The Dynamite Room Read online

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know…how to scale cliffs, how to make charges, defuse them, dismantle them, how to lay mines and traps. How to disguise ourselves.”

  Lydia giggled.

  “Why do you laugh?” he said. “The training I had was brutal. There is nothing fun about learning how to kill someone, how to do it with your bare hands, silently, by surprise so they never have a chance. I could have killed you a hundred different ways before now if I wanted.” He picked up the ball of twine that had fallen from his pocket. “I could kill you five different ways with this cord alone, maybe six. I could hang you from a tree with it, by the neck; stuff it into your mouth until you choke; tie it around your nose and mouth until you suffocate…I won’t,” he said, “but I could.” He stuffed it back into his pocket and carried on tending to the plant. “War is not kind,” he said. “Everything we were taught with the Brandenburgers goes against the Geneva Convention, but tell me, has your Churchill got British soldiers being trained to do the same thing? Of course he has.”

  Lydia didn’t believe that. Perhaps none of it was true.

  He stood up and ran his hands through his damp hair, then pulled his shirt out from under his armpits. “Let’s sit in the shade. I’m hot,” he said, glancing over to the back door, ornamented by a selection of pots in which her mother grew herbs.

  They sat on the back step in the shadow of the house, and she watched him trim the herbs with her mother’s pruning shears. She could imagine her mother pottering about around the side of the house, rummaging around in the flower beds and slopping across the lawn in her wellies, her hair tied up scruffily in a scarf. “You need to trim them back and cut off the old leaves to encourage fresh ones to grow,” he explained. “You need to take care of them.”

  He picked a leaf from one plant and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. He held it to her nose. “Tell me, what do you call this?” he said. The leaf was soft, grayish, and quite large. It smelled slightly peppery.

  “That’s sage,” she told him.

  He said the word quietly to himself. “We call it Salbei,” he said. “And this?”

  He picked a sprig from another plant and handed it to her. “That’s easy,” she said, smelling it. “That’s thyme.”

  She gave it back to him.

  “Thyme.” He held it up. “It’s almost the same. We say Thymian. Der Thymian.”

  He picked another easy one.

  “Chives,” she said.

  “Schnittlauch,” he told her, but he had to say it several times before she could say it herself.

  And so it went: parsley, coriander, basil, all three nearly dead, as well as rosemary and a plant that neither of them knew but which might have been oregano. Lydia wasn’t sure.

  He got up and stood with his back to her, scanning the perimeters of the garden.

  “We need rain,” he said. “We can’t do anything here unless we get some rain.”

  “Perhaps we should do a rain dance,” she suggested.

  “A rain dance?” He laughed.

  Then, before she knew what she was doing, she was standing up and dancing about, waving her arms up at the sky and then swinging them down towards the ground, chanting and hollering as if she were summoning the gods.

  “Come on,” she shouted. “You have to do it too!”

  And to her surprise he did. They kicked at the dust and gravel and whooped like Indians, and for all too brief a moment she forgot herself entirely but just danced and laughed in the sun.

  When she went back into the house though, there really was no water. What did dribble out of the bathroom and kitchen taps too quickly drooled away to nothing but an airless wheeze, and then not even that. She stood behind him, watching as he tried himself, turning the taps this way and that, and then furiously slammed his hand against the sink. He pushed past her and back into the garden. For half an hour she watched him, suddenly feeling worried, as he worked at the dead pump again.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “We will fix it.”

  But she knew somehow that he wouldn’t.

  During the day, his memories of her came like trap doors through which he suddenly fell. He saw her now as he leaned over the sink, clinging to the dead taps, his knuckles pushing through his skin. A picnic in the Tiergarten. She always liked the parks. She would lie flat on the ground sometimes, as she now was in his memory, face down, her cheek to the ground. She liked to feel the closeness of the grass. She used to say that she could feel the earth’s heartbeat. It looked as if no matter how the world turned, she would still cling on, while, if gravity suddenly ceased to exist, all around her the rest of them would fall away and fly off into space.

  Play for me, he would say, in the dark nights of the garret room, and she would take out her violin. The sound of it would fill the room, every corner, cupboard, crack, and cranny, every chamber of his heart, every space in his head, so that he could hold it tight within his memory, so that even when the music was gone a sense of it remained.

  He looked out the window. Once they had sat in the garret window, facing each other, their legs intertwined, Eva finding faces in the clouds or counting chimney pots. Suppose we said every chimney pot is a note, she said. That first one, over there, being a “C,” then the piece would sound something like this, and she hummed it, thirteen notes in all, forming a funny little tune. She called it their “Chimney Pot Concerto.” And when she was done she mapped out the notes on a piece of paper held to the glass. So that we don’t forget it, she said. It’s quirky, don’t you think.

  I’m not sure that the ministry would approve. It’s a bit atonal, Heiden said.

  And the two of them had laughed.

  They walked through the wood away from Greyfriars, her holding one of the buckets, him the other two. She felt oddly relieved to be away from the house.

  “Stay close,” he told her. “Don’t try to run.”

  But she had no intention of running. She felt safer with him near her. And anyway, where would she go?

  The bucket was heavy. Shafts of light came through gaps in the branches and it was dry and dusty underfoot. He had made her wear a tin hat that he’d found on top of a wardrobe. It kept slipping down over her eyes.

  “No baths. This is for drinking and cooking, that is all,” he said, as they stumbled on. “When the rest of the men come we will send them out to get more.”

  “There are streams across the marsh,” she told him. “On the other side of the wood.”

  He nodded as if he already knew, and they pushed on through the bracken, picking their way over broken branches and bits of rubble, trying not to stumble down animal holes or catch their ankles on trailing brambles. She glanced behind her but the wood had already swallowed them, and there was no sign of the garden or Greyfriars. He could kill her in these woods, she thought, and no one would ever know.

  He turned and waited. “What’s wrong? Come on—keep up!”

  She hurried to catch up to him and tried to smile but couldn’t. She imagined her body lying half-buried beneath the bracken, a single bullet hole in her back.

  They walked in silence, side by side. His eyes scanned the trees and looked up into the branches. Sometimes he stopped and turned his head to one side to listen.

  In a small clearing they walked through a cloud of mites. She swung her bucket at them, but they seemed to swarm around her even more furiously, and yet they took no notice of him.

  After a while they stopped. She was hot and tired and feeling faint, and they found an uprooted tree to sit on. Only now that she’d put the heavy bucket down did she see that inside it was crawling with baby spiders.

  “In Norway I used to make up tunes in my head,” he said, “whenever we had a long way to march. It was the only thing that kept me walking.”

  “Was it very cold?”

  “Yes. Bitter cold and blizzards. I was trapped in the mountains for five days,” he said. “A few of us got separated but we managed to find somew
here to hide out from the storm, but it was still bitterly cold. Some sort of shed: a concrete floor and a couple of windows. We had a smaller room too, just about big enough for a couple of men to lie in. From the window in there you could see the railway line across the gorge. We used to take turns to sleep there. We had some shelter quarters and some lining to lie on. You had to do whatever you could to keep warm.”

  He bent to push his finger into the top of his boot and rubbed at his ankle, and then rolled his wounded shoulder as if trying to loosen it. She let her toes scuff over the dried leaves and dead twigs and watched him. He was reminding her more of her father every day, making her longing for him to come home even more unbearable, wanting him to return and wrap his arms around her and tell her, Hey, missy, don’t cry.

  For ages they sat there until she started to feel afraid again, and then he said, “Look, there’s a face in the branches up there, made out of leaves.” He pointed. “Can you see it?”

  But although Lydia looked she couldn’t see anything.

  “You speak very good English,” she said.

  “My grandmother,” he told her. “I spent my holidays with her and my grandfather in Bavaria. She would only speak to me in English. She was born near Cambridge, I think. And then I lived in London for a while too. My uncle had an apartment in Bloomsbury and I stayed with him. He was a journalist for a German newspaper. I spoke no German at all when I was there—only English. I suppose I wanted to—how do you say?”

  “Blend in?”

  “Yes…exactly.”

  “What did you do in London?”

  “I studied,” he said. “At the Royal College of Music actually. It was rather good.”

  “Do you play an instrument then?”

  “Of course.” He laughed. “They would not have let me in if I didn’t. I play the cello.”

  “Oh, Alfie wanted to play the cello but he ended up with the violin,” she told him. “My parents said it was too expensive.”

  “They are,” he said. “I was fortunate. My grandfather left me some money when he died. I bought mine with that. It was him that first taught me, in a way. He taught me how to play the saw.”

  “A saw?” she said. She almost laughed. “That you saw things with?”

  “Yes,” he said. “What’s so funny? It has to be a special type, of course, not an ordinary saw, although you can still play them too. It’s quite like a cello really. But…well…” He maneuvered himself so he was sitting sideways on the trunk and facing her. “A cello hums to you, you see, but a saw, a saw is different. A saw sort of…sings.”

  She smiled at the thought of it. She might write a story about it one day: a man with a singing saw.

  “It’s pretty here, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m rather fond of England. It’s very serene and stately. The hills. The rivers and the streams and the woods. So pretty…the Home Counties, the Cotswolds…have you been?”

  She shook her head. “How long were you in London?”

  “Not long. Two years. There was a lot of trouble in Germany then. They were burning books at the universities. It wasn’t a good place to study. Everyone thought there was going to be civil war and my mother thought I’d get caught up in it, just like my father had done. She wanted me to be safe somewhere, so I came to England. Even when she wrote and told me all that was happening back in my homeland—the Olympics and the autobahns, the air force, all that—she didn’t want me coming home.”

  “But you did?”

  “Yes. I felt I had to. They were recruiting. It was my duty. And anyway, I felt cut off from Germany. I wanted to go home.” Then, as if he’d suddenly remembered, he pulled something crumpled from his pocket. “Sorry, I have been meaning to give you this,” he said. “I found it in the shelter. I presume it’s yours.” He handed her the story, The Incredible Adventures of the Tiny Princess. She felt her face redden.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought I’d lost that.”

  “Well, it was down the side of the bench,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I read it. It is very…” He fumbled for the word. “…creative.”

  “It’s silly really,” she said. “I wrote it ages ago. I’m much better now.”

  “My grandfather used to tell me stories,” he said. “Fairy tales and folk stories. He used to carve scenes out of wood…” He trailed off and she looked at him, waiting, and then he said, “Do you know the tale of Bearskin? About a young soldier who after a war has ended makes a pact with the Devil?”

  She shook her head.

  “The Devil says that he will make the poor soldier rich if he does not wash himself or cut his nails or his hair for seven years and wears the skin of a bear.”

  “What happens? Does he beat the Devil?”

  “You will have to read it and see. I think you might like it. It’s Brothers Grimm. It was my grandfather’s favorite. He liked magical stories like that.”

  “Do you believe in magic then?” she said.

  He smiled. “That depends on what it is.”

  “What about angels?” she said.

  “Angels?” He rubbed at his ankle again and tidied the bottom of his trouser leg. “You seem to have an obsession.”

  “You don’t have to see them,” she said. “Sometimes they’re like a tiny light. Or you just know that they’re there. They live in heaven and only come down when you need them. They leave something behind sometimes too, like a clue, so you know that they have been there.”

  “What have you run away from?” he said, the question coming from nowhere. “You ran away from something, didn’t you? What was it?”

  She picked up the bucket and tipped it on its side and started knocking the rim against the ground, trying to dislodge the spiders. She didn’t want to carry it now in case they crawled up her arm.

  “Where were you? Were you evacuated?”

  She bashed the bucket a couple more times and then gave up. Six or seven tiny spiders still clung stubbornly to the bottom.

  “What happened?”

  She looked at him. She supposed it didn’t matter now. “We all got sent to Wales,” she told him. “Everyone from school. Even Button and he’d only just got here. I don’t think they know what to do with children anymore. They keep shunting everyone around. It’s like nobody wants us.”

  “Who is Button?” he said. “What sort of name is that?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just a boy. He had to come with me. He’s from Poland.”

  “So why did you run away?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t like them in Wales. They were mean.”

  “And this Button, where is he now?”

  She shrugged again.

  “You left him there?”

  When she didn’t answer he asked her again—You left him there?—and she nodded. She thought she might cry.

  “They were horrid to him,” she blustered. “All the Welsh boys.”

  “What do you mean?”

  And she told him how they used to tie Button up, how they beat him with sticks, how they liked it when he cried, and how one time—the worst time—they’d taken him to the brook and pushed him in and held his head under until he almost drowned.

  “And when I tried to stop them, they said they’d get me; they were going to drown me for real one day.” And that, she said, was why she had run away. She had been scared.

  “Boys can be animals sometimes,” he said.

  Lydia nodded. And now she’d left Button in Wales with them, and after everything she’d promised her mother. She hadn’t looked after him at all; she’d left him there on his own.

  Overhead came the chuttering of a plane. He lifted his hand for her to stop and they looked up through the branches, holding their hands up to the sun as it seared through the leaves. He pointed. “There,” he murmured, but she couldn’t see.

  “Is it one of yours or ours?” she asked.

  He said nothing. His eyes
were fixed on the plane, following it between the gaps in the leaves.

  “Come on,” he said, “we need to go. No more talking.”

  They walked for a couple of minutes in silence, listening to the scrunch of their feet and watching a lapwing darting between the trees, disappearing, then zipping past again.

  As they got nearer to the edge of the wood and the marshes, he made her wait, hiding in the ferns with one of the buckets, while he walked on ahead with the other two.

  She watched him, his back arched, pistol in his hand, as he moved from tree to tree so quietly. She put her hands over her mouth. He had said once that he could hear every sound and every breath; he could hear the beat of her heart. She turned back to see if anyone was coming, straining to listen in case she heard footsteps that weren’t his.

  When he got to the edge of the wood she saw him crouching down, leaning forward with his shoulder against a tree, and holding a tiny pair of binoculars to his eyes. He scanned the thin stretch of marsh and the coast for what seemed an inordinately long time. She picked at the ferns as she waited, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on him. Now that they were still and silent she could hear crackling gunfire and distant booms far off, yet still quaking through the ground beneath her. She needed to pee.

  She looked at the large clump of ferns and then pushed her way in, first just one step and then another, crushing some of the leaves down beneath. She could still see him through the mesh of foliage even if she squatted. She took another step in but as she did her foot stepped on something hard that shifted out from beneath her so that she fell. She looked to see what it was. It was the heel of a boot, and it was attached to a leg. And then she saw that it was a body, face down on the marshy soil.

  Lydia shrieked.

  He came running, scrambling, pushing his way through the ferns towards her and picking her up and onto her feet.

  “What is it?” he shouted. “What is it?”

  The body was covered in dried blood. It looked as if something had dragged it out from a hole in the ground. It had the same shoulder flash on its uniform as the Essex Regiment. The legs of it were torn where something had dug the body up and scratched and ripped at it; a hand still sticking up out of the dirt, the fingertips gnawed and frayed.