The Dynamite Room Read online

  “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 th
e 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.

  Walking became almost mechanical. In the days and weeks and months that followed he would do it in his sleep, tramping ever on towards the railway line, seeing it sometimes in the distance, but never any nearer, the wooden scaffolding underpinning the tracks as it wormed its way around the mountainside, occasionally disappearing into a crudely cut tunnel and then reappearing further on: the Ofoten Railway.

  Saturday

  He went from room to room, opening the sash windows to let some morning air in and awaken the house. Though the shutters remained in place, he pushed up a slat or two in each so that thin slices of sun could stream in.

  He had slept badly, cramped into one of the chairs in the sitting room, head thick with dreams. He remembered running down endless dimly lit corridors, dark and narrow, the smell of damp and cordite pervading, and his feet echoing. There were hundreds of doors: doors opening onto more corridors and more doors and more corridors. He had been trying to call out, to shout, Where are you? But he had no voice, and when he put his hand to his mouth the contour of his face had been wrong; he had no teeth, no tongue, just a bloody hole. Panic had settled on his chest and he had shouted a single word up at the ceiling as he woke.

  She pushed up one of the slats at her window and could see early morning mist drifting in off the salt marshes. She wondered, not for the first time, why nobody had come.

  She found him in the kitchen digging around in the drawers and set to spying on him from a safe distance as he busied himself about the house. She watched his every move through the gaps in doorways or from behind sofas and chairs. He moved things about, spread maps out on the dining-room table, emptied his kit bag, and raided things from cupboards and drawers (screwdrivers, she noted in the back of an old exercise book, sticking plasters, Germolene, pencils and a pencil sharpener, candles, and a new tube of toothpaste). All the while she heard him mumbling to himself in English. A rabbit run, but with how many rabbits? Tapioca pudding, he said to himself. Cauliflower cheese. The man was barking mad.

  When she got bored, she lay on her bed, her ear trained to his movements about the house. She thought about writing a letter, some sort of SOS, but she didn’t know how she would get it out of the house. Having an idea, she went to the window, but it was too high to jump and there was nothing on the wall outside that she could have climbed down. She leaned back against the windowsill. She should do something, but what? She held still, listening, her heart suddenly quickening. Her ears strained to hear him somewhere in the house, the slightest footfall or disturbance or just the sense of his presence, but there was nothing.

  Originally he had planned to set the sitting room up as an operation room, but once he’d started pushing back the furniture it didn’t feel right. The sitting room, he realized, reminded him of his days in London and his professor’s house in Pimlico, Baxter running circles around him whenever he arrived and yapping at his heels. So he moved instead to the dining room, spread his maps over the large walnut table, and cleared the tops of the dressers and sideboards to make room for candles and oil lamps, aware as he did it of the girl sidling out of the sitting room and slinking along the hallway, carrying her Jewish bear with her, then padding soft footed up the stairs. Somewhere above him a door clicked shut.

  Here at Greyfriars, he could imagine days gone by, the sun streaming through the open windows, voices in the garden, the tinkling of the piano, the shelves of the study filled with books. His mother would have liked it. The pretty furnishings. The flowers and frills. Water-colored farming scenes hanging from the picture rail. A scent of lavender in the air.

  The year 1909 was inscribed in a keystone embedded in the brickwork above the front door, which he rather liked; it was as if the date in the stone somehow marked the birth of the house, which in turn signified that the house was alive. He thought he felt its warmth when he ran his fingers lightly down the banisters or pressed his palm against the door—not a warmth burned into the wood from the summer’s heat outside, but something that seemed to be emanating from deep within. Now that he had recognized it, it made him feel at ease, as if somehow the house was welcoming him.

  He sat on the floor of the sitting room and took the record sleeves out from the cabinet. Most of them were jazz and swing, including a collection by Fred Astaire that he considered playing but changed his mind.

  You couldn’t buy anything like that in Germany now, not even on the black market or in the secret backstreet record shops. For a while Eva had taken a fancy to Negerjazz, particularly an American trumpeter called Erskine Hawkins. The Reich Music Chamber had put a stop to all of that. Even Mendelssohn was banned, labeled a mere “imitator” of genuine German music, while Mahler was the composer of degeneracy and decay, and Irving Berlin a Jew.

  You’ll have to toss your copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream out of the window if anyone comes around asking awkward questions, Eva said.

  And you’ll have to be at the bottom to catch it, he told her with a smile.

  The recording had cost him almost a week’s wages.

  During the economic depression many musicians had left the country or had been purged or simply quit; so many in fact that there had been a shortage of quality musicians commensurate to the shortage of quality compositions that they were able to perform. The situation had been exacerbated by the expansion of organizations like the army, the SS, and the Labour Front, all of which wanted their own military bands and orchestras and demanded the very finest performers to provide them with the necessary pomp. In 1933, just as he had been leaving for London, there had been an assault on Jewish and left-wing musicians organized by the Fighting League for German Culture. Even the Jewish players of the Berlin Philharmonic had been fired, many of them Eva’s friends. With the expanding number of orchestras required by the Reich and the vacant positions left by the expunged Jews, he had often wondered whether—if he had remained focused on his music, if he had shown enough dedication—he might have managed to eke out a living from it. Instead—and with perhaps some sense of pride, which only now could he concede—he had ended up consumed within the wheels and cogs and chomping teeth of Field Marshal Keitel’s Wehrmacht.

  She lay on the floor beside the banisters at the top of the stairs, slowly and carefully lowering a small square mirror tile that she’d managed to tape to a ruler. This was something that Alfie had once taught her—a way of looking into rooms without being caught—and was what all the best spies did. She wouldn’t let herself be beaten by a Jerry, even if she was only a girl. She would play him at his own game. She would be a spy too.

  But as she tried to maneuver the mirror around, all she saw were reflected glimpses of the ceiling and the top of the walls, and very occasionally the passing glint of a light fitting as it swooped by. She leaned a little farther over, her whole arm pushed through the gap in the banisters and the side of her head pressed awkwardly against one of them. It was just as she was beginning to feel that she was in position and was trying to steady her dangling arm that he came out of the dining room. She hurriedly pulled the mirror back up, but it got caught between the banisters and the tape gave way. With a silent gasp, she saw it fall and smash at his feet. He bent down and picked it up, the mirror now cracked in his hand. He studied it for a moment and glanced up at her. He held it up as if offering it back.

  “Is this yours?” he said.

  The girl had left him some biscuits for lunch and a tin of Fray Bentos Corned Beef, together with a jar of rhubarb and ginger preserve. He found them on a plate in the kitchen with a note on a scrap of
paper written in wobbly green pencil. For you, it said.

  In Norway they had always been famished—cold and tired and empty. He remembered the platoon stopping midway up a mountainside where the ground leveled and the trees gave some protection from the wind. A flock of rooks reeled above them.

  The boy who had been suffering from the cold had sat next to him. He had a bread bag with him but the bread inside was frozen solid, and he had turned and smashed it against a tree until it broke.

  You can’t eat that. Here.

  He offered the boy some of his own black bread that he’d wrapped in paper and insulated inside a sock, and the young private had taken some and nodded his thanks.

  Unlike the boy, he had trained with the 3rd Mountain Division under General Dietl, and he was used to this terrain—they had been put to the test in the Austrian Alps only the previous year—but this kid was like so many in the company: new and ordinary infantrymen scrambled together from other regiments and completely ill equipped.

  They sat and smoked awhile as he examined the state of his feet and changed his socks. He had blisters on both heels and on the anklebone that were the size of fifty-pfennig pieces, two of which were burst and sore, leaking sticky liquid. The boy pulled his rifle through as he sucked on his cigarette and said nothing. They listened to the boom of artillery shells in the distance, sitting together for half an hour or more before they set off again. Only now, thinking back, did he realize that he had never asked the boy’s name.

  Later that afternoon, he saw her walking down the long corridor with her arms full of folded pillowcases and bedsheets trailing around her ankles. When he later walked past the spare room he saw that the bed had been made up—the sheets tucked in and folded but ending somewhat short of the bottom so that they stuck out at the edge like a flap.