Opposite Sides (63 page)

“
Like I am
misunderstanding you now?”

“
In the kind
of relationship you are dreaming of, Jan, yes. It can only be a
dream. We are serving on opposite sides and you may be in the
English forces but you are still not my enemy.”

“
Then I
suppose I’m a friend, then?”

“
Exactly. A
very good one.”

“
Is that all?
Just a friend?”

“
I said a
very good one. A special friend. We come together in a hostile
situation yet I like and respect you. I hope you feel that way,
too.”

“
I do but I
came here to say far more.” She held out her hand towards him but
he did not react. “I’ve got to tell you. It may be the last chance
I have.”

“
Well?” His
eyes narrowed and at the same time his brows came together. It was
a puzzled expression for he had no inkling what Jan was wanting to
say.

She cleared her throat
awkwardly and then drew in a breath to clm herself.

“
I have
always thought of you as just Hans. Still do, in spite of that
uniform you’re wearing. You’ve always been just you.” She drew in a
soft breath and her breast heaved up, then down with a slow
drawn-out sigh. “I’ve more than liked you for a very long time,
Hans. Did you know that?” Her face flushed and she smoothed down
her grey skirt in the hope of steadying her hands.

“
Really?” The
idea amused him. He an officer in the German army and she, a
British nurse. But then, they weren’t the crazy ones; just the
world they were living in.

‘
I’ve heard
from my aunt,” she suddenly said throwing back her head as if
shaking out all the memories.

“
And?”

“A bomb landed near her
house a week ago. At night. She wrote that it shook the whole
house. Scared her and Andrea so much they could not
sleep.”

His interest keened when
he heard the mention of his daughter’s name. He had almost
forgotten she was growing up to be an English girl; and in the same
house as Miss Turner. He laughed again but this time it carried a
tone of absurdity with it.

“
Don’t they
have shelters, then?”

“
Of course
but it’s too far away for poor aunty to get to with her walking
stick. She is an old lady now. Andrea wouldn’t leave without her.
They never had an Anderson shelter put in the back garden. Aunt
said she was not sleeping in a tin can. You know Aunt. She can be
awfully stubborn at times. Says no-body, especially Hitler’s bombs,
is going to drive her out of her home.”

Hans had to smile. He
could picture the elderly Miss Turner shaking her stick in the air
and scolding the Luftwaffe pilots for venturing in to her space. He
saw the bomb fall and shuddered at the thought of them, alone in
the middle of the air-raid. He had seen the utter destruction the
bombs were capable of doing.

“
Wahnsinn
! Sheer madness! My daughter
. . . being terrorised by bombs from the country her own father’s
fighting for. It’s crazy! Are we also deranged, Jan?”

“
No. I don’t
think so. We’re caught up in it and what choice did either of us
have once war began?”

“
Very little.
In Germany, it was call-up and obey. Obey or be shot. If you were
somebody in the party, then you could get into an office or
something similar. But not for the majority. I guess you could call
me a coward but at the time I didn’t fancy being stuck up against a
brick wall in front of a firing squad.”

“
Couldn’t you
have been a conscientious objector? Ours have ended up behind bars
but at least they stood by their convictions.”

Hans laughed satirically
as he remembered some of the things he had noticed when he was in
Berlin.

“
Not in the
Reich. Absolutely not. Anyone even remotely against the Nazis are
removed. They disappear. One does not dare to object or to
criticise. Doing one’s
duty
is expected. No, more than that. It is
demanded!.”

“
I realise
that, Hans. You’re no coward, either. You wouldn’t have been made a
major if you had been.”

He brushed the remark off
with a flick of his hand and then looked earnestly at
her.

“
I think you
are braver. Not many women would go nursing under the conditions
you have had to put up with, especially not out in North Africa.
That requires real toughness. But I still say, war and the front
lines are no place for a woman. Fighting’s a man’s job!”

She looked quizzically at
him. She held her torso upright and proud as she told
him,

“
Not if your
country’s in danger of invasion!”

That defiant utterance
had flummoxed him. He found he was at a loss as how to answer her.
It was looking as though Corporal Nurse Jan Turner had won this
battle and before he could gather his thoughts, any further
conversation was interrupted by the return of the Sergeant. He
reminded Nurse Turner that it was time to wrap up the meeting. He
reminded her that the Major needed to return to his duty as one of
the camp translators. Jan stood and indicated to him that she was
ready to move.

“
I’ll be
outside there, Corporal.”

The man indicated the
flap entrance by pointing. As he walked away, Jan moved closer and
pressed a small piece of paper into Hans’ hand. He wrapped his
fingers round the note and the hand that had offered it.

“
Here is
where you can reach me. Please keep me informed, Hans. I do care
very much about what happens to you. I just wish circumstances were
different.” Her voice faltered and a tear trickled down the side of
her cheek. “I would have liked to have hoped. . . .” She withdrew
her hand and clenched her fingers together. “I wish you weren’t
married!”

“
You’ll find
someone,” he said. He had not realised Jan had desired to marry.
She had always appeared to him to be someone who preferred to
follow a career rather than have a family. But then he remembered
what Miss Turner had told him about herself. “You still have time,
Jan. When this is all over, someone will be there.” He tried to
sound encouraging.

“
No, they
won’t!” She was very adamant. She looked him full in the face. Her
bottom lip quivered. “I’ll never marry, now. This bloody war’s
killing off too many of our young men. Besides . . .” She knew the
moment had come when she had to divulge her true feelings for him.
She moved close and, with tear-filled eyes, whispered into his ear.
“It is you I love, Hans Resmel.” She stepped back and looked at him
like a chastised child. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I shouldn’t
have said that but it’s true. Oh, Hans, I wasn’t sure at first but
. . . I have these feelings and I can’t help myself. There, I’ve
said it. It’s not new. I do not want to marry anyone else. So, you
see I was angry and hurt when I found out you had
married.”

“
I’m so . . .
s, sorry,” he stammered, taken aback. “I . . . I never
realised.”

“
Do you
remember that song we all used to sing: ‘
Together
’?
You’re gone from me but in my memory we will always be
together
. Remember, Anne played it on her
gramophone?”

“
That was a
long time ago.”

“
In
’28.”

“
Good days.
No hint of war.”

“
Well, I want
to feel young like that again. I feel as if I’ve mislaid my youth
and missed out. I’d like to find it. I want it before I am too old.
I do not want to be like my aunt. I have longed for love for a long
time and when the war started and I knew I could no longer hope for
you, I had hoped that one nice young man would love me. But he war
kept taking them away. I am a woman, Hans, and I have the same
desires as any.”

He watched the tears
trickle onto the inside lenses of her glasses and drop off the
bottom of her rims. Her hands were trembling as she tried to wipe
away the sorrowful drops that betrayed her deep feelings. Hans was
taken aback by her genuineness.

“
I never
knew. Honestly, Jan, I never knew you felt like that!”

He could feel the
intensity of her emotions. He did not know how to answer this woman
who had opened her heart to him. He could not reject her, nor did
he wish to give her false hope. Yet he felt a tenderness for her he
had never felt before. He thought of Caroline and the short
whirlwind romance they had; the lust and excitement of youth. Their
love had been cut short the day Andrea was born. The hurt was still
with him. Could he re-kindle such feelings or had any feelings of
love for a woman been extinguished when Caroline died? The feelings
he had for Elisabeth were not the same. He could never grow to love
Elisabeth in the way he loved Caroline even though she had provided
him with a son. Their son was a product of the Reich. He was a
child for Hitler and everything that marriage stood for in his
Reich. And now there was Jan. Yes, there was definitely something
that had been trying to draw them together for a very long time.
But could he love her?

He did not reply but
cupped her hands in his, and then gently raised them to his lips,
and kissed them.

“
We always
seemed to be quarrelling. I assumed you hated me and wanted nothing
to do with me.”

“
No! I just
wanted you to take notice. It was so lonely growing up in that old
house with my aunt. No brothers or sisters. Friends, too scared to
come round. You saw how it was with my aunt. She ruled my life as
she ruled over the school.”

Jan had never spoken to
him before like this and especially never in her teenage years. How
miserable she must have been. Alone. Afraid to go against her
aunt’s wishes.

“
When this is
all over, when things are normal again, when Germany’s able to
shake off this nightmare . . . ” He did not know how to say such
things. “Jan, you know I could never marry you. Not while Elisabeth
lives. Marriage is for ever until death. That is the law of my
church. We have to hope . . .”

“
For what?
For an end to this war? Or for Elisabeth to die? How long? How long
do we have to wait?”

“
We wait for
as long as it takes.” His words sounded empty and unconvincing even
to himself. He knew he and Elisabeth had very little in common and
that family life after the war would be a burden on both of
them.

Jan squeezed a smile and
her hand automatically reached upwards to her glasses but she did
not ajust them. Instead, she caressed a lock of hair that had crept
across her moist cheek. She breathed in slowly and
deeply.

“
When the
war’s over,” she sighed, “I’ll bring Andrea to see you. I know I
sound like a silly schoolgirl but I can’t help myself. I feel
goosebumps every time you look at me.”

He stepped
forward and hugged her. He felt her arms around his own torso and
for a moment they shared the embrace, sharing in the rhythmic
movement of each shared breath, together with the shared
realisation that they had both stepped through the curtain of hate
into a chamber of love: their own
Lebensraum
. When they let their arms
drop, they remained standing silently together.

“
You do have
feelings for me,” she breathed. Can there be any hope?”

He kissed her lightly on
her forehead as one would kiss a dear child.

“
Hope is
always good. It keeps us going. We will survive!”

He swung slowly around on
the heel of his boot and walked away from her. She stood watching
him until he disappeared through the entrance flap of the tent and
she was alone once more.

CHAPTER
21

The Last
Christmas

With the removal of all
the Italian and German prisoners of war from North Africa, the
campaign there was really at an end. Major Erwin Resmel was one of
the last men of the Afrika Korps to leave. He had remained as an
interpreter and having done so, he, too, was to be shipped out. It
was only a matter of waiting for a vessel to leave.

While he had been at the
camp, he had earned the respect of his captors. Hans was sitting
for the last time in Commander Brownless’s office. During the past
month the two men had got to know each other more as human beings
than as officers in opposing armies. Their conversations had been
cordial yet each man had full knowledge of what could not be
discussed. Hans had been on edge since he knew Jan was to return to
England because even though the threat from U-boots was no longer
as bad, there were still enough of them lurking in the Atlantic
waters to pose a continuing threat to Allied shipping.

“
You must be
quite taken up with Nurse Turner to keep such close tabs on her
whereabouts, Major,” he commented. He picked up the phone and rang
through to Headquarters to find out if the nurses had arrived. Hans
waited patiently, his hopes rising with each nod of the Commander.
“Yes, Nurse Turner’s ship arrived safely in Southampton three days
ago and that her tour of duty outside Britain is over. I shouldn’t
have told you that information, though. You never heard it, do you
understand? But you can rest easy. She’s safe.”