The Dynamite Room (8 page)

His fingers fell still and he glanced at her.

“Have you finished?”

She nodded.

He pushed his plate aside and stood up and, taking his jacket from the chair, he walked out of the room.

“Thank you,” she whispered to herself.

“Oh, that's quite all right,” he said.

In the sitting room she watched him put the blackout frame back up at the window, pressing it into place, a tiny torch gripped between his teeth. She held Mr. Tabernacle to her chest and watched him as the room grew darker and smaller, frame by frame. Soon he was not much more than a dark figure up against the wall, only his hands occasionally seen in the torchlight as he worked. She felt as if she were being packed away into a box.

“Do you have blackouts in Germany?” she asked him, because she was becoming afraid of the silence between them.

He looked at her but didn't answer and she fidgeted awkwardly in the doorway. She held on to Mr. Tabernacle so tight that she thought he might burst in her arms.

They'd had blackouts in England since just before the war had started, so that now the only nighttime lights seen with any regularity were the beams of searchlights crisscrossing the skies on the coast. Hardly anyone left the house after dusk for fear of falling over something or not being able to find the way back home again. Even before Lydia had left, there had been several incidents in the village with people stumbling off pavements or into the ditches along the sides of the road. No one dared drive anywhere on a cloudy night, and with no street lighting in the village even her father had given up risking the walk to The Cricketers; he'd have his own brew at home.

Lydia's mother had wanted everyone safely indoors by the time it got dark, but Alfie had proven to be a law unto himself.

What time do you call this?
her father would say when Alfie finally tramped in.
And where in God's name have you been?

Don't worry.
No Jerries are coming tonight,
said Alfie.

Oh, is that right? And how do
you
know?

With the blackout fabric in place, the soldier set candles in jam jars out on the floor and then opened up his pack and pulled out a canvas case, each narrow pocket snugly holding a pencil. He unbuckled the main flap and took from it a large map, torn and crumpled and stained in places. He opened it up and laid it out on the floor, then repositioned the lights around it. He looked up at her standing in the doorway, her eyes suddenly welling.

“What is it?”

She stared at the map, brought of course by him, then shook her head and said, “Nothing.” Her endeavors to hide anything useful from him had, it seemed, been pointless.

He turned back, bending over the telltale lines of roads and rivers and the target dots of towns. The map was of England, but it was only the southeast coast that he seemed interested in, and, taking a pencil from one of the bag pockets, he placed a small
X
where she supposed Greyfriars must be. She nervously walked across the room to one of her father's leatherback chairs and sat with her feet up on it and her knees huddled up. He followed the roads inland with his finger, occasionally writing something down on a scrap of paper and mumbling to himself, then took a coil of thread from his pocket and measured out one of the roads.

“Are you a spy?” she said. He probably was. “I know that's not your uniform. Where did you get it?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Then how did you get it?”

He said nothing but turned back to the map, following the different roads with his finger and occasionally looking up, not at her but just to think, his lips moving ever so slightly as if the thoughts were words that he was trying to shape but he didn't quite know how. He scribbled things down, finding another road, maybe measuring it with his thread.

After a while she lowered herself out of the chair and onto the floor beside him, taking Mr. Tabernacle with her, and he edged a candle away to make room for them. She leaned in close so she could read some of the towns: Ipswich, Colchester, Felixstowe…

He had drawn little circular symbols at Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Brightlingsea, and Harwich, and she wondered if they were naval bases. When she asked him he didn't answer.

“Did you fight in France?” she said.

He raised his eyes to look at her.

“Yes.”

“Where else? Did you fight in Poland?”

He made no response and turned his attention back to what he was doing, and then he changed his mind. He ushered her to move out of the way as he lifted the map, getting up onto his knees to do so. He turned it over and laid it back down. The flip side covered the whole of Europe and was scribbled all over in washed-out pen and pencil so that almost every inch of sea was covered in such a scrawled tangle of words and figures and numbers and symbols that she couldn't pick out anything that made sense.

“Here,” he said, showing her a point on the French coast where there was a similar penciled
X
. “And here,” he said. “Poland. And here too.”

She bent closer to look. “Norway?” she said. “Isn't it cold there?”

He nodded. “Very.”

She looked at the map, Europe obliterated under his notes, and wondered where her father was among all of it. She missed his hugs, and the tang of his Woodbines, and the way he'd call her
missy
even though she used to hate it.
I'll be home before you know it
.

“How did you get here?” she said.

“To England?”

She nodded.

“On a boat,” he said. “This is to be our first post. We have to prepare. More men will come soon, and then more, and then more.”

“Here?” she said.

He nodded.

“And then what?”

“Your country will fall—just like the rest,” he said. “You will be overrun.”

She looked at the map again, at the tiny island that was Britain and all the bits around it that she knew Germany now had; it seemed the only way they might escape was to push themselves further out into the Atlantic and not let the rest of Europe gobble them up.

“Where are the rest of your soldiers then?”

“Coming.”

She had meant the others in the boat that he had arrived with, but perhaps he hadn't understood. She looked at the windows, all boarded up and blacked out.

In the autumn, just after the war had started, Alfie and Eddie had found a rowboat washed up on the beach. They had thought then that the Germans had landed—Alfie had been quite convinced—and made such a terrible fuss of the matter that the police had set to combing the nearby fields for more signs. But in the end it turned out to be a fisherman's boat from Boulogne, with its black hull and yellow and white bands, set adrift in a storm perhaps and blown across the Channel until it was washed up on Shingle Street Beach for Alfie and Eddie to find.

For months they'd watched bombers flying overhead, and over the last few weeks the ports and harbors all along the east coast had been targeted by German aircraft. She'd heard it on the wireless at Mrs. Duggan's. The aerodromes and military installations had been targeted too. There had been a raid on Garrett's munitions factory in Leiston, less than ten miles away, her mother had written. A stray bomb had even blown out the greenhouses at Wetherby's fruit farm. Lydia had imagined the shards of glass taking to the sky like a swarm of glittering insects.

He folded the map away, returning it to its canvas case. She sat back up in her chair. In the weeks before they'd been evacuated, the boys from school had spent most of their time lying along the hedgerows, wooden sticks ready to fire, waiting for someone like this man to arrive. She wondered how brave they'd be if they were here now, and thought of how silly they'd look with their sticks.

“You've run away, haven't you?” he said. “That's why you're here, on your own. You're not supposed to be here.”

“I am,” she said. “This is our home. Not yours. What happened to your shoulder anyway?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It is just a wound.” He switched on his torch and then went around the room blowing all the candles out. As the torchlight flickered she saw the pits and shadows in his face.

He went to the window and used the tip of his blade to hook open a tear in the material just enough for him to look through. He switched off the torchlight and the sitting room fell into darkness. Lydia did not move.

She remembered that first night of the blackout, when her mother couldn't bear being trapped in the house. They'd taken their tea outside and sat in the moonlight on a blanket, having a picnic.
We can make this fun. Look, Mr. Hitler!
her mother had yelled out into the dark.
Look what fun we're having!

“Does your bear have a name?”

The sudden question surprised her. “Mr. Tabernacle,” she said.

He laughed. “That is not a name. That is a word. A Jewish word as well. Is he a Jewish bear?” He laughed again. Then he turned his back on her once more and stooped down to look through the slit in the blackout frame. For a while longer, he did not move.

Her hair was fanned across the pillow, a thin clump of it lying across her face and gummed with moisture as if she had been sucking on it. Pale cheeks, a button nose, freckles spattered across its bridge by the summer, nostrils barely moving as she drew air in and out. He moved closer, the mouth of the gun against her jaw. He tightened his grip and felt the tension in his hand, tendons straining wire tight in his arm. He heard the soft sound of her breathing and saw her flickering eyelids, dreams or nightmares chasing through her sleep.

After watching her for a while, he lowered the gun's barrel towards the floor, and left the room as silently as he had entered.

Midway down the stairs he sat and rested his elbows on his knees, his heartbeat thundering. He watched the hallway and the front door, the gun still held in his hand. He let the darkness close in around him until, like the girl—whose name he knew but wouldn't say—he was swallowed and lost within it.

They had trudged slowly through the trees, pushing up the Norwegian mountainside and away from the town. The snow was thick and dry, their feet sinking into it over their boots, each man weighed down by his rucksack, rifle in one hand, the other grasping at branches and tree trunks for support. Groups of four dragged sledges carrying heavy machine guns and mortars strapped on with ropes. He had never known such tiredness.

War was a long and arduous slog. It dug at the back of your heels, and pinched and rubbed and cut and gnawed, and hung heavy from your shoulders, and dragged you to the ground. It was better not to think of yourself as human or alive. You were an organic machine, nothing more, with wheels and pistons and bellows and cranks that somehow kept you walking.

As they climbed higher he remembered seeing the mountains circling them through the treetops; at their most vertical points the grazed rock faces were bare. The air was thin. Gusts of wind blew between the trees and slapped at their faces until they were red and chapped.

The ground eventually leveled, and when they reached the summit they found nothing growing but tufts of gorse and small clumps of birch bent over by the wind. They cautiously picked their way up to the highest point, where they stood around clapping out the cold and squeezing their hands deep into their armpits as they looked down into the gorges beneath them, and out across to where higher peaks lost their tops to the clouds.

Many of them were inexperienced—too old to still be considered schoolboys and too young by far to be men. He had shared a cigarette with one of them, who had round-rimmed mountain goggles hanging around his neck and a look of terror so frozen into his face that the boy could barely chip out a smile. He told the boy to put his gloves back on and make sure that all his buttons were fastened.
If the wind gets in you'll have frostbite and then, by God, you'll be sorry.

They had arrived on ghost ships through fog, coming up through the black waters of the fjord. In the harbor they made short work of two Norwegian defense ships, blasting the keel out of one, striking the battery of the second. The detonation rolled around the cliffs behind the harbor like thunder. The water was clogged with civilian ships, merchant ships, smaller vessels, all torpedoed; the harbor water burned around the wreckage. The landing boats nosed their way through floating bodies.

Within twenty-four hours the British navy had arrived, appearing through the mist and snow just as the German flotilla had done. Cannons and mortars thumped. From behind their defenses in the town, he had watched his destroyer, the
Wilhelm Heidkamp,
break up in flames. Around him guns rattled, zips of light flickering out in lines across the darkness. Mortar shells exploded. People ran. Even their supply ship, the
Rauenfels,
had gone down, taking all their artillery with it.

Now though, up on the mountainside, everything was quiet and subdued. Cigarettes were lit and smoke dispersed in the air. Men talked in muffled whispers and coughed at the cold.

We should go back. This is madness,
one of them murmured.
We're going to die up here. We're never going to find our way.

Weber,
warned another.
For God's sake, shut up.

I'm telling you, these fucking mountains are going to swallow us—

I said, fucking shut up!
The man took Weber firmly by the collar and for a moment it seemed that a brawl would start.

Hey!
shouted Ohlendorf.
You two!
And, just as quickly, the moment passed. A flurry of wind blew snow up into their faces, and the men all turned their heads or covered their eyes as the flakes chased around them.

Ohlendorf gave a signal, tossing his cigarette butt into the ravine, and they slowly made their way down from the mountaintop. Their faces were solemn and nobody spoke. Later one of the sledges would be lost down a channel between the rocks, and it would take thirty men almost an hour to haul it and the equipment back up onto the path, their hands frozen and boots struggling to find grip in the snow.