Читать книгу The Dangerous Places - Louis Golding - Страница 4

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It’s close and heavy, the woman said to herself. There’s far too many blankets on the bed. It’s not blankets. There’s dust in my nostrils and in my mouth and in my ears. I can’t move. There’s dust and rubble all over me.

Who am I? What’s my name? What’s that rattle like pins on my ear-drum? The stuff’s all over my hair. If Brauner shampoos me from now till next Friday, she won’t get it out.

Brauner? Who on earth’s Brauner? She’s my maid. Then who am I? You’ve lost your papers, have you? Then you might as well call yourself Channah, he said. Who said? Where am I?

Boom! What’s that? A gun? That’s right! Or it’s a bomb, maybe. It must have been a bomb that put me here. I’m alive. It’s certainly not heaven, and I don’t think it’s hell, is it? No, it isn’t. It’s earth right enough. So I’m still alive. It would take more than a bomb to kill old....

(A name winked like a firefly in the depth of the darkness. She shied away from it as a nose shies away from a sudden whiff of ammonia.)

I was in the Post. That’s right. Post Sixteen. The air was stifling with the stench of wounds. Medical supplies were dwindling. The dead were piling up, for it was getting harder to bury them. Prr! Prr! Prr! Yes? That’s machine-guns. It’s cold! Air’s coming in. (She licked her lips. There was the taste of blood under the dust.)

“Channah,” said the young doctor in Post Sixteen, “they’ve just brought in a little girl in a dead faint. They’ve dumped her under the slope of the roof at the corner there. See if there’s anything you can do.”

Post Sixteen. In the cellars under the tall grey houses of Kupieçka, in the Warsaw ghetto. I was rolling and unrolling bandages. Then they let me swab the pus away and tie up the wounds. How did I get down here?

Hands dragged me down. I was going to tear their eyes out, but the hands pulled me away, down into the cellars and the sewers. There were two Germans in the street in black uniforms. One got hold of an iron spike and stood it upright on the pavement. Another got hold of a baby and lifted it and brought it down on the spike till the point stuck through....

Then it was like an electric bulb exploding, light and darkness at the same time. I knew what a lump of filth I was all the time I was Frau General, Aryan and German, lawfully wedded wife of Willy von Brockenburg, Hitler’s man, Goering’s man. Pretending all those years I knew nothing of what was going on in the concentration camps and the extermination camps. But I knew all the time, of course. I knew all the time.

Just as I’ve known since the moment I came to myself down here that I’m Elsie Silver, Elsie Silver, Elsie Silver, the trollop who betrayed the Jews, her people, and England, her country.

Hands reached out for me and dragged me down into the cellars. Then the fighting started. I swabbed pus and did up wounds. But I never took myself in. I never thought I’d made up for what I’d done, and what I hadn’t done. I was boiling a heap of bandages in a bucket when the young doctor called out to me and sent me to do what I could for a young girl they’d just brought into the Post. So I got up and went forward.

Then the bomb fell, I suppose.

If I tried hard, I think I could shake off this rubble and get clear. But I’m bone lazy. I’ve never tried hard at anything. Besides, I don’t want to get clear. I’m afraid of the Jews. And the Germans. And Himmler. He’s after me. He got Willy, my husband, and he’ll get me too. I like it the way it is, this buzzing in my ears. The drowsiness creeping along my veins like luminal. What bad luck, to come up out of it a few minutes, just time enough to remember what a cow I am! Won’t be long now. Not unpleasant, not bad at all. And safe, very safe. If only no grit in my hair....

The sea’s like glass all round.... Grey glass. Dark. Can’t see through....

Then a faint voice, a girl’s voice, came through the grey glassy water, weak as the voice of a young bird fallen out of the nest. Wasser the word was, tiny and far-off and near at hand.

“No!” murmured a voice inside her skull. “I don’t want to come back. Let me go. It’s good. It’s like bees buzzing and droning. No more Himmler. No more Elsie Silver. No more Frau General. No more Channah. All over.”

“Channah!” the young doctor said, a little more sharply than before. But it was a different sort of sound from the sound the girl made. For the girl was a living girl, and the young doctor was dead; she knew for certain he was dead. She was certain that the whole of Post Sixteen had been wiped out, excepting for herself, and, apparently, one small girl, calling for water. “Didn’t you hear, Channah?” the dead doctor went on. “That little girl I sent you.... See what she wants.”

The buzzing and droning thinned in the ears. Light spread through the grey glassy waters. It was not water now in the nostrils, but air, the hard smell of dust, like snuff. You might stop being Elsie Silver or the Frau General von Brockenburg, for you were those people entirely for your own sweet sake. It was different to stop being Channah. You were Channah for other people’s sake.

“Yes, doctor, at once,” said Elsie obediently to the voice in her brain. She made to move from under her bedclothes of rubble, but they were far heavier than she had thought. There was no strength in her. The effort almost made the slowed-down heart stop beating. She had succeeded in nothing more than moving her head a centimetre or two. She lay quite motionless for some time, feeling her blood to be as thin as water, and not knowing from what empty reservoir it could draw virtue to thicken again. It was not quite dark. Just enough light filtered into the place for her to see the rubble that covered her, some great slabs of masonry lying askew on her left, and on her right the sloping wall-section that had held death at arm’s length from her and her companion. The girl lay in the deeper darkness, still beyond her eye’s range. A second time she strained at the neck-tendons, skewing her neck round still further; then at last her eyes came to rest where the girl was. She, too, was almost covered by a bedding of dust and small chunks of lath and plaster, but at least the nose and mouth were free. You could just make out the profile, or thought you could, the delicate forehead, the fine cheek-bones, the delicate chin.

She tugged at her limbs again with increased urgency. You must get to the girl, not only because the dead doctor had given you charge of her but because she was so small and frail. The guns boomed from time to time. The machine-guns stuttered from far off and close at hand. Then, once again, a sound issued from the lips of the girl, this birdlike noise in its moral weight so much more resolute than the guns, though as sound it had hardly more lineament than the face from which it issued. A moment later, as if there were no other fitting answer in Hitler’s Warsaw to the last uttered breath of a trapped child, a smother of dust and plaster came down like a wry rain. While the air was still opaque with it, the inexpugnable determination came to the woman also trapped there that she must find somehow, from somewhere, the strength to free herself, thrust over to the girl, and lift her out of the tomb that was closing around them both. She tore at her nerves as with fingernails in the smooth walls of a crevasse. Somehow the broken and bleeding fingernails found lodgment in the smooth walls. Somehow she lifted herself from the vast inertia which lay on her like lead. She was over at the girl’s side, sweeping the dust away from her mouth, tearing the rubble away from her lips.

“There now, little one, there now,” she murmured, lifting the supine head to her bosom. “You’re all right now, see.” She bent her ear down upon the girl’s mouth, waited in an agony of suspense, then became aware that a faintest movement of air touched the lobe of her ear.

“You see, doctor?” It was the dead young doctor from Post Sixteen she was addressing now. But the doctor’s voice was silent. His last thought had been realized. Only his spectacles were glinting in the hole between the straddled wall-blocks. The rest was up to herself.

There was a little strength again in her fingertips. She got the girl clear, so that the whole frame was exposed. It did not seem there were any bones broken. She got her arms at last round the girl’s body and pulled her up from the waist. She was not so small as she had seemed when most of her was invisible under dust. Eleven? Twelve? More? But in Elsie’s profoundly enfeebled arms she might have been a mature woman, or a heavy piece of furniture. It felt, as Elsie tugged and pulled and tugged, that the veins in her forehead were standing out like cord; that the shoulder-blades might crack at any moment. Time was itself a heavy piece of furniture, that could be budged, maybe, by a gang of men in shirt-sleeves, with muscles like huge, smooth stones, but not, no, not by a corrupt woman, who had lain about for years on satin bed-sheets, her head resting on down pillows soft as water. Then at last she reached the jagged lumps that lay between them and the obliterated Post, only to find that there was no way out there; they were trapped. She laid the girl down, and scrabbled in the debris below to see if there was any way out under; she sought to climb the desolate rocks. But the intact ceiling that had saved them now held them fast.

Suddenly, with whatever there was in her lungs, she gave tongue.

“No!” she protested. “No! No!” She had been ready, anxious, to die herself. But the girl must not die. She forgot the inexorable enemies that lay in wait inches beyond the barrier, starvation, disease, the enemy’s guns and bombs, the fire-engirdled city, the enemies crouched in all the vast fields that stretched beyond river and hill and wood to the limits of all the horizons. “Help!” she cried. “Help!” She spoke to the girl again, soothing her. “Klaninke, little one! Can you hear me?” There was no reply. She brought her mouth still closer towards the girl’s ear. “Can you hear me?” She placed her finger under the young chin. Oh, the girl heard. She nodded. She felt the pressure of the chin once and still again on the side of her finger. A tear came into Elsie’s eyes, and drew a warm line down to her trembling mouth. The girl was aware of her, of arms protecting her, and, maybe, of a brain scheming for her.

She had asked for water. “Are you thirsty?” Elsie went on. Again the girl nodded. “Poor little one. There’ll be water soon. It will be possible to wait, yes?” The girl nodded again. She was trying to talk. It was not easy. It would probably not be easy for some time, after the horror of the interment in the bomb ruin, let alone the nameless horrors that must have gone before.

“Don’t talk now. Just nod your head, or shake it. Are you in pain?” The girl nodded. “Is it much pain?” The girl shook her head. “I’m going to ask your name. If you feel you can talk, and would like to tell it me, say what your name is.” She listened, her ear close against the child’s lips. There was silence for some time, then at last the name came.

“Mila,” she whispered. She tried to say something more. “Der ta....” But that was too much for the moment. The word was not finished.

“Mila! What a pretty name! There, don’t think of anything more now.”