Ashenden (32 page)

Eighty men a hut, two tables, four benches, one stove in the middle of the room. Ten huts in the camp. Previously troops had been stationed here preparing for the landings, and he thought it a particular British efficiency—no one could have called it over-confidence the way the war was going by then—that as soon as the huts emptied of soldiers, the bunks were free to accommodate the prisoners they took. As the months wore on and the camp filled up, they played skat, told stories, took English lessons. English lessons were popular. Kaplinski played his mouth organ in the evenings when they came back from digging ditches, dredging, hedging, bone weary and stunned by air and labor.

The first thing Walter did when he woke up this morning was pull out the drawstring bag from underneath his bunk and spill the wooden blocks across the iron-gray blanket. Twenty-six of them, sanded smooth, each one carved with a letter of the alphabet, and on the other side a picture. A for Apple. B for Boat. C for Cat. It had taken him weeks to make them and tested his vocabulary as much as his woodworking skills.

Frisch, the
Lagerführer,
threw open the door to Hut C and the corrugated iron shuddered on its timber frame. The cold air brought in a sharp smell of autumn bonfires. Most of the men were already up and yawning, heading out to the latrines.

“Beckmann,” said Frisch, approaching.

He pulled up his uniform trousers, P for Prisoner painted on the side of them. “Sir.”

Frisch handed him his day pass and inspected the blocks by peering down at the blanket, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Good work. Christmas gift?”

“Birthday present.”

“Not long now,” said Frisch, who had a round face that looked as if it had been carelessly formed out of putty and might be re-formed any minute and not necessarily in a better fashion. “You’re on the next list. Expect an interview soon. Your conduct has been good. No tarts, no fights, no Nazi talk. And you’ve seen the films. You know what they want to hear.”

Walter nodded. He’d seen the films. They screened them in the chapel once a month. Reeducation was what the British called it, those jerky, grainy images of emaciated corpses and walking dead in their wire-fenced circles of hell. The first time, Kaplinski had barely made it outside before he’d thrown up, which left you wondering what he’d seen on the eastern front and wouldn’t talk about. Vogel had said, and carried on saying, that it was propaganda designed to humiliate them and that the newsreels were faked.

Walter watched the films with compulsion and dread, silent in the flickering light, storing the images with the other heavy truths the war had taught him. The biggest truth, and perhaps the worst, was how easy truth was to ignore, how fragile it was when delusion combined with self-interest. An entire country, a people, could will their eyes and minds away from it while their acts demonstrated a terrible knowingness and purpose to the contrary. A few years before the war, his father acquired a Jewish business in the small town where they lived, the premises and stock, the old upright cast-iron cash registers and a small motorized delivery van, “for almost nothing” he had announced over the evening meal, as if the transaction had been a triumph of his own commercial acumen. Later he remembered accompanying his father to make an inventory and finding in the darkened flat upstairs a heavy coat with a fur collar hanging in a wardrobe smelling of camphor. What had arisen in him was a feeling of shame so intense he had quickly closed the wardrobe door to trap it inside. Now when he watched the films, the wardrobe door swung open and shame came tumbling out. He wondered if you
could ever get used to it, as you could get used to a cough in the mornings.

Frisch said, “If you need packing materials, come by the camp office. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, sir, but that will not be necessary.”

Frisch laid a hand on his shoulder. “Home soon. We shall all be home soon.”

*  *  *

After breakfast Walter went to the chapel where the interdenominational pastor talked about plowed fields and scattered seeds. You got a good mark on your record if you attended chapel, although that was not why he had come. He was there because there was nothing else to do until ten o’clock, which was the time when his day pass came into effect.

During the service a memory came back to him. It had been a summer’s day soon after the bombing of Hamburg and he’d come home on a forty-eight-hour leave. When he’d arrived, hot and tired, at the railway station, it was crowded with bewildered refugees laden with cheap luggage and reeking of smoke, many with singed hair, raw faces, and dull, empty eyes. He recalled one couple—they could not have been much older than he was—and the woman was murmuring to a child wrapped in a dirty shawl. The child was burnt black and quite dead.

Coils of barbed wire surrounded the camp, enclosing machine-gun posts and gun batteries trained on the rows of huts. He presented his pass to the guard at the gate.

“Open your bag,” said the guard, stamping the pass.

Walter opened his bag and the guard examined the wooden blocks with absent curiosity, nodded, and waved him through.

Release was a birth. Soon the camp lay behind and the world fell away in every direction. To his right was a stand of trees, clumped together for company, beyond which the land dipped down and rose again to the hill where the house was situated. To his left were fields rutted by tank treads and littered with rusting oil drums. Farther
in that direction was the American airfield, overgrown with nettles and other choking weeds that encroached upon the abandoned runway.

The path that bisected the fields was mud striped with chalk, knobbly flints cast upward giving a grip underfoot. The colors were what he described to himself as English: a sharp yellow and a dull blue that answered it, the rest dirty green, gray, and brown. Above, the sky was streaked and indefinite.

He had been captured somewhere near Caen and brought across the Channel with other prisoners on a barge laden with wounded Allied troops, the sea foaming red near the beach and many men screaming and dying before they reached the port. He didn’t remember much about the crossing; he thought he must have slept or blanked it out. Afterwards a train—with upholstered seats, to his astonishment—took them to a football ground serving as a holding station, where they were deloused and interrogated. To get to the football ground from the train, they were marched in columns down the main street of the town. He had been expecting to be spat at or beaten, at least abusive words, but they had passed through silent stares, the women with their hair wrapped up in head scarves, smoking, the gray men lost in their thoughts, the sharp-eyed children brandishing polished bits of shrapnel.

Name, rank, company, papers. The purpose of the interrogation was to determine how zealous a Nazi you were. Regardless of their answers, all members of the Waffen-SS were given black cloth badges to sew on their uniforms and sent to wild parts of Scotland and similar remote places. Gray badges were given to party members whose loyalties were more ambiguous. They were also assigned to camps away from the cities. After a series of questions barked at him in a clipped voice by a man with a mustache behind a desk, translated by a Pole (although his
Hochschule
English meant he understood the greater part of it), Walter had been given a white one, which graded him as an ordinary enemy. Then he was sent to Ashenden Park. There were many men to process and it was not an infallible system. Vogel was proof of that.

He slipped on the path and almost fell. All captives eventually learned that if they were going to survive their imprisonment, they had to live in the monotonous present. Now, as he steadied himself, holding the drawstring bag up and away from the mud, it was the future he was protecting, something precious, tender, precarious, and unexpected.

*  *  *

Alison watched her father out of the kitchen window. He was digging and wore no coat or jacket, braces over his shirt hitching up his work trousers. In the far corner of the garden a small fire sent wisps of smoke into the air like a regular in a public house drawing on his pipe. By her feet the child played.

“I do wish there was more in the shops,” said her mother, for whom cooking was clattering. “One wonders when it will ever improve!” She did battle with an oven tray. “How tired we all are of cakes made of carrots. I know I am.” The oven door slammed and the child, Thomas, reached up his arms, uncertain. Were all war children so uncertain? wondered Alison, bending down to pick him up. “You do spoil him,” said her mother, resting her hands on the sink. “Sugar, in proper quantities. Is that too much to ask, after all we’ve been through?”

“Go have a rest,” said Alison, the child tugging her hair and her earlobes. “I’ll watch the cake.”

Her mother said, “Oh, Lord, now the cat’s being sick.”

“I’ll clear it up. Go have a rest.”

“You’ll let the cake burn.”

“I shan’t, I promise.”

Her mother went off in her apron, and Alison heard her go along the passageway and up the far stairs, and all the slight adjustments and tidying she made as she went along. She set down the child, who immediately reached up his arms to be picked up again, and wiped the cat sick off the quarry tiles with a floor cloth.

Long ago Prospect Place had been two separate cottages and the rooms were little, low-ceilinged, and duplicated one another, which
meant that it was difficult to assign to each a settled purpose. That hadn’t mattered so much when they had evacuees billeted on them and everything was chaos, but now the ambiguity that she remembered from her childhood had returned. There had always been too many rooms for the three of them, yet somehow not enough space. Her parents’ bedroom, with its old Morris willow-pattern paper, was on the upper story at the front. She and the child slept over the kitchen, which isolated their noise. It used to be the spare room, and she could recall wet afternoons when she and her school friends had tugged the feather mattress off the bed, placed it at the bottom of the stairs, and taken it in turns to hurl themselves onto it.

Her father came in the back door and the cat shot out of it.

“What’s up, Sunny Jim?” he said to the child fretting on the floor, turned on the tap, and scrubbed his hands with a nailbrush that had seen better days. “Where’s your mother?”

“Gone for a rest.”

Hanging on a peg beside the mackintoshes was the tin hat her father had worn when he was fire watching on the roof of the insurance company in Reading where he was employed. There had been nights early on in the Blitz when she and her mother had huddled under overturned armchairs, waiting for the all clear, a sick taste in their mouths; then the raids eased off and the second wave of evacuees had come. The biggest explosion they’d heard in the following months was when a land mine close to the big house was detonated, which had set off a fresh round of bed-wetting among the youngsters. That was about the time an incendiary bomb dropped by a straggler off-course had set a field on fire at Grange Farm and the smoke from the burning stubble had hung over the village for days.

Alison looked at the clock, a skip and a flutter in her chest. Almost eleven. In the chipped white enamel colander on the draining board, blackberries leached purple juice. Her father dried his hands on a souvenir of a rainy summer holiday in Bournemouth.

“Remind me,” he said, “what time is this extravaganza?” He was a slight, dark man, with a bald patch on the crown of his head.

“Dad,” she said, with a smile. “You know. Teatime.”

“Birthday boy,” he said, bending down to touch his roughened knuckles to the child’s reddened teething cheeks. It would not have occurred to him to pick him up, any more than it would have occurred to him to change the sheets or lay the table.

“I’m just going to put him down for his nap and pop out for a bit.”

“Right you are.” He winked at her. “Don’t let the cake burn, will you, or I wouldn’t want to answer for the consequences.”

*  *  *

Love was hard to hide in a village. Sometimes Alison wished she lived in a bombed-out part of London or was back in the cramped flat in Reading where she and Geoffrey had spent the early months of their marriage, anywhere indifferent and anonymous. Here you couldn’t post a letter without Mrs. Peat, the postmistress, saying, “Run out of stamps already, Alison?” or Mrs. Harris, a curtain twitcher who lived across from the postbox on the corner of the green, wondering in the butcher’s queue whether you’d taken up a correspondence course and, if so, how you managed to find the time to study with a little one to look after. Even your thoughts weren’t safe. “Penny for them,” the milkman said. “Lucky chap, whoever he is.”

Half eleven, the cake was cooling on a wire rack on the kitchen table and the child was asleep in his cot, his dimpled fist pressing the satin bias binding of his blanket close to his cheek. She let herself out of the house and headed off down the lane towards the river.

These were great moments of freedom when Alison felt wholly alive. Her prewar self would not have recognized this person wearing an old navy-blue jersey and a pair of trousers, her face bare and her hair anyhow. Perhaps if Geoffrey had survived and come home, he would have met this person and they might have arrived at a different understanding of one another. “When there’s a flap on and we’ve all got the wind up,” he had said on his last leave from the airfield, “I remind myself what a looker I married. What a lucky bugger I am.” Then he’d pulled her towards him and kissed her, and all
she remembered afterwards was the revulsion she’d felt at his urgent wet mouth. That involuntary shrinking had come back to shame her in the long blank months after he was killed, when she was carrying his child and guilt and grief were one and the same thing.

Alison thought that if she ever had a daughter, she would tell her to beware of first impressions, particularly the ones you created yourself. After she’d met Geoffrey at a dance at the social club, dressed up to the nines, she’d let herself in for hours of applying lipstick, curling her hair, and straightening the seams of her stockings, knowing all the while that she was constructing a person who didn’t exist and whom she didn’t much like the look of in the mirror. If war had taught her endurance, how to put one foot in front of the other, it had also taught her the fine art of being herself.