When the Sky Fell Apart (31 page)

‘It is a hard thing,' Gregor said, at last. ‘Before, for a long time, I am good to these men. And the men do not work hard for me. They are lazy for me. The soldiers, my comrades, they laugh at me. I am soft, like a woman, they say. They hit me. They tell me to hurt the
Häftlinge
. This will make them work better. I am not hitting. I never do this. But now I see other men hitting and I am not stopping them…'

‘But hurting people is wrong.'

‘But these are not men,
Liebling
. I know this now. They are like animals. A cow works and she pulls for us, yes? And if she is too slow, we teach her to be fast.'

‘But…that's different.'

‘No, not different. The cow works, yes? We strike her and she works harder. She makes something for us. She is then more than a cow—she is a…how do you say it?…
Bildner.
'

‘Builder?'

‘Yes. So she is now more, better. You understand?'

‘
Ja
. I think so.'

But she didn't—not really. How could good, kind Gregor believe such terrible things? It was so confusing, the twisted line between right and wrong, good and evil. Gregor was good, she knew, and yet he could behave like a monster. Was everyone such a confusing mixture? In Hitler's black heart, was there a tiny glow-worm of tenderness that made him kind to children? She thought of Dr Carter, who was so good, so kind, and yet he helped the Commandant, which was wrong, surely?

Gregor held out the other half of his apple, with a smile. Hunger scrabbled in Claudine's guts.

As she ate, she spoke haltingly about Maman and how she had been miserable and poorly all through the winter and into spring. She told him about Hans being at home. She wondered how much he knew of what had happened on the beach that night.

‘He scares me, Gregor,' she said quietly.

Gregor's mouth was set in a thin line. ‘This is not a good thing. We must help you. We must think of…something for help you.'

Claudine said, ‘I don't understand about you.'

‘Warum?'

‘You are so kind and yet—' She nearly said it: he was kind to her but so awful to those poor men. Instead, she said, ‘You are good to me, even though you are a soldier.'

‘How can I be rotten for you?'

He grinned, pleased with himself for using the unfamiliar word. Then his face grew serious.

‘I have a boy, a son. In Germany. I think that I want him happy. You are a child. War is cruel.'

He shrugged, an open-handed gesture that contained the difficulty of all the ideas he couldn't say in English, or perhaps couldn't say at all. ‘It is good for being kind to children. This is what I hope for my boy.'

After a long time, the air became ragged: biting gusts scraped their cheeks. The sea turned slate-grey and Claudine could feel rain waiting in the cold wind.

She didn't talk about the night on the beach. The sand eels. Hans.

Claudine knew she had to go home.

As she stood up, Gregor reached out to her. ‘This Hans,' he said. ‘I will not let him hurt you. Don't be frightened.'

But Hans came to their house every day, all through May. He brought bags of food and he brought medicine for Maman, too. She stopped coughing and started singing while she cooked. Her piano-ribs faded and filled with plump flesh. By the summer, her face was round and happy.

Francis started to sleep instead of crying. Claudine's stomach didn't gripe all the time. It was easier to run without feeling dizzy.

Hans brought her a wooden hoop and a stick to play with outside so that he and Maman could go and lie down together. A toy for a child, but she played with it anyway. She tried not to listen to the grunts and groans from Maman's room.

She wondered where Papa was fighting. They had received one tattered letter, via the Red Cross nearly ten months ago (and it had been dated from two months before that, June 1941), which had been very bright and talked about the heat, as if Papa were enjoying a holiday. Some sentences were black blocks of the censor's pen. Papa had written,
I like to think of you, safe in Jersey.

Maman had scowled when she read that and thrown the letter to the floor. Claudine had picked it up and tucked it into her pocket. She had read it again and again, trying to understand what had made Maman so angry.

Hans was kind to Claudine. Called her
Liebling
. Sometimes, he patted her on the head or stroked her hair. Sometimes, he stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders. Or he put his hands on the back of her neck and rubbed it, very gently, so that it almost tickled. His touch sent spiders skittering into her stomach.

Maman watched. Once, after he had gone, she said, ‘Hans is very kind to you, my love.'

‘Yes, Maman.'

‘He's never hurt you, has he?'

Claudine imagined the shock and disgust on Maman's face if she told her. Perhaps she would make Hans go away. But perhaps—and this thought was more terrible—perhaps she wouldn't. Might she
blame
Claudine somehow, for making Hans do those terrible things to her?

‘No, Maman,' she replied.

‘Do you like him?'

Claudine looked at her face. Maman was smiling, truly smiling. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were bright, like they used to be before Francis was born. No trace of her black mood. If Claudine told Maman what had happened, she knew that Maman's darkness would return, along with the squeezing hunger.

‘Of course I do.'

‘You'd never know he was a soldier, really, would you? Not a German soldier? To look at him, he could be English or French. Or even from Jersey, except that his hair is a little light.'

‘Shall I peel the potatoes?' Claudine said.

One day, Hans brought another chicken then took Maman to the bedroom.

Claudine knew how to cook vegetables and fish, but she had never cooked a chicken before. She didn't know where to start with it: what to do with the feathers and feet and head. So she took it to Edith's house.

‘Goodness, child, I must be dreaming. A chicken? A
real
chicken. Come, let me hold it.'

Edith was showing Claudine how to pluck the chicken when she suddenly stopped.

‘What's this then?'

She was pointing at the chicken's foot: the skin was green.

Claudine grimaced. ‘Is it bad?'

Edith's voice was hard. ‘Where did you find this bird? Or
who
did you steal it from, I should be saying.'

‘No one. I
didn't
steal it.'

‘Well, what's this?' She beckoned Claudine closer so she could inspect the foot. It wasn't mould but green paint.

‘There's only one man I know who paints his chicken's feet green so they don't go missing. This is Oliver Le Marchand's bird, stolen from his coop just yesterday morning. Making a right old song and dance about it, he was.'

Her cheeks burning, Claudine told Edith how a soldier had become friends with Maman. How he had been giving them lots of food. How Maman was happy.

‘She
sings
, Edith. And she hums and laughs for no reason.'

Edith stood and looked out of the window. The wind was flattening the grass and shaking the gorse bushes.

‘Are you angry?' Claudine asked.

Edith shook her head.

‘Do you think Maman is a bad person?'

Edith shook her head again and gave a sad smile. ‘Those that live on hope die of hunger, my love.'

‘Should I take the chicken back to Mr Le Marchand?'

‘Take it back,' Edith laughed. ‘Are you mad, child? First thing he'd do would be skin you alive. Second would be to eat that chicken. Which I must say, I quite fancy a bit of. It would also do Marthe the world of good.'

After that, whenever Hans brought a chicken, Claudine took it to Edith and helped her to strip and gut it. Edith kept the innards for paté and stews. Maman never asked where the giblets had gone, but she must have known that Claudine was taking the birds to Edith's house. Perhaps it was because Maman knew Edith had cared for the children when she had been in hospital, or perhaps it was because Hans and the food had turned her into a different person, but she didn't seem to mind.

When Claudine watched Edith and Marthe and Maurice eating the paté, it made Hans's eyes on her body and his hands on her skin seem to matter less.

EDITH had thought Maurice a fool for fretting when the soldier disappeared for those days. What was the worry? But then, after she'd seen him help Maurice take Marthe over to Dr Carter's, she started to bother over it. It kept her up all that night and worried her over the weeks that came after: was he a spy, reporting back to the Commandant? The darkness makes monsters out of thin air. Still, what with fretting over Marthe too, Edith didn't catch a wink of sleep.

Three weeks later, at 5am and with the air still freezing, Edith stamped outside to fetch some wood. The shed was thick with the darkness—her little candle blinded her to anything past the reach of her arm. But she could see the pile of oddments that she'd heaped in the corner to hide the wood.

She took one of Frank's old rakes and prodded off the old newspaper and the sacks (they could use them for fuel once the wood ran out). She was just poking the last piece of newspaper when it moved and gave a moan.

Edith screeched and ran from the shed back into the house. Was it an ambush? Or an escaped prisoner of war? They could be violent, half starved and desperate as they were.

She leant against the door, trying to think where she could find her sharpest kitchen knife, her heart still going ten to the dozen when there was a
rat-a-tat-tat
at the door.

‘Leave me alone. I've nothing for you.'

‘
Helfen Sie mir!
'

She opened the door a crack. There he was, the soldier: crouched on her doorstep, that ruined arm held up like an offering.

She gasped. ‘You frightened the life out of me.'

‘Sorry.'

‘I suppose you want to come in?'

‘Thank you.' He rushed past her into the house and then cowered in her kitchen, looking all about as if he was the one with an army after him.

‘You look dreadful. Whatever's the matter?'

‘I must…hide.'

‘Hide? From whom?'

He laughed but there was no joy in it. ‘My countrymen. They take me, I think.'

Edith frowned. ‘But why?'

He held out that arm again. ‘This. I take the potatoes for the Commandant. He is happy. Then he see my arm. Before, he has forgot it.'

‘How?' Edith grinned. ‘It's not the easiest thing to miss, that arm.'

The soldier's face was serious. ‘Not
forgot.
But my father is a big man with much power in Lübeck. Before, I am safe because of him. But now Lübeck has bombs, many deaths. My father…'

The soldier's eyes filled with tears and Edith took his poor, broken hand and held it. But he pushed her away.

‘The Commandant say I am only in Jersey because my father was big man. Now this is all change. He tell me to stay in my house, not move. He will send men. I ask why. He say I am better for going to Germany. But…I know what this means, so I must hide.'

‘He wants to deport you? But then you would be going home.'

‘No! Not home. To…I do not know how you say…
Konzentrationslager
.'

‘Not to the work camps?'

‘Perhaps. The Führer does not like men who are…broken. Since long before war,
bihindert
people are killed. They pretend secret, but many people know this.'

His eyes were bright with tears.

‘Come, come.' Edith put her arms around him. No other way to give true comfort. His shoulders shook like a child's. ‘There, now. So you were hiding here? Stealing food where you could find it?'

He nodded. ‘But I do not take food from you. From other field or garden, yes, but not from you.'

‘Well, I suppose that's a compliment of sorts.'

She sighed, was about to tell him to go and find some other house to bother, but the hunted look in his eyes stopped her. How many people had war devoured over the years? There were those it had killed outright, like Frank and that poor French boy. It had disfigured Clement's body, distorted Dr Carter's mind beyond all recognition. Then there were those who were fading fast because war stopped them getting the help they needed: poor Marthe and little Francis, who, sweet as he was, would always be scrawny and seemed backward.

Edith made up her mind: her own private protest against the evil beast that was war.

‘Now listen,' she said. ‘If you're going to be hiding then there are better places than my wood shed. You'll stay in my larder.'

He shook his head. ‘This I cannot. If they find—'

‘They
will
find you in my wood shed and then we'll both be for it.'

‘I can find other place. In woods or cave. You are good woman. I can't—'

‘You
can't
keep disagreeing with me or I shall give you a clip around the ear. You will sleep in the larder and that is that.'