The Evening Chorus (6 page)

One of the guards pushes James into the back seat of the motor car and climbs in after him. The other guard gets into the driver’s seat. The engine starts up, the gates of the camp open, and the car moves out onto a bumpy stretch of country road. It is only then, as they are leaving the camp, that James sees that the person in the front passenger seat is the Kommandant.

“Where are you taking me?” James asks, the panic rising in his throat.

But none of the men in the car answer, or even look at him. They are all staring ahead at the road, which twists slowly through the fields.

James is sweating. He rubs his face with his sleeve. He is restless with agitation, his foot tapping against the floor of the car.

“I haven’t done anything,” he says.

The Kommandant turns around. “Try to relax,” he says. “Try not to worry.”

And then James knows for certain that he is going to be executed. He leans his head against the car window, the glass cool against his temple. The little picture he keeps at the back of his mind of Rose and his cottage on the edge of the Ashdown Forest dissolves into fear. He can’t reach it for comfort now.

The road, little more than a lane, is bumpy and rutted. The car makes slow progress through the fields. James has no sense of time, cannot judge how far they have driven. The moments he is in the car are both horribly short and horribly long.

The landscape gradually alters. Where once there were fields stretching out on either side of the motor car, now there are only woods. Northern woods of pine and fir, the trees growing so closely together that there is no light visible between the trunks.

They pull off the road and lurch to a stop.

“
Aussteigen!
” says the guard in the back seat beside James. He nudges him with his arm.

“Get out,” translates the Kommandant. “Please.”

James exits the car. For a brief moment he considers making a dash for it, but the field extends for quite a way before it reaches the edge of the trees. He would be shot almost immediately. It would be worse to be shot in the back, perhaps, than to be made to kneel in the middle of a field and take a bullet through the temple.

“Now we walk,” says the Kommandant. He leads them across the field. The two guards flank James. They all trudge across the stiff grass and enter the woods. They will shoot me here, then, thinks James, and leave my body hidden among the trees, where it won’t be seen from the road.

If these are to be his last moments on earth, he wants to savour them. He wants to be able to concentrate on the smoky light coming down through the trees, the damp patches of moisture on the ground as they move deeper into the woods. But all James can do is listen to the sticky tattoo of his blood in his veins, the stutter of his heart. He can feel the sweat running down his chest. There is no world outside the noise of his own body in this moment.

The Kommandant holds up his hand and everyone sways to a stop.

“Why?” says James, but the Kommandant, who has turned to face the prisoner, holds a finger to his lips. Then he moves the finger from his lips, and James thinks that the Kommandant is about to kill him, that he will unbutton the leather holster at his hip and remove the Luger that sits there, tell James to kneel on the ground, and put a bullet through his head.

But the Kommandant removes the finger from his lips and points into the air above them.

“Look,” he says. “Look up there.”

James tilts his head back and directs his gaze to where the Kommandant’s hand is pointing. Up at the top of a fir tree there are a dozen or so birds balanced on the branches, chattering to one another.

“Cedar waxwings,” says the Kommandant. “Here by accident, do you think?”

James looks dumbly at the birds.

“They are not common to these parts,” continues the Kommandant. “They are what I think you would call an
accidental
.”

“Yes.” James looks at the sleek waxwings at the top of the fir tree. He has seen these birds in his reference books, but never in person before. Sometimes there are Bohemian waxwings in Britain, but never cedar waxwings. “Vagrants or accidentals. Often blown off their migratory routes by a storm.”

“In German we call these birds
Seidenschwänze
,” says the Kommandant. “It means ‘silken tails.’”

The waxwings are neatly groomed, their feathers slicked back as though with pomade.

The Kommandant waves his hand at the guards and speaks to them sharply in German. They retreat through the trees. James listens to their footsteps crisping through the leaves on the forest floor.

“I sent them away so we could talk freely,” says the Kommandant.

The waxwings chirp from the top of the tree, their overlapping sounds buoyant and cheerful.

“I thought you were going to kill me,” James says.

The Kommandant looks stricken. “No, no,” he says. “I just wanted to surprise you. I meant no harm.” He reaches out and touches James on the shoulder. “I wanted to stop the war, just for the morning, so we could enjoy the birds together. We are not so different, you and I.”

“In some ways, no,” James says. “But you can kill me if you choose, and I can do nothing to stop it.” He pauses, feeling his heartbeat gradually return to normal. “Your English is very good.”

“I lived in England.”

“When?”

“I went to Oxford. After the first war.” The Kommandant takes a cigarette case from the pocket of his coat. He opens it and offers it to James.

“Thank you, but I don’t smoke.”

The Kommandant withdraws a cigarette from the case, clicks the silver box shut, and returns it to his coat pocket. He lights a match, cupping his hand around the flame. James notices that the older man’s hand is shaking slightly.

“What did you read at Oxford?” he asks.

“Classics. I teach at the University of Berlin. Like you, I am not a soldier.”

How odd, thinks James, that this war and the last have been fought by classics professors and birdwatchers, gardeners and watercolourists.

“Christoph.” The Kommandant extends his hand and James shakes it.

“James.”

“Do you like the
Seidenschwänze
, James?”

“They’re very beautiful.”

The smoke from the Kommandant’s cigarette rises up through the tight canopy of trees. James watches it dissolve in the cool morning air.

“I lived in your country,” says the Kommandant. “For many years. Before I went to Oxford, I was a prisoner of war and worked on a farm. That’s where I learned my good English.”

“You fought in the first war?”

“I was a boy then and knew nothing of fighting. I thought the war would be an adventure.”

“A terrible adventure, I imagine.”

“Yes. For days, I fought on while all the men in my trench were dead or wounded. Finally the English soldiers simply walked across the muddy stretch of ground between their trenches and ours, and took me prisoner. One of the soldiers gave me some chocolate. I had been surviving on water. They called me a hero for holding the line, but really I was just too afraid to move.”

Christoph takes a pull on his cigarette.

“But working on the farm was very soothing. I liked the rhythm of tending to the animals. My time was attached to their needs. It made the days bearable.” He pauses. “How is your bird study progressing?”

“It’s going well,” says James. “I’ve logged a lot of hours watching the redstarts. The chicks are about to fledge. I worry for their safety when they leave the nest.”

“Yes, of course. It’s very difficult to survive in this world.” The Kommandant finishes his cigarette, stamps it out in the earth. “We should go back now. It is not a good idea for me to talk to you for very long.” The guards are leaning up against the sedan car. James can see them there as he and the Kommandant step out of the woods and start across the field. There’s an ease to the guards when the Kommandant isn’t around, in the way they slouch against the hood of the motor car, smoking. Their laughter spools like birdsong through the air towards him.

“They behave as men on a break from their jobs. They are not real soldiers either. One of them was a baker. The other worked on the railway.” The Kommandant sighs. “It might be a long war,” he says, “that we are all waiting out together. It might be a long time before Weber makes a loaf of bread again.”

The drive back to the camp is no different from the drive out, but James feels such relief at not having been shot that it translates into a sort of ecstatic happiness. He presses his face to the window and watches the countryside shudder past. The fields are just now emerging from their long winter sleep, the brown grass tipped green in patches, the sun pooling on the surface. He is suddenly touched by the Kommandant’s gesture of friendship, and cheered by the sight of the waxwings in the fir tree. It has been a most extraordinary morning. He must find some way to tell Rose about it.

When they arrive back in camp, he hurries down to the river to check on the redstarts. As he waits by the fir where he usually stands to survey the birds, he realizes that something is wrong. There is no activity around the stone wall across the river. Where only yesterday the adult redstarts came to the nest with food every few minutes, now there is no sign of the birds. The chicks have fledged while he was away with the Kommandant. And where baby birds in the nest do nothing but make noise—to persuade their parents to feed them—adolescent birds that have left the nest must remain perfectly silent for fear of attracting predators. The baby redstarts will be hiding in the trees and bushes near the stone wall, trying not to draw attention to themselves, but from this moment on they will be invisible to James, no matter how quiet he is or how much he watches. The young birds must stay hidden now in order to survive into adulthood. They will call out from their hiding places, and their parents will bring them food. Then, after a week or two, they must find new territory to occupy. They must find their own food.

James misses the chicks with a ferocity that surprises him. He is anxious for their survival and upset that he has missed his chance of seeing them. All these weeks of waiting and he still doesn’t know how many babies were actually in the nest.

T
HAT EVENING
after curfew, when they are locked in their bunkhouses for the night, James lies awake in his bed, listening to the chatter of the other men in the room and thinking about his childhood on the farm. He remembers the dogs and the thick soup of mud in the yard, the warmth of the kitchen stove, the outline of the sheep on the hills at dusk. He remembers his mother with newly hatched chicks in her apron pocket, to keep them warm after they had the misfortune to be born during the cold winter months. And he remembers the birds—the kestrels over the fields; the sparrows near the house; the geometry of the swallows outside his bedroom window, and the way they cut and parcelled the air into shapes with the blades of their wings. The lifting/falling sensation of the birds crossing in front of the mullioned windows, so like the rise and fall of his own breath.

As a boy, James studied the field guides with their black-and-white illustrations of birds. It was always startling to see the colour on the real birds when he came across them on his rambles in the countryside. Perhaps this is why he was so drawn to the redstarts, he thinks. Not just because they were available to him here at the camp, but because of the dramatic splash of red on their tail feathers, how the brightness of it astonished and cheered him every time he saw it.

“Where did you go this morning?” Harry’s voice rises up from the bottom bunk and interrupts James’s reverie.

“The Gardener saw you getting into the Kommandant’s sedan. Did they take you out to interrogate you about the tunnel?”

“No,” says James. “Actually, the Kommandant brought me to a forest to see some cedar waxwings.” Harry snorts. “I’m not an idiot, Hunter. But if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. As long as you didn’t give anything away.”

James does want to talk about the waxwings in the tops of the pine trees, wants to convince Harry, with the details of the morning, that he isn’t lying. But perhaps it is better that his story is so unbelievable, because there is danger in his friendship with the Kommandant. He doesn’t want to be seen as a collaborator by his fellow prisoners.

“I didn’t give anything away,” he says.

A
WEEK
after James was taken to see the cedar waxwings, Davis and the other tunnellers, having waited until after morning roll call, lift a wooden lid covered with earth, drop one by one through the trap door in the floor of bunkhouse 14, and begin their crawl to freedom.

They make it out of the camp. The Germans, it appears, did not know of their enterprise. That evening at roll call, their disappearance is discovered and there is a scramble by the guards to get after them with the dogs.

All night long, James lies in his bunk and hears the barking of the Alsatians. The prisoners in his room are silent, each man lying awake, willing the escapees through the woods, down into the town and onto a train, and then off the train again once safely in Switzerland. No one speaks. Their room in bunkhouse 11 practically vibrates with their combined prayers.

The escapees are captured the following day. While the prisoners are standing for evening roll call, the gates of the camp open and the men are dragged back inside the compound. Their clothes are ripped. One of the tunnellers has blood on his face from a gash above his left eye. They are pushed across the prison yard, made to pass in front of the men on parade on their way to the cooler, where they will be locked in solitary confinement for weeks as punishment. For all the individual industry in the camp, there is nothing to do in the cooler. No company or conversation. The long hours of solitude and inactivity carve into the soul of a man and alter him. The prisoner who gets thrown into the cooler after an escape is not the same man who returns to camp society after a month of being locked away.

“There are only eleven of them,” whispers the Gardener, who is standing beside James. “Thirteen went through that tunnel. Perhaps two managed to get away?”