The Dynamite Room (14 page)

“Have you killed anyone?”

The question had been smoldering inside of her all day, and only now had she found the courage to finally ask it.

He looked at her. They had eaten another silent dinner and were back in the sitting room, him with his maps, her in her father's chair with her knees pulled up, arms cradling Mr. Tabernacle. Around them candle flames fidgeted in their jars.

“This is a war,” he said, “and I am a soldier. So, yes, I have killed people.”

He carried on, marking up the map with his pencil. She leaned into the arm of the chair.

“What about children?” she said. “Have you killed any children?”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at her again.

“Why do you ask these questions?”

She shrugged.

“If you are wondering if I am going to kill you,” he said, “I haven't made up my mind. Perhaps you ought to keep such questions to yourself. You might not like my answer.”

She sat for a moment and watched the shadows cast by the candlelight across his face, his eyes almost disappearing into the darkness of their sockets.

“We could pray,” she said. “It might help.” Her mother always said it did.

“Who might it help?” he said. “Me or you?” He bent his head back down to his map. “There is no God anyway. God does not exist. So who are you going to pray to?”

Her face flushed. “You mustn't say that.”

“Why not?” He put the pencil down and faced her. “It is the one thing I have learned in this war. If there is a God,” he said, “if he is real, that is, he cannot be the good God that everyone says he is. If he does exist, he must want to strike us from this world he has created.”

He rested his elbow on one knee and pointed his pencil at her.

“Let me tell you something. When I was in Norway,” he said, “we broke into some offices, a railway administration office. A woman was there, shouting; she wanted us to leave and my men, they chased her into one of the rooms and they raped her. Six of them. One after the other. This is what war does to us. And do you know what I did?”

She shook her head. She could feel herself pushing deep into the chair. She didn't want to hear.

“I watched. I did nothing to stop them. Nothing. And God did nothing to stop them either. I have seen him do nothing good.”

He poked the air with his pencil again, and Lydia's stomach tightened.

“And why? Because he does not exist. That is why. He is something made up to keep us under control, but it doesn't work anymore. We have become too clever. We know now. We have made him a joke. Worse than that, a swear word, a blasphemy.” He laughed. “We say his name without thinking. He does not mean anything to anyone anymore. And without him, what is there to control us? What is there to stop us doing whatever the hell we like?”

“That's not true!” she said. “He's real. He is.”

The man laughed again. “Do you believe in ghouls and goblins and the Erlking as well?”

She turned her head away. She would not let herself cry.

“It is a war,” he said. “People get shot, hurt, killed. Not just soldiers, but women, children, babies…God has nothing to do with it. This is, this is…” He seemed to catch himself, his voice softening as if he had suddenly heard what he was saying. “It is our choice.”

She pulled her knees into her, holding Mr. Tabernacle tight to her chest. The heat of the night was pressing at her, even her breath burned in her throat.

She looked at the pistol on the floor beside him, and she remembered how his hand had trembled when he had first pointed it at her, hands that had been so bloody. She had no idea where he had come from or what he had done, what terrible things he might have been part of.

“What's your name anyway?” she said. “I don't even know your name.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“I just want to know. I don't know what to call you.”

“Heiden,” he said. “My name is Heiden. That is my family name.”

“But what do people call you?”

“Heiden.”

“Don't you have another name, a Christian name?”

“Yes. But you can call me Heiden.”

She rolled the name around in her mouth. It didn't feel right.

“I don't want you wearing my father's clothes,” she told him.

“You said my clothes smell. You said it yourself.”

“But they're not yours. They're his.”

“Yes.” He raised an eyebrow as if it were a question.

So, she thought, it wasn't right, but she couldn't find the courage to tell him that.

She pressed her hands in her lap and stared at them. She couldn't think of what else to say.

“My brother gave me wings once,” she then said, suddenly remembering. “Like an angel. He took a photograph. Would you like to see? I could find it.”

Alfie had made her stand on a stool against the sitting-room window so that the dark night outside formed a backdrop to the photo.
I'm going to make you immortal
and give you wings,
he had said. The night had been cold and wintry, and he had drawn the outline of wings on either side of her in the window's condensation, lines of it dripping down the pane like threads. And then, when the flash of the camera went off, it lit a glow above her pale head that was still there in the photo, a burst of light like a halo in the glass.

“I could show you. I could take your photograph too and give you wings…then perhaps—”

“Do you think this is a game?” he said. “You talk about angels and God but you have no conception of what you are saying. Your head is full of stories. You have to grow up. Everyone has to grow up. Even you. Especially you. Do you understand?”

She stared at him, her eyes filling.

He got up and perched on the windowsill, pulling his fingers through his hair.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I should not have spoken like that. I am expecting too much from you. These times expect too much from us.” He offered her a faint smile. “Let me see the photograph then. I would like to see it.”

“No, I don't want to,” she said. “I don't want to talk to you anymore. I wish you weren't here!”

He listened to her feet running up the stairs and along the corridor. A door slammed shut. In the sitting room the candles were burning out, the room folding in on its darkness and shrinking tighter around him. Was it any wonder that they could barely breathe? He could feel the heat sticking in his throat. All that nonsense about God. He had no idea where it had come from. Why had he said such ridiculous things? And to a child.

He pulled up a chair to the window and sat in it, twisting himself so that he could look through the slit in the blackout frame and prize up one of the slats.

He had killed three children in Poland. They had been hiding in a cupboard in an empty farmhouse outside a town called Olszanica. They had burst out as he had opened the door and ran at him and, in his surprise, he had shot them. Two girls and a boy. A reflex, not a decision. Not like this was. They had all three fallen face down, one in the hallway, the other two out in the yard. He had wanted desperately to turn them over to see their faces, to see what he had done, but Metzger had said,
Don't touch them. Just leave them,
and so they had. And when he dreamed about them now, they were still faceless. Even in that freeze-frame when the cupboard door opened, each face was erased, a pale, featureless blur.

Across the lawn in the vegetable patch the cherub statue glowed, bits of quartz in its stone sparkling. There was a bomber's moon tonight. Strange that these memories should come now. He had felt his mind drained of them in Norway, as they moved through the mountains. He would not become jittery like the other men had, a contagion of fear sweeping through the group, heads nervously twitching. They had been out there somewhere—Norwegian sharpshooters. They'd hear gunfire, shouting in the distance, but it had been almost impossible to tell how near.

He let the slit in the sheet close and paced silently about the room, into the hallway and back again, then sat back down and rested his elbows on his knees and listened.

He had spent some of the afternoon in the garage making fuses in preparation: breaking up cartridges and emptying the gunpowder into strips of material, and then rolling them up and binding them with tape, waterproofing them with tar. He had thought about asking the girl if she wanted to help or watch, if only for some company, but decided against it.

He crossed to the window and peered through the slit again, at the stone cherub watching him. In Norway, in the dynamite room, the windows iced up so much that you couldn't see out. Once he had held his hand against the cold glass until the heat of him had melted the frost and he could see through his watery finger marks, the cool, melted lines of water racing down the pane as he rested his head against it and felt the ice numbing him.

He leaned back against the wall. One by one the candles were guttering, the room darkening by increments. He tried not to think of Eva, to see her in the park, or on the lake that day.

I got the job,
she said.
At the institute.

And what was it he had said to her? He couldn't remember now. Something thoughtless. Careless. Or not.
That's marvelous, Eva! Well done!

With a sharp tug he wrenched the blackout frame out of the window and put it down on the floor. He stared at himself in the glass reflection, then picked up the gun from the floor, released the safety lock, and pointed it at himself in the glass. Again, he tried to take himself by surprise, turning and pulling the gun quickly on his reflection, quicker and quicker, and wincing at the pain, his arms straight, elbows firm, his breath suddenly fast and furious. He wanted to shout out, to yell, to shoot. Then he stopped. He stared at the man staring back at him. His head was filled with the screams of others.

They were in a clearing where the ground leveled and the trees were thinly spaced. Flakes of snow drifted down through the thick mist. Even now he had no idea of what had happened or how the shooting had started. As they had made their way cautiously across the clearing, one of the soldiers in the middle of the platoon had stopped, his head suddenly twisting sharply, turning this way and that.
Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!
Then the man had started shooting.

Closing his eyes he could still see and hear the men, gunfire rattling into the undergrowth. Someone near him was shouting
Fuck!
over and over again as he emptied his weapon; whilst slightly further away, another voice screamed at intervals. Bullets whipped out in all directions, pelting into trees and arms and legs and heads. He had thrown himself to the ground and buried his own head beneath his arms. Then he shuffled forward on his elbows and slid into a shallow ditch on top of two other men. He could hear their rapid breath, but, with their heads wrapped within their arms, he saw nothing of their faces.

She had her gas mask on and she couldn't get it off. It had suckered itself onto her face, clamping itself to her as if it were alive. She tried to breathe but the filter was blocked, and what little air was left inside the mask was hot and sweaty. She clawed and tugged and pulled but it wouldn't come free, and when her fingers fumbled for the edges she found that her skin and the mask were continuous.

Her body jerked and she woke, breathing hard. She stared at the wall in front of her, the blackout frame across the window. She wasn't alone. She felt the man in the room. She could sense him standing behind her, watching. Perhaps I'm not awake, she told herself. This is still the dream. She squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the springs of the bed straining, the mattress tilting from under her and sinking as he lay down next to her. His breath was hot against the side of her neck. She waited for his arm to reach around her over the covers, or for his leg to wrap itself over hers, but he lay perfectly still.

As he lay in the bed, staring, men struggled in the wall in front of him still. He remembered reading, a long time ago, that Leonardo da Vinci used to advise his pupils to stare at a mottled patch of wall until faces leaned out of it. He closed his eyes and listened to her breathing. How cold he had been that night. How much he had wanted to wrap himself in another's arms, to bury his face into the warmth of someone's neck. If he could just reach out to the girl, just pull her into him…But he didn't. He lay quite still.

When they had woken they were covered in a thin layer of snow and it was light. Inadvertently in the night they had pressed against each other for warmth, and he could feel the heavy weight of their bodies against him. Their faces were hidden and he had no idea who they were, and yet they had huddled into each other, burying themselves from the cold. Without speaking, they struggled out of the ditch, shivering and brushing the clods of ice from their uniforms. All tracks or footprints were buried beneath a blanket of white. Flakes still floated down through the trees. The three of them stumbled blindly about, weak-kneed and holding their guns at the ready, but there were no shots. No voices. No sound bar that of their breath and the soft crunch of their boots. Around them the bumpy outlines of bodies lay, half-buried in the fresh snow; as many as half the platoon, it seemed. The rest of them must have run. They turned the bodies over one by one with their boots. One was the young man who had been suffering from the cold, the one to whom he had given his bread. The boy's ice-blue eyes stared up at him, a bullet hole blown wide open through his cheek, a window into the architecture under his face.

They went from body to body, looking for men they knew, and softly mumbling the names as they were found or simply pushing the eyelids shut. He could barely see the shapes of his two companions as they drifted about through the mist on their own bewildered wanderings. One of them shouted.
Hey! Hey!
And then started calling out names—Röthke, Schröder, Studmann, Türke—his voice echoing through the trees—
Where are you?
—but there was no reply.