The Evening Chorus (21 page)

Christoph’s hands are shaking. What a strange thing it is to receive this book and letter, for the past to rise up and meet him here.

He remembers very clearly the day he took James Hunter to see the waxwings.

It had been unusually cold the night before. His body was stiff from the cold when he awoke. He remembers shaving in the early morning before setting out on his journey to visit a friend who was in command of a smaller prison camp sixty miles distant from his own. He remembers dragging the razor slowly across the stubble on his cheeks, making faces in the mirror to flatten out the planes of his face and avoid any nicks from the blade.

The mirror was small, which meant that Christoph had to stand a certain distance from it in order to view the whole of his face. This distance was farther than he could see without his glasses, so he wore them for the shave but had to constantly remove them to wipe the steam from the lenses.

Aging is an annoyance, he had thought at the time. And right after that, War is a young man’s game.

It seemed unfair to be made to participate in another war at the age of forty-six, an age when he should have been feeling the waning of ambition and enjoying his position at the university. But many soldiers who had distinguished themselves in the first war were appointed to command positions in prisoner-of-war camps. His predicament was not unusual.

Christoph had driven himself that morning because he liked to have time alone, and there was precious little of that at the camp. He also wanted to feel, just for one day, not like a man in control of two thousand English officers, but like the classics professor he had once been. He wanted to imagine he was living that relatively uncomplicated life again, merely going for a drive, merely visiting a friend.

The drive out in the morning was slow and peaceful. He arrived at Wilhelm’s camp in time for lunch. They ate and drank well. He had felt relaxed in his friend’s company—more relaxed than he’d been for months. It was a relief to be out of the camp, not to feel the burden of his command pressing down on him every minute of every day as he waited for the war to end and his life to resume its familiar shape.

Perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps it was the loosening of the clamp he always kept tightened down on his emotions, but halfway through the drive back to his camp, Christoph started to panic. He hadn’t wanted the war, hadn’t welcomed it, was surprised to have been given a command. He wasn’t a member of the Nazi party and was, frankly, afraid of their swagger and cruelty. When SS officers came to perform inspections of his camp, Christoph was always nervous and tried to move them through quickly. He didn’t want them to linger and find any discrepancies with how he ran things. When prisoners escaped, he tried to make sure they were brought back alive. He believed in the Geneva Conventions and upheld their principles. But even so, the war was working its way into his bones.

The day before, he had been sitting at his desk in his office and had heard what he thought was birdsong. He’d stood up and made his way to the window, just in time to see one of the guards shoot a prisoner through the head while he tended his little garden in front of the bunkhouse. The casualness of the act had shocked Christoph so deeply that he forgot to breathe for a minute or two. The prisoner’s beautiful song had drawn the Kommandant to the window, the same song that had infuriated the guard and driven him to murder. It was yet another example of the difference that existed between Christoph and the men around him.

He wanted to be out of the war. He missed his wife so acutely that he either was overwhelmed by memories of her or couldn’t recall her face. The pain of missing her brought her back in full force or not at all, as though his mind couldn’t decide which would be the easier state for him to bear, and so offered him both at once.

His friend at lunch was full of bravado, seemed to prefer his new life as Kommandant to his old life as a civil engineer. Christoph did not want that to happen to him. He was finding it hard to get the execution of the gardening prisoner out of his head.

He pulled the car off the rutted road, stopped the engine, and walked out into the darkening landscape. It was early evening. He trudged over the stiff grass towards a copse of trees at the edge of the road. He walked into the trees, hoping to clear his head of the clamour of his anxious thoughts.

At first Christoph thought the murmuring of the birds was the wind in the top branches of the trees, but it became louder, more distinct, and when he stopped to listen, when he looked up, he saw the bobbing heads of the cedar waxwings, their slick plumage pale against the dark green of the pines.

Christoph has always liked birds. When he was a boy he had collected eggs and nests. He would go out in the early mornings to look for different varieties to add to his species list.

He knew that the cedar waxwing, while native to North America, was rarely seen in Europe. He had seen Bohemian waxwings only once before, when he was that boy who rose early and went out into the world with a notebook and a pair of spyglasses.

Christoph looked at the birds in the trees. He thought of the prisoner in his camp, Hunter, who had been watching the redstarts down by the river. Hunter had probably never seen a waxwing. The birds were as rare in Britain as they were in Germany. Perhaps Christoph would bring the prisoner here tomorrow to see the cedar waxwings. He would show Hunter that they were not so different as men. The war may have separated them, but their love of nature joined them together. It would be a small but humane gesture, to take a prisoner out of camp for the day, to bring him here to see the birds.

The thought pleased him and he walked out of the trees, got into his sedan, and drove back to camp.

C
HRISTOPH LOOKS
down at the letter on his desk. Another death to add to the countless others that occurred in his POW camp. He rests his head in his hands, feels emotion rise like bile in his throat. He wishes that he could write to his former prisoner and tell him to wait out the awful, urgent moment he is in; tell him that the moment, like all moments, passes, and the feelings with it. But it’s too late for that. Hunter’s last morning must be almost a week old now. Any letter Christoph writes and sends would be useless, would never reach the living James Hunter.

But he is touched that James would reach out to him, that after all this time, through the war and its aftermath, James Hunter would remember so vividly that day when Christoph took him to see the waxwings. It’s a day that Christoph remembers with equal clarity. It was a moment that felt blessed, in the midst of thousands of other moments that were not the least bit redemptive. Christoph is not proud of many things that happened in the war, but perhaps he is a little proud of that moment in the pines with James Hunter and the cedar waxwings.

He turns the book over in his hands and opens it, looking for a photograph of the author, but there is none. Just a note on the endpapers that says, “James Hunter works at a bird observatory in Wales and is writing a book about ocean birds.”

What an achievement, to turn those days of imprisonment into study, and that study into a book. Christoph may not be able to do anything to help his former prisoner, but he will remember him, and he will sit here this afternoon and read James Hunter’s book on the redstart from beginning to end.

He stands up, goes over to the window, and looks down into the courtyard below. Students cross the square, hurrying to their lectures. One girl’s red scarf blows off and she bends to pick it up. A man with dark hair pauses by a tree to light a cigarette.

From above, the people are only patches of colour, streaks of movement, the noise of their shoes on the quadrangle stones, the arc of their shadows leaning away from their bodies.

J
AMES DECIDES TO WALK TO THE POSTBOX TO MAIL
the letter, rather than leave it on his kitchen table to be found afterwards. He doesn’t trust that whoever discovers his body will choose to post the letter. The German name and address on the envelope might put them off. There is still a lot of anti-German sentiment about.

James wears his suit. It seems appropriate to dress up. He would wear his suit if he were going on a journey, or to meet his sister at the bus. Killing oneself seems oddly, and similarly, formal. An event.

He walks quickly over the fields. The postbox is by the bus stop. He wants to get there swiftly, post the letter, and hurry back while it is still morning. James does all the business of a day in the morning, and today, even given the macabre nature of the task, there will be no exception. Start early, he has always said to himself. Start early if you mean to get anything done.

There is only one letter to post, and it’s tucked carefully away in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. James hasn’t written to his sister, even though he has thought about it. But he doesn’t know what to say beyond “I’m sorry,” and he just can’t bring himself to post a letter that contains only those two words. Instead, he has left a note on top of the notebooks where he has written his findings on the ocean birds he’s been studying. He has put the notebooks on his kitchen table, and the note simply says, “For Enid.” His sister will know what to do with the notebooks, will decide if there is enough information in them to publish or if she will merely keep them to read through occasionally, as a sort of memorial to her brother.

It’s a cool morning, sunny. The grasses in the field ripple in the wind and James brushes his hand along the tops of them as he walks to the village. He likes the soft, feathery feel of them under his hand.

It is a simple thing to post the letter, to drop it through the mouth of the letterbox. The walk out was all about this task. The walk back is all about what James will do when he returns to the cottage. This will be the last time he makes the journey from the village across these fields. What he thinks, on the return, is that he won’t even stop at the cottage. Everything is in order there. He will just keep walking, past the cottage, straight off the edge of the cliff. That seems the easiest thing to do. There’s an efficiency to it that pleases him.

It is a cowardly act, and James feels that he is a coward to do it. All through the war he kept himself alive, kept himself safe, only to give it all up now in the peace. But he is tired of the nightmares, the emptiness in his chest; he is tired of drinking to feel better, and then not feeling better at all. He simply wants it all to stop. He simply wants to fly off the top of the cliff and be done with it.

But this is not what happens.

James nears the end of the field and startles a flock of ducks that are floating in a large puddle in a flooded ditch by the track. They beat up into the air, the chatter of their wings as they flap together mimicking the exact sound of the cry of a single duck. The creaking of the wings as they move into flight sounding as a lone squawk.

James stops, his head back, watching the ducks as they climb into the sky, the sound of their wings fading slowly. How odd, he thinks, that the collective is the echo of the individual. And then he thinks, How wonderful. What a perfect machine the ducks are. How beautiful that one mallard’s voice is carried aloft by the flight of his companions.

And suddenly he can see how he belongs to all of it—to the morning and the ducks, to the men who were in the cage with him during the war, to his sister, even to Rose when she was his bride and their life together was new and untried. He has a place in every one of them. He is carried forward by their lives, even though those lives are largely lived without him now.

The redstarts too—that pair on the stone wall that he watched so fiercely through the war—those birds and their descendants lift his captive soul up with them every time their little feathered bodies rise into the air. The line of their flight reaches all the way back to him here.

James hurries along the track, trying to get home as soon as possible. He has already missed hours of work today. He doesn’t want to miss any more.

The morning breaks open, new and beautiful before him.

W
HILE A WORK OF FICTION, THIS NOVEL IS BASED
on three actual events.

There was a Wellington bomber that crashed on the Ashdown Forest during the Second World War, killing all members of the six-man crew.

There was a German prison camp Kommandant who took a prisoner to see some cedar waxwings in a nearby forest.

And there were birdwatchers during the war in some of the prison camps. One of these wartime birdwatchers, John Buxton, wrote a book about the redstart that is still regarded by many as one of the most comprehensive single-species studies ever undertaken.

I
WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY AGENT
, C
LARE
Alexander, for her belief in this book, and for her wisdom about how to improve it.

My Canadian editor, Jane Warren, and my US editor, Jenna Johnson, offered precise and invaluable editorial suggestions. Thank you for making this story better.

I would also like to thank managing editor Noelle Zitzer. It is always such a pleasure to work with you.

Heartfelt thanks as well to my UK editor, Rebecca Gray, and my Italian editor, Andrea Bergamini.

The Canada Council for the Arts, the Woodcock Foundation, and the Access Copyright Foundation all provided financial assistance during the writing of this book, for which I am very grateful.

Thanks to Glenn Hunter for the title.

My family and friends make my writing life possible, but I would particularly like to thank Nancy Jo Cullen for her love and support during the writing of this novel.