Hannah & Emil (7 page)

Perhaps when the dead had been removed and buried they would stop walking out at him at dusk. He could hear those Turks not on duty in their trench close to the Germans, their murmured prayers. He wondered whether the retrieval parties would find Thomas's body, whether they would pray over it.

He remembered a hot night by the Rhine. He and Thomas played cards by the light of a little fire. They had stolen liquor being unloaded outside their fathers' social club and lay on the damp grass moaning, the stars swirling. Thomas's head lay still on the ground, in the summer field. He was becoming something of a heartbreaker around the town. His sister asked about him in her letters to the front. He had not yet answered her.

He let himself imagine for an instant, his head light, that he had never left Germany, that he had been allowed to simply go from his studies into work as an electrical engineer, to marry Uta. There was no pit burial, no faces to be sprinkled with lime. He felt movement near him in the deepening dusk. It was Captain Hass, gentle behind the lines, softly spoken, yet Emil had seen him shoot an able-bodied Turk for coming back with wounded in the midst of an attack. The captain looked him up and down. ‘You've been declared fit, haven't you, Becker? You can go out tonight.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Half an hour.'

There was a rumour that Germans were a prize to the Australians on the beach. They did not really know for certain that they were there, it seemed, or how many, but if they found one they had no interest in taking him back down to the pen. It was said the Australians had been promised extra leave for whoever brought back a German head on a stick.

In half an hour, if he chose to, he could end every sensation in his body: the lice running up and down his neck into his hair and shirt, the dried mud caked around his feet, the rod of electric fear in his back, the hunger that made him dream in his scarce moments of sleep of the cinnamon rolls in the Konditorei on Unterstrasse, the noise of the guns that rattled his brain and made every thought an effort. The memory of Thomas lying in the mud, over the lip of the trench. Afterwards, while Emil's body remained here among the Turks, or was dismembered as a trophy for the Australians, some other part of him would travel to the fields on the edge of the Rhine, away from the factories and the town, where all you could hear were birds and the wind in the leaves. Hares running in the fields, more than you could fit in your rucksack.

But that was not the plan he had formed as he emerged from delirium in the medical tent. He stirred his legs, gave them a little shake, went along the tunnel to wait with the Turks. The insects swarmed and dived. He could hear them in the quiet of the ceasefire, and men's voices, just talking. One he knew, Faisal, gave him a cigarette and they chatted a little in the Turkish he had picked up from the men between actions. A group was returning to the trench from the burial, quiet. He took his position. Can I do it? he asked himself.

The machine gun in the trench started up along the line and he climbed to the lip, ready to go over. He wondered how bad the pain was going to be. And now the Turks were running forward, he with them, firing, some falling. Their voices in the night, the strange words and rhythms, helped him not to believe that anything in this world was real. He let his rifle slip towards the ground. He waited for a mortar flash and looked down, took aim—that is my knee, there are my toes, not those, wait for dark,
now, do it
—and fired.

He came to in the dark. His leg lay against another's that did not move and was hard. God was talking to him. He was asking him how you fix a Howitzer that has ceased to fire.
Quickly, while they come
forward with rifles, how do you fix it?
No, not God. Father. He always wanted to learn what he could from Emil's education, wanted to add to his own understanding of machinery, and Emil loved to explain to him the smallest details of how a machine worked, how you might fix it when it failed. His voice came, as clearly in the dark as though they were sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table. ‘Ah yes, I never would have thought it was something so simple.' But Emil could not answer him. His throat was very dry. The blackness was like velvet across his eyes, and the hard leg did not move.

There was no time for gentleness for the Turk who dragged Emil over the pocked mud to the medical tent. The firing had ceased but it was never safe in the open. The Turk let Emil's leg slam and bounce along the ground. Every impact sent a shock the length of his body. The astonishing
pain
. So this, precisely, was how much it would hurt. It obliterated thought. The light was coming. He could smell the burial pit somewhere close, bodies decomposing in spite of the lime. The world was the Turk's stretched face against the fading purple sky, the sharp breaths, the rhythmic jarring of pain. In a shallow ditch the Turk laid him down. Through a thicket of dry grass he saw the man running low, zigzagging like a hare from hollow to hollow, back to the line. It was almost light. Stay down, he thought. He lost him and then his helmet emerged again. He heard German voices. In his head he said, I am breathing. Please, don't put the lime on my face.

They tipped him onto a stretcher and carried him around to the back of the hospital tent where a line of men groaned or lay still and silent in the dark. The medical officer shone a torch into his eye, looking at something at the back of his head, shot something in his arm. The others on the stretchers rose up and gathered around him. They all peered, the Turks; they too wanted to look at something beyond his eyes. They shook their heads, ignoring their own wounds: arms stopping at the elbow, burnt faces with pink eyes and mouths. Then he felt himself pulled backwards towards the green centre of Europe away from the wild cliffs of the coast, to a place where the earth stood still and there were women.

The Turks on their beds in a long row were grey in face and limb, some gangrenous and foul. They moaned, day and night, though they received visitors, wives with hips that held the eye. They had only been taken back as far as Constantinople. He wondered whether his injury would take him back to Europe at all.

Be quiet or die, he told them silently. From his own body rose the constant tang of old blood, confusing him. He did not bleed anymore and his dressing was changed regularly.

Early in the morning shafts of light slanting from the high windows onto the beds along the wall opposite made them seem blessed in their disfigurement, as though they were about to be taken away to something better. City sounds—hawkers, children—cooking smells from street vendors, coffee, drifted in. He longed to venture outside to see. The intricate hot mystery of the palaces, lanes and bazaars, the call to prayer.

The sister was a dark woman with a lined face like a peasant, and very strong. She lifted men on and off beds, often without assistance, though it was true that many of them were thin, looked weightless. He could feel the ripple of his own ribs when she dragged the sponge across them. She smiled when he used fragments of Turkish to ask for cigarettes and water.

On the night shift there was an Austrian nurse who he had discovered was nineteen, a year older than him. He slept when he could in the day so that he could talk to her. He didn't know if she was pretty. The hair at her temple was an ordinary brown colour, disappearing under her cap, and her features seemed even enough. He couldn't tell anymore, but she had hips and a bosom and looked soft. Her skin was clear. She seemed clean. She was a quiet girl among the Turkish soldiers, eyes cast down like a Turkish woman, but if she had a few moments she would sit on a wooden chair beside his bed and answer his questions. He tried not to scratch at the memory of lice.

What sort of school did you go to? Do you have brothers and sisters? What writers do you read? Why did you decide to be a nurse? Tell me how the houses look in your street. Who are your friends? Once he found the recklessness to say, ‘Describe your room at home,' thinking now she would turn her face away, never answer him again. She paused for a few moments as she did with every question and then she told him, stepping out gently into her description as always. She shared a room with her sister in her parents' apartment in a village in the Alps. They had a bed each along opposite walls. Between them was a window that opened out onto the town square. Over the roofs one saw the mountains. When the war began a year ago the square was filled with people singing and she and her sister leaned out their window and listened to them until late at night. She almost fell, she was leaning so far. Her sister pulled her back as she slipped by grabbing hold of her plait. He closed his eyes. He could see it. The people in the square, the girl wide-eyed, careless, her sister more sensible, alert, grasping the long thick plait. He too had sung when they set off. And Thomas.

But she also told him when he asked of the meals at home: ‘There is almost nothing to eat. Old bread. Pea soup that has been stretched out for days. No coffee. Hardly any milk. A neighbour's baby died.' She frowned when she spoke, a little furrow appearing over her nose.

The Turkish sister mostly left them alone unless there was an emergency, a fresh delivery of wounded, the bathing of a burnt man. When he heard the cries of one of these and knew that the nurse, called away from him, was holding him, his heart ached for her and he wished that the answering of his questions was enough to keep her here beside his bed.

They moved him away from her after a while, to a large house on the edge of the city that had been converted into dormitories for recuperation. He was not given a chance to say goodbye and he was surprised at the wrench he felt as he bumped along in the back of an uncovered lorry, his leg jarring, crutches either side of him. Here were the streets of Constantinople that had been calling to him. He glimpsed a shady courtyard filled with flowering vines on the tiled walls, a family meal taking place at a long table. A young woman was serving, bending forward. She looked up and saw him as the truck passed down the narrow street. He saw her eyes, and they were much more beautiful than the nurse's, but it was the Austrian girl's ordinariness that had touched him. He might have seen a hundred girls like her any day of the week in Duisburg.

At the house, there was an overgrown garden to hobble around, games of cards, sudden booze bounties, bawdy talk, even whispers of revolution—or desertion, if you gave it its proper name.
We could
just . . . not go back
. Longing glances at the hills that led down to the sea. He avoided these conversations. Such thoughts were a contagion. There were men being shipped home or back to the fighting, newcomers with astonishing afflictions, a former schoolteacher who was coaching the men in French, obscure phrases guaranteed to bewitch any woman into weakness and acquiescence. They bet cigarettes from home on cockroach races. Emil picked them well. He never ran out of cigarettes and was often able to buy liquor and chocolate. But he knew this was a brief interlude of unreality. And soon a letter came, congratulating him on his immediate promotion and providing instructions for transport to Palestine.