The two loves of sophie.., p.32
The Two Loves of Sophie Strom, page 32
‘Sophie, what’s the matter?’ Jens asked as soon as he caught sight of her face.
‘My waters broke,’ Sophie said. ‘The contractions have started.’
Hans
He was asleep on the concrete bench. His limbs twitched and his eyeballs darted back and forth beneath the thin lids. In his dream he was holding Max and Sophie’s tiny newborn baby on his shoulder. Even after the bell started ringing and electric light flooded his vision, even after the image of that sweet little girl was obliterated, he could still feel the warmth of her soft round cheek against his, the almost weightless bundle of flesh and bones in his arms.
Mechanically Hans swung his legs around and groped with his hands until he was sitting up. Squinting against the dazzle, he could see the young guard still shaking the bell as he yelled: ‘On your feet! What is your name?’
On the floor beside the guard, as always, was a metal tray containing a hunk of bread, a tin mug of water, and a whip.
Hans resisted the temptation to close his eyes. ‘SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Oskar Schatten,’ he muttered, pushing himself up from the bench. The ringing stopped.
‘Louder!’ said the guard.
‘SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Oskar Schatten!’ Hans shouted.
He was so hungry and thirsty and sleep-deprived he could hardly stand. If it weren’t for his dreams, he knew, he would have cracked long ago. But Max and Sophie’s baby, little Suzi, had kept him moored to himself, fed him with a secret source of hope when all else had been stripped away.
The guard put the bell on the tray and picked up the whip. Hans flinched at the sight of the leather cracker dangling from the end of the long cord. The wounds on his chest and arms and back were only just starting to heal. For the past three days he had given no wrong answers.
‘Who is our guiding spirit and protector?’ the guard demanded.
‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler!’
‘To whom do we owe our allegiance?’
‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler!’
The words were like a deeply carved groove through which Hans rolled unthinkingly.
‘Who is our greatest enemy?’
He half-closed his eyes and glimpsed the sleeping baby in his arms. ‘The Jews.’
The whip twitched. ‘Louder!’
‘The Jews are our greatest enemy!’
‘What must be done with them?’
They must be saved, Hans thought.
The guard raised his right arm and Hans’s knees buckled momentarily. He forced himself to stand straight.
‘What must be done with them?’ the guard shouted.
‘They must be destroyed!’
‘Louder!’
‘THEY MUST BE DESTROYED!’
At last the guard told Hans he could drink. Hans knelt down and crawled over to the tray. He raised the mug to his lips. His hand was shaking so badly that some of the water spilled down his chin and he frantically tried to push it back into his parched mouth. Even while he drank, he was hungrily eyeing the piece of stale bread. As he carefully set the mug down, still half-full, and reached for the bread, the guard unexpectedly stood in his way, the whip still dangling menacingly from his hand. Hans looked up, dumbfounded by this change in routine.
‘What is today’s date?’ the guard asked.
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘What is today’s date?’
Hans understood. He would not be allowed to eat until he had guessed correctly. He had no idea how much time had elapsed since he’d been locked in this cell. At random, he said: ‘The third of July?’
‘Wrong.’
‘The fifth of July?’
‘Wrong.’
‘The sixth of July?’
‘Wrong. You know why?’
Hans looked blankly at the guard.
‘It’s past midnight,’ the guard said.
‘The seventh of July?’
Without a word the guard picked up the bell and turned on his heel. He left the cell, locking the door behind him.
Hans ate and drank with a pleasure and relief so great that they turned to shame when he caught sight of his reflection in the metal tray. How could he care so much about staying alive when Sophie had been murdered? He ought to be stronger than thirst, than hunger. It sickened him that his body had such power over him. When he’d finished the bread and water, he crawled slowly over to the bench, lay down and closed his eyes.
And then he remembered what day it was.
Max
It was just after midnight: half-moon rising over rooftops, the first hint of chill in the air. Max and Sophie were leaving their apartment on Rue du Cherche-Midi. Max carried their belongings in a knapsack and their sleeping daughter wrapped in a blanket on his shoulder while Sophie peered at the hand-drawn map. They didn’t speak at all. While they walked through darkness, they listened out for the echo of other footsteps, the hum of distant car engines. It was long after curfew and anyone they met on the street at night would almost certainly be an enemy.
Tonight was the seventh of July. They didn’t know whether the raid would take place tonight or tomorrow night but they’d decided it would be too dangerous to stay at home. Max had gone to the Gare de Lyon earlier in the day and tried to buy train tickets to the Zone Libre but he couldn’t get one for Suzi because she didn’t have a travel permit. In fact they couldn’t even rent a hotel room without a third ID card. Jens had told them he could manufacture new identity papers for their baby but they would not be ready until the next day. So Max and Sophie were left with no choice: they had to go underground.
They reached the iron fence that surrounded the Jardin du Luxembourg and followed it along Rue Auguste-Comte. As he walked behind Sophie, Max kept checking that his daughter was still breathing. How perfect she was, so small and frail, and how wrong that she should be in such danger in only her second day of life. Poor little Suzi … He’d wanted to call her Sophie, in tribute to Hans’s lost love, but his Sophie had said that would be too confusing, so in the end they’d settled on Suzana, a contraction of their mothers’ names. Suzi for short.
They came to a house, and a figure emerged from the shadows. Max tensed but Sophie kept walking. The man spoke in a murmur and Sophie recited the words Jens had made her memorise. The man turned and disappeared into a doorway. Max and Sophie followed. When the door was shut behind them, the man turned on a lantern and they caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow light. He was a boy, not a man: he couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen.
The boy led them down a steep staircase into a basement and Max concentrated on not losing his footing. At the far end of the basement, hidden behind planks leaning against the concrete wall, was a small door. Max had to duck his head to get through it, and the corridor in which he found himself on the other side was narrow and not much higher. ‘Close the door,’ the boy said in a neutral tone, and as soon as Max did they were encased in a cool, humid blackness that the halo of light from the lantern seemed only to deepen. Max breathed in the damp smell of rot and felt the first stirrings of panic.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘The catacombs,’ said the boy. ‘Safest place in the city.’
Hans
He was mumbling and twitching on the concrete bench for several minutes before Karl rang the bell next to his ear. He gasped and sat up, covering his eyes with his forearm. In his dream everything had been so dark and silent.
‘On your feet!’ Karl barked. ‘Name!’
‘SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Oskar Schatten.’
Hans’s ears were still ringing and he could barely hear his own voice.
‘Louder!’
‘SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Oskar Schatten!’
‘Who is our guiding spirit and protector?’
‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler!’
‘To whom do we owe our allegiance?’
‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler!’
‘Who is our greatest enemy?’
‘The Jews!’
‘What must be done with them?’
‘They must be destroyed!’
‘Louder!’
‘THEY MUST BE DESTROYED!’
‘Good,’ said Karl with a smile. ‘And what is today’s date?’
‘The seventh of July.’
‘Yes. The night of the Liberty raid. Are you ready, little brother?’
Hans looked into Karl’s eyes and felt an inkling of dread. ‘Ready for what?’
Max
The boy took Max’s knapsack and carried it down an iron ladder that led through a sort of dry well. Sophie, carrying the lantern, went next. When she was about six feet into the narrow hole, she looked up at Max and said: ‘It’s all right. Come on.’
Sophie knew all about his claustrophobia. She understood that the prospect of hiding in the Paris catacombs – that vast network of tunnels sixty feet underground where the bones of six million corpses lay neatly stacked – was Max’s worst nightmare come to life. Suzi, now strapped to his chest, whined quietly. Her eyes were still tightly shut. Was she was having bad dreams or did she sense her father’s fear? Max pressed his lips to her forehead, stroked her silky hair, and said ‘Shhh.’ Then he turned around and began to climb down the ladder.
At the bottom the boy took the lantern from Sophie and silently walked ahead of them through the narrow corridor. Sophie held Max’s hand and asked: ‘How is she?’ She spoke in a low voice but it was amplified by the strange acoustics of the tunnel and the boy turned around with his finger to his lips.
‘Still sleeping,’ Max whispered. ‘Still breathing.’
Sophie squeezed his hand.
Max filled his lungs with the stale, putrid air and tried not to think about the massive weight of earth pressing down on them from above.
They followed the boy for what felt like hours, their feet trudging through foul water, until at last they reached a small opening where the ground was higher – and dry. Someone had lit a fire. The boy held up his lantern, illuminating the squarish shape of this underground room. There were half a dozen other couples there, with small children. Piles of blankets and pillows. Some food and flasks of water. The sound of coughing and wailing, whispers and lullabies. The palpable tension of fear. The boy carried the lantern to an unoccupied corner and dropped the knapsack onto the rock floor. ‘You’re the last ones,’ he told them. ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sophie.
The boy nodded and walked away, the lantern’s glow shrinking then vanishing and leaving them in the dim flicker of firelight. None of the others spoke to them. They were busy with their own little ones, and besides, they were all aware of the network’s rules: the fewer comrades you knew, the fewer would be endangered if you were caught. Now Max had stopped walking, Suzi started to fuss again. Sophie loosened the straps tied around his back and lowered the child into her arms. She sat next to Max and the two of them watched their daughter breastfeed in the smoky orange glow, arguing in low voices over which of them should sleep first.
In the end Sophie won the argument and Max lay on the blanket, a pillow under his head, Suzi curled up inside his arm. He felt guilty that Sophie, who had given birth only yesterday, should be the one to keep guard, but it was true that he hadn’t slept much recently: his dreams were unendurable and he’d been constantly on edge at the thought of the looming raid. Would he even have trusted himself to stay awake?
The baby was silent but wide-eyed, so Sophie sang her a lullaby in a hushed voice. ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream …’ Max’s breathing slowed and in place of the mass of earth suspended above his head he found himself in a boat floating on a glassy lake, water lapping against the hull, on a perfect summer afternoon long ago.
When Suzi had fallen asleep, Sophie leaned across and kissed Max on the lips. ‘Süsse Träume.’
‘What time is it?’ he asked drowsily.
She looked at her watch in the faint glow of firelight. ‘Ten past one.’
‘Wake me if you hear anything. And wake me after an hour no matter what.’
‘I will. Now get some sleep.’
Hans
In the cold cell, Hans’s fingers were numb as he tried to button up his jacket. He was so tired he could feel himself swaying as he stood. His eyes closed for a second and he heard the notes of the lullaby echoing slowly inside his head. The song, the girl, and—
Karl slapped him hard in the face. Hans reeled but stayed on his feet. His cheek stung, his ear hummed. ‘Time to wake up, little brother. You remember what the Führer said about the Nazi of the future? “He must be tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel.” You’re too soft.’ Karl grabbed the back of Hans’s hair and pulled his face close. His breath smelled of meat. ‘I’m going to change that,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to melt you down and forge you into something new. Tonight we will hunt down your weakness … and kill it.’
Sophie
Max groaned in his sleep. Suzi lay beside him, cradled in a nest of blankets. Sophie stroked Max’s back and shushed him. The last thing she needed was him waking up their daughter. Other than the echoing drip-drip-drip of water in the tunnels, there was almost no sound at all. The fire was dying and in the spreading darkness she couldn’t tell if any of the others were awake. But there was no way the Nazis could find them down here, Sophie told herself. The catacombs were a labyrinth: she and Max probably wouldn’t even be able to find their way back to the surface without the boy’s help. What was happening up there now? She imagined the SS raiding their apartment on Rue du Cherche-Midi, Karl Schatten smashing her piano in a rage when he realised his prey had escaped. She tried to picture where the boy might be hiding, then felt a jolt of panic at the thought of what would happen if he were killed or arrested during the night. Would they ever make it out of the catacombs? Sophie went over to the embers of the fire and looked at her watch. Two twenty. She had let Max sleep longer than he’d wanted, but he looked so peaceful now that she was reluctant to wake him. He’d been sleeping badly ever since he was shot. Besides, she felt wide awake. She sat down beside him, her back against the hard rock wall, and thought about the book she was going to write.
Hans
He sat in the back of a limousine, flanked by SS guards with submachine guns. Through the windows he saw the monuments of Paris flash past. The Arc de Triomphe, the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the Seine glittering in moonlight. The streets were empty and they made quick progress. The thrum of the engine lulled Hans to sleep and he dreamed of silent blackness, dripping water.
The car stopped and Hans woke with a start. The guards pulled him out and he found to his surprise that they were not parked by any of the safe houses on the Liberty list. They were near the Jardin du Luxembourg. They entered a brightly lit building. A former school, by the looks of it. Not the same place where Max and Sophie had gone, he noted with relief. The clock on the wall in the entrance hall told Hans it was half past two in the morning. Karl led them down a series of steps into an underground bunker, where soldiers saluted them. Their ‘Sieg Heil’s echoed in the cavernous dark. The air smelled of paraffin. One of the soldiers took a wooden stave from a rack on the wall and dipped its end into a large bucket. Another soldier held a lighter close. The flaming torch lit up the space around them. They were in what looked like a disused Metro station. The walls were painted with swastikas and train tracks swept past the platform where they stood. Karl and the two guards were each given a torch. Karl’s face shimmered demonically. ‘Follow me,’ he said, before jumping off the platform and striding along the train tracks, torch aloft.
Fearful now, Hans asked: ‘Where are we going?’
‘The catacombs, little brother,’ Karl called over his shoulder. ‘You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?’
One of the guards prodded Hans in the ribs with the barrel of his submachine gun. Hans jumped onto the tracks. Stumbling over sleepers, he caught up with Karl. ‘Why are we going to the catacombs?’ he asked. His voice sounded shaky. It was hard to get enough air in his lungs.
‘The resistance found out about our raid,’ Karl explained. ‘But we discovered their new hiding place.’
Hans closed his eyes and silently hissed: Wake up.
Sophie
Max’s body twitched and he made those little grunting, humming noises he always made when he was having a nightmare, as if he had a mouthful of bees. He was desperately trying to break the surface of his dream, to come up for air and yell, but Sophie was worried he might wake Suzi or the others. One of the men had rebuilt the fire an hour ago but they all seemed fast asleep now. So she lay down next to Max and curled her body around his, resting her chin on his shoulder and whispering: ‘Shhh, it’s all right, Max, everything’s fine, we’re safe, go back to sleep’. At last he calmed down and the twitching ceased. After that there was no sound but the dripping of water, the crackle of the fire, her loved ones’ breathing.
Hans
They fell into a steady rhythm and Hans listened to the crunch of their boots in the ballast, the quiet roar of the torch flames, his own ragged breathing. After a while they turned into a narrower corridor and left the train tracks behind. Here the air was closer and damp cobwebs clung to Hans’s face. The crunch of ballast was replaced by the slosh and squelch of muddy water. A vile smell filled Hans’s nostrils and stung the back of his throat. The guards walked in single file behind him and the light from their torches illuminated walls crammed with human bones. So many dead bodies … Where had their souls gone? Hans thought of Sheol. Was this what the afterlife would be like?
They came to a place where the tunnel divided. Three identical-looking arteries branched out in different directions. Karl stopped and stared into each, frowning. Hope flared in Hans: perhaps they were lost? Karl ordered one of the guards to step closer and hold his torch, then took a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. He unfolded what appeared to be a map and examined it. In the wavering light Hans caught a glimpse of some words painted on a wall in one of the tunnels: YOU ARE ENTERING THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD. Hans shivered. Now he was no longer moving forward he could feel fatigue unfurling through his body, like blood in water. His legs wobbled, his eyelids drooped. Perhaps it was just the effects of sleep deprivation, but there seemed something unreal about tonight. The watery silence, the undertow of dread, the maze of tunnels, the interminable quest. It was like a dream – a normal person’s dream. The kind that quickly vanishes upon waking. Maybe I’m dying, Hans thought. Maybe my body is stretched out even now on that concrete bench in the brightly lit cell but my soul is retreating inward, spiralling down to the underworld in search of Sophie. Is she here somewhere? He looked around but saw only Karl and the guards and beyond them darkness. Surrendering to exhaustion, he closed his eyes and found himself staring into a vast black sea. Sleep or death? Either way, it looked peaceful and inviting. Was this where he would find her again? Hans yearned to dive into its depths, to let his soul swim with hers in night eternal. He staggered and his hand caught hold of a wall to stop himself falling.
