Half in shadow a novel, p.33
Half in Shadow: A Novel, page 33
The truck slips off the road and into deeper snow, and several prisoners are pulled roughly out through the large back doors to dig out the wheels. Guards curse. It isn’t working. Everyone must get out to push it back onto the road, the effort too great for some.
Josephine can barely stand. There are pains in her back. She has no strength.
They are rewarded at least with mouthfuls of snow to give them momentary ease of their cracked lips.
The German boy whom the crowd had set upon makes a run for the edge of the track that falls away into hilly forest. Everyone stops what they are doing, shocked. Two of the four guards react quickly, firing on him at the same time as he reaches the edge. He falls with bullets in his back, and Gisela chokes down a sob.
“He was just a boy,” she whispers to no one.
One of the guards is so angry about the loss of a prisoner that he kicks one of the other boys, none of whom are game to try the same.
An elderly gentleman puts his arm around Josephine and helps her climb inside, Gisela on the other side, helping her in. Josephine crawls into the dark, grateful again for her mother’s lap.
The doors are shut. The engine roars loudly, blowing out the cold.
“Remember how Yves used to climb on top of your lap when he was small and suck his thumb?” says Gisela. “He didn’t want anyone else. He was yours. He was always yours.”
Josephine smiles inside, feels the weight of Yves almost, can smell his sweet hair.
Gisela strokes her daughter’s head and hums a tune. Josephine is small again, her parents each with a hand.
A stabbing pain in her lower belly to remind her where she is, what is happening to her, what to fear. How much she has lost.
Memories are best left in the past.
44. THE DAY OF THE END
The tent door flaps aimlessly in wind. The dim light of the lantern shudders. Through the cavity Arthur can see the moonlit field that has a single, tall wooden stake, where he will be shot at dawn. He wonders if there is some rationale behind his placement so close to his execution, whether the stake reinforces the idea of good versus bad, as the symbolic line between the two.
He had come back from Belgium six months after he had left his unit. He had argued with the captain who had first applied the charge of desertion. He had not deserted, Arthur stated. He had helped their cause a different way.
But you had the opportunity to return, did you not?
It was a point that he could not counter with any solid argument. Gordon had told them that it was Arthur’s choice to stay. Gordon had told them of a girl, of a life that appeared to his jurors as comfortable compared with the standards of soldiers in the trenches.
You are setting a bad example, how to avoid fighting for your country, said one of his accusers.
I was severely injured when I arrived there. I didn’t run, I just thought that I was still needed, most of the country occupied.
And who were the people you were living with?
With members of a resistance organisation. We helped Allied soldiers escape.
Are you aware that you swore an oath to fight?
Yes, but—
Are you aware that we have a witness statement that claims you were able bodied for several months before you returned?
Yes, but by then it was harder to leave . . . I want to fight again for Britain—
It didn’t matter. They needed to make an example. The war was looking hopeless. They could not allow men to have thoughts of fighting it elsewhere. They needed every man, and they would sacrifice one if that meant securing the loyalty of others.
Arthur had seen some misgivings on the faces of the men charged with assessing the account of his crimes. The officers had examined a pale man with soft golden-brown eyes, with an accent that every so often held a hint of the North. He did not freely speak or self-defend but answered all the questions without any apparent grievance. They had heard him admit to his crimes with a humble acceptance that was almost, if not for the seriousness of the offence, endearing. They had seen a man who appeared honest. And it was this honesty that saw them confused and to some degree pained to prescribe the punishment of death.
Though not all of them felt this way. Some of them, narrow eyed and with a keener understanding of the thoughts of certain men, saw him as an enemy of the Allies and deserving of death.
What sort of man are you, Shine, one such juror had asked, who can admit to negligence of his own comrades-in-arms and then in the next breath profess to be innocent of malfeasance?
One that knows the difference between the two, sir.
Not that it mattered to anyone. A crime was committed, a charge was laid, a sentence was passed, and it would be recorded for anyone, for no one. In a matter of hours, he would be in a box and buried unceremoniously in foreign soil.
A company of men crunch the dried earth in heavy boots as they pass the tent of shame, the faint jangling of their tin cups strung to packs. He can picture their faces, knows what lies ahead of them, knows that they are once more headed to uncertainty to draw the lottery of life and death.
Gordon stands just outside the doorway of the tent, glances furtively behind him, then steps inside. He is a young man, perhaps early thirties. Dashing if he had to describe him and likely to succeed in life if he makes it out of France alive.
“You are extremely humble, and I will never forget your help,” Gordon tells him. “You should know that I never expected the powers to take it this far.”
Arthur nods, but doesn’t look at him; more in the hope he will leave him alone to his thoughts, for there is so little time left now to think.
“When I arrived back I made the mistake of telling them about you, made a passing comment about the girl. Wouldn’t have mentioned her name even if I’d remembered it, you have to know that . . . They wrote it all down, of course, everything noted, though were seemingly uncaring since I’d brought back intelligence . . . You seemed more of a hero for a brief minute. To be honest I thought I’d never see you again. Then later . . . after . . . well, they called me in again, a more intense interrogation the second time.”
He pauses. Arthur looks up to see that he is sincere.
“As you learned at the trial, the information you gave me in the file was false,” Gordon continues. “Our men were led into an ambush. The map was staged, I’m assuming. Your contacts there were played . . . It didn’t help your case in the end, as you know. I spoke in your favour during the trial. I’m still a bit stunned by the sentence. A short prison sentence maybe, not death . . . I’m sorry. Truly I am, Arthur.”
Arthur nods tiredly, closes his eyes. Perhaps it’s for the best. He’s done some things he knows will not be forgiven. He has torn open torsos and filled them with lead and copper. He has seen these dead men that continue to live inside his mind.
“I have to go,” says Gordon, “before someone sees me here.”
Gordon bends down to him, pats him gently on the back, speaks softly, then is gone. Arthur lowers his head on his chest and drifts into sleep. There are no fires in the dream, as if this close to death there is nothing more to fear. His images are clear, of Josephine, Jack, and Harriet, the three of them vibrant and carefree; and of himself, at peace, his feet on soft sand before an ocean that shimmers and beckons. This place he does not wish to leave.
Father! No!
“Jack,” he mumbles, then jolts awake, chills at the base of his neck, and something drops from his hand.
Through the doorway to his death, the sun bursts out from a cluster of feeble clouds on the horizon to lay one long yellow arm across the earth toward him. He looks down to follow the light to his feet and a small hunting knife on the ground beside his chair.
There’s been a delay, I’ve heard, said Gordon. You have at least an hour. It’s all clear at the back. Forest mostly. Broken buildings. Take the rope with you so they don’t see you were given a knife. It’s your choice in the end, of course, but I know what I would do.
He looks up quickly and around him. No sounds outside.
He tilts the chair, falls heavily on his shoulder. He strains the bindings to reach for the knife, clutches it firmly, then twists it toward the rope. The metal meets his hands twice, blood trickling down his fingers.
He thinks of Jack, who is gone, Harriet, too. There is nothing here for him but death.
The measure of a good man, he was told once, is the way he treats his friends and enemies, as if they are the same. But he would argue that the measure of a man means nothing in the end if he dies alone.
45. THE FUTURE
ELEANOR
1938
The train hisses to a standstill. I take my small suitcase from the shelf above me. I have watched the fields and villages for hours. People, cars, horses, bikes. The air is clean after a shower of rain. A man is waiting on the station platform expectantly.
He sees me first, and his smile takes my breath away. Not that he is fine looking, which he is, but that he is so like the man in the photograph, my father.
The package that was handed me at the funeral contained two letters that were returned to a Gisela Verhoeven, who had written to my father. I opened the first of these to find a photograph of a very young child. Gisela had sent the letters secretly, the war still a year away from its conclusion, thinking that Arthur would receive the news via the English address that he had given to Xavier during his recuperation at La Vérité. Gisela had been sent to prison, serving a short time for no specific crime other than being aware of activities deemed criminal. She had no way to know my father wouldn’t be at this address to receive the announcement that he was the father of the small boy in the photograph. The envelopes had been opened, and since the handwriting instructing the letters to be returned is in my mother’s hand, I have to presume Harriet knew of the letters’ contents.
“Hello, Eleanor,” says Etienne.
He bends down to graze my cheek with his. He has a thick head of dark hair and light-brown eyes. He is dreadfully handsome, tall and broad shouldered, with his open-mouth smile, a small gap between his front teeth.
“I am so glad that we finally meet,” he says in English, but with a heavy accent. He takes hold of my shoulders, then leans back slightly to inspect my face, as if to convince himself that I really exist, before stepping forward to hug me.
He is my half brother, the brother my mother decided to keep from me. To try and piece together my mother’s thoughts, from a letter that she had of my father’s—perhaps the only one that wasn’t destroyed—was to understand the grief she had felt from losing my brother, Jack, in the war, for the misguided blame she had toward Arthur. A possessive nature that certainly was not always in my best interests. But to blame her for anything is wrong. For people work with what they know, from their own experiences, good and bad, and I know that she did this because she loved me, that she feared the loss of another child. That she had not fallen out of love with my father, but that she couldn’t live with such a daily reminder of what she had lost.
My father wasn’t told of my existence. That probably hurts more than anything else. Would that have changed what happened to him? Of course. Would it have changed my view of life? Absolutely.
There was no letter from the War Office correcting the news of his execution. I presume it looked better if they hadn’t in fact lost him. Amongst the personal items that I had discovered while cleaning out my mother’s past were my father’s personal effects—found in his haversack on the battlefield and sent back from France—that my mother had kept hidden. Amongst them was her letter to say she’d left. She would have known about me by this stage of the pregnancy, yet she didn’t mention me.
My mother’s choice was to raise me by herself. She was pregnant at the time my brother, Jack, was killed, though she didn’t know it then. However, she knew it by the time my father had signed up for war, by the time she left him. I imagine the pregnancy had been a part cure for her grief.
“I learned about my history very early,” says Etienne casually, light jacket over an open-neck shirt. I can tell he is a man who is comfortable with himself, but without conceit, if I can judge this early. “My uncle Xavier wrote a book that tells much about what happened during those days.”
We have walked to the car. He puts my suitcase in the trunk. And we climb into his cream-coloured drop-top coupe. On the floor of the automobile is a newspaper. It is in French. I try to read the headlines but fail.
“What is happening?”
“Oh, you have probably heard. The chancellor of Germany is growing his army, annexing his neighbours, and France is particularly worried like the rest of us. Adolf Hitler has already negated the Treaty of Versailles, as you would be aware, and placed troops along the Rhineland.”
I had heard, though I had never taken a deep interest in news or politics.
“What does it mean?” I say.
“No one really knows. But people are talking all the time, thinking there might be another war.”
“Surely not like the last one.”
“We pray it is not.”
“What happened to your uncle Xavier? At the funeral, I saw that he’d been injured.”
“He was shot during the escape of our father and my mother, and then was sent to prison, where his leg became infected. While in prison it became so bad they had to remove it. And since he was useless for labour and not deemed a threat, they sent him back to Brussels. He seems to think that authorities thought he would die anyway . . . You will be seeing him again, too. He is very keen to meet you properly.”
“He was a priest, you wrote?”
“Yes, he didn’t go back to the priesthood, but he did much for the church in other ways. He helped with counselling people in grief. He set up a charity to help the families who had lost loved ones in war, and an orphanage near the church. He is a great man. You will love him.”
I watch a family have a photograph taken in a park outside. Mother with a baby and two other children who stand up and lean against her. On the crest of a rise behind them is a church and tiers of gardens and narrow pear-shaped trees. The sun shines in through the window so that I have to shield my eyes with my hand. It is beautiful here and peaceful.
“You told me some things in your letter about my father and Josephine,” I say. “It saddened me greatly, what happened. To learn that . . .”
He turns to look at me to see why I’ve stopped. I am choking on the words to stop me from crying, but some tears escape anyway.
“It is overwhelming. I know,” he says. “Then to meet your half brother for the first time. I didn’t really understand a lot of it until I was older. Papa didn’t tell me some things. He didn’t think it would benefit me to know all the details, only that he loved my mother and did not return to England when he had the chance because he wanted to be with her, to protect her. I know that it probably hurts to hear this, but he did not even know you existed until recently. He used to buy the English papers to keep up with news and look through the obituaries. He came across the obituary for your mother, and in it he learned there was a daughter whose father died in the Great War. Xavier offered to go to the funeral to learn the truth. He recognised straightaway that you were Papa’s daughter.”
I frown at my reflection in the glass. I feel a tinge of bitterness that comes in a rush sometimes, which I attempt to force back, because of my mother, her frailty.
“I’m really sorry for the lost years,” he says. “Papa had escaped his early death, his execution. It may have seemed dishonourable, but the powers at the time, the men, had not seen a future when a daughter and a son would want to know their father, that what they saw as justice would deprive us of a past. He had escaped from where they were keeping him; then he was caught by Germans as he attempted to cross back into Belgium. He served out the remainder of the war in a German prison. Once released, he returned to Belgium to look for Josephine. Papa knew she had previously lived in Louvain and searched and found my grandmother Gisela in the broken town and Xavier and, to our father’s shock, his baby son.
“I have tried often to think of my mother giving birth in prison, because of her participation in the resistance, and then having to hand me away to strangers. My mother died in my grandmother’s arms in prison, not knowing where I was and what was to become of me.
“It was a German by the name of Franz who intervened shortly after that, who had me returned to Gisela. We were then sent back to Brussels. It was so hard on my grandmother . . . ,” he says, voice breaking with emotion, though he controls it better than I could.
I know that Gisela suffered much, too, losing her husband and two sons and then her daughter.
“Who is this Franz? How did they know him?”
“My grandmother said he knew my mother, and while they were in prison, he argued for their release. He won the release of my grandmother but at a cost. He was demoted. He came to see Grand-mère once after the war, and they talked for hours. He stayed the night and then went back home the next day. Though that was the only time he came. They have exchanged a number of letters since.”
“Where is he now?”
“Germany. He married. Has some children. Two, no . . . three. He is still in the military, I believe.”
He slows down as we approach a narrow laneway.
“Over in that direction is Louvain. Some call it Leuven, the Dutch way. Don’t get me started on the politics, and don’t talk about it in front of Grand-mère whatever you do . . . Anyway we live in a village close by.”
“What do you do?”
“I am a photographer. I have a studio in the town. A lot of people getting married.”
“And my father?”
“Yes?”
“He is looking forward to seeing me?”
“Very much.” His eyes glisten warmly.
I feel my stomach flutter. I had believed him dead for years. He is a traitor in England but not here. He is a hero, much loved, by the sounds of Etienne’s letter.
