Resistance (16 page)

Since they’d got to Britain, he’d noticed his physical decline more. He’d put on weight but not in a good way and not in the right places. When he sat down there were soft ridges of fat where there hadn’t been before. His chest was tight, gripped in a stubborn cough. His dark hair was shot with silver, his stomach was always unsettled, and now, on top of everything, that piece of shrapnel had left a legacy of regular headaches. The war was taking his best years. He was thirty-three years old, but he felt as if he’d aged much more. The body of a young man about the heart, lungs, and skeleton of an old one.

Albrecht had started taking these early morning walks partly to ease himself into his mission in the Olchon, to get a sense of the area, to look over the valley’s intimate places. But they were also for his old-young body. To make it work, to bring the fresh air pumping through it like a purifying draught through the opened windows of a long-abandoned house. Kill or cure, as the English would say. He’d leave by The Court’s back door, leaning into the steep slope that rose directly behind the house. He always went alone, which Alex didn’t approve of despite Albrecht’s assurance there was nothing to worry about. He’d be careful and there was no need for concern. Things were different here from where they’d been before. Maggie’s visit had convinced him of that.

The incline behind The Court was immediate and abrupt and it wasn’t long before his thighs were burning and his weak chest heaving. He often removed his scarf within the first five minutes of the climb, exposing his prickling neck to the November air. On the initial few walks, he stopped regularly, suddenly stilling his body, the brushing and rustling of his clothes giving way to his own heavy breathing and the throbbing of his pulse; a crude, rhythmical beat to the unmoving view beneath him.

Just as the air purged his lungs, so the views purged his sight. The valley was beautiful, there was no denying it. No tanks, no dugouts,
no snouts of antiaircraft guns protruding from behind sandbags. The few derelict buildings had fallen under age and weather, not bombs and bullets. It was nature in all its massive certainty, from the crowds of trees running along the valley floor to the barren challenge of its hilltops. He’d never seen anywhere like it before. He was a city man, born and bred in the city’s landscape of streets, buildings on buildings and lone elms and sycamores levering up the pavement slabs with their roots. As a child there’d been outings to the countryside, true, and while at university he’d even taken to walking along the granite ridges and hills of Upper Lusatia with a group of friends. But he’d never seen somewhere quite like the Olchon before. Somewhere so still, so bluntly beautiful and yet possessed, within that same beauty, of such a simple, threatening bareness too.

He’d walk straight up until he was through the fields and on the sheep tracks that cut through the brown expanses of withered bracken. Then, long before he reached the top of the ridge, he’d turn and walk along the slope, the valley falling away to his right. He suspected it was a false horizon anyway, that there’d be more climbing before he’d be able to see the land on the other side of the ridge. Not that he wanted to see that land. That was where the war was, that was where they’d come from, and for now he’d rather just explore the valley itself and know nothing of what lay beyond.

On the day he saw Steiner, Albrecht had followed the same route he’d walked on that first morning of Maggie’s visit. Skirting along the west wall, he passed above the old woman’s farm and worked his way round to the steeper curve at the head of the valley, where the incline became cliff above him and the young river cut a deep crevice, arching from between clusters of rocks. Here, he climbed again, moving above the damp ground where the spring that became the river first surfaced through the thin soil. Using this spring as a pivot, he walked down the slope and swung right again, crossing the river to bring himself back to rejoin his original path, the toe of his boot stepping over the heel of his previous footprints. He never went further around the head of the valley towards the
east wall and the ridge of the Black Hill. Even then, on that first morning, he’d somehow sensed the unspoken border that would divide the valley while the patrol was there. The farm women would have the valley east of the Olchon, dark until late in the day, and they, the soldiers, would have the west of the valley, greying to night from the early afternoon onwards. Only Maggie’s farm cut into this silent division of territory, but she kept to her fields and often worked with the others along the eastern wall. Upper Blaen, at the head of the valley, marked the apex of this invisible divide.

Sometimes, if the mood took him, or the view was of particular clarity, Albrecht would pause in his walking and sit on one of the rocks near the source of the Olchon. On the morning he saw Steiner, it was the nature of the mist, lingering low in the valley, that made him stop and look out over the view. The edges of the stones nearest the stream were softened under mouldings of ice, air bubbles suspended like pearls under their transparent skins. The coarse grasses at the edge of the water were also iced, each individual blade encased in a thin tube, as brittle and fragile as the stems of champagne flutes. Albrecht carefully snapped one of these ice rods and drew it off the blade, leaving the pale grass exposed, quivering in the wind. Looking out over the valley clogged with mist, he blew through the delicate ice straw and felt his warm breath cooled against the palm of his hand.

The sun was just over the Black Hill, diffusing its light through the low mist and throwing shadows in unexpected places. Which was why, at first, Albrecht hadn’t seen Steiner standing by a stone wall far down the slope below him. It was only when Steiner removed his radio pack that his movement, unfamiliar in the rhythm of the landscape, caught Albrecht’s eye. The pink semaphore of his hands as he slipped the straps from his shoulders, then the lifting of those hands to his face. And then Steiner was still again, his uniform melding back into the greens, browns, and burnished ambers of the early winter hillside.

It was the first time Albrecht had seen anyone on this walk. Had Steiner left The Court before him? He didn’t think so. He must have
taken the lane, the lower route through the valley, while Albrecht made his slower progress along the hillside. Why he was here, Albrecht didn’t know. He thought of calling down to him, but he didn’t think Steiner would hear. He’d already learnt the valley threw visual illusions all the time, that perspective seemed to shrink and shift within its narrow parameters. Steiner was too far away for a voice to reach him. Albrecht watched his motionless back, squinting to sharpen his edges. He was waiting for him to move, to turn, so he could stand and wave to him. But Steiner remained as he was, standing by the broken stone wall, his hands held to his face and his elbows angular on either side of his head. Albrecht recognised that stance. He’d seen it on hillsides all over Europe: officers and generals surveying a battlefield through the intimate distance of a pair of binoculars.

Taking the ice from his lips, Albrecht twirled it once through his fingers, then with a delicate pressure across his thumb, snapped the stem in two. He pushed himself off the stone and began to pick his way down the slope, the broken rod of ice melting in the warmth of his fist. As he neared Steiner he began to drift left, away from the course of the river ricocheting between the rocks. Steiner was armed. He’d spent the last month in constant conflict. Albrecht didn’t want to startle him.

Reaching a buckled thorn tree, he paused and watched Steiner again, one hand resting against its trunk. The young soldier still hadn’t moved, transfixed by whatever filled the figure-eight view of his binoculars. Albrecht found himself mimicking this motionlessness; a hawk hovering above a hunting hawk until eventually Steiner broke their mirrored stillness, unfolding his right elbow, and lowering one hand to his waist, as if looking for something in his pocket.

Albrecht walked on, sweeping his legs through the bracken hoping Steiner would hear his approach. But still he didn’t move, the binoculars held to his eyes with his left hand, the right still searching on the other side of his body. Albrecht moved further down the slope again and it was only then, when he was on a level
with Steiner, that he was able to follow the line of his gaze. There, further down the valley below the bracken line, one of the local women was moving through the low-lying heather and bilberry bushes, a wicker basket hung over the crook of her arm.

“Guten tag, Steiner.”

Steiner’s whole body jolted as if shocked with a sudden voltage. Dropping the binoculars he spun towards Albrecht while reaching at the same time for his rifle, his right hand coming up to the stock of the gun, already half off his shoulder.

“Hey! Steady!” Albrecht stepped back, holding both his hands before him and for a frozen moment the two men faced each other like that: Albrecht with his hands out and his knees bent as if braced against a boulder, Steiner poised between flight and defence. Slowly Albrecht straightened up again, allowing himself a breathy half-laugh. “I didn’t come all this way to get a German bullet, private. Could have got that at home a long time ago.”

Steiner returned a weak-eyed smile, slipping his rifle back over his shoulder and making a half turn away from Albrecht as he adjusted himself. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You caught me by surprise.”

Albrecht walked up beside the young soldier and looked down the valley.

“It’s so quiet,” Steiner added, as if by way of further explanation.

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” Albrecht said. “Admiring the view?” He raised his eyebrows at the pair of binoculars hung round Steiner’s neck. He was careful to keep his voice light. He still didn’t know Steiner, not like he knew Alex or Sebald. He also had no idea why Steiner was here, out on the hill so early in the morning.

“Yes, sir,” Steiner said, his eyes playing over Albrecht’s face trying to read his expression.

“Mind if I have a look?” Albrecht held out his hand, his palm still dewed with the melted ice. Steiner lifted the strap over his head and handed the binoculars to Albrecht. Albrecht lifted his glasses onto his forehead and looked through the binoculars. They were Russian, the rubber about the eyepieces perished at the edges, cracked like the skin of drying lips. Turning the dial at their centre,
he brought the view below into focus, drawing the valley from an Impressionist myopia into flat precision. Making small movements that brought the landscape sweeping across the lenses, he found the woman, still moving and bending among the bushes. He knew who she was before she lifted her face. The young wife he’d met at the last farm on their first night in the valley. He recognised her hair but he’d known it was her before that. When he was standing by the thorn tree, he’d known then. She was picking bilberries, methodically pulling them from the undergrowth and dropping them into the basket. She obviously had no idea she was being observed.

Albrecht watched her small hands deftly searching under the tight leaves and branches. She was wearing a large, shapeless coat, her hair tied back from her face. Putting the basket down, she stood up and arched the small of her back, working the muscles there with the knuckles of her fist. Even then, from this distance, there was little apart from her long hair and the finer bones of her face to mark her out as a woman. The coat hid her shape and her skin was ruddy in the cold of the morning. He felt nothing and was, in some rational part of himself, relieved. But somewhere else, somewhere within him still untouched by the war, the questioning continued. Had that piece of shrapnel numbed him completely? Had it taken not just his taste and his smell but his desire too? He could see why Steiner would be watching her, and yet he felt empty. A lifeless but moving machine, possessed of enough residual knowledge to recognise what he once felt, even if he was no longer capable of sensing it anymore.

He lowered the binoculars and turned to look at Steiner. The young soldier looked back at him, the embodiment of everything he was not. His face had changed while Albrecht had been looking at Sarah. Albrecht recognised his new expression. Just like he’d recognised the stance of a man looking through binoculars, so he’d seen this look of Steiner’s on the field many times before too. It was a different kind of searching. Steiner knew Albrecht no better than Albrecht knew him. He was waiting for permission, for licence, for the official nod to the unofficial operation. For the blind eye. How
many times had a young soldier like Steiner looked in this way at a superior officer before? And how many times had that officer given the slightest of nods, or just turned away, as Albrecht did now. He breathed in deeply, looking out to the distant hills framed in the valley’s broad mouth.

“Do you have any sisters, Steiner?” he asked.

The young soldier was wrong-footed. Albrecht couldn’t see his face, but he knew his expectant expression had suddenly dropped.

“Yes, sir,” Steiner said.

Good, Albrecht thought, then this will be easier.

“I had two sisters before the war, sir,” Steiner continued. “Now I have one, Hilda.”

Of course. That genetic subtraction all of them made these days. Families tapering to single figures, brothers and sisters diminished to the past tense. This would not make it easier.

“I’m sorry,” Albrecht said, still looking out over the view and wondering how it was you could live with a man for over a month and not know about the death of his sister.

“It was a British raid,” Steiner said, his voice clipped. “Margaret was always last to the shelter. The sirens were faulty that night. My father looked for days afterwards. For anything. Some hair. A shoe. Just something. But there was nothing.”

So many stories like this. That’s why he hadn’t known. Because they were no longer unusual. So many ways for someone to leave, to be extinguished. Albrecht lowered his gaze to follow Sarah again, now just a pale patch without the binoculars’ magnification. That would make it easier, he thought. From here, from this distance, it would be easy. And after all, why shouldn’t he let Steiner have his revenge and his pleasure all at once? Give the young man his sympathies, then walk on, stepping over his own prints, edging around the valley back to The Court. Walk on and let Steiner descend the slope behind him, waving casually to the uncertain, unnerved farm woman. Let him hold her face into those wet bushes, one of his hands spread against the back of her head. Let him lift that shapeless coat and the skirt beneath. Let him empty his grief, his anger,
and his sadness into her. Let him leave her, alive but with her life suddenly taken. Let him introduce her to the war with which all of them have had to become so intimate these past endless, dragging, unforgiving years.