Chapter Eighteen
The night shift had become like a secret and the journal is full of its whispers. In truth, my shifts varied and so did his, but it was night that lent us cover. It was night that cocooned us, so it is night that I choose to recall.
Amongst the pages of news there was a poem.
‘Can you read this for me?’ I passed the page to Hugo.
‘It is in German,’ he said.
‘Hence my request.’
‘A poem.’
‘Yes.’
‘Liliencron,’ he said. ‘I know this poet.’ He looked up and smiled; it was becoming more common. ‘From a patient?’
‘No.’
He tilted his head.
‘One of Helen’s girls.’
‘She reads German poetry?’
‘No, not usually. She works at the University Press and they’re printing The Oxford Book of German Verse. She was hoping you’d help with a translation.’
‘Their English press is printing German poetry?’
‘Apparently.’
‘I thought maybe they would not.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought they would hate us.’
‘They do hate you,’ I said, and saw it hurt him. ‘But maybe they like your poetry.’
Hugo bent his head to the page in his hand.
‘What is it called?’ I asked.
He thought, then made a translation. ‘Death among the ears of corn.’
He read in silence and I watched the poem move across his face. His forehead relaxed, his lips parted. Moisture pooled behind the lower lids of his eyes and threatened to spill, but didn’t. It was a translation of sorts.
‘A sad poem,’ I said.
‘It was written for another war, but it might have been written yesterday.’
He looked along the ward, each bed occupied. ‘Any of them could have written it,’ he said, then he looked at me. ‘Or any Englishman.’
‘Are they all the same?’
‘Can you tell them apart?’
I had been overheard, more than once, asking a Tommy if he wanted Wasser.
‘No,’ I said.
‘But others can. They see horns on our heads.’
‘Some do.’
‘They should know us by our poetry, not their propaganda.’
‘I’ve never put as much store in words as some,’ I said. ‘Whether it’s poetry or propaganda. They too can be hard to tell apart.’ I was remembering Bill reading Rupert Brooke. There is no English heaven, I told him. If you die you’ll just be dead.
Hugo said nothing, but he held tighter to the poem and I sensed he disagreed. He had no interest in arguing but I began, contrary and more bitter than I intended.
‘Poets do the work of governments when they glorify war and turn dead soldiers into saints,’ I said.
‘Some,’ he said. ‘But others write war as they see it, without glory or reason.’ Then he began to read the poem.
I couldn’t understand the words, but their rhythm and his voice were slow and sad. The argument I’d wanted to have retreated.
‘Can you translate it?’
‘It is not so easy.’
I took some paper from the desk drawer and offered him the chair.
‘Write it down,’ I said. ‘Take your time. I’ll check on the children.’
I did another round – beds, bags, drains, pulleys.
I settled with whispers and caresses and sometimes morphia.
When I looked to the nurses’ desk Hugo was bent over his task, sometimes writing, sometimes with the end of the pencil between his teeth.
His fringe flopped forward and I could not see the lines I knew were playing across his brow.
I went to the storeroom and washed my hands. I replenished the trolley. I made tea and put a cup, strong this time, and steaming, on the desk in front of him.
‘I am done,’ he said, and he arranged the pages side by side, the German and the English.
I arrange them now, side by side on my kitchen table. The German scribed by an English woman and the English scribed by a German man. The form is the same if not the words: short lines, four to each stanza.
‘Will you read it?’ I asked.
He nodded and I perched on the edge of the desk so I could follow the words as he read.
‘In the wheat field with corn and poppies,
Lies a soldier, unfound.
Two days already, two nights already;
With severe wounds, unbandaged.’
I meant to follow the words as they were written, as he had written them, but instead I watched his mouth, his lips full and softly pink as they moved carefully around each word.
‘Tormented by thirst and fever wild,
In death’s throes he raises his head.’
Hugo’s hand was on the desk beside the translation, the pencil loosely held as if he might make a correction. I shifted my weight on the edge of the desk and moved my hand slightly, to steady myself.
‘One last dream, one last vision,
His breaking eye looks upward.’
He paused, crossed out breaking and changed it to blinding. He put the pencil down and his hand returned to where it had been, though closer to mine. It was a lonely poem, not just sad. He kept reading and our fingers touched; they began to move, mine among his.
‘The scythe rustles in the field of corn,
He sees his village in peaceful labour,
Farewell, farewell, my homeland –
And bows his head and is no more.’
He read the last lines and they hung among the whispers of the ward.
I heard his breath go out, draw in, and I saw the flare of his nostrils and rise of his chest. He continued to look at the page but he was silent and his fingers had stilled.
They lay loosely among mine and I could feel, exactly, all the places that they touched.
I clasped them and brought his hand to my chest. I held it as he had once held mine and I remembered the heat of his breath on my frozen fingers.
I’d convinced Alison it was nothing. I bent my head and pressed my lips to his knuckles.
That is all, I thought. It is nothing. It is almost nothing.
‘Tilda.’ He exhaled it.
I did not let go. I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of his skin, searching for what was beneath the soap.
‘Tilda.’
I longed for something, was aching for it. I became deaf and blind to caution.
‘Tilda.’
I wanted to taste him.
‘Tilda.’
My lips brushed his fingers and I felt the ring. I let go.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know… I’m sorry.’
I stood and looked around the ward, unsure what to do. My hands, which had been holding his, tried to hold each other, but they twisted within their grasp and would not be still. I had felt, exactly, all the places where our fingers had touched and now I was rubbing the sensations away.
He stood up from the desk and I turned to him.
‘I shouldn’t have…’ I said.
‘No.’
‘But I…’
I couldn’t finish, because I could not explain. He makes me feel, I wrote later.
I’d made tea. For him and me, it was on the desk, not quite cold. I did not ask if he wanted to drink his. I just picked up the cups and took them to the storeroom and emptied them in the trough.
I leaned against it and breathed and tried to remember the rules – what they were and why they were there. Which rules mattered. Truly mattered.
Someone called out and Hugo went to them.
Then there was another and another, as so often happened – the call of one reminded others of their pain.
I returned to the ward and for half an hour we did our job.
Him on one side, me on the other. We did not talk and we did not look in the other’s direction but when the ward was quiet we made our way to the storeroom.
We washed our hands and faced each other.
I could hear our breathing, it was out of sync. I put a hand on his chest and a hand on mine and felt our two hearts beating. His was stronger and faster.
‘We are alive, it seems.’
His fringe of curls fell forward and I pushed them back, as I’d longed to do. I tangled my fingers among them and guided his mouth to mine.
I felt words on his lips, half-formed reasons to step back, so I stepped forward and the length of my body was against the length of his, my mouth wordless but insistent. His lips softened and opened and we kissed like two people at a railway station on the eve of war.
We kissed like we knew how it might end.
I took blankets from the linen shelf and laid them on the floor then I stood before him and raised my skirts, just enough to undo my stays and remove my drawers.
He stood there, and only now do I think of his torment.
I wonder if I was cruel to him or if I was offering him what he wanted, and if those two things might be the same.
When I reached for him, he yielded. When I placed his hand on my waist I felt the press of his fingers through layers of fabric.
Then he traced the line of my spine and I felt myself lengthen.
He touched the exposed skin above my collar and I felt all my nerve endings alight, all the dullness gone.
Then his fingers were in the curls at the nape of my neck.
I removed my cap and his fingers were in my hair, they were behind my ear, they were caressing the lobe.
He held my face in both his hands and told me that poetry was how he endured the unendurable.
He spoke as if all we were doing was having a conversation, as if the words might veil us.
‘Sometimes it has to be a lie,’ he said, close to my ear, his breath teasing.
I wanted him to take the lobe between his lips.
‘We need to believe that in the end it was worth it.’ Then he stopped speaking and his mouth moved towards mine, covering it.
We kissed and it might have been enough but I was greedy.
I undid the buttons of his trousers and we sank to the blankets on the floor.
When I touched him he shuddered. His low groan, more relief than pleasure.
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
I smiled. ‘We are alive, it seems.’
Touch was all we had in the months that followed.
Seemingly accidental. The back of my hand against the back of his as we stood beside a patient’s bed.
Moments in the storeroom when we would pause in passing and he would lean in and whisper.
It was always in German. ‘English,’ I once said, but he shook his head and I came to think of his desire as a secret that must be kept, even from me.
We would stand at the trough and share the soap and I would lean across him to reach the towel that always hung on one edge.
I would feel his breath on my neck, warm as it once was on my fingers.
And I would hear him breathing, in and out and in.
In bed, when sleep should have taken me, I’d hitch my nightdress up to my waist and stretch my limbs.
The sheet was cool where I hadn’t lain and I’d be aware of the bareness of my legs, the sudden goose flesh.
I’d imagine him beside me and move as if he was.
I’d touch myself where he might touch me. I’d come quietly and fall asleep.