Josh would have said, normal times, that he could accept silence.
He lay on the mattress and the blankets were tight around him. He lay on his side and faced the wall. He could smell the damp of the wretched little room they shared. The party of seamen from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, wherever, must have sailed that day. Down below, in the reception of the pension, his key and her key would be the only ones missing from the hooks. He could hear her breathing behind him, and he did not know whether she slept or whether she lay awake, and he did not know whether images of the body, the shoes, the terror of the man obsessed her as they knifed him.
He had held her close, tight, against him all the way back down the path through the forest. The moment that they had broken clear from the dull light and the sun had fallen on them, she had shouldered herself free of his arms, pulled away from him.
In the faint night light of the room he saw her hand hanging careless at the side of her bed, near to his face.
‘Are you awake, Tracy?’
‘Trying to sleep.’
‘You know that if we fight, Tracy, we fail.’
‘I didn’t ask you to be here… and I didn’t ask for lectures.’
‘Do you know how much you hurt, Tracy? Does it bother you?’ She murmured, savage, ‘God, are you going to moan again, again? Is that why your wife left you?’
Josh pushed himself up. He sat against the wall. He heaved the blankets around him.
‘We’ll start there. That’s as good a place as anywhere. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t open your horrid little mouth… I was out of the Army. I was a social worker. I worked with kids for three years. Can I say it, so it’s on the record? They were thieves and vandals and joyriders and none of them had the quality of viciousness that you parade, that you find so easy to justify.’
He heard her breathing sweet and regular. He saw the outline of her body and her hand careless beside his face.
‘There was a boy, Darren. He was on the pills. He thieved to get the money for the pills. I quite liked the kid, I thought I could break him off them. He thieved from this house, big place, smart road in the Chalfonts, he was all dosed up when he went in and he didn’t do the necessary with the alarm. The police picked him up outside the house. He was in the cells when I saw him and he was going back, as night follows day, to Feltham Young Offenders’, and he was sitting on the bunk bed and the tears were streaming down his face. I thought he was worth the effort, and the custody sergeant told me I was an idiot. I went to the house he’d broken into. She was Libby Frobisher, stinking rich, divorced, and I told her about Darren and what the custody sergeant had said and that the kid was in the cells and weeping his heart out. She withdrew the charges. The kid, Darren, walked free. I drove him round to see the woman and made him stand in front of her and apologize and mean it.’
He did not know whether she slept or whether she listened.
‘She rang me a month later, she wanted to know what had happened to the kid. She said I should come round, have a drink, tell her. Six weeks later we were married. I was fifty-one years old and she was the first woman I had loved. There was only her accountant and her solicitor at the wedding and they thought I was into her life for the easy ride. I made her – insisted on it
– write a will where nothing was left to me. Until I met her, I was not a man who cried or laughed or knew happiness or understood pain. I learned them all from her. For a year I knew happiness, and then she found the lump.’
Josh reached out and took her hand.
‘For half a year I cried and understood pain. She went through the treatment. She died.’
He brushed his lips against her hand and opened his fingers and allowed her hand to drop back, careless, beside the bed.
‘I tell her about you each day. I went to see her the day I left to come to find you. I told her then that you put your hand into a snake’s hole, that you weren’t beautiful, weren’t even very pretty. I told her about the killing of Hans Becker, your boy, and that the only thing we had in common was that we had both had the person we loved taken from us… I tell her, each day, how we’re doing. I tell her that we’re frightened, that we don’t know where it’s leading us.’
He thought she slept. He saw the calm stillness of the profile of her face.
‘I tell her that, thank God, tomorrow is always another day.’
Chapter Fourteen
Josh had tried to think, in his methodical way, while they had dressed in the gloom of the room at the pension, still dark outside the window, and then she had sung the song. Whether she sang it, whether she whistled it, whether she murmured it, the one bloody song with the words or the one bloody tune, it scraped through his mind and deflected him, breaking his train of thought. They had left Rostock early, before the traffic was on the main streets. The irritation grew in him because he had not made a plan in his mind. It was another day, the day for Artur Schwarz. Time was so precious, and was running, sand grains from the upper bowl slipping steadily into the lower… but the bloody song, the tune, hacked at his ability to use the time. His irritation surged.
‘Can you leave it?’
‘Leave what?’
He said, ponderous, ‘Can you leave that noise?’
‘What noise?’
‘Can you, please, stop whistling, singing, whatever, that puerile dirge?’
‘What’s the harm of it to you?’
‘Just that I can’t think.’
She lifted her eyebrows and made a face at him that was grotesque. She closed her eyes and pursed her lips shut as if to show him how idiotic she thought his irritation. The song was her anthem. She would have lain in her bed at Brigade in Berlin and heard it played on the radio and known that her boy, beyond the Wall, heard it too.
He had the wipers on now. The light was a grey smear ahead, to the west. The sleet storm burst over the car, was running free over the flat expanse of the fields either side of the road. They had driven through the last village before they came to Starkow. He had not used the main road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund, the obvious way to Starkow. He tried to think. He could see into the low cloud of the storm. He could see the dulled shapes, far away, of rectangles of planted forestry, and at the fringes of the trees were timber-built platforms for the marksmen who shot deer in summer. Cranes were feeding in the yellow weed grass close to the road, tall, elegant birds who seemed not to notice the blow of the sleet storm against them. He wanted cover from which to watch the farm, high ground or hedgerows or a plantation of forestry…
There was only one farm at Starkow. The village was a main street of old houses, a post office, a shop with a new front and a church. From the main street he could see the farm. Up a long lane, between open fields, was the huddle of buildings. There was a rectangular block of trees away to the left, and a marksman’s tower, but nowhere to leave the car where it would be hidden. There was no way to the forestry and the marksman’s tower but across the open yellow weed grass of the field. He parked the car at the end of the village main street, and saw a curtain flicker. He stood beside the car and shivered. The sleet blew into his face and settled on her hair. He looked at his feet.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
‘Because I didn’t think it through. Because we don’t have the right footgear.’
‘Is that why you’re so miserable?’
He stamped away ahead of her. There was a hawk in front of him, blown by the storm, careering in flight, not able to hover and hunt. The mud was a slippery carpet to the frozen ground. He plodded forward. It caught at his shoes, clung to them, weighted them. Once, he fell and slithered to the ground and she stood over him and grinned. He hoped, the night before, that she had slept and had not known that he had held her hand and kissed it. He went across the open field towards the block of forestry. He was near it, close to the marksman’s tower, when he saw the car leave the farm, bump away on the potholed track from the buildings of grey-red brick and grey-brown wood. He was too far from the track to see who was driving behind the misted windows. The wind swayed the high trees above.