The Dynamite Room (6 page)

The motorcar was a Crossley Torquay Saloon with a sliding roof. He remembered them from when he'd been in London; his music tutor, Professor Aritz, had owned one too, although this was older, a '33 model. Still, it looked in good condition, and while the wheels' spokes were grubby, it had only a few dents and hardly any sign of rust. He walked around the garage admiring the vehicle and occasionally giving one of the wheels a nudge with his boot. Even in the dimness of the garage the front lights gave him a bug-eyed stare. He had never had a motorcar of his own, and this was a particularly fine one; the bottom half a milky cream, while the top half and the sliding roof were a smart jet black. Inside were brown leather seats, and the woodwork was so beautifully finished that even through the murky windows he could see the polished grain.

He opened the door and sat in the driver's seat, resting the pistol in his lap, then looked in the mirror at the garage doors behind him, slightly ajar, and the hot afternoon sun burning through the gap. He ran his hands around the steering wheel and across the polished dashboard. The seat was surprisingly comfortable, and he inhaled the slight tang of leather and polish. He studied the dials and pedals, familiarizing himself with them. There was no radio. He had tried tuning in the wireless in the sitting room to find German broadcasts, but all he could pick up with any clarity was the BBC Home Service.

On the back seat was a neatly folded picnic blanket of green and blue tartan. He imagined driving to picnics in this car, along the twisting, turning English roads. Out of London into the heart of the country. Henley, Oxford, and then, perhaps, on into the Cotswolds…

Eva had enjoyed picnics. Their first afternoon on their own together had been a picnic in the Tiergarten during the May Day celebration and parade. The day had been unseasonably warm, full of people enjoying the sunshine, kicking balls about and playing games, drinking and laughing. He could see them now, past the duck pond, more and more people joining the line along the parade route, shuffling about as they tried to find the best spot to take up their positions. Fathers carrying sons or daughters on their shoulders, wives and mothers with woolen blankets, children with paper windmills and footballs, bunting swinging from the trees and lampposts. And all the flags, hundreds of flags; everybody holding one. They had found a quiet spot beneath a couple of trees and laid out a picnic blanket along with the food they'd picked up from Hertie's department store on Dönhoffplatz. He had surprised her with a bottle of wine, pulling a couple of glasses from his pockets. She had looked so pretty in her summer dress with the sun dappled on her skin through the leaves. The light fluttered like butterfly wings across her face.

He pulled the starting control out to its fullest extent and turned it, then switched on the ignition and operated the starter. The car choked and spluttered, the whole vehicle juddering under him with the effort and then puttering out. He tried the starter again and the engine coughed and died. He sat for a moment, waiting. He didn't want to flood it.

He remembered the conversations. Even back then there had been the vague talk of war. Eva had a brother, Bernhard, who worked in the new Air Ministry building on Wilhelmstraße. He said the rumors were all unfounded. There weren't any plans to expand Germany beyond what it had already reclaimed in the Rhineland and Austria, and those had both been rightly theirs. Eva said she didn't believe a word of it.
What does silly old Bernhard know anyway? He's just a pen pusher.

They were late joining the throng of people lining the parade route through the park. Although they ran along the line with their picnic hamper and flags, they had caught only the briefest sight of the official cars through the mass of excitable bodies. The noise—claxons, cheers, and music—had been almost deafening. And as the crowds dispersed again, he thought for a moment that he had lost her, among all the hundreds of faces.

They took a walk around the park in search of ice cream and stopped on what he now considered to be “their bridge,” asking a passing couple to take a photograph of them. It was an act that he would soon learn Eva would insist upon, on every afternoon stroll they took there, on every future picnic and parade, as if this bridge was a reminder of that first delicate and quivering flush of romance, and each photograph taken in their usual spot and pose—half-turned towards each other with an elbow on the rail—fastened them just a little tighter together.

In the garage he tried to start the car again, but the engine wouldn't take and the air filled with fumes. He cranked down the window and sat, thinking. Then he tapped on the fuel gauge. Empty, of course. Not even the English would be stupid enough to abandon a car full of petrol.

If there
is
a war,
Eva had said,
I mean another one, what will we do?

The comment had come quite out of nowhere.

Do? What do you mean?

Well, we'll all get dragged into it somehow, I suppose. I can't just play in an orchestra. What good will that do? I'll have to turn my hand to something useful, something good.

Her mother, she had said, thought getting married and having children was useful.

And then she had stopped herself and laughed, thinking maybe that talk of marriage and children on their first turn together around the park was perhaps a little presumptuous.

But he hadn't minded at all. And, in time, that had been their plan, he thought as he sat in the Crossley, staring at the empty petrol gauge. After the war.

In the study she pulled out a road map of England, and another of East Anglia, a walking map of Suffolk, and another, barely used, of the nearby Fens. She took down her father's leather-bound atlas from its shelf and, with barely a thought, hurriedly ripped out several of the pages. She opened up the desk drawers. They were all in a mess as if someone had already been rummaging, the identity cards, ration cards, and her father's bank statements gone.

She could hear the car's engine coughing several times and stopping, then coughing again as he tried to start it. She gathered the maps and torn pages up inside her dress and hurried across the hallway into the sitting room.
DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS.
She pushed the piano stool aside and scrambled under the piano; then, taking a hair clip and bending it open, she got down on her hands and knees and slid it along the edge of one of the floorboards until she felt some resistance. She could hear him still in the garage, the car coughing and choking. She fumbled with the clip but it kept flicking out of the crack. She straightened it and tried again. Her mother had twenty pounds in cash hidden.
I know it's daft,
she had said,
but it makes me feel better, if anything should happen…

Outside now, it had gone quiet. He'd give up with the car before long and come back in. She fiddled desperately with the hair clip, but her palms were sweaty and the clip kept slipping from her hand. Then, with a delicate
click,
the tiny catch her father had fastened unhooked, and with the tips of her fingers she managed to prize the broken floorboard up. She lifted a few folded bits of paper out of the hole and checked, but her mother's money was gone.

Before marriage and a family, there was Eva's father to contend with. His daughter being a musician was something to be proud of. But a future son-in-law?
Pah!
He had made it quite clear that music was a profession delicate enough for women, but any man participating in it must surely be of questionable character. Germany hadn't been made in the music halls after all, but in the trenches, in the thunder of battle. With the exception of Wagner and a few traditional folk songs, he pronounced, music had done nothing to cajole the German people and was, at best, a passable distraction on a Sunday afternoon—and only then when there was nothing better with which to occupy the soul. It would certainly not make Germany great. Or a son-in-law worthy.

He had only recently signed up again, feeling like so many others that it was his duty and privilege. In those first few weeks of the training he had felt a camaraderie with other men that he had never experienced before—the sense that together they were on the cusp of something great, something worth fighting for. And in the months preceding the war he proved himself to be an elite soldier. He had a level of awareness matched by few and could tune his ears to the slightest sound, while his ability to remain undetected out in the field had brought him to the attention of the NCOs. None of this mattered to Eva's father though, who still branded him a “musician”—and no amount of hobnail boots or cross-fire action, or even his later Brandenburg training, was likely to change that.

He climbed out of the car and looked around the garage for a petrol can. In the corner, piles of black sheeting lolled about on a workbench, cloth sacks sagged against the wall, pot-bellied with potatoes, and tatty spiderwebs drooped and dripped from the overhanging beams. He dragged aside cans of paint, a toolbox, a scuffed water bucket, and the sleeping coils of a hose, but there was no petrol.

That first afternoon, they had walked about the Tiergarten and eventually found themselves back at the same picnic spot. She had lain on her back, her hand drifting across the grass and picking the heads off daisies, casually flicking them at him. He had lain beside her, propped on an elbow and swigging the last remnants of wine, and had told her about his childhood in Bavaria. How his grandfather had taken him hunting almost every day and poaching most evenings, so that he had learned not only the skills of stalking, he said, but also of survival; and then how, as an older boy, he had joined an Outward Bound group, refining his skills on weekend treks in the Rhön Mountains and the Black Forest and even Austria, where they'd spent a week walking the Eastern Alps and catching marmots and mountain hares.

She had laughed.
Do boys never grow out of hunting? That, and playing at wars.

What do you girls like to do then?
he asked.

We like to lie on our backs in the warm sun and pick daisies and look up at the clouds and find things in them.

And she had shown him: a bear with a frown, a plump bunch of grapes, the underside of a fluffy sailing ship as it passed slowly over them.

At some stage that afternoon they had watched a couple of Brownshirts grasping each other in a drunken headlock and staggering around in circles, trying to pull each other to the ground. Later the same pair would drag a young Jewish man out onto the lawn and, forcing him onto his hands and knees, make him eat the grass.

God, look at us,
Eva had said.
We're turning into animals.
The sudden change in her had quite surprised him.
People everywhere, sitting around having their picnics, and no one does a thing. We all just turn our heads and carry on as if nothing is happening.

He hadn't known how to respond at first, and then had said that there wasn't much they could do—not unless she wanted the Brownshirts to turn on them instead.

That's just an excuse,
she said to him.

Is it?

Yes,
she said,
and that is why things won't ever change. No one takes a stand.

He walked around the car to the driver's seat and clambered back in, pulling the door shut behind him with a click. He needed petrol, damn it—it was the first thing that they had been told to do: attain a reliable mode of transport.

If he shut his eyes he could still see Eva, feel the weight of her head in his lap. A smile flickering across her face. Two dimples no larger than pinpricks appearing in her cheeks and then just as quickly disappearing.
We should spend all summer sunbathing and having picnics. You're too pale.
Then she reached up and wrapped her arm around his neck and pulled him gently down to her, rising from his lap so that their lips touched for the first time. He felt her through the thin wrap of her skin, her flesh, her delicate warmth.

He got out of the car, leaned against the bonnet and rubbed at his eyes, then wearily turned his attention to the shelves, pushing aside jars of nails, screws, and bits of wire, tins of varnish, and offcuts of wood. Beside his feet a sack of potatoes fell and scattered across the floor. He picked one up and rubbed his fingers across its nubbed surface, then lifted it to his face and smelled its dry and earthy skin.

After sitting for a few moments beneath the piano, pressing her hand over her mouth to stifle any tears, she took some deep breaths and tried to pull herself together. From under her dress and within her socks, she emptied the maps, the torn pages, her identity card, her stories, all the bits and pieces she'd gathered, hurriedly stuffing them into the hole. She pushed the board back, hearing the click of the catch snapping into place. Outside, the garage door grated over the gravel as the soldier pulled it shut. She crawled out from under the piano and slid the stool back into position, then ran into the kitchen and jumped up onto the work surface as if she had been there all the time.

The front door opened and shut again, and he came down the hallway towards the kitchen, clumping in his boots. He stopped in the doorway and caught her for a moment in his stare.

“You've been running,” he said.

She shook her head.

“I can hear it on your breath. Don't lie. What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I wasn't doing anything,” she said.

“Listen to me. I can hear every sound, every breath, every single beat of your heart,” he said. “So, some advice. Do not creep about. You will only make me nervous.” He took hold of her by the chin, his fingers pressing gently. “Do you understand?”

She nodded.

He turned and walked back along the hall and up the stairs. She heard his footsteps passing over her head, just the gentle give of wood.