The Dynamite Room (9 page)

Walking became almost mechanical. In the days and weeks and months that followed he would do it in his sleep, tramping ever on towards the railway line, seeing it sometimes in the distance, but never any nearer, the wooden scaffolding underpinning the tracks as it wormed its way around the mountainside, occasionally disappearing into a crudely cut tunnel and then reappearing further on: the Ofoten Railway.

He went from
room to room, opening the sash windows to let some morning air in and awaken the house. Though the shutters remained in place, he pushed up a slat or two in each so that thin slices of sun could stream in.

He had slept badly, cramped into one of the chairs in the sitting room, head thick with dreams. He remembered running down endless dimly lit corridors, dark and narrow, the smell of damp and cordite pervading, and his feet echoing. There were hundreds of doors: doors opening onto more corridors and more doors and more corridors. He had been trying to call out, to shout,
Where are you?
But he had no voice, and when he put his hand to his mouth the contour of his face had been wrong; he had no teeth, no tongue, just a bloody hole. Panic had settled on his chest and he had shouted a single word up at the ceiling as he woke.

She pushed up one of the slats at her window and could see early morning mist drifting in off the salt marshes. She wondered, not for the first time, why nobody had come.

She found him in the kitchen digging around in the drawers and set to spying on him from a safe distance as he busied himself about the house. She watched his every move through the gaps in doorways or from behind sofas and chairs. He moved things about, spread maps out on the dining-room table, emptied his kit bag, and raided things from cupboards and drawers (screwdrivers, she noted in the back of an old exercise book, sticking plasters, Germolene, pencils and a pencil sharpener, candles, and a new tube of toothpaste). All the while she heard him mumbling to himself in English.
A rabbit run, but with how many rabbits?
Tapioca pudding,
he said to himself.
Cauliflower cheese.
The man was barking mad.

When she got bored, she lay on her bed, her ear trained to his movements about the house. She thought about writing a letter, some sort of SOS, but she didn't know how she would get it out of the house. Having an idea, she went to the window, but it was too high to jump and there was nothing on the wall outside that she could have climbed down. She leaned back against the windowsill. She should do something, but what? She held still, listening, her heart suddenly quickening. Her ears strained to hear him somewhere in the house, the slightest footfall or disturbance or just the sense of his presence, but there was nothing.

Originally he had planned to set the sitting room up as an operation room, but once he'd started pushing back the furniture it didn't feel right. The sitting room, he realized, reminded him of his days in London and his professor's house in Pimlico, Baxter running circles around him whenever he arrived and yapping at his heels. So he moved instead to the dining room, spread his maps over the large walnut table, and cleared the tops of the dressers and sideboards to make room for candles and oil lamps, aware as he did it of the girl sidling out of the sitting room and slinking along the hallway, carrying her Jewish bear with her, then padding soft footed up the stairs. Somewhere above him a door clicked shut.

Here at Greyfriars, he could imagine days gone by, the sun streaming through the open windows, voices in the garden, the tinkling of the piano, the shelves of the study filled with books. His mother would have liked it. The pretty furnishings. The flowers and frills. Water-colored farming scenes hanging from the picture rail. A scent of lavender in the air.

The year
1909
was inscribed in a keystone embedded in the brickwork above the front door, which he rather liked; it was as if the date in the stone somehow marked the birth of the house, which in turn signified that the house was alive. He thought he felt its warmth when he ran his fingers lightly down the banisters or pressed his palm against the door—not a warmth burned into the wood from the summer's heat outside, but something that seemed to be emanating from deep within. Now that he had recognized it, it made him feel at ease, as if somehow the house was welcoming him.

He sat on the floor of the sitting room and took the record sleeves out from the cabinet. Most of them were jazz and swing, including a collection by Fred Astaire that he considered playing but changed his mind.

You couldn't buy anything like that in Germany now, not even on the black market or in the secret backstreet record shops. For a while Eva had taken a fancy to Negerjazz, particularly an American trumpeter called Erskine Hawkins. The Reich Music Chamber had put a stop to all of that. Even Mendelssohn was banned, labeled a mere “imitator” of genuine German music, while Mahler was the composer of degeneracy and decay, and Irving Berlin a Jew.

You'll have to toss your copy of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
out of the window if anyone comes around asking awkward questions,
Eva said.

And you'll have to be at the bottom to catch it,
he told her with a smile.

The recording had cost him almost a week's wages.

During the economic depression many musicians had left the country or had been purged or simply quit; so many in fact that there had been a shortage of quality musicians commensurate to the shortage of quality compositions that they were able to perform. The situation had been exacerbated by the expansion of organizations like the army, the SS, and the Labour Front, all of which wanted their own military bands and orchestras and demanded the very finest performers to provide them with the necessary pomp. In 1933, just as he had been leaving for London, there had been an assault on Jewish and left-wing musicians organized by the Fighting League for German Culture. Even the Jewish players of the Berlin Philharmonic had been fired, many of them Eva's friends. With the expanding number of orchestras required by the Reich and the vacant positions left by the expunged Jews, he had often wondered whether—if he had remained focused on his music, if he had shown enough dedication—he might have managed to eke out a living from it. Instead—and with perhaps some sense of pride, which only now could he concede—he had ended up consumed within the wheels and cogs and chomping teeth of Field Marshal Keitel's Wehrmacht.

She lay on the floor beside the banisters at the top of the stairs, slowly and carefully lowering a small square mirror tile that she'd managed to tape to a ruler. This was something that Alfie had once taught her—a way of looking into rooms without being caught—and was what all the best spies did. She wouldn't let herself be beaten by a Jerry, even if she was only a girl. She would play him at his own game. She would be a spy too.

But as she tried to maneuver the mirror around, all she saw were reflected glimpses of the ceiling and the top of the walls, and very occasionally the passing glint of a light fitting as it swooped by. She leaned a little farther over, her whole arm pushed through the gap in the banisters and the side of her head pressed awkwardly against one of them. It was just as she was beginning to feel that she was in position and was trying to steady her dangling arm that he came out of the dining room. She hurriedly pulled the mirror back up, but it got caught between the banisters and the tape gave way. With a silent gasp, she saw it fall and smash at his feet. He bent down and picked it up, the mirror now cracked in his hand. He studied it for a moment and glanced up at her. He held it up as if offering it back.

“Is this yours?” he said.

The girl had left him some biscuits for lunch and a tin of Fray Bentos Corned Beef, together with a jar of rhubarb and ginger preserve. He found them on a plate in the kitchen with a note on a scrap of paper written in wobbly green pencil.
For you,
it said.

In Norway they had always been famished—cold and tired and empty. He remembered the platoon stopping midway up a mountainside where the ground leveled and the trees gave some protection from the wind. A flock of rooks reeled above them.

The boy who had been suffering from the cold had sat next to him. He had a bread bag with him but the bread inside was frozen solid, and he had turned and smashed it against a tree until it broke.

You can't eat that.
Here.

He offered the boy some of his own black bread that he'd wrapped in paper and insulated inside a sock, and the young private had taken some and nodded his thanks.

Unlike the boy, he had trained with the 3rd Mountain Division under General Dietl, and he was used to this terrain—they had been put to the test in the Austrian Alps only the previous year—but this kid was like so many in the company: new and ordinary infantrymen scrambled together from other regiments and completely ill equipped.

They sat and smoked awhile as he examined the state of his feet and changed his socks. He had blisters on both heels and on the anklebone that were the size of fifty-pfennig pieces, two of which were burst and sore, leaking sticky liquid. The boy pulled his rifle through as he sucked on his cigarette and said nothing. They listened to the boom of artillery shells in the distance, sitting together for half an hour or more before they set off again. Only now, thinking back, did he realize that he had never asked the boy's name.

Later that afternoon, he saw her walking down the long corridor with her arms full of folded pillowcases and bedsheets trailing around her ankles. When he later walked past the spare room he saw that the bed had been made up—the sheets tucked in and folded but ending somewhat short of the bottom so that they stuck out at the edge like a flap.

He imagined Eva living here, walking down the same landing, her own arms full of sheets, making their bed up perhaps, tucking in the sides, patting out the pillows, a sprig of lavender tucked beneath the covers. She'd sit in the sitting room reading the newspaper. She'd worry about the world, the things that were happening that she could do nothing about. She would catch him watching her over her half-rim glasses—
What's so funny?
she would say—and then she would laugh at him and it would make him smile.

In Berlin he had rented a small garret room in the corner of a large tenement block. The building had been constructed in the 1920s—part of a new architectural movement designed to bring functional living space to the masses—but already it was looking worn out and tired, as if functionality was a hard grind. There was a kitchen area in the corner with a surfeit of cupboards, most of which remained empty. In the living area they'd hung paintings over the walls to hide the patches where the plaster was pulling away. Eva would sometimes bring him flowers, holly, grasses, even clutches of twigs if that was all she could find. She'd tie a red ribbon around them and put them in a chipped glass vase—and there they'd sit, bold and defiant in their color, until they turned gray and dry.

He had chosen the room solely for its window and view. They would sit opposite each other, legs thatched together, feeling the snug of each other's toes beneath their buttocks, or Eva leaning back against him between his open thighs.

From up high Berlin looked peaceful, all the sound drained away, all the disturbances, smells, and struggles. They would watch the sunsets—the reds and pinks and oranges unfurling themselves from behind the buildings.
We're halfway up to heaven,
Eva told him.

Yes,
he said.
Or halfway down to hell.

They had no table and would eat cross-legged on the floor, Eva laying out a red checked cloth with tassels around the edges so that every day was a picnic day. They would listen to the dripping tap, to the tick of the metronome swinging, to the wireless or the gramophone—Bruch's “Kol Nidrei,” Kreisler's “Liebesleid,” Ponce's “Estrellita”—all of which they themselves had played on some occasion or another. Sometimes they would push the furniture back and waltz about the room, bumping into things as they went, their feet drawing invisible patterns on the floor. The waltz was the only dance that he could do without tripping over his own feet. Eva would tease him, saying that he made the dance his own, and he would tip her back into his arms and pretend he was going to drop her so that she shrieked and laughed.

Now, in the sitting room, he lifted the sheet from the piano and opened it up, then sat on the stool and gently rested his fingers on the keys.

If you ever go to fight,
she had said,
I want to fight too.

He had laughed.
And what would you fight for?

Freedom and justice. I don't know. The rights of all people…

German people?

Everyone.

You can't fight for everyone,
he said.
You have to take a side.

Why?

Why?
He laughed again.

I don't want to be left here dangling, worthless. I'd have to do something,
she said.

He let one finger play its droll note and hang for a moment in the air.

“I can play ‘Clair de Lune.'” The girl was standing in the doorway, fingering the buttons of her cardigan. “I could play it. If you want me to.”

“No,” he said. “No, thank you.”

He closed the lid and she stood there a while longer, perhaps thinking he might change his mind or do something, but he didn't; in the end, she backed out into the hall and disappeared. He draped the sheet back over the piano; it was better not to touch.

She slowly retraced her steps back upstairs and found herself drifting into the bathroom. She perched on the edge of the bath, its numbing coolness under her thighs making her feel suddenly helpless. She wondered what to do. Earlier she had made them a lunch of sorts but had left his on the sideboard along with a note so that she didn't have to speak to him. Then she'd made herself busy, getting a room ready for him, because if she were more like her mother perhaps her mother would come back. Soon, surely sometime soon, someone would come to look for her. She had taken clean, ironed sheets and pillowcases from the cupboard. Her mother always put clean sheets on the bed when a guest arrived, even if the sheets on the bed hadn't been used. It was better to have fresh sheets, she said, and, besides, the spare room often smelled musty. Fresh clean sheets and an open window, her mother said, soon fixed that.