The Dynamite Room Read online

  Now that he had taken the board down from the kitchen window, she could see him through the glass. He was at the back of the garden, past the water pump, disturbing the remains of her father’s bonfire with the tip of his boot, the ash blowing around his feet. He had a half-eaten apple in his hand and he took another bite before tossing it into the hedge. He wiped his fingers against his trousers—Papa’s trousers, she thought. He looked up at the sky and then over to his right where something had caught his eye. As his glance flashed across the window she stared down at the sink so that he’d think she wasn’t watching him. She was aware of him walking away, down the side of the house across the terrace. She heard his boots on the gravel, and then the front door opened and he went up the stairs. She listened to his footsteps overhead. After a minute or so, he came back down, retracing his steps into the garden. He had the British uniform he’d worn that first night draped over his arm and what seemed to be a handful of papers. She watched as he dropped them all onto the fire pit and then stuffed the arms of the jacket and trouser legs with the paper. He lit a match and held the flame to the material. She saw the fabric slowly starting to smoke.

  He watched the bonfire flames build and almost catch the hydrangea next to it. From the back she could imagine him as her father, standing over the bonfire as the garden rubbish burned: the same build, the same dark hair floppy at the front, the same blue eyes made brighter in the sun. She could just about see their glint when he turned his head as he nudged a jacket arm back into the flames.

  She stood behind the sink just as her mother would have done, watching.

  George! For goodness’ sake, mind the hydrangea! It’s only just started to bloom!

  And bloomin’ lovely it is too, he’d say, grinning at her. But he didn’t. There was just a man dressed as him, burning a British uniform on a bonfire because, as he had said, the Germans were here now and he no longer needed disguises.

  Perhaps her father would be the first to come back for her. He’d bring her back a memento—not something that he’d bought, but something that he’d found. Like the pebble with a face ingrained in it, all the way from Africa, or the shell that looked like a spider with eight bony legs. You can hear mermaids singing in it, he had told her, and it was true—the shell had indeed sung.

  The soldier walked over to the water pump and pushed the handle several times, but the pump had long been out of use, the pipe’s throat blocked with silt. He bent down to examine it, then tried the pump again. He leaned heavily against it, resting for a moment, and then he pulled something from his pocket—a letter. He didn’t open it but just held it in his hand and ran his finger and thumb along the edge of the paper, sharpening the folded creases. She leaned in closer to the window. Would he protect her when the others came? Would he keep her safe from all the other soldiers when the house was full of them, when there were plans to be carried out and activities and exercises and noise and decisions and drunkenness and shouting, and all of it in a language that she didn’t understand? People running up and down the stairs. Queues for the toilet or men just urinating in the flower beds. The thought made her want to spit. All their books being burned. All their letters. Everything that was to do with them. Every room being turned into something else. She would be in the way then. They would think she was under their feet, an inconvenience perhaps, an annoyance. She would have to make herself indispensable, tell them anything they wanted or needed to know; she would have to do whatever they wanted just to stay alive.

  She lifted her hands from the washing-up suds and saw how withered they had become. She put them back into the sink and groped around beneath the bubbles and murky water. One last teaspoon was left, which she swilled around a few times and then wiped dry on the tea towel. If men came she didn’t know how they would feed them. There were tins in the larder but not enough for an army. She should sneak a tin of sardines into her room, she thought, and hide it for herself.

  She put the spoon in the open drawer beside her and then tackled the stack of drying plates and mugs and glass tumblers. Sunlight glanced off the steel knives and forks, dabbing a splash of rainbow on the windowsill. Now that she was a good six inches taller, she had no trouble leaning over the sink to put her finger into the shimmering pool of light and see how the colors reflected across her fingertip.

  She repositioned the double lengths of string over both shoulders and then, gathering them up on either side of her legs as if they were puppet strings, she hauled them up and clumped over to the cupboard. She had turned the empty paint pots into stilts before the summer as part of an experiment to see what life might be like as an adult. Alfie had shown her how she could put a foot into the pots’ handles as if they were riding stirrups, and then how to attach strings on either side of each pot and run them up over her shoulders and down the other side. The first attempt had been disastrous. Both strings had snapped as she had tried to haul herself over the doorstep, and she had fallen splayed across the gravel, grazing both knees. After some reconsideration, it was decided that they needed to use tough garden string instead and at double thickness so that the string could take the weight; and that she would have to pull them up with her hands as well as her feet if they weren’t going to break. It made maneuvering awkward, but she eventually got the hang of it. After a couple of days she could clump all the way down the corridor and had once managed to haul herself all the way up the stairs when no one was around to tell her off.

  The paint pot stilts had been abandoned in a cupboard after the third day, but they were proving rather useful again now; she could return any dried glasses or plates to the right shelf without having to get up onto the work surface or pull up a chair, or—worse still—ask him to put them away. She could even lean across the sink and turn the mint plant in its pot so it would grow evenly and a fresh set of leaves would feel the sun’s warmth.

  Outside, the man had disappeared, so she held still and listened. A wave of anxiety washed over her as it always did whenever she didn’t know where he was. She half expected to be suddenly dragged away with a hand across her mouth.

  She clumped closer to the sink and leaned into it, straining to see through the window as far as she could on either side, but there was no sign of him. She straightened up and turned around to look down the hall. The front door was open and beyond it the sun was burning bright. He had forbidden her to leave the house, and with the whole of England probably awash with German soldiers by now, it would be stupid to risk running. If there was any hope of finding her mother she knew that she needed his help.

  When he finally reappeared he had taken her father’s shirt off but still had the braces hooked over his bare shoulders. Even from here she could see the ragged-edged hole in his skin where maybe a bullet had gone in. He had their spade with him and was digging up the dead lettuces that her mother had so neatly planted out along string rows, a cigarette gently smoking between his lips. As he bent over the spade, his back was greasy with sweat and his shoulders had already started to burn. The muscles in his arms tensed as he unearthed the shriveled lettuces from the crumbling soil and one by one flicked them away into the undergrowth. All around him dust rose up into the air.

  Once, last summer, Alfie and Eddie had taken her over Sutton Heath, nets and notebooks in their hands and jam jars hanging from string around their waists.

  What are we doing?

  Going hunting, Alfie said.

  The heath was blanketed in purple heather that grew as high as Lydia’s waist, and ferns that were even taller. The sun would have been relentless had it not been for the wind, butterflies battling against it and thistledown blowing everywhere.

  You can use heather to make beer. Did you know that? said Alfie. And tea.

  Eddie didn’t believe him.

  It’s true, said Alfie. Isn’t it, Lyds?

  Yes, it is, said Lydia, but only because Alfie had said so.

  They popped the seed pods of yellow gorse and scuffed at the rabbit droppings or struck down
harebells with the rods of their nets. Above them the sky was endless. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

  Right ho. Let’s start, said Alfie. If you catch anything let me know, he told her. We’ll pop it in a jar.

  Within an hour they’d captured a bumblebee, an earwig, a hawk moth, and a small tortoiseshell; and she then spent almost twenty minutes chasing another small butterfly, yellow and orange, that flew close to the ground as it fluttered between the gorse and was buffeted about on the wind.

  Yes! Got it! she shouted as a sudden flurry of wind blew the creature into the gaping mouth of her net.

  Or rather, it got you, said Alfie.

  That’s a small heath, that is, said Eddie. That isn’t anything special.

  What are you going to do with them all anyway? she said.

  Fix them to a felt board, Alfie told her. One of every kind. And I’m going to get myself a studded blue too.

  Not that day though. When they got home again, he and Eddie lined up the jam jars along his windowsill and for a while they watched the creatures inside, buzzing and bumping and scrambling around. The next day they were all dead. Creeping into Alfie’s room she unfastened one of the lids and carefully lifted out the small heath that she’d caught. It felt so weightless in her palm, its legs like bent eyelashes. She gently pushed her finger against its body and thought she could feel the scrunch of its tiny bones breaking. She wished she hadn’t caught it now. She wished it hadn’t died. And when she tried to put it back in the jar its dust-dried wings disintegrated between her finger and thumb so that every bit of it was now broken and Alfie would not even want to pin it to his board.

  As the British uniform burned on the bonfire he rested against the water pump, holding the folded letters in his dirty hands. He had received just two letters from Eva since the end of ’39, although she said she had written many more and had put them in the nurses’ “Post Out” tray in the secretary’s office.

  He held them to his nose and smelled them—her thoughts to him made real by the ink. The paper still held the faintest scent of her; her skin rubbing across its skin as her hand had moved across the page. Sealed with a kiss. And in the days and weeks and months that followed he wondered whether she had indeed placed her lips against the paper somewhere, there in the top-right corner, or at the bottom of the last page. He had tried to feel with his fingertips where a slight dampness had once occurred, where the paper was slightly puckered, and sometimes he thought he had found it and sometimes he wasn’t so sure.

  Her first letter was a predictable gush of enthusiasm. She had thrown herself into her new role with typical zeal and had, she wrote, already won the confidence of the senior sister, Nurse Hartmann—this seemed no mean feat when he considered the hour he had spent with her during their visit. The woman was so rigid and clamped tight that even when she smiled her teeth remained cemented together.

  It was a Saturday in September, the day unseasonably hot but breezy. She led them in through the main hall and supplied them with lemonade, rattling out the history of the hospital as they drank.

  Set among acres of ground the institute had all the grand delusions of a country estate, complete with Grecian pillars outside, disused stables, and even its own clock tower. The corridors were wide and echoing with tiled walls of pale green, and as they walked the sun shone through the large-paned windows and washed light across the floor.

  People ask if we can cure them, Nurse Hartmann said, pointing out a step with her finger as they walked in case one of them missed it and fell. It is not a question of curing, it is a question of making what life they have worthy of living. You’ll find that our work here is highly regarded. We think of ourselves as progressive.

  He held Eva’s hand and gave it the occasional squeeze of reassurance. She said little as they passed through the corridors, Nurse Hartmann showing them the offices, the dining rooms and kitchens, the nurses’ quarters, the dispensary. There was a library, chapel, and what she called “the day area,” although these were all empty. It was quieter than he had expected, he told her.

  Dr. Kesselring insists that windows and doors must be closed softly, plates and utensils must not be clattered, Nurse Hartmann said. No jangling of keys please, she told Eva.

  I was talking more about the noise of the inmates, he said.

  We have our moments, Herr Heiden. However, we do not encourage them.

  They crossed the paths of other quick-heeled nurses, each smiling politely as they passed. In her first letter to him Eva wrote warmly of the young nurse she was bunking with, Käthe, who had been particularly welcoming, showing her around and priming her on the unwritten rules and regulations of Nurse Hartmann’s regime. There was, Eva wrote, great camaraderie.

  There was no time to think though. They were required to be present around the clock: waking, bathing, and dressing patients, then supervising them at mealtimes, sluicing bedpans, changing bedsheets, and feeding them an array of pills. Dr. Kesselring, the physician, seemed terrified they would all be struck down with the plague, so everything was scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed again with carbolic soap: floors, bedposts, bedpans, clothes, and fingernails; she wondered that she had any skin left on her hands. Worse still was the endless counting; counting in patients, counting them out again, counting in forks and knives and spoons and anything that might cause some harm. Her biggest fear, Eva wrote, was that patients might accidentally hurt themselves or, worse, someone else while she was on duty.

  Her violin was her one relief. She would play out the frustrations of the day in her room every night. She missed the window seat of the garret room, she wrote, and watching the sunsets over Berlin. She wondered where he was. Are you still in the Hunsrück, or have they moved you on again? Please come back to me. I sometimes think you are the only reason I am living. I miss you. I love you. I think about you every night.

  He was in the Hunsrück mountain region on the Western border of Germany in reserve with the 16th Army. But by the time the second letter arrived he had been moved twice more and was at Cochem. This letter had been altogether shorter and more abrupt, as if her mind were elsewhere. She wrote nothing of the work she was doing, only that she was exhausted. There was nothing of the patients either, or Nurse Hartmann and Käthe. Instead she wrote of the gardens and how the autumn was turning the color of the leaves and starting to scatter them across the lawns.

  On their visit, he remembered spending some time walking the gardens by himself while Eva was in one of the offices going through various forms and talking about the finer details of the job. The garden was functional, with just one or two small and unruly rose beds and benches set beneath bunches of trees: oaks and ashes and maples and conifers. They were only about a mile out of town, although from the front of the hospital where the gardens were there was little sign of civilization, just fields and forests and farms. He had been hot in his uniform and remembered crossing the lawn to sit on one of the benches in the shade. He watched two nurses in their own starched uniforms hurrying down a path. One of them gave a polite wave and he must have waved back. Then, feeling rather foolish, he looked back at the hospital, at the rows of tall windows blinking in the sun, the mock pillars lined up along the front, and the wide double doors that the two young nurses passed through. Eva would be happy here, he had thought.

  How devastatingly wrong he had been. In the weeks and months that followed he had trawled back and forth through the memory of that visit, thinking that there must have been some clue, some way of knowing—a cracked paving slab or dead bird in the grass, some warning of what was to come—but, of course, there had been nothing. The afternoon had been so warm and bright.

  He ran his fingers down the folded creases of the letters. He knew them word for word. You are the only reason I am living. I miss you. I love you. I think about you every night. He could forge her writing if he wanted to; he had studied every loop and curl. She always wrote on lined paper, each letter placed like a note, whole sentences plotted
out like lines of music. He could sing the words—he could hear the song of them playing in his head.

  Schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorders, therapy-resistant paralysis, syphilitic diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington’s chorea. Anything neurological…

  Nurse Hartmann was leading them through one of the wards. It must have been earlier in their visit, not long after they had arrived.

  I sometimes think it a wonder that we make it out of our mother’s wombs at all without being struck down by something ghastly, she added. They all have to be vetted and qualified before they’re allowed in. The paperwork alone is quite disabling. She laughed.

  The beds were narrow and tightly packed, a dozen or more on either side with a small bedside table with a drawer between each. The men lay dozing or staring blankly up at the ceiling or some midpoint in between. They were quite comfortable and content there, Nurse Hartmann had stressed.

  They stopped at one of the beds. The man beneath the sheets was withered, his face like a clay mask. His bony fingers curled around the top of the sheet that he’d pulled up to his chin. Beneath the covers there hardly seemed to be anything of him at all. The nurse lifted the clipboard at the end of the bed so she could read it. Heiden was about to ask what the man’s prognosis was when she turned and asked her own question, as if there had been a reminder for her there in the man’s notes.

  You’re not married?

  We’re to be married after the war, Eva said, smiling.

  Ah, yes—the war, said Nurse Hartmann, as if it was something that in the confines of the hospital had somehow passed her by. Eva wouldn’t be staying with them long then. Very few, she said, stayed after they were married. Children, you know. Housewives’ work. She turned to Heiden. Just so you know, visitors are not allowed after hours, and only on days off, not whenever it best suits you, Herr Heiden. Men, of course, were not permitted in the women’s staff quarters. We have a lovely orangery though, which I am sure will be adequate for any conversation that you and Fräulein Winkler need to have.