Chapter Twelve #3
He hesitantly offered it to her. ‘Here. Take it. It’s a handkerchief.’ He thrust it towards her again. ‘I thought you might like it.’ She tentatively reached for it.
‘Thank you.’ She appeared visibly moved by the gesture. Her pale fingers caressed the lacy edge.
‘It’s not very practical. And it’s stolen. Didn’t think I’d turn into a thief. Feel bad for stealing but I thought—’ he knew he was rambling — ‘you deserved something nice.’
‘It’s pretty. Thank you.’
Her blue eyes brought heat to his cheeks and he looked away. For the first time he noticed she’d taken her boots off.
‘Your toes are bleeding.’ He had known about her blisters, but not the extent to which her feet had deteriorated. Many would have complained incessantly, but Elsa, who was becoming frailer every day, had not said a word. He found the plane’s first-aid kit and gave it to her.
She took it and began to dress her feet. ‘It is nothing. This salve will help greatly.’
His stomach churned. ‘I should have stolen you some new socks instead.’ Tubs had fallen ill due to his feet and now Sam was letting it happen all over again.
He considered opening another ration packet but somehow his appetite had deserted him. ‘Why were you living in Gollnow if your home is in Bremen?’ he asked, in the hope of changing the direction of his thoughts. Their friendship had been sorely tested of late; it was time to start anew.
‘My father moved us to Gollnow when he was given a job under Hitler’s work scheme. Life had been hard and he had been unemployed for years.’
It began to rain outside. Sam found a discarded helmet, turned it upside down and placed it outside to catch the rainwater. ‘Is your father in Bremen waiting for you?’
She shook her head. ‘He died some time ago.’
He wanted to ask more, but as they were only now speaking again, he decided to stick to safer topics. ‘Was Gollnow a nice place to live?’
‘At first it was good. For the first time he could afford to put food on the table. We made friends. I graduated from school and started training to be a teacher there.’ She nodded sadly. ‘At first life was very good.’
‘At first?’
‘Yes. My mother was so happy. We all were.’
‘So when did it change?’
‘When Kristallnacht happened. Things took a sinister turn. I didn’t want to see it then. I wanted to still believe in the promises.’
‘What happened on Kristallnacht?’
‘A mob tore up parts of Gollnow. Jewish shops were vandalized, the synagogue burned. Those Jews who had stayed left soon after that. I heard some were transported to Lublin, in Poland, but I don’t know where the others went.
’ She hugged her knees and stared ahead.
‘At the time we thought it was just happening in Gollnow, but later we found out that mobs were smashing up Jewish-owned buildings all over Germany. I couldn’t pretend that everything was all right any more.
The changes that had happened to our life had now become violent.
And it was happening to our neighbours .
. . people we knew. It was happening right in front of us.
’ Her eyebrows pinched together in deep thought.
‘And we did nothing, just hid and watched. Otto wanted to go outside and try to stop them but Mother wouldn’t let him.
She was scared of the retribution we would receive.
She was terrified, particularly for my sister and me.
’ Her voice cracked. ‘We were all terrified.’
A conciliatory silence fell in respect for those who had suffered.
‘There will be many incidents, choices, omissions that people will regret for the rest of their lives.’ His words felt like a plaster on a fatal wound, but she was sweet enough to accept his clumsy summary.
‘I don’t believe you have anything to regret, Sam.’
‘I regret getting captured.’
‘Apart from that.’
‘The Russian prisoners were not treated as well as us. When we left we took food from the stores and kept it for ourselves. We gave no thought to the Russian prisoners left behind. They were starving, but we did not give them any food, despite the fact they were fighting against Hitler too. We needed the food to survive. We knew we would not last long without it.’
‘I am not sure there would be many people who would give away their only rations.’
‘I saw Hitler once, you know. I often wonder . . . if only I could have killed him. I expect there are quite a few people who now feel they missed their chance.’
She looked at him in surprise.
‘If I’d killed him perhaps the war would have ended. That was nearly five years ago. How many men have died in that time?’
‘Thousands, including my brother, father and grandfather.’
Elsa had lost so much already. In war there were no real winners. ‘Do you wish I had killed him?’ he asked. ‘He is your leader.’
‘We can’t turn back time, Sam. Why talk of such things?’
‘But if we could, would you have wanted me to kill Hitler when I had the chance?’
She fell silent, deep in thought. Finally, she lifted her chin.
‘Yes. I wish he was dead now.’ She breathed in deeply and exhaled in a soft sigh.
‘I have never felt able to say such a thing before. It feels strange to say it out loud without being afraid that someone will report me.’ She looked at him, her pale complexion a little fresher than before.
‘He started a war, Sam. Millions have died and continue to die while he hides somewhere. Yes I wish he had died long ago.’ She tilted her head as she looked at him. ‘What happened? Tell me about it.’
He began to tease the paper of the block of food he had yet to eat.
‘I was a prisoner on my way to Poland. We were at a station.’ She opened her mouth to speak.
‘Don’t ask me which one, I have no idea.
Somewhere. Nowhere. The journey was full of stops.
We were standing on the platform when orders came that we should be moved out of the way.
An armoured black train pulled into the station.
Suddenly he was there . . . so close that I could have shot him in the head. ’
‘How? Did you have a gun?’
‘I didn’t but the guard next to me did.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘At first I couldn’t believe what my own eyes were telling me.
I expected . . . I don’t know . . . that Hitler would be bigger, scarier.
’ He shook his head as a smile curved his lips.
‘I don’t know what I expected, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that he wasn’t anything special. Such thoughts sound so pathetic now.’
‘So you didn’t shoot him because he looked small?’
Sam laughed. It felt good to laugh again.
‘No! He just surprised me, that’s all. If I had shot him without thinking, the deed would have been done, but seeing him so close, with so much ceremony for such an ordinary man, stopped me long enough for my brain to process all the possible repercussions of such an act on my part. ’
‘Repercussions? I don’t understand that word.’
‘I had time to realize that if I had killed him, I would be shot too. And, perhaps, all the prisoners at that station as an act of revenge.’ He mimed reaching for the guard’s gun.
‘Would I even be able to grab the gun in the first place?’ He held his imaginary gun and took aim at a metal rivet on the plane’s broken wing.
‘Would I have hit the target?’ He breathed steadily, imagining the train and the man inside.
He was back there again, the smell of steam, the sound of polished boots on the platform and the stench of the prisoner next to him.
He dropped his arm and closed his eyes in an attempt to block it out.
The touch of her hand on his did the trick and brought him back to her side.
He rocked his head in her direction and smiled at her.
‘I thought too much, Elsa. Suddenly my opportunity had passed. I failed to do what I thought in my heart was right.’
‘Do you think of that moment often?’
‘I try not to.’
‘But sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes it’s impossible.’ He looked at her with new eyes. ‘Is there something you find hard to forget?’
She shrugged and moved her hand away. ‘Many things. One can regret the things one does just as much as the things one doesn’t do.’
‘What do you regret, Elsa?’
She tidied away the first-aid pack and placed that and some remaining rations into her bag. ‘Persuading my grandfather to come with me to Bremen. I should have let him die peacefully in his bed; instead, I made him climb into a damp wagon in freezing temperatures. He was shot soon after.’
‘You did what you thought was right at the time.’
She gnawed at her lip as she considered his words.
‘I couldn’t even bury him properly, Sam.
The ground was too hard.’ Her eyes were brimming with tears.
‘I buried him in the snow. At night, when I am trying to sleep, I wonder how his body looks now that the snow has melted. I left him to rot by the side of the road.’
He slid his arm around her shoulders. ‘You did your best. It sounds like you loved him very much.’
‘He lived with us for many years. He liked to make us things when we were children. Swings, slides, seesaws, dolls houses. The best thing he ever made me was a rocking horse for my eighth birthday. I rode it all day. My mother became exasperated that I wasn’t eating anything and my grandfather said, “Let Elsa eat on the horse. It is her birthday. If you can’t eat on a horse on your birthday, when can you?
”’ She laughed at the thought. When her smile faded, Sam was compelled to reach for her hand.
He held it gently in his, as if it was a fragile bird, and was surprised how cold it felt.
‘Your hand is cold.’ He frowned. ‘Where are your gloves?’
‘They got wet.’
She shivered, so he held her closer. ‘You should have told me. I would have given you mine.’
‘I know. That is why I didn’t tell you.’
He pulled up the collar of her coat and held her again. ‘Is that better?’
She nodded. ‘Thank you.’
The silence fell again, but this time it felt like a warm blanket holding them together.
Her voice was barely above a whisper when she spoke again. ‘It aches, doesn’t it?’
‘What does?’
‘Not making their last moments as good as they could be. Not making it better somehow.’ She looked up at him when he did not reply immediately.
He nodded. ‘I’ve lost many friends in battle, but there is one that haunts me more than most.’
‘What was his name?’
‘His nickname was Tubs, but his real name was Edward Turner.’
‘Who was he?’
‘A fellow prisoner who made my imprisonment bearable.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died when we were forced to evacuate the prison camp. His feet got infected and he fell ill with a fever. He was executed because he couldn’t walk any more.’
‘I am so sorry. What was Tubs like?’
‘He had a dark humour.’
‘Dark?’
‘He found humour in the grimmest moments. Not everyone liked it, but it was what I needed. He was . . . a good person.’
‘He sounds nice.’
‘Sometimes I feel like I let him down. We should have escaped sooner. Maybe he would still be alive if we had.’
‘Or you might have both been shot in the back. Questions like that will never go away. I think we just have to learn to silence them when they grow too loud in our heads.’
She was right. Sometimes she surprised him how much wiser she was than her years.
He supposed war aged everyone, giving them experience that would, under normal circumstances, take decades to achieve.
Klara was a prime example of this. Her level of maturity, adaptation and stoicism was far beyond any five-year-old he had encountered at home.
He kissed the top of Elsa’s head before he’d realized what he was going to do. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
She pretended not to notice. ‘Shall we lie down and try to get some sleep?’ She stood up and he joined her to find somewhere to sleep deeper in the body of the plane.
They found Klara already asleep, curled up in the pilot’s seat like a kitten by a fire.
They covered her with a folded parachute and settled down nearby.
He felt ashamed of his earlier cold behaviour towards Elsa yet when she slid into his arms and snuggled up against his body, the shame he had felt quickly drained away.
He thought back to their earlier conversation.
‘How different things would have been if I had killed Hitler,’ he mused, thankful that for the first time the thought did not cause him pain.
Elsa braced herself on her elbows and looked down at him. ‘We would never have met.’
He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Perhaps that would have been a good thing. You would not have to put up with my moody silences.’
She smiled down at him, her hair grazing her cheeks. ‘And you would not have to see my blistered feet.’
‘Perhaps we should stay here a few days for your feet to heal.’
‘No, there’s no need.’ She snuggled back into his embrace. ‘I think the first-aid kit will help very much. It is not rest I want.’
He craned his neck so he could see into her eyes. ‘What do you want, Elsa?’
She smiled languidly to herself. ‘A long, hot bath.’
The image of her sitting naked in a bathtub came to mind, the curve of her back wet with droplets and her skin, smooth and soft, crying out to be touched.
He swallowed as his body stirred at the thought.
He’d been starved of a woman’s sweet-tasting curves for so long that he hadn’t even been sure if carnal desire was still there — until now.
‘Me too.’ The tone of his voice was barely recognizable.
Husky. Choked. Unsure. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.
She snuggled closer against him and the ache to know her body better grew even stronger.
With his mind filled with Elsa, he closed his eyes, knowing what would happen next.
So often Tubs would be waiting for him there, reminding him of his loss before he fell asleep.
Normally images of Tubs’s shocking death and all the dark thoughts that accompanied it would rise up behind Sam’s closed eyelids.
For once, he hoped it would be put to good use and help to divert his carnal thoughts away from the woman in his arms. Tubs obliged and came easily to mind, as he knew he would, but this time there was no reminder of his death.
This time he was laughing. Sam had not heard his laughter in so very long, yet for once, in his mind, it was so loud and clear it was as if he was next to him.
Sam indiscernibly shook his head in defeat.
That was typical of Tubs, he thought. Only the dark humour of a teasing friend could find hilarity in the aching predicament Sam found himself in now.