The Dynamite Room (23 page)

“Well, sit down,” he said. “I thought we should celebrate, having water again.”

He had put a cushion on the floor for her, and he sat cross-legged on another. The chairs were pushed back against the wall to give them ample space. His shirt stuck to his back and across his shoulders. He tried to pull it free but it kept clinging to him like another skin, wrapping its damp heat around him.

She sat down and he waited for her to say something—something about the picnic, about the effort he'd gone to, or just a thank you—but she only looked at him and at the spread of food and, in the end, said nothing.

“Would your parents allow you some wine?” he said.

She shook her head.

He put the bottle back down and then changed his mind and poured himself a glass anyway. He handed her a plate, thinking of the picnics he and Eva had enjoyed in the garret room, or the parade days in the Tiergarten or Tempelhof Field: paper bags of lemon tarts that they had got from the Wertheim department store, Eva lying with her head in his lap, the sound of children shouting and laughing, the smell of cut grass.

He sipped at his wine and opened the cheese biscuits and offered them to her. She took just one. He put a handful on his own plate, along with a couple of slices of ham.

He watched her as she nervously bit into the cheese biscuit and it cracked into pieces between her teeth and fell into her lap. She collected them and, keeping her head down, piled them on her knee, and then took another from the packet and studied it as if assessing the risk of another crumbling.

“Aren't you hungry?”

She shook her head.

“What about some tomato?” They had been a last-minute addition to the picnic, found growing in a pot outside the back door. Only a few had been edible and he had picked them, cut them into quarters, and displayed them on a plate. She nodded and slowly reached out to take one and put it in her mouth. He took a mouthful of wine. Outside he could hear crickets twitching.

“I have always liked to picnic,” he said. “It is a very English thing to do, isn't it, and everyone does it, everywhere you go. People picnic. It makes them happy.”

He waited for a response, but she lowered her eyes and slowly reached across for another piece of tomato.

“Do you want some ham with that?” he said, offering her the plate.

She shook her head. She put the tomato in her mouth and dragged the flesh from its skin with her teeth; then she laid the skin out on her knee next to the pile of broken biscuit. The skins were tough, but it was little wonder she was gangly if she was going to be this fussy.

He tried her with a smile. They'd had conversations before—she'd interrogated him about God, for heaven's sake. Why wasn't she eating anything when he'd gone to all this trouble?

He took another gulp of wine. What he wouldn't give to be drunk now: deliriously, ridiculously drunk.

“I used to have an apartment in Berlin,” he said, trying to come up with a story. “We used to lay a blanket down and have picnics like this on the floor. Put a blanket down anywhere and some food, and suddenly everything is all right because you're picnicking.”

He looked at the girl. She was still offering no conversation. He tried again.

“Do you like school?”

She nodded.

“I wanted to be a teacher once,” he said. “But it was not to be. War changes a lot of things. Plans get changed.”

He took another mouthful of wine. He tried to imagine her as a woman, redrawing her in his mind with generous curves and another four or five inches of height. She would always be a slight girl. She hadn't the frame to be much larger. Eva had been slight too.

He could feel the alcohol now, thick like an oil spill over his thoughts, and heavy in his head. He went to the gramophone and lifted the lid, then raised the arm to inspect the needle.

“What shall we play?” He opened the cabinet beneath and took out the collection of shellac records. He looked over his shoulder at her. “Do you have any favorites?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? Then I shall have to decide.”

It took a few minutes, flicking through the selection several times before choosing one called “Summer Classics” because it seemed the most apt. He removed the record from its sleeve and lowered it through the spoke. He slowly turned the winding lever, feeling the tension tightening, and placed the needle in its groove.

There was a crackling anticipation before a scratchy recording of Vaughan Williams's “Fantasia on Greensleeves” started. He smiled at how contrived the selection was, how patriotic of the English to put an English composer first when Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart would have made for a much more appropriate opening.

“Germany has produced more of the world's finest composers than anywhere else. Bach, Beethoven, Handel,” he said. “Pachelbel, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, the list goes on.”

“We're not supposed to play German music,” said the girl. “Father won't allow it.”

“Well, that's a shame,” he said. “You take away the German composers and there really isn't much worth listening to.”

He emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass. The music sounded distant, as if coming to him through a dream, and the room was hot and clammy, the wine slowly unpicking him. He wished he could break her open and see what she was thinking. He wondered if she hated him, if she was still scared. He could barely imagine the house without her. There was some comfort in knowing someone was with him, in hearing her footsteps overhead, in finding telltale signs of her in the rooms—an unmade bed, a kicked-off sandal, a glass over a dead fly.

He thought of Professor Aritz's house in Pimlico, of Baxter pawing at his shin with his disgusting bit of bone between that shaggy-haired jaw and wanting Heiden to toss it down the hall for him to fetch and slide and skitter back over the tiles with. He had only visited the house three or four times, but each time they had gone out to the local park and took a turn around the lawns as Baxter pelted up and down, scattering the pigeons and small children.

It had been no surprise to the professor when Heiden decided to abandon his studies in London and go back to Germany. He knew that Heiden felt it his duty.

So…you are lost to us,
the professor said.

I am not lost,
Heiden said.
We all know that I was never going to be one of the great musicians.

Perhaps not, but better than most. You sell yourself short. And I'm afraid I shall rather miss our squabbles.

The professor had laughed and taken a folded piece of paper from his pocket.
If you are ever back and need somewhere…
He handed Heiden the address.
You never know how these things pan out. The cottage is empty most of the time—too cut off for me so I never use it myself, but you might find it to your liking. I suspect it's a cottage that likes visitors, and unfortunately I've rather neglected it on that front.

He remembered the watercolor of a cottage hanging from a bent nail at the end of Professor Aritz's hallway. Lightly dabbed flowers growing up a trellis, window boxes at every sill, caramel-colored stone, the thatched roof and lead-lined windows, the peaked top of the red, slatted front door.

He got another bottle of wine and a box of chocolates from the larder in the kitchen. They'd been hidden on the top shelf in a sleek black and red box. The professor had been right. He could have been a musician, but never one as talented as Eva. It was hard to admit, but he was jealous of her for that.

He took the bottle of wine and chocolates into the sitting room. He opened the box. Around them Mahler's Adagietto from Symphony no. 5 was simmering, the slow swell of strings sifting through the air.

“Here,” he said. “Have one.”

The girl hesitated and then nervously picked out one of the chocolates and put it into her mouth. He looked at the inlay card and chose one himself with a swirl on the top. He bit into its soft shell. The chocolate coating was rich and dark. Inside was a sickly sweet fondant that tasted vaguely of orange.

“Black Magic,” said the girl. “They're my mother's favorites. We're not really allowed them. They're for emergencies.”

“Emergencies?” He laughed. She leaned over and took another. “Do you think this is not an emergency?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “I like the caramel ones best.”

He uncorked the second bottle of wine—he'd gone for the Merlot this time—and he poured a glass and took a sip, then picked out another chocolate. Already it was soft and tacky in his fingers.

He looked at the girl. “We can't stay here, you know, like this; not for much longer.”

“Why not?”

“People will come. We've already had someone snooping about.”

He put the chocolate in his mouth and licked the melted smears from his fingers. It reminded him of Norway, that peace offering of sorts that he had made to Pendell.

“Will you promise me something?” the girl said. “If you leave, don't leave me here on my own. I don't want to be on my own.”

He could feel the chocolate liquefying, spreading out over his tongue as it melted and spread between his teeth.

“I'm sorry we're not outside,” he said. “It's not a real picnic unless it is outside. I told Eva that.”

“Will you promise, what I said?”

“No. I can't,” he told her.

“Why not?”

He stood up. “Why don't you play something on the piano for me?” He went over to it and lifted the dust sheet from it. “I'd like to hear you play. What was it you said you knew?” He opened the lid and pulled out the stool, but she shook her head.

“Why not?”

The girl said nothing.

“Then I shall have to play for you.”

He sat down on the stool and theatrically flexed his fingers, then started to play all the wrong notes, a dreadful racket, so that she had to laugh and he laughed as well.

He turned on his stool and lifted one finger to her—a
wait
—then disappeared from the room. She heard him leave the house, going across the gravel to the garage and opening the doors. She sat waiting on the floor, suddenly feeling awkward, as if she shouldn't be there, living with a strange man who wouldn't even tell her his Christian name.

When he came back he had her father's long saw and Alfie's violin bow that she realized, with a brief wave of anger, he must have taken from Alfie's room. He perched on the piano stool facing her, holding the handle of the saw between his legs and the other end in his hand. He looked up at her as if to see if she was ready. He surely wasn't going to play it. You couldn't play a saw.

Then, as if to prove her wrong, he rested the bow against the side of it and gently pulled out a note that was long and slow and seemed to wobble in the air. He bent the blade into a curve, shaping it like an
S,
then pulled out another note that seemed to vibrate. As it sounded he bent the saw more and the note traveled up the blade, rising higher and higher in pitch and then down again. His eyes glanced at her, seeing the amazement in her face. He smiled. Then he pulled the bow across again, bending the saw this way and that and wobbling the end of the blade a little so that the note quivered, swelling high and then low, rising up and down as if on air currents.

“It's beautiful,” she said, “but sad.”

“My grandfather said it was the sound of tears, but they don't have to be sad.”

He repositioned himself, getting himself comfortable. “Massenet's ‘Méditation' from
Thaïs,
” he announced quietly under his breath. “Performed on bow and saw.”

Lydia giggled, and he started to play again.

Whole days and weeks now he could not account for. Somehow though he had marched and fought and clawed his way across Europe. Everything he had since become had grown out of one moment—a hole blown into a body that might just as well have been his. He had tried to shut himself down, to not allow himself to think or feel or reason or rage. But now, in this house and with this girl, he did feel and he did hurt and he did remember, every memory leading him back to that point, that shot, that day that had started so simply: a line of trucks being stopped at a junction west of Berlin on their way back to the barracks, and Metzger's head appearing at the back.

I want volunteers.
They'd been ordered to send a truck out to a medical institute.
Near Brandenburg,
he told them.

Heiden's chest had tightened.
I know that place,
he said.
I'll go.
His heartbeat had quickened at the thought of seeing Eva.

He had scrambled out, regrouping in another truck with a handful of others. Then, as the rest of the convoy had set off again, they had turned off the main road on a new course heading north.

The truck had sped away along the narrow road through the fields, the soldiers in the back jolting around inside as it splashed through the puddles and lurched over the bumps, the rain blowing in through the open back and hammering against the canvas.

When they eventually pulled off the road and started down a short drive, he looked out of the back and saw the familiar-looking lawn. As the truck pulled up he could hear footsteps crunching through the gravel and voices nearby, barely audible over the thrum of rain on the roof.

He ushered a soldier out of his corner seat at the front so that he could pull the canvas roof away enough from its fastening to stare out and try to see her. Through the narrow gap he saw the dented side of the truck, Major Metzger's jawline in the wing mirror, the thick rolls of his neck barely contained within the collar of his uniform. There were scuffed arcs in the gravel where a car had skidded or something had been dragged. He recognized the long line of windows. The fanned brickwork at the top of each, and the Grecian pillars and part of a double door. A nurse hurried past, almost running; but it was not Eva. He strained to look but he couldn't see her anywhere.