Resistance (29 page)

Sarah couldn’t see his face, but his voice had changed again, returned to the voice she’d always known.

“This map is why I came here, into your valley. And it is why I am still here too. This map.” He turned towards it once more. “It deserves more than a castle in Wewelsburg. It deserves light, not darkness.”

Sarah shifted her feet in the dry earth. She felt afraid again but this time she didn’t know why. “I should get back,” she said at last.

“Yes,” Albrecht said. “Of course.”

He lifted the sacking cloth and tarpaulin from the floor and pulled them across the packing crate, obscuring the world within. Then, taking the lead but shining the torch behind him so Sarah might see her footing, he led her out of the cavity into the natural crevice, and then out of the Red Darren altogether onto the hillside and its steep slopes of scree. Outside, Seren and Fly were on their feet, stretching their backs. The blustery day had pushed
what few clouds there’d been over the Black Hill and as Sarah emerged from the crevice she had to squint in the brightness left in their wake. She looked down the valley, and for the second time in her life saw everything held within its steep walls cast in an unfamiliar light.

I
t was a week after Albrecht had shown Sarah the map when Atkins, half-blind and missing all the fingernails on his right hand, came stumbling down the valley’s west wall towards The Court. Stopping at an outcrop of rock he crouched behind it and peered down at the moss-covered slates of the farmhouse below him. His vision rose and fell with his heavy breath. There was a milky cloud always drifting across his left eye, the watermark of a blow from one of those unseen hands that had, for months now, assaulted him every day.

Atkins was exhausted but still energised by the ebbing adrenalin of his escape. By the sheer luck of it. The bullet in the back had never come, however much he’d expected it as he’d scrambled down the railway embankment and rushed headlong into the trees at the edge of the siding. He’d lain in the drainage ditch for the rest of the day, motionless but for his shivering, the water making his joints ache with cold.

A toolshed in a cottage garden on the edge of the village had supplied him with the file with which he’d spent most of the night, running the chain of his cuffs across it as slowly as he could for fear of the noise it made. The cuffs themselves he’d had less luck with. He’d never been much good at picking locks and so he still wore them on each wrist, a few links of chain hanging from each one, still tarnished with the blood of the guard from the train.

Just before dawn he’d set out for the valleys. There were Auxiliary Units out there, or so he hoped. He didn’t know for certain. The Special Duties Section had always been his only responsibility, but
he thought it was likely that somewhere in those remote hills there’d be a bunker and men who could help him. Or at least, if not a unit, then this, a local farmhouse so isolated even the Germans had left it alone. And inside, people like this young boy coming out to feed the chickens. People who could also help him. Who could feed him, hide him, until he made contact with the units.

Atkins watched the boy scatter the mash inside the chicken pen then stand still in the midst of the stabbing of the birds’ beaks at his feet. Slowly, the boy crouched lower until he was almost at their level. Then, just as slowly, he reached out an arm to stroke the oil-spill feathers of one of the cockerels. The bird let him do this, tame to human hands, and only gave the lightest of resistance when he picked it up and carried it out of sight around the corner of the house.

The boy didn’t come back and Atkins had to wait for over an hour before he saw another person. This time it was an older man, dressed in a similar way to the boy, in a farmer’s way, clothes that Atkins had come to know and trust. An old tweed jacket, a flannel waistcoat beneath, and heavy corduroy trousers pulled tight at the waist with a thick leather belt. The boy’s father perhaps. Atkins watched the man pull a fork from where it was stuck in the ground and begin working over the soil of a vegetable patch. He felt a wave of tiredness wash over him. These were the people he was fighting for, for whom he’d endured these months of pain. Men of the earth, men who knew their landscape as intimately as they might a lover. This man, he would understand.

Standing from behind the rock, Atkins began walking down the slope, the chain of each cuff held in his palms so as not to alarm the farmer. He felt as if he was walking towards the gates of Eden. A rare sanctuary just when he thought the game had been up. The man continued with his work, absorbed in his digging. Atkins walked on, the dew from the longer blades of grass soaking the bottoms of his trousers. He filled his lungs with the fresh mountain air, with freedom, with life. When he was near enough, he paused in
his descent, took a deeper breath, and called down to the man below him.

“Hello there! Good morning!”

Sebald looked up from his digging to see a tall man standing on the slope above him, raising one hand in the air. He was speaking English. Any soldiering instinct still silting somewhere within him failed to show itself. Dropping the fork, he ran back inside The Court, clattering through the back door into the kitchen and on into the front room where Alex and Albrecht were eating their breakfast.

“A man,” Sebald said to them, the air gulping in his throat. “An Englishman. Outside on the hill.”

Atkins knew he’d made a terrible mistake the moment he saw Alex’s boots. Surprised by the farmer’s reaction, he’d walked a little further down the slope hoping to put him at his ease and so was closer to the house when Alex came round the corner. Even through the cloudy patch of his left eye he saw immediately that the man’s boots were not those of a farmer’s but regular Wehrmacht issue. It was all Atkins needed to know and he was already turning to run when Alex swung a machine gun from behind his back and aimed it up the hill.

Atkins felt a sudden burn of energy flooding through him as he half ran, half fell up the slope, grasping at roots, branches, rocks, anything that would propel him up and away from that gun behind him. As he ran he once more waited for the crack, for the momentary bumblebee whine of the bullet as it sped towards his back. But it never came. Just the scramble of loose stones and soil falling away behind him and the panting breath of another man, drawing closer and closer. Suddenly the breath became touch as he felt a grab at his trailing ankle that brought him smashing into the ground and sliding backwards. Then another hand on his other leg.
He kicked out, made contact, then felt his ankle gripped again as he was dragged down the slope. Then more hands on his back, pinning his arms, on his head, pushing his face into the sweet smell of the young bracken, its fronds still curled like the fists of a foetus in the womb.

Albrecht paced back and forth before the range in the front room of The Court, the heel of his boots scuffing over the flagstones. Atkins sat in a chair with Alex standing behind him pressing the muzzle of his gun into his neck. A bruise was deepening under the sergeant’s eye where Atkins’s boot had caught him. Albrecht kept his hands in his pockets because they were shaking. With rage, with fear, with sadness.

He hated this Englishman sitting before him, his head bowed, his hair matted and stinking. Not because he was English. Not because of those defiant, hard blue eyes. Not even because he was his enemy, but simply because he had come here from there. He had brought the war back into the valley and so had also brought with him the choices Albrecht so hated and the parts of himself he so wanted to forget.

Albrecht stopped pacing and looked down at Atkins. The man was obviously British Intelligence, otherwise he’d no longer be alive. He bore the marks of the Gestapo all over him; those denuded, bloodied fingers. He must have something they wanted, otherwise they would have shot him by now. He must have held out, somehow. That was why he was still alive and still here. So it was no use questioning him further. If he’d stuck out the Gestapo’s interrogation then anything Albrecht might try would be child’s play in comparison.

He went and sat at the table, his head in his hands. The dark wood of its surface was stained with even darker pools, worn smooth in little hollows where generations of men had placed their elbows. The table was a map of all the humanity who had lived in this house. Of all those who had nurtured food from these bare hills and
sat here to eat the fruits of their labours. Men who had given to the soil, but only to take. This was the equation here, he saw that now. This was the pattern by which these farm women lived. The cycle of husbandry and farming was a simple one. Give life and take life, so there may be life once more.

Albrecht sighed, feeling the weight of his own head in his palms. “Take him away,” he said to Alex without looking up from the table. “Get rid of him. Quietly.”

APRIL–JUNE 1945

A
lbrecht watched as Sarah dressed the orphan lamb in the flayed skin of another. Just moments before he’d observed her with equal fascination as she’d run the blade of her knife about the dead lamb’s neck, hooves, and rump, then peeled the skin from its body, drawing it over its head like a jumper.

“You’d best bury that one,” she’d said to him as she turned the skin back the right way round, her small hands as bloodied as a butcher’s. Albrecht took the raw body, mottled with globules of fat, wearing its head like a mask, and dug a shallow grave down beside the river. When he returned Sarah was still preparing the orphan lamb, slipping its legs through those of the skin jacket. She pulled the new coat tight over its back, making sure it covered the tail where the ewe would smell to recognise her own offspring. Brushing a strand of hair from her eye and tipping back on her haunches, she inspected her work. The skin still hung loose about the lamb’s midriff.

“I’ll need some string,” she said. “Hold it for a second, will you?”

Albrecht knelt beside her. There was a pale pink smear of blood across her temple where she’d smoothed back her hair. He wanted to lick his finger, press it to her temple and rub the mark away, but he just took the lamb instead, holding it with both his hands, his fingers touching under its belly. He could feel its skin beneath the adopted coat, supple over the bone, its ribs, thin as twigs, and the rapid tremor of its heart beneath its ribs again. A cloud passed from over the sun and a quick tide of light slid down the valley, over the farmhouse, the two waterfalls on either side, and then across the lower field where Sarah was walking away from him towards her
coat, hooked over the gatepost like the body of a hanging man. Without that coat he could make out her shape more clearly. She wore a cardigan over a blouse tied at her waist, which was narrower than he’d expected. From this distance it looked as if his hands would encompass it completely, as easily as they did the body of this lamb.

The tide of light reached him, bringing with it a warmth that had seemed impossible all through that long winter. Such light was a rare gift in this valley, he’d come to appreciate this now. A cloud passing, or the sun rising over the Black Hill could transfigure the landscape in seconds; from a dark notch of earth and broken stone into a gilded wound, as if the mountains had been scratched and revealed to be pure gold beneath.

The lamb moved under his hands, lithe and fragile, just hours old, its dark eyes still filling with light. If there had ever been any rhetoric of National Socialism that struck a faint note in him, Albrecht thought, then perhaps it had been this. The idealism of the simple, rural life, a celebration of the German peasantry and their values. He’d lived his life in cities and towns but this lamb, its delicate heart, the borrowed skin, the sudden sun, the waterfalls that never stopped; all of it countered the years of war behind him and made him feel whole again. It also made him feel younger, a child once more; ignorant but learning, edging his way towards a knowledge that seemed more elemental, more connected than anything he’d ever studied in the libraries of Dresden or Oxford.

Sarah returned with a ball of string from which she cut a length to tie the skinned coat about the lamb’s stomach.

“What if this doesn’t work?” Albrecht asked.

“Use the dogs, I s’pose,” Sarah said, pulling the skin tight over the lamb’s rump.

As ever, her speech was sparse, but Albrecht had come to understand that for every word spoken there were another ten shadowing it, unsaid within her. The words she did speak were like stones dropped into a well to determine its depth. Few, but resonant beyond their own sound.

Checking the tightness of the string Sarah took the lamb from Albrecht and let it into the pen where the surrogate ewe was already grazing. Together, they leant on the top rail of the hurdle fence and watched.

Ever since Albrecht had shown Sarah the map a month ago she’d engaged with him and the rest of the patrol more in the manner of the other women in the valley. Still infrequently, still guarded, but in a pragmatic spirit of circumstance; as fellow subjects of events and not as occupier and occupied. She’d even allowed him to visit her with the gramophone again, and play her some of Bach’s other cello suites.