The Dynamite Room Page 9

  Lydia could hear the echo of everyone’s voices, could imagine what they might have been saying to her: Gosh! Look at you! Haven’t you grown? You look the bee’s knees in those sandals! Are they new?

  How did our Government ever think they could help? said Joyce, who every year lent Lydia’s mother extra glasses from The Cricketers.

  Joyce, do you actually know where Poland is? her father asked.

  Good Lord, George, of course I know where Poland is, she said, laughing from under her enormous hat. It’s in Europe somewhere. Near all those funny little countries in the east. Hungary and whatnot. We’ll all be getting evacuees, I expect. I hear they’re going to be quite the rage. But where do you put them? I swear to God, they’ll eat us out of house and home—these city children are like dustbins. You wait.

  Be over by Christmas, said Old Mr. Howe as he puffed on one of his homemade cigarettes and blew Lydia a smoke ring that smelled oddly of chrysanthemums. Don’t you go frettin’ over this, little ’un. You young ’uns got nothin’ to worry ’bout. Our boys will sort that Hitler out. I tell you, the fellow’s crackers.

  The day before her father went up to join his ship, he took her mother out into the garden with his rifle.

  He had paced across the lawn and drew chalk crosses on the trees. Lydia’s mother had yelped every time she pulled the trigger, the end of the gun lurching up and the shot pelting over the treetops.

  Steady on, girl—I want you to shoot an oak, not take down a bloomin’ Messerschmitt!

  They practiced for an hour and only once did she hit a tree.

  Then, later, after her father had left, Lydia found a pigeon in the wood, a single bullet through its chest. She took it in to show her mother, its body cold and hard beneath the softness of its feathers. Look, Mother. Look! But her mother had just taken the bird in her hands and, sitting with it on the floor of the kitchen, she had sobbed.

  She was aware of footsteps up the stairs and then the man appeared. He came down the dark corridor, his heavy boots clumping. She realized how silly she must look sitting there cross-legged on the floor, and she averted her eyes. She waited for him to turn off into one of the rooms but he didn’t—he kept coming. She pulled her knees in tight.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He wanted to get past, get into the room.

  She glanced up at him and quickly looked away, but she didn’t move. All of a sudden, sitting guard at the end of the corridor didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  He pushed past her and she scrambled to her feet.

  “You can’t go in there,” she said.

  But he was already at the door, his hand on the knob.

  “You’re not to go in. It’s private.”

  “And you’re going to stop me?”

  “There’s nothing in there.”

  He turned the handle and started to open the door but, before she knew what she was doing, her hand was on his arm and she tried to pull it away.

  He yanked her off him. “Let go!”

  She grabbed at his arm again.

  “I said, let go!” He pushed her hard against the wall with a thump, and for a moment he had her pinned to it, his hand pressing firmly against her chest.

  “You’re not in a position to tell me what I can or cannot do, or where I can go,” he said, his face almost against hers so that she could smell his breath. “If you don’t want me to put a bullet through your skull here and now, you’d be wise to remember that.”

  His hand released her and she felt herself sinking. He opened the door, walked through, and then shut it behind him. She sank to her knees, her mouth wide open and gasping. She could feel her whole body shaking. She held her hand to her chest and felt where his fingers had dug in like bent nails. She looked down the corridor and sensed the tears forming. All around the house was silent. She would not let herself cry.

  The work shed, when he found it later, reminded him of his grandfather’s outhouse. From the high horizontal window the light spilled onto the blades of the tools, lighting up the bradawls and pliers that were arranged along the shelf and walls. The shed was called “The Pottery,” according to a piece of slate nailed to the outside, although that must have been the work of previous occupants—all evidence suggested that a different sort of craftsmanship was practiced there now. The workbench was thick legged and solid, with a number of wrenches and clamps attached at one end. He had been here once already, his torchlight sweeping across the tools, frantically searching. Now though, in the clear light of day, everything was calm and still but for the soft scrunch beneath his boots of the curled shavings from the lathe.

  In Bavaria his grandfather had carved woodland scenes into slabs of oak and maple that he’d collected from the forest, and once finished these were hung about the house: animals foraging, birds taking flight, and scenes from German fairy tales, like the Erlking haunting the forests and luring travelers into the dark, or Bearskin, the soldier who made a pact with the Devil and became a bear. The carvings had scared him, for they were extraordinary—and if life could be so extraordinary, what control could he have over it? What protection could there be?

  You hunt or you are hunted, his grandfather said. You need to be invisible and silent and full of tricks if you don’t want to be caught and eaten, or turned over to the Devil.

  Resting on several nails attached to the wall was a long handsaw. He smiled as he took it down, feeling how light it was, how thin. His finger traveled up and down the flat of the blade, and he bent the saw into an S-curve, flexing it this way and that, and then he put it back for now. He would need to find a bow.

  On the workbench, beneath a box of matches, he found intricate pencil designs sketched out on graph paper. The next project: a yacht. There were fifteen sheets or more, each plotting out the boat from various angles, or elements of it, labeled and precisely drawn, complete with measurements, swatches of painted colors, and the type of wood or material to be used. He studied each diagram in turn, in awe of the detail, dedication, and precision. This was all there would ever be of the vessel now.

  Sitting at the workbench on the high stool, he opened up the matchbox and laid one of the matches down on the bench. He chose the knife with the sharpest tip and, holding the match down by its head, he carefully made an incision halfway up the stick from its base, following the steps that he remembered seeing. The wood broke, a piece splintering off, the cut not straight enough. He tried with a fresh match, getting the length of the cut just right, but it broke again, as did the third and fourth. With annoyance he put the box of matches in his pocket for later; he was doing something wrong.

  He was about to leave when he noticed a model rowboat high up in the window ledge called Annie, Darling. It had the same degree of detail as the sailing boat he had found on the windowsill of one of the bedrooms. He reached up for it. There had been a boat like it at a hunting lodge their string quartet had played at just outside Berlin. He remembered the sun had pounded off the white flagstones of the terrace and into their eyes so that it was almost impossible to read the sheet music. They had been positioned by the open doors of the conservatory, and people kept pushing in and out past them. The party was to celebrate a birthday and the recipient, a man who was allegedly a close colleague of Ribbentrop’s in the Foreign Office, had been drinking since breakfast. He seemed to spend most of the afternoon colliding with things, including the quartet, or hanging off people’s shoulders and nuzzling into their necks. Around them were Party officials and one or two ministers who had nothing better to do on a Sunday. Waiters drifted about the terrace and the lawns serving glasses of Sekt and canapés. Everybody was smoking.

  Midway through the afternoon the quartet took a break, and Eva suggested they take a rowboat out onto the small lake at the bottom of the lawn to escape from the rabble. On the other side, perching in the overgrown grass, was a stone folly shaped like a miniature Greek temple, and he had the idea that they would row across to it and back, but they got midway across when Eva said, Let
’s just float awhile.

  She reclined back against the boat’s rim and let her fingers trail in the water. Now, he thought, was as good a time as any to tell her that he had been called up.

  She looked at him blankly.

  He told her that they were being moved to the border. They were being sent in.

  Sent in, she said. Sent in where?

  Poland, of course.

  She looked down at the water. Oh.

  He rested the ends of the oars in his lap so that the paddles were lifted from the lake and water drizzled from them. As the boat slowly turned, he could see that someone on the slope leading down to the lake had fallen—a man in a sharp suit—and people were helping him back onto his feet.

  Eva said something and turned her head away, and then, as he thought she would, she started to cry.

  This, he explained in a faltering voice, was why he had come back from England—for Germany’s great revival. The Führer had turned the country around, dragging it out of the desperate doldrums of its depression. There was pride and confidence, a new resurgence, and he wanted to be part of that. But saying it aloud then, he knew it to be only half the truth.

  But you’re no good at it. Look, she said, still teary eyed, taking his hands in hers. These are cellist’s hands, not…not…

  She stared out across the water to the party, the drunkenness and the larking about, all the noise and shouting and laughter.

  I don’t want you to go, she said. I’m going to lose you.

  You won’t lose me.

  She wouldn’t.

  She straightened her hair, tucking a strand of it into the bun that she so hated and only wore when she was performing and was required to be neatly presented.

  She looked at him. I had something to tell you too, but I don’t think I’ve the heart for it now. I got the job.

  At the institute? he said. Oh, Eva, that’s marvelous!

  Yes. But there wasn’t any enthusiasm; he had somehow ruined her plans.

  They sat gently bobbing, listening to the revelers on the bank and the soft lap of the water.

  Perhaps we could take a trip out there, he said. I’d like that. I’d like to see where you are going to be working.

  Yes. A trip. That would be nice. Then she turned to look back at the party and wiped at her eyes. I suppose we had better get back then and entertain the monkeys.

  She lay on her parents’ bed, trying to write her mother a letter. It didn’t matter if it never got posted, or got out of the house, or was even read. What mattered was to write it—she needed to talk to someone. Balanced in the silky swells of the bedspread was the framed photograph of her parents taken at their wedding. Over the last few hours she had developed an unreasonable and terrifying panic that she might suddenly forget what they looked like.

  Her father looked out at her from the arch of the church, so smart in his wedding suit and so young. He was always in a uniform: either his naval uniform or his cricket whites, just like Alfie. Even when he was in his workshop he’d wear all-in-one parachute gear, his motorcycle goggles pulled over his eyes. They helped him focus his mind, he said; blinkered him like a Shire horse. He’d spend hours in his work shed, working late into the night, the oil lamp burning and voices quietly singing to him through the stuttering wireless.

  Her mother, in comparison, had been early to bed and early to rise, busying herself in the kitchen sometimes before the sun was even up. She’d waft through the house in a silk dressing gown or she’d be dressed already in a narrow tweed skirt and a smart pair of Oxfords, their heels clicking efficiently across the hallway floor. Looking at her in the wedding photo, her mother had barely changed at all: that same slender waist and curling hair, the slightly prominent chin that both Lydia and Alfie had shared. And now they were all gone.

  She didn’t deserve to be rescued, Lydia thought. That was the truth of it. She had been mean to Button long before they had even got to Wales. I don’t see why we have to have him, she said to her mother. He’s not English. I don’t see why we can’t just send him back to where he comes from.

  Her mother was not impressed.

  Well! He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t do anything. He might as well not be here. He just gets in the way.

  Excuse me, young lady, her mother said, but where is your charity? What do you think God would make of you saying such things? You’ll never go to heaven with an attitude like that.

  And so she had tried, but it wasn’t easy. She told Rosie and Cath about how her mother had burned his clothes in the garden and bought him new ones; she had been worried about fleas. Fleas were the least of her troubles, they told her. Jews—especially Jewish boys—had all sorts of diseases, diseases that sometimes could not even be seen.

  This troubled her, and she decided that it was in her best interests to pretend he wasn’t there.

  Sometimes though, in the night, she heard him in the spare room next to her, the sound of him climbing quietly into the wardrobe, the click of the door.

  We don’t know what he’s been through and shouldn’t ask, her mother said. He’s a long, long way from home though, and all on his own, and the very least a lucky girl like you can do is be nice to him.

  So, rather reluctantly, she had made an effort, and as the days passed and she grew more used to him skulking about the house and suddenly appearing from behind pieces of furniture or closed doors and making her shriek, she found herself warming to him.

  And now, after all of that, here she was without him. She’d undone all her efforts. No one, she thought, would come and save a girl who only thought of herself.

  Somewhere outside there was a boom, so loud and near that she felt it reverberate through the house. Windows rattled and downstairs something fell from a shelf and smashed. She scrambled off the bed and ran into the hallway. It had sounded like a shell blast.

  “Hello?” she called. “Hello?”

  She looked up and down the corridor. Bits of dust were falling in trails from the cracks in the ceiling.

  “Are you there? Mister! Hello?”

  Eventually his head appeared at the bottom of the staircase—“Are you all right?” he said—and she sighed with relief.

  You hunt or you are hunted, his grandfather had said. You need to be invisible and silent and full of tricks if you don’t want to be caught and eaten or turned over to the Devil.

  And so he had taken the boy out hunting in the night, far into the dark Bavarian forests that surrounded the farmhouse.

  You have to train your eyes to see through your blindness and train your ears to hear sounds in the silence. The forest is full of living things, he would say, and if you are to be the hunter, you have to know that they are there.

  They would go deeper and deeper, and the boy would learn how to listen with new ears and see with new eyes, his grandfather teaching him how to walk so light footed that barely a leaf beneath him would crinkle and barely a twig would crack.

  You see things that others think are invisible, and you hear things that others think are silent, but you yourself need to be silent and invisible, he said. That is all that differentiates the eater from the eaten.

  Through the darkness of the forest his grandfather would cock his gun and fire into the pitch black, and although the boy saw nothing, somewhere he would catch the sound of a wood pigeon dropping through the trees. His grandfather would send him off to fetch it.

  That will do for tomorrow’s dinner.

  But I didn’t see where it fell, the boy would say.

  His grandfather would shake his head with solemn despair. You need to look with your ears as well as your eyes, he would tell the boy. If someone magicked you into a bat, what a mess you would be in.

  Then his grandfather would send him off rummaging in the darkness to find it. But one night, when he eventually found the pigeon in a soggy pile of forest debris, he turned around and the old man was gone.

  He stood there for a moment and then called out. Grandfather? Grandfather,
he called. Grandfather, where are you?

  He stood there, quite still, holding the dead pigeon and feeling the darkness of the forest thickening around him, the trees growing taller out of the ground, the lofty tops closing in and thatching themselves over him, until the darkness was immense and complete.

  Where are you? he said again, or whispered, or perhaps just thought. A panic surged through him. Where are you? He let the pigeon drop to the ground and for a moment he stood, listening hard, and trying even harder to see; and then, rather timidly, he stepped forward and began to fumble his way.

  How long it had taken him to feel his way out of the forest, he did not know. Long enough for his hearing to grow acute and his sight to sharpen, so that, after a while, the darkness began to retreat and shapes started to emerge. His toes were stubbed and his fingers were pricked and grazed as he slowly made his way, half-blind, slithering over fallen tree trunks, his clothes occasionally catching on briars, his feet slipping in the sodden, uneven ground. When he finally broke out of the forest into the clearing, it was with a rush of relief. He found his grandfather sitting on the front steps of the farmhouse, casually lighting his pipe. A thread of smoke lifted from it. An oil lamp burned from inside one of the windows.

  Where were you? the boy said—almost demanded—as he tried to hold back his tears.

  There, his grandfather said.

  No you weren’t!

  I was. I was right beside you, all the way. You just chose not to see me.

  She slopped along the landing with the buckles of her sandals undone, now that her mother wasn’t there to say, For goodness’ sake, Lydia—take them off or do them up! The house was a furnace, every surface hot to touch. She paused at the top of the stairs and looked down the dark corridor to the closed door at the end and the room she had tried to stop him from going in. If no one came, she had told herself, she would have to go in as well; and now it was her third day here and nobody had come.