The Dynamite Room (13 page)

Because they were Jews,
he had told her.

Yes, yes, I know that. Of course I know that. But they play so beautifully. It doesn't make sense.

He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting her away, and then flicked through the pile of documents in front of him again, knowing already that they would offer him nothing more. He carefully returned them into the paper wallet, into the box within a box.

The new day was cold and still, the air thick with mist. Everything was bleached white and muffled silent so that all they heard was the crush of their own feet through the snow, the creak of the sledges behind them, and their panting breath. He had blisters within blisters that rubbed against the backs of his boots. He tried to focus on walking but ridiculous memories kept slipping into his head: a holiday in the Alps with his parents, having his photograph taken on a jetty with a bathing ring around his waist, playing Ping-Pong with his father, the back and forth and back and forth of the ball. He could play the memory eternal, just like the rhythm. Back and forth, back and forth. Step, step, step. He kept forgetting where he was going. Perhaps they were walking home.

The mist grew patchy and in parts they could see the mountainsides rising up over them, and occasionally rocks and rubble skittering down into the chasms, dislodged by the snow. In the distance a rusty bridge crossed the gorge. The Ofoten Railway line. They were to secure it east of Narvik, clearing out the Norwegians that were holding the railway between Norddal Bridge and the Swedish border. Often they would stop to scan the trees for sharpshooters. Ohlendorf said that the Norwegians would be almost impossible to see or hear, all dressed in white and moving silently through the trees on their skis.

Keep your wits about you,
Ohlendorf had said.

They'll pick us off one by one, he remembered thinking.

Their path took them downhill again. The snow got deeper in the sunken ridges until it was almost waist high and it took every ounce of strength to haul their way through, following one behind the other through deeply channeled pathways and pulling each other out. Trying to drag the sledges through became impossible, and they stopped while Ohlendorf and his officers huddled in a circle with a compass and squares around their maps and decided what to do. The men waited, some lying flat out on their backs in the snow. Others leaned against trees, smoking. He opened his canteen but the water inside was frozen.

In the end they sabotaged the gear they'd dragged there on the sledges and abandoned it in pieces in the clearing. They set off again, slowly, traveling along the base of a gorge for some miles before heading uphill again. The mist would not lift, and as afternoon came it seemed to thicken around them.

As they walked through the trees a bough above them cracked and snow thumped heavily to the ground. Someone's gun went off.

Jesus Christ!

No firing!

The men stopped and held still, nervously scanning the trees.

He watched as up ahead Ohlendorf tried to radio the scouts. Then, after several minutes, he signaled them to move on slowly, and they did, straining to see through the mist, their fingers jittery at their triggers as the trees lumbered towards them out of the fog.
You hunt or you are hunted.
The mist swallowed everything until all but the men on either side of him had entirely vanished, just as his grandfather had done.

She held the glass of water to her cheek, her forehead, to her neck and to her arms, letting the cold condensation cool her before she finally drank it. She then upturned the empty glass on the windowsill over a fly, trapping it, and watched it bumping around inside for a while. She had never much liked flies.
Filthy little things,
her mother said, and Lydia was inclined to agree.

She tiptoed along the landing past all the portraits of her mother's family, the ones that she had never known. She wanted to go into the sitting room and search through her mother's
Good Housekeeping
magazines for survival tips, but he was in there and she didn't want to see him; she would pretend he didn't exist. She felt quite certain that today someone would come. She was getting agitated just waiting. She wondered if they'd be young like him, whether they would speak English too, whether she'd understand them. Every time she passed an upstairs window she looked out in case there were Germans in the garden or coming up the lane, maybe whole lines of men tramping through the fields towards the house. If only Alfie himself would walk out of the woods. If only he would come back.

They didn't know what had happened to him. The story had no final chapter.

Damn this bloody war,
Aunt Em had said, and then she broke down, even though she had promised not to.

Sitting on a crumbling wall in Wales among the ruins of Cledwyn's Tower, Lydia felt sorry for her aunt, who had, perhaps against her better nature, driven halfway across the country for her with the news that Alfie was dead. Lydia hardly knew her. She was just a woman who lived miles away in London with a man called Ronald and an arthritic terrier called Mr. Chips, and whom she could only remember ever meeting twice before, once on a trip to the Tower of London and once at a wedding near St. Albans, or had it been a christening? Either way, Aunt Em had never ventured as far as Greyfriars.
She's allergic to us, missy,
her father joked.
Poor ol' girl can't travel more than a twenty-mile radius of London without coming out in a rash.

Lydia couldn't quite think straight. Somewhere around her a fly was buzzing. Even the sound of the word was awful. That last
d
so abrupt and final. Dead.

But why didn't my mother come?
she said.

We've had to put her in a special place, a type of hospital,
her aunt said.
Not for long. Just for a short while, you know. It's for her own good.

But is she all right?

Oh, she'll be fine. Grief's a funny old business. Some people don't take to it very well. You know what I mean.

But Lydia didn't.

She's had a terrible shock. We all have. So you must be brave, Lydia.

I will,
she said, but she didn't want to be. She wanted to wrap her arms around her aunt and sob, but she didn't feel that she could.

Flaming timbers crashed down through the broken rib cages of buildings. Behind the men the hulks of ships, blasted and blazing in the harbor, lit up the darkness. Huge columns of black smoke poured up out of the wreckage. They moved up the street in short bounds, going from corner to corner and doorway to doorway through the blizzard, rifles at the ready. An explosion across the road blew the windows from a hotel, and they buried their heads as glass and chips of wood and masonry rained down over them, shrapnel rattling on car roofs or hissing in the snow.

It was quieter on Narvik's back streets as they headed away from the harbor where there had been no air, only smoke and flames and soot, the booms and blasts of warships slugging it out against one another. There was another blast and he woke with a lurch. He was hunched in the chair. His throat was parched dry and he rubbed at his eyes. It took him a while before he realized that he was in the sitting room at Greyfriars, before the chairs and cabinets, the gramophone and piano became familiar again.

He had stood on the pier watching as survivors from a coastal defense ship were brought ashore. Through the thick snow clouds the early morning sun sketched the tips of the mountaintops. Nearer, smoke still hung above the chaos of the harbor, wispy tails of it drifting around the debris. He remembered taking off his suede gloves; he had wanted to feel the cold biting his skin but everything was numb. Flakes of snow and flakes of ash fell from the sky, some melting when they landed in his hand, others lingering until he touched them and they turned to dust. Behind him he could hear the roar of motor vehicles moving through the streets. Below him bodies—young Norwegian sailors mainly—floated in shoals, caught against the stanchions of the jetty.

He suddenly had a weary sense of the distance he had traveled. What the hell had he been doing there, in France, in Poland, in Norway?

He had heard that the harbor of Narvik was the only Arctic port that did not freeze over and provided year-long access to anywhere in the west. The Ofoten Railway linked the port with the mining community of Kiruna one hundred miles eastwards over the border in Sweden. Thousands of tons of iron ore were mined there every year, and whoever controlled the Ofoten Railway line and Narvik controlled access to the iron ore. Ohlendorf had told them this during one of their brief stops on the mountainside, high up from the fjords. The platoon was supposed to trek eastwards towards the railway border station at Bjørnefjell, and from there they would secure the railway and the old navy trail that ran parallel to it—places that had seemed as distant and unreachable then as they seemed now.

He closed his eyes. He should try to forget. All that had happened there no longer mattered.

She found him in the sitting room, on the floor in front of the wireless. He leaned in close, his hand on one of the dials, turning it with precision. Among the crackles and buzz of the static she could just about hear a voice. He bent his head so his ear was almost against the speaker and raised his other hand to her—a
Hold still
and
Shush,
a
Don't make a sound.

It was early evening, but while the world outside was still bright, the house with the blackout sheets at the windows was dark. He had set out candles as he had done the night before, and they glowed in jam jars around the floor, and on the nested tables and piano. Beside him was his folded map and a pencil, and her mother's metronome, gleaming golden in the candlelight. He made a slight adjustment to the radio dial and the static grew louder; then, as he adjusted it again, it fell away and a voice came, forcing its way through the crackling as if it were suddenly coming up for air.

It was male and spoke in German, issuing a steady stream of words with hardly a breath between them. If she concentrated hard she could hear beneath the voice and static the sounds of dance hall jazz playing, the ghostly whisperings of another radio channel bleeding in.

He twisted around and scrawled something in the corner of the map.

“What is it?” she said. “What are they saying?”

He put his finger to his lips to shush her, then leaned close to the speaker again and listened, his eyes still fixed on her.

It was then that she heard the word:
London.
It sounded strange—said in such an odd accent and trapped within all those other words that she hadn't understood—but she had heard it quite distinctly.

“What is it?” she said again. “What did he say?”

He motioned again for her to be quiet and lowered his head, straining to hear the announcer's voice. His eyes were locked on her so that she didn't dare move. The man's voice kept getting sucked under waves of static, and then came suddenly blustering out again as if he knew he was battling the noise.

He reached out and switched off the wireless with a sharp click of the dial. The room fell silent.

“What did he say?” she asked.

He sat up and looked at her. “The landings have started.”

“Landings?” Her eyes filled. “Where? Where are they going to land?”

He repositioned himself and unfolded the map, spreading it out over the floorboards. Then he glanced up at her and motioned her to sit down.

He showed her the likely points at which they would arrive. He pointed out beaches from Ramsgate all the way around to the west of the Isle of Wight. He told her that it was all planned, down to the finest detail. They'd move up the Thames, taking London, Reading, Oxford, then they would sweep through the country, marching through the streets of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, across to Wales, to Cardiff and Swansea, and up north further and further, taking all the major towns, the ports, the aerodromes, the centers of academia, the cultural heritage sites, the museums, the churches, and the cathedrals. Every inch, brick, and step.

“Are they out there now?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Everywhere.”

“In London even?”

She tried not to imagine it but she couldn't help herself: the tanks in the streets, the grenades and the gunfire, houses burning and being looted, German soldiers, people running, people being shot…She could feel her stomach tighten as if a great hand had hold of her and was squeezing. She needed to get out, get some air, some light, some help, but he wouldn't let her, and where would she go? They'd be in the fields, on the roads, in the woods, everywhere. Alfie had said as much—they hunt like wolves in packs.

“You must not leave the house,” he said quietly, “if that is what you are thinking. It is more important now than ever. If you leave the house I can't protect you.”

She felt the heat of panic washing through her.

“But what are you going to do?”

“We have to prepare,” he said. “We must get the rooms ready. We will need extra bedding for when they arrive.”

“When who arrives?”

“The men, of course. My comrades.”

“But, my mother…I don't know where she is.” She finally started to cry.

He leaned forward and with his finger lifted her chin. “Look at me,” he said. “Look.” His voice was not harsh or cruel; it was almost a whisper. She looked up into his face, his round blue eyes, his hair falling over his eyebrows, the light stubble on his cheeks.

“If you help me,” he said, “if you do exactly as I tell you, then, perhaps…”

His finger lifted her chin up higher so she could feel the crick in her neck.

“…perhaps, I might be able to help you…but,” he continued, “only, only, if you help me. If you do exactly as I say.”