Somewhere Over England (48 page)

‘Do the case up.’ It was an order but she did not wait to see him force it down and click the locks. She marched instead to her own room and took Ed’s clothes and hers, folding them, pushing them into her case and his, then she looked at him as he stood silent in the doorway.

‘Do the cases up.’ It too was an order and again she did not wait to see him zip his own and lock hers but went down into the kitchen, sorting through cupboards as Mom watched, bringing out elastic which she knew would be needed where they were going. She put toothpaste, soap, cotton, needles, cigarettes, cans of ham, sugar, coffee and flour into a rucksack which she pulled out from the drawer in the laundry room. She told Mom and Pop where they were going then and they nodded, for what else could help?

Helen showered then, raising her face to the jetting water, letting it drench her hair and her skin, letting it take her breath and her thoughts away, just for those few moments. She felt it sting her skin and ease heat into her body. The towel was rough
and the mountains clean and snow-laden as she rubbed the condensation from the window with her hand, her tiredness gone now because she knew now where they were all going.

She told them that it was to Germany that they were travelling as they stood on the platform, stepping backwards as the Pullman roared in, so loud and large. She and Claus had arranged that her share of this year’s profits from the agency would pay, but she didn’t tell them and no one asked. She took Chris’s arm as he spun round away from her, from the train.

‘You will come because you need to, and I insist.’ That was all, and her voice was hard and angry, but there was love in it too. She looked at Ed and there was shock in his face.

‘You will come because I can think of no other way of clawing back your life and if you don’t then I will go alone and never return.’

They both boarded the train with her, heaving up the cases, then sitting, watching the white valleys and mountains merge into night. They slept and woke and ate and slept again but did not speak. The train rattled and jerked and Helen felt Ed’s arm against hers but it was stiff and afraid. Chris watched America, not her. He read comics which they bought from the stations they halted at, flicking the pages, his head down. Helen did not try to reach him. She could wait.

They reached Chicago and changed trains and travelled again and slept again until New York loomed, cutting out the light, its tall skyline one of the few left in the world which was untouched by the war.

They caught a cab to the docks where Claus met them in the shadow of the liner. He held her and his body was warm, and she wanted to lean into him, rest on him, but she could not. There was no time. Until they had been home, there was no time.

‘So, my dear Helen. You have heard at last.’ His smile was kind and his face no thinner than it had been last year.

She nodded. ‘And you?’

He shook his head. ‘There is nothing. I never will, I think. But you, at least you have heard.’ His eyes were deep with distress but there was a certain acceptance. ‘It comes in the end, a sort of acceptance,’ he said. ‘It has to.’

He looked at Ed and Chris. Chris looked away but Ed put out his hand.

‘I’m grateful,’ he said. ‘It’s good of you to do this for us.’ His hand trembled and there was stiffness in his every movement.

Claus smiled and shrugged. ‘My friend, it is so little. You did so much for us. Do not forget that as you travel back.’ He turned now to Helen. ‘I have the press pass. You have your camera? Good. Present it if you need to bypass the occupying regularities.’

Helen took the pass, stepping to one side as a passenger pushed past them up the gangplank. There was movement all around and the noise of traffic and ships and tugs. Their liner hooted, long and low, and she looked at the ship and then back at Claus.

‘I will try to find out what I can, my dear friend,’ she said, holding his arm and kissing his cheek. ‘Really I will.’ A steward was beckoning to them, his face red as he gestured from the deck.

‘
Auf wiedersehen
, my friends,’ Claus called as they started up the gangplank and Helen turned, her eyes meeting his, both wondering what she would find in the Germany they had once known.

The voyage to Liverpool lasted ten days and the weather was rough. They lay in their bunks for the first three days and then walked the decks and still Chris would not speak, though Ed held her arm and they breathed in the air together, feeling the cold on their skins; the wind whipping their salt heavy hair. As the days went by she felt him loosen and his walk became his roll. He bought more cigarettes to take as currency but smoked some too. They sat in deckchairs and talked a little and his hands grew still as his face took on the look of someone who could not turn back now. His cigarette glowed in the wind and the smoke was brushed away before it became visible, and its smell with it. He did not drink. But he did dream.

They docked in Liverpool and drove by taxi to the airport through drizzle-drenched streets, passing women in head-scarves and streets gouged by bombs, the ruins laced with rosebay. There were queues outside shops and now Chris turned to her.

‘Remember what they did,’ he said. ‘And you are making me go back.’ His face was set and his lips were thin.

‘I am making you go home,’ Helen said. ‘Because you have to face yourself, you and Ed have to face yourselves.’ She
reached for her son’s hand and held it, though he tried to pull away.

‘Listen to your mom,’ Ed said. ‘She loves you. Listen to her. She’s right. We’ve got to face it.’

But Chris would not listen and so Helen looked from him out to her homeland, its smallness, its hardship. It looked broken, like Ed, but it wasn’t, she knew England better than that. But what about Ed? Was he broken?

She sat back, feeling the streets and rubble pressing in on her as they followed behind small cars driving on the left-hand side. She had forgotten how comforting such closeness was, how England clustered, keeping the great vast spaces out of view. She loved it, but she loved Ed too.

She reached for his hand and he squeezed hers and smiled but there was a distance between them which would always remain until he had come to terms with the past. Would Germany do that for him? Would there be absolution?

‘Anyway, I want to see Laura and Mary,’ Chris said, looking out at a park with no railings, his breath misting the window. The drizzle had turned to rain and it jerked down the window as the taxi rattled along the pot-holed road.

‘We shall see them, on the way back,’ Helen replied, looking at her watch. Claus had arranged for a flight at four and it was now two o’clock. She looked up into the grey sky. We shall also visit Heine’s grave, she said to herself. This was something they must both do at last.

The arrived at the airport at three-thirty and as Helen strapped herself into the small Dakota she looked at Ed who was at the front talking to the Captain. He was investigating the controls, sitting in the pilot’s seat, getting the feel again, and she saw life in his face, in his hands which moved quickly, competently and knew that she was frightened. She had never flown before.

Chris sat next to her with Ed in front and Helen couldn’t speak as they took off, rearing up into the air, the bucket seats hard, the air pockets bumping her so that she was lifted from the seat. She gripped at Chris and screamed.

Chris and Ed turned and saw her face, so pale and fraught, and they laughed, looking at one another and then at her, and Chris put his hand on hers while Ed explained the rudiments of
flight, though she heard not a word. She did feel her son’s hand, though, and feigned fear long after it had gone.

There was a steady drumming of sound in the plane and they looked down through the narrow window as they skimmed over the North Sea, seeing the waves rippling and breaking.

‘Just like the snow, Mum,’ Chris said, leaning across her to see more easily and she liked his closeness and touched his hair where it stuck up at the back. He didn’t feel it and so did not pull away. She looked up and Ed was watching. He smiled and for a moment there was no distance at all between them.

The plane bumped its way through the overcast sky and the sea seemed to last for hours. Helen looked around at the plane. It was small and cramped and seemed to be held together by wire, but it was quick because she could see a sandbank ahead already.

‘This is the coast of the Netherlands,’ the pilot called.

They flew over the island of Walcheren, most of which had been under water, though the floods had now receded, the pilot told them, as the gaps made in the dykes by the RAF had been closed.

‘The fields will be barren though because of the salt,’ he added and Helen looked at Ed but couldn’t see his face because he had turned towards the window.

They flew over bomb-damaged woods, in one of which a wrecked plane still lay. There were bridges and railways sprawled beneath them, some still useless and in disarray. Long stretches of electric railway lay grass-covered and unused. The pilot brought the plane down lower so that they could see.

‘The Nazis looted miles of copper wire which was needed for the cables,’ the pilot explained and now Helen looked at Chris who just stared at her.

They landed and drove through the once flood-ravaged streets of Holland, sometimes breathing in the smell of sea-saturated earth and there was magenta rosebay here too on the ruins, though clearing and rebuilding had begun. They stopped to buy milk and the Dutch pastor told them how the Dutch had eaten tulip bulbs to survive but that Canadian rations had entered and the children were beginning to put on weight.

Helen looked around at the scabied legs and the hand-made shoes that the thin children wore.

Ed said, ‘In Little Fork they grouse because they had to pay heavy taxes for the war. They don’t understand.’

Helen took his arm. ‘How can they? It is only those who’ve seen and been amongst it all, like us. We are the only ones who can understand.’ He looked at home now, relaxed as though there was no conflict, no battle. Would he still dream tonight?

They stayed in an old inn and he did dream.

They drove the next day along roads which were full of Allied vehicles. They reached the border and this time there were no Nazis holding them up, no red and black flags, and no hidden camera. Helen looked at Chris as they were waved through and his face was tight and cold.

‘We brought in a camera for your grandfather. Do you remember? We brought it in so that he could blackmail the Nazis and save some people. He is a man to be proud of.’

But Chris turned away and did not reply.

They drove through the west German countryside, along roads carved through heathland, dotted with pines. Some snow remained where clumps shadowed it from the sun. They passed through decimated towns where hardly a building remained and the people pushed prams from ruin to ruin, searching for fuel. Rosebay grew here too, though clearance had begun.

Helen watched Ed’s face as he looked at the crosses which were still planted in the rubble so long after the war. He stopped the car and walked across and stood near one and she joined him and could smell the dust. It was the same dust as in England.

They travelled along the great Nazi
Autobahn
from then on which bypassed all the big cities, and now the three of them were quiet, filled with their own thoughts.

Helen counted the steel-helmeted military motor-cyclists which wove in and out of the Army lorries, the small military cars, the German farm carts pulled by thin horses. They passed the flat beet fields and there were women bending and walking, bending and walking. Helen asked Ed to stop and she stood by the car, taking photographs because Heine had done this once.

She told Chris to come and see. He stood next to her and was almost as tall. She told him of his father; how he had taken photographs and exhibited them, how he had thought life
would be simpler if he lived as one of these workers, hoeing and weeding and harvesting.

They stood in silence and then he turned to her.

‘I guess maybe he was right.’ There was not the earlier hardness in his face, there was doubt and this is what Helen had wanted to see.

At last they drove into what remained of Hanover. The Kröpcke was destroyed, its glass dome gone and cleared away along with the smart women and their cigarette holders, along with a world which had once glistened and glittered. In its place there was ruin and devastation, and rosebay too.

They parked and watched labourers, thin and with sacking tied to their backs for warmth, clearing piles of melted lead and stonework. There were people here too who pushed prams and sorted in the rubbish and Helen wondered where the old Jew dressed in black was now. Had he survived? Had Claus’s family survived? They were also Jews.

They passed broken bridges and bomb-proof shelters which had saved thousands of people, but not enough, because thousands had also died. Now a policeman told Helen they housed the homeless. She took photographs and Chris stood with her, while Ed walked to the ruins, picking up rubble, turning it over and over in his hand.

They drove to the Headquarters of the British Occupying Army and Helen presented her press pass to the commanding officer, explaining why she was here, the real reason why she was here and the officer nodded and turned away, saying he had not seen her, because fraternisation was not allowed.

Helen smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said and left the room which was solid and full of photographs of his wife and children and very English.

Her footsteps sounded on the steps and on the road and an old woman glared at her.

‘
Engländerin
,’ she hissed but Helen did not mind because she would feel the same if the Germans were marching all over her ruined land.

They reached the village as dusk was falling and now there were no Nazi flags, no blonde girls with coiled hair, no windowboxes, and only six houses left standing in this main street. The church was still there and Herr Weber’s house, or part of it. Helen walked up to the front door. There was ash on
the path, left over from the snow which only lay now beneath the stumps of the limes which was all that remained of the trees that Heine had loved, and for a moment she thought she could smell their summer scent.