The Captain was unconscious when she got back to him. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, as best she could tell in the dark, but she wouldn’t have dared move him even if she could have. He was hidden and dry, so the barn was as good a place as any. But he was going to need water, food, clean dressings.
So Sarah went back to Rothenstadt.
It had taken more than an hour to rinse the blood and mud from her clothes, then longer to find somewhere for it all to dry where it wouldn’t be found. She had swept her muddy footprints from the corridors as well, but the school was so grubby that it barely mattered. When she finally climbed into her cot, she found her heart was beating too fast to sleep.
She dozed through the next day’s lessons, with the winter light and buzzing electric bulbs cruelly bright to her twitching eyes. She was barely capable of evading the Mouse’s innocuous but probing questions. In the bathroom. Going for a walk. Watching the storm. Couldn’t sleep. Just stepped out. Yes, and my socks. At dinner she was dropping a dry roll into her pocket when she realized her constant companion was watching.
“What are you doing with that bread?” asked the Mouse, sounding only faintly curious. Not again, thought Sarah.
“Keeping it for later. I sometimes get hungry.”
“You could eat it on your walk…”
Sarah swung on the Mouse, but she was already busying herself with the salt.
“Mouse,” Sarah began after squashing her anger. “Sometimes this place is so…horrible, that I can’t be here any more. Do you understand that? I mean, I’m not leaving. I just need to be outside from time to time.”
The Mouse pushed an unconvincing vegetable around her plate. “You wouldn’t leave me here, would you? Alone, I mean.”
Sarah answered immediately, knowing a pause would be damning. “No, of course not.” She smiled. With your eyes.
“Do you promise?” she pleaded.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
“Yes.” Liar, liar, liar.
“Here, take my bread,” the Mouse offered. Sarah took it, and the uncomfortable feeling that she was stealing, with a tired smile.
Maybe I’ll be here for ever after all.
Although the sanatorium had all the dressings and tools she thought she might need, she was faced with the problem of transporting water to the barn. In the end she resorted to using a flower vase that sloshed its precious contents at every opportunity onto her still-wet coat. The moonless night provided a series of trip hazards and mysterious puddles for her tired feet to find. Twice she found herself in the wrong place and had to correct her course, taking an age to reach the barn, all the time worrying that he’d been found.
She tried watching the barn from a distance, but there wasn’t enough light for her to tell if anyone was inside, outside or surrounding it. Finally she just walked up to the entrance to find it exactly as she’d left it.
“Hello?”
She pushed her way in and tugged the doors closed behind her, pulling a candle and matches from her pocket. With her eyes closed against the flare of sulphur to keep her night vision, she struck the match and waited for the red glow through her eyelids to fade. The barn seemed empty, except for dancing shadows. The candle sputtered and eventually came to life.
“Captain?”
“You know, the nurses haven’t been in to see me all day,” a voice croaked from the straw. Inside Sarah a little fire ignited, fed by hope and relief.
“I hid you very well.”
“Yes, and now I smell of dung. Thank you for that.” He sounded pitifully weak, but the words were still his. This pleased her, not just because he was alive and she was not alone.
Sarah kneeled next to the pile and brushed the straw from his head and shoulders. He was a sickly white, and his lips were chapped and dry. His eyes opened long enough to look at her and then closed again. She put the vase down and began to unpack her pockets.
“It makes a difference from the whiff of impropriety, doesn’t it?”
He tried to laugh but the sound rattled in his chest. “The girl who ate a dictionary.”
“A girl who knows things. So unusual. How does the world cope?” She wriggled behind him and with difficulty she slid her knees under his shoulders. “Hup,” she ordered. He cried out as she pulled his head into her lap. She reached for the vase and tipped it towards his mouth. “Drink.”
It was a messy process, but he gulped down the tepid water. It seemed to have an immediate effect on him. His eyes opened wider, and it was probably Sarah’s imagination, but the cool blue seemed to gain a spark of life again.
“You led them away?”
“Oh yes, I told them, no British spies here. You have the wrong address.”
“Are they still looking?” He sounded like he didn’t care, but he probably couldn’t.
“They didn’t inform me otherwise. Drink.” He swallowed another few mouthfuls.
How will you keep him fed? How will you get him home?
“They didn’t know who you were, or why you were there,” she explained.
“How do you know that?”
“A very nice SS trooper called…Sturm, Stern? He’s from Dresden.” The Captain made a curious noise. “I know things, remember? Let me look at your shoulder.”
The coat pulled away, but the shirt underneath was stuck to the wound by a dark brown crust, along with Sarah’s handkerchief. A giant scab. Maybe. What was the first thing her mother would have done?
“This needs cleaning. Tell me what to do.” Sarah tapped his good shoulder. “Come on.”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” She was flabbergasted. “Were you shot before? Someone you know must have been shot, you’re a gottverdammter soldier. You were in the last war, weren’t you?”
“I’m not a medic and yes, I was shot before. There were doctors and nurses, with a good bedside manner.”
“Fine. They cleaned it?” He nodded. “Then, bandage… things? Right.”
Sarah did not like him not knowing things. He always knew things when she did not.
She poured a little water over his shoulder and used it to dissolve the crust. He hissed as she began to pull the shirt away. The wound wept blood but didn’t open.
“There’s a bullet in here, isn’t there?” Sarah demanded. “Does that need to come out?”
“I don’t know,” he whined, shaking his head.
“Hey. Stop snivelling,” she barked. “Straight yes or no answer.”
“I don’t have any useful information for you,” he said, regaining his composure. He winced again as Sarah bathed the wound. She slowly and clumsily tried to bandage his shoulder. He began sweating with the effort of moving and gritted his teeth.
“Talk to me. Tell me about the Grapefruit Bomb,” Sarah said.
“What about it?”
“See, this is the bit where I get you to talk about something to take your mind off what I’m doing. So just…things, Captain Floyd. Consider this an opportunity to reveal my ignorance. How does it work?”
“It’s complicated.”
“So make it simple.” She was the one who needed to take her mind elsewhere. Her dressing was hopelessly amateur.
“Professor Meitner says, there’s…an element, uranium. It’s unstable.”
“Unstable. What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t like being together… It wants to be smaller, to become something else.”
“Don’t we all.”
She just needed him to talk.
“If it’s hit with a spare neutron, a small bit of another atom, it can split to become two new things.”
“This sounds very technical. Carry on.”
“When that happens, it releases a little burst of energy. Like a breaking stick making a sound. Tiny but… Jesus.”
The wound started to seep again.
“Keep still. Go on.”
“It also spits out three neutrons. Remember the small bit?”
“Indeed.” Sarah was mopping up the blood with her skirt. She hoped it wouldn’t show.
“These extra bits can hit another big bit and make that spit out some more extra bits. They’ll make more and so on in a big chain.”
“The bits spit, the spit hits, and then the bits spit some more. It’s a tongue-twister,” Sarah chimed in with her mother’s best party voice.
“Eventually all the bits that make up the Grapefruit Bomb would be spitting and hitting all at once and – boom.”
She pulled the bandage tighter, hoping the pressure would help. “Like gunpowder.”
“No. Much, much more powerful. Millions and millions of times. Are you bandaging me or tying me up?” He winced.
“Sorry. Enough talking. Now eat.” She unwrapped her meagre supplies and tore the bread into small chunks before feeding them to him like a bird. If the wound opened again when she was gone, would the bleeding stop, or would it keep going until there was nothing left? Would she be bringing tomorrow’s lunch to a corpse?
Kommt Zeit, kommt Rat – you’ll deal with that in good time.
“Thif breadf is schtale.”
“Day old bread is cheaper, didn’t you know? They’d say you’d have to be Jewish to know that trick, but this?” She held up a piece of dry bread. “This is pure Aryan greed.”
“What’s that?” He looked at the rectangular bundle that was left.
“It’s a book.”
“A book?” He started to laugh again, a dry hacking sound, but he had to stop.
She bristled at his ingratitude. “I thought you might get bored.”
An arm reached out of the straw for it and made a hand-clenching gesture. “Mein Kampf?” he said on seeing the book. “I’ve read it, it’s rubbish.”
“Rothenstadt’s library is very limited.”
Sarah was so tired when she got back to the dorm she could barely get undressed. She almost failed to see the Mouse waiting in the dark, but nodded in her direction to acknowledge the moment.
Sarah climbed into her cot. She couldn’t worry about the Mouse. Her mind was already full.
How long are you going to be able to do this?
As long as it takes.
Long enough for him to die or for you to get caught?
Exactly that long.
He was not a corpse. In fact he claimed to feel better.
“So what’s happening in the war? Why has nothing happened since September?” she asked.
Sarah ladled the soup into the Captain’s mouth. The tin container was a real find, but entering the kitchens and seeing how their food was prepared had been the price. Feeling around in the dark for food while the cockroaches played was bad enough, but finding maggots on the ham was nauseating. The soup had been out too long, but it smelled all right. She fully expected it to make a reappearance in the refectory tomorrow, anyway. One way or another.
“I’d rather hear about Elsa Schäfer,” he said, the spoon at his lips.
“You’re kidding, right?” she exploded. “When would I have had time, the energy to do anything about her?”
“You’re spilling the—”
“I believe we’re dealing with the results of your little phase of the operation right now. If you want me to stop stealing food for you and smuggling it out, just let me know.”
She waited for an answer, but he just watched her. Her fury burned itself out over the seconds – it was too exhausting.
Finally, he spoke. “So shall I eat that food or catch you up on world events?”
“It’s hard to be superior with soup dripping down your chin. Swallow, then talk.”
He obeyed. “Well, as of three days ago…bad weather stopped the invasion of France. No more fighting this winter. The British were in place by October anyway, makes no difference.”
“So what will happen in the spring?” Sarah found something unpleasant on the spoon and wiped it off on her sleeve. It seemed strange to be talking about the idea of spring, of the future, when survival meant dealing with one day at a time.
“Optimistically?”
“If you like.” She liked the sound of that right now.
“The Allies will give Manstein a bloody nose in Belgium and it’ll all grind to a halt.”
“And realistically?”
“Guderian is right, and they’ll be too fast and too strong. The British will be lucky to stop them outside Paris while the French are still sitting in their trenches, waiting for the last war to start again.”
“You’re very well informed.”
“I go to the right parties.”
“This would be easier if you fed yourself,” Sarah remarked, giving up on the last few trails at the bottom of the can.
“I can’t move my arm right now.”
She reached out and touched his arm gently. Then she took it between her thumb and forefinger, repositioning it. He blanched and turned his head away.
“Not better, then,” she murmured, peeling his coat away from his dressing.
“Give it time,” he said.
She touched the skin next to the wound. “This is…warm. Is that normal?”
“Means it’s getting better.”
Despite Sarah’s experience, she could not tell when he was lying. He might just be tired, or he might be a professional liar.
“Biscuits, then. You can put those in your own mouth. The best weevils the Reich has to offer.” She offered a napkin of powdery beige mush. “So, tell me more about the bomb. Is that going to be ready for spring?”
“No, but sooner than I imagined.” He picked out a weevil, then another, before giving up. “A few months ago, I thought a bomb like this was…going to need several tonnes of uranium. Too big to use. That’s why Schäfer had a Zeppelin refitted to carry it.”
“Ah, that’s where I came in.” She immediately recoiled from the memory of that day and began to pack up the picnic.
“But now Professor Meitner thinks they’ll need just a few kilograms. A bomb you could drop from a plane…or even carry.”
“You’d want to fly away very fast.”
“I have a friend at Siemens. He says they’re working on planes without pilots. Rockets. You know what a rocket is?”
“Fireworks.” She almost laughed.
“Oh, so much bigger than that…” He winced. “I need to rest. You should go back.”
Sarah didn’t think he looked too good. “How is the book?”
“Ideal, thank you. I found a perfect use for the Führer’s prose.”
“Oh really?”
“Like the revolutionary Soft-Tuff Scot Tissue Towel: no lint, no tear, no waste. It set a new standard for softness and absorbency, yet was amazingly stronger in service…”
The stick hit the wood with a crack. Sarah’s eyes snapped open and she jerked into a sitting position. She looked dead ahead, aware that a trail of dribble was running under her chin from a crusty deposit on the corner of her mouth.
“Were you sleeping?” Fräulein Langefeld growled. “Were you actually so impertinent that you’d fall asleep in my lesson?”
The room was beyond silent. Even the clock seemed to have stopped ticking. The floorboards were embarrassed to creak as Langefeld readjusted her weight.
Lie? Silence? Apology?
“Sorry, Fräulein.”
The stick struck the desk again. “No one said you could speak, kleine Hure.”
Silence.
To her horror, Sarah began to shake. Her veins seemed to be filling up with fire.
Do not cry.
It might work…
Not with her.
“Stand,” Langefeld commanded. Sarah stood, her chair shrieking and clunking into the desk behind her. Without the desk Sarah felt defenceless. The teacher disappeared from view, counting time with the rod against the floor.
“Who thinks it’s acceptable to doze during my classes? Liebrich?”
“No, Fräulein.”
“Posipal?”
“No, Fräulein.”
“Mauser?”
“Erm…no,” quavered a little voice.
“What?”
Sarah closed her eyes. No…
“No, Fräulein,” the Mouse said, her panic audible.
“Do you agree with Haller? You think we should all have a Schlummer in my lesson?”
Sarah watched Langefeld towering over the Mouse’s desk. Only the girl’s quivering legs were visible.
Sarah looked to the front again and kicked her chair so it made another shriek. She heard Langefeld turn behind her.
“You’re a bad influence, Haller. You’ve got a stinking little Polack like the Mouse all confused. I won’t have it.”
The pain across the back of her legs was like touching a hot stove. It lapped up and down her thighs like boiling bathwater. A low groan escaped from Sarah’s mouth to fill the space left by the cry she smothered.
“You can stand for the rest of the lesson. That should keep you awake.” Langefeld came into view as she walked back to the front of the class. In Sarah’s head, unbidden, she saw herself swinging a rock at the teacher’s head.