known her for more than the stolen hour I’ve passed in her home.

  As Gwen waves me off from the doorway, I see the woman with the purple hairband sweeping up leaves in the garden of the house opposite. Her curtains are still open, and the yellow light causes pulsing purple shadows to fall from her as she sweeps. When she notices me she drops her broom and scurries indoors.

  In the distance, I see the tram approach, and I rush to catch it. And this time it feels as if I’m running towards something, not running away.

  Chapter 17

  January 1945, Nazi Germany

  Tom

  This time he was ready for it: the knock at the manse door. Blackness pressed in on his eyeballs and the dust crept up his nose. There was the tickle of an incipient sneeze, but he couldn’t raise his hand to itch his nose, wedged as he was between solid oak and crumbling plaster in the suffocating blackness.

  He’d heard the phone ring three times, dimly, as part of a dream, and woken fully to the sound of the priest’s footfalls coming upstairs: it was Detta on the phone, warning them that the SS were on their way – she’d seen the vehicles from her bedroom window. The priest helped with the hurried scuffle into hiding places. Gordon was back in the space under the floorboards. Tom had squeezed into the alcove and the priest pushed the heavy bookcase in front of him with a grunt. They were more practised than last time: ready, waiting for the knock at the door.

  Sounds were muffled, with the bookcase and all those leather-bound volumes in the way. There were still the guns, of course, and he’d heard vehicles drawing up and voices in the guesthouse car park as they hid, but nothing now. He strained to hear. Soon the knock would come, barking German voices, clumping boots up the stairwell. He waited, blinking in the darkness. It might be okay. The bookcase completely covered the alcove – they wouldn’t suspect the hidden space in the wall. Unless they had brought dogs. Then they’d be done for – him, Gordon, and the priest, too – the Nazis had no love of the Catholic Church. Tom’s thighs started to burn. He was cramped into an awkward foetal position. His breathing seemed suddenly impossibly loud, and the sneeze still threatened. Why weren’t they here yet? The waiting was the worst. Dark. The black was endless here in this tiny hole. He could be falling through space, if it weren’t for the pain in his limbs, and the vice-like clench of the bookcase and wall. His breath rasped, catching in his throat. He gulped down a cough, and tried to slow his breathing: in-out, in-out. Calm down. Panic won’t help you, sonny Jim. But where were they? Why was there no knock at the door?

  He remembered how it had been in his lonely Perspex bubble in the Beaufighter, claustrophobia in motion, hurtling through the burning night skies. They’d had a lucky escape that night, he and his skipper. Perhaps their luck would hold . . . What was that, now? Not a knock, but something: a scuffle, voices from downstairs. The sounds seemed to get louder. Was that someone coming upstairs? Dear God. Stop it. Too late to pray now, you silly sod. A bang as the bedroom door was flung open. Here we go.

  There was the scraping sound of wood against wood, and a sliver of light appeared beside him. ‘Come out. He’s told me where you’re hiding.’ But it wasn’t the guttural shout of an SS officer, it was a woman’s voice. Confusion and panic swirled in Tom’s head.

  He held his breath and waited for the worst.

  Detta

  ‘Mon Dieu! You forced me to throw those poor soldier boys out into the cold and all the time you were hiding British terrorfliegers here?’

  ‘But Mother, if we had let the deserters stay, the SS would have shot them by now,’ Detta said.

  ‘Ah, oui, mais maintenant nous avons un problème encore plus important a régler, n’est-ce-pas?’ Mother hissed, shaking her head so that her night-time plait dangled like a noose.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Father Richter said, inserting himself between them. ‘I should never have asked Detta to help me. It’s me you should be angry with, Frau Bruncel.’

  ‘You are a man of God, Father. You have no choice but to reach out to those who are in need. But my daughter should have known better, and refused to get involved.’

  ‘But you helped those deserting soldiers, Mother. I don’t see how that’s any different—’

  ‘Don’t you dare take that tone with me. You are still my daughter, and until you turn twenty-one . . .’ She flung her hands up to her cheeks and exhaled through her splayed fingers. ‘Oh, mon Dieu!’

&
nbsp; The candle flickered, revealing lemon-white patches of flesh in the darkness: the priest’s cheekbone, a taut sinew in her mother’s neck, and, to one side, the angular jawline of the escapee. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tom said in German. ‘I should never have put any of you in this situation.’

  ‘No, you should not!’ Mother pulled her hands from her face and clamped them to her hips.

  ‘Will you lot keep it down?’ An English voice came from the bed. ‘Just because the SS have requisitioned your guesthouse, doesn’t mean they’re not still on a manhunt for us.’

  ‘What did that man say?’ her mother asked, and Detta translated for her.

  ‘He’s right,’ Father Richter said. ‘We should try to keep quiet, get some rest, and not overreact.’

  ‘Not overreact? The SS come storming into my home in the middle of the night to take it over, and I come here for sanctuary, only to find that one of my oldest friends is harbouring escaped enemy prisoners, and, what’s more, my own daughter has been in on the secret from the outset. The pair of you have conspired to keep it from me, and you tell me not to overreact?’ She spat the words into the flickering half-dark and they all shifted uneasily.

  There was a crack like lightening then, and the whole house seemed to shudder from the artillery barrage. ‘I’m so sorry, Frau Bruncel,’ Tom repeated as the noise died away.

  ‘Ach, Mensch!’ Mother reverted to German, dropped her hands from her hips, and Detta knew she was beginning to calm down.

  Father Richter turned to her mother. ‘Why don’t you and Detta have my room, and I’ll sleep downstairs in the study?’ he said.

  Tom offered to keep watch from the hallway window whilst they slept. The priest took a blanket from a cupboard and went downstairs. Detta followed her mother into Father Richter’s spartan bedroom. They didn’t undress, just took their shoes off and slid beneath the eiderdown.

  Between blasts from the front line Detta listened to her mother’s breathing slowly to a rhythmic assonance. She heard the scrape of Tom’s chair in the hallway and the fizz of a match being struck. She waited for sleep to come to her, watching the slivery streak of candlelight under the door. There was a faint tang of fresh cigarette smoke. Tom was awake. And so was she.

  Detta felt again that sensation inside. It wasn’t as harsh or shocking as the first time, on the pathway in the blizzard, but it was still there, pulling her towards him. As her mother began to snore, Detta slipped out from under the covers and padded into the hallway.

  He looked up as she approached. In the half-light, his eyes weren’t blue, they were shadowy grey, but they still gave her that feeling, as if the air between them was brittle, and she was about to smash through.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. He offered her his chair, but instead she took the wickerwork stool that had held the bathroom door ajar. The only light was from the church candle by the sink. The bathroom mirror shimmered as the door closed. She carried the stool towards him in the darkness and put it down opposite him, so they could sit on either side of the little window, looking out through the shutter slats and the bare beech branches to the Deutches Haus. He lit her a cigarette and passed it over.

  ‘I didn’t realize that was your house,’ he said. ‘Which is your room?’

  ‘That one, above the front door,’ she pointed with the lit tip of her cigarette. As she leant across her knee grazed his.

  ‘So close,’ he said.

  ‘So close.’ And somehow it didn’t feel awkward at all, having her knee rest against his. So she stayed like that, connected to him by a little circle of warmth, as they smoked their cigarettes. ‘Some SS officer is in my bed now,’ she said, and shuddered at the thought. Would it be candle-wax face or bull-neck or one of the other myriads who had come swarming in from the car park, demanding food, beds, brandy, now-now-NOW! No wonder Mother had decided simply to fill up the old toboggan with provisions from the cellar and decamp to the manse. It had been futile to even attempt to dissuade her. Luckily Detta was still dressed, her suitcase packed. They were across the road within minutes, leaving the ‘grey dogs’ to sort themselves out. And, of course, once they arrived at the manse, the truth about the escapees had to come out.

  The sky above the Deutches Haus was dark as a witch’s hat, and the moon nowhere to be seen, but occasional brilliant flashes lit the main road where it stretched towards the horizon, and the air crackled and boomed. The SS had decamped their HQ to Lossen. Did that mean Schurgast had fallen? How far away were the Russians now? It didn’t bear thinking of.

  ‘What about you?’ Detta said, still conscious of the warmth of Tom’s leg against hers. ‘Where’s your home? What’s it like?’

  ‘I suppose it’s a bit like this place, really. A little village with a couple of pubs, a church, a handful of shops, farmland all around. It’s in Southwest England. They evacuated it for a while this time last year because the Yanks were practising for the D-Day landings on the beach nearby. Only found that out afterwards, of course. So I had an American GI sleeping in my bedroom for a while. For all I know, might have been the same one that stole my girlfriend.’

  ‘You’ve got a girlfriend?’ She was embarrassed by the stab of jealousy she heard in her whispered question, and flushed in the darkness.

  ‘Not anymore. Not since the tear-stained ‘Dear John’ I got a while back. It was rather sweet, actually. And I can’t say I blame her, given the circumstances. I was only missing in action, but they told her to assume I was dead, and it was months before word got back that I was in a prison camp out here. Well, like I said, I can’t blame her, really.’

  Detta thought, then, of Frau Moll, and the Brigadier’s driver, together in the window seat. ‘In times like this, only God can judge us,’ she said, repeating Frau Moll’s words from earlier on.

  He ground out his cigarette and without the light she couldn’t see his features properly. ‘You’re probably right.’ There was a pause. The sky shivered and roared, and angry fireworks slewed above the horizon. ‘And you? Do you have a boyfriend?’

  She thought of Rolf, and the long-ago walks in the woods. She had still been a schoolgirl then. ‘No. Nobody,’ she said.

  They talked more after that. The artillery fire got louder, and they had to move closer to be heard, tired heads nodding towards each other.

  Outside, a full moon rose up behind the battlefield flack. Inside, Detta and Tom shared their lives with each other. Tom told her he had a sister, Gwen, who worked as an army driver, and Detta said she’d always wanted a big sister. Like Detta’s own Papa, Tom’s father had served in the last war, in France but Tom’s father was an army padre, and hadn’t fired a weapon. They discovered that they both liked hiking and nature. She liked singing. He liked painting – might have a stab at a career as an illustrator, he said, once this was all over. She told him her secret dream of becoming a writer. She’d never told anyone that before. Mother expected her to take over the running of the guesthouse, eventually. Tom told her he’d been to Germany as a child, but not here, further west, a town called Monchengladbach, which was somewhere near the Dutch border. There had been an exchange programme organized by his father’s church. ‘It was supposed to promote peace and understanding in the aftermath of the last great cock-up,’ he said. ‘And fat lot of difference it made.’ He spoke in German but said ‘cock-up’ in English. When she said she’d never come across that phrase before, he laughed, and gave her a literal translation.

  ‘Well, that’s something else Sister Maria neglected to put on her vocabulary sheets,’ she said, glad the darkness disguised her blushing cheeks.

  They swapped stories of childhood. She told him about summer holidays in France, and he asked how her mother ended up marrying a German man, and coming to live here.

  She explained how her mother was training to be a ballerina when the last war broke out, and had ended up as an ambulance driver instead, and that was how her parents had met, in a field hospital in 1918. The guns were loud outside and he could
only hear if she kept her lips close to his ear as she spoke, so close she could smell the musky scent of him, and just as she inhaled ready to continue, there came one of those violent flashes and a booming crack. She started, and her lips brushed the stubble on his cheek, and he turned.

  They kissed: soft as a pillow, smooth as cream, just a touch of lips.

  Afterwards they carried on talking, telling their life stories, confiding their dreams, but each sentence was punctuated with the gentle touch of their lips and the warmth of their breath. The guns raged on, and they carried on talking and kissing, throughout it all. Her left hand curled up to the space at the nape of his neck where there was a slice of skin between his hairline and his collar. She stroked it with her forefinger. His right hand came to rest on her left thigh, thumb pressing soft pulses through the cloth of her dress.

  They kissed, and told, and the tearing skies lit up like the end of days: his breath in her ear, his mouth brushing hers, and the soft urgency of their shared secrets and dreams – as if telling them would make them last.

  Then, towards dawn, the guns fell finally silent. His lips were at the point where her jawline touched her earlobe. He had inhaled, and she waited to hear him whisper another confidence. But instead, he exhaled, and she felt his head loll heavy against her shoulder. Sleep had come suddenly with the quiet, creeping dawn. His head felt warm and solid against her chest. She shifted in her seat, moved her hands to better support his weight, heard his breathing slow.

  It seemed to be getting light outside, but a fog was falling. She couldn’t see the horizon, and the Deutches Haus looked smudged and grimy. The first of the day’s military convoys slewed past. The night was almost over, and soon she’d have to let him go.

  Tom

  OhGodOhGodOhGod – scrabbling for the rip cord and the spinning rush of space.