The Watcher Read online

  THE WATCHER

  Monika Jephcott-Thomas

  Dedication

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Watcher

  Copyright

  Someone was watching the house.

  The terraced red brick house on three floors in the suburb of Mengede in the heart of the Ruhr district. Sulphurous clouds draped the rooftop and thick soot lined the windowsills, even on the pretty, round Tiffany window in the attic.

  It was the blue and red glass of the window, lit up from the inside that evening, which the watcher’s eyes were fixed on. It was as if the watcher knew exactly who was in there and exactly what they were doing. Or perhaps it was just that the Tiffany window was so much more appealing than the other windows below – tall, skinny, square, humdrum – windows which made the house look gaunt.

  It was time to go home. It was getting too cold to stand around on street corners. It would arouse suspicion. The watcher sneered at the house and sloped off.

  Charred fragments of letters snow down over Max as he dives for cover in the icy mud. The Russians have blown the Luftwaffe plane to bits and now their infantry, clad in white, is advancing out of the mist, over the field towards him and the shell of a monastery where his field hospital cowers; where his patients lie helpless and his colleagues hide hopeless.

  The floor is crunchy with shattered glass from the patients’ drips. Those that can walk are already being helped to clamber out of the basement, barefoot and in their pyjamas. They limp, slip and slide across the icy ground, falling on top of one another absurdly, heading for who knows where.

  Max fumbles around the remains of the basement, assessing those still in their beds, trying to reassure the monk sitting on a bench with a thick piece of the ceiling crushing his lap like a diabolical desk.

  ‘Doctor, help me!’ he cries out.

  Max remains for a while, knowing the masonry is too heavy to move and even if they ever did move it the resulting reperfusion in the legs would send potassium, phosphate and urate leaking into the circulation, killing the monk before they could amputate. So he shouts reassuring words to the monk and begins clearing rubble from a pile out of which sticks a nun’s legs. He soon stops. Her head is pressed flat like a flower in a book.

  His fellow doctors Horst, Edgar, Lutz and Dolf are on the field with him now. Nuns who stand in for nurses and soldiers in pyjamas on crutches shiver there too. The Russians begin to fire their Tokarevs and throw grenades. Soldier after soldier, patient after patient, is shot. Two feet from Max a grenade explodes. He can feel the heat penetrate him, but he’s still alive, walking across the field as if he was walking down Mengede High Street on a summer’s afternoon. Nightmares are strange like that. The nuns either side of him are decapitated by more explosions, but Max walks on. Horst is shot in the shoulder and Max runs to his brother, wrapping himself around him to protect him from further injury. But the Russian bullets find their way through Max and riddle Horst. Max walks on. Sees Lutz and Dolf on fire. He pulls Lutz to the floor and rolls him in the snow to try and douse the flames. He succeeds. Then does the same to Dolf, but as he does so Lutz spontaneously combusts again. His efforts are futile. He should be dead himself, but nothing Max does matters. He cannot be killed and he cannot save anyone else.

  Captive now, they are made to march endlessly around the city.

  Another shot. Another patient who cannot keep up.

  And another. And another.

  Max’s eyes fill with tears. He is livid at the contempt this signifies his captors have for the infirm when he has made it his mission in life to mend and cure them.

  ‘Oh God!’ the soldier in front of him cries. Max can’t be sure if he cried for the patients being shot or for himself as his trousers drip with urine.

  All that coffee he had this morning with Jenny is having the laxative effect it was fast becoming associated with in some medical journals. He thinks about asking one of the Russians if they can stop for a break, appeal to their better nature, but then another shot rings out from behind and he realises shitting himself would be the least of his worries. But he settles on urinating, like his comrade in front, just to ease the pressure on his bowel, buy a few more hours, he hopes.

  He looks at Edgar as he does it. To lock eyes with him perhaps. To keep Edgar from looking down and seeing him do it. Edgar smiles at him in the way Max had smiled at the monk crushed under the masonry.

  More gunfire.

  Max woke with an epileptic spasm in the attic room with the Tiffany window. Next to his wife. Drenched in his own piss.

  ‘It’s all right, darling.’ Erika concealed her revulsion in a whisper, trying to both soothe her husband and not wake their daughter Netta, who was snoring gently in her little bed on the other side of the room. ‘Go downstairs and have a quick wash. I’ll find some spare sheets and we can get back to sleep.’

  He did as he was told, silent with embarrassment, leaving half-footprints on the bedroom floor and stairs as his wet pyjamas dripped mockingly onto his feet.

  She pulled her nightdress carefully over her head and used the dry half to rub down her wet leg. She rolled it into a ball and threw it by the door, finding a clean one in the drawer. Then she went downstairs to get some water to wash the mattress with.

  She found him sitting in the bath, head on his knees, as it slowly filled with water. He had been back a few weeks now, but only when she saw him naked like this was she reminded just how malnourished and mistreated he had been in that labour camp on the edge of the Arctic. He would certainly never talk about it. She was at once repulsed by his appearance – his cheeks of flint, his reptile back – and yet desperately sorry for him. But most of all she felt guilty. Guilty for seeking solace in the arms of another while he was away. And guilty for thinking right now how she would rather be looking at Rodrick’s muscular bulk in that bath. Guilty for the way her thighs were tingling even now with the thought of washing Rodrick as he grinned at her and grabbed at her breasts. Guilty for how difficult she found it to look at Max’s skin with anything but her medical brain, with the curiosity she would usually reserve for an abnormally large sebaceous cyst on a patient’s cheek.

  ‘That’s enough water,’ she cooed, ‘you only need a quick wash. Then you can come back to bed. Get some sleep.’

  Max didn’t answer. He continued to let the water run. His eyes wide, far from sleep, staring through the wall to somewhere beyond. Somewhere two thousand miles away at the dark northern edge of the world. To Gegesha, the labour camp where he’d lost good friends, been beaten, almost frozen to death, where he’d tried to heal the sick in his hospital on stilts out in the diesel coloured waters of the Barents Sea, in quarantine, away from the Russians who feared the diseases which thrived in the awful conditions they perpetuated. And yet, after four years in the camp, Gegesha had become a kind of home, albeit a perverse one. He had found a way to survive and to help others survive too. He had formed friendships with fellow prisoners and, although they could be graced with nothing like the same designation, he had formed connections of sorts with some of his captors, who favoured him for the medical attention he gave them and their families. It had all become so familiar, even the discomfort and the cold, that to change it, to leave it for something new, or return to something from the past, seemed frightening.

  And, of course, there was Jenny. Jenny, who had shown him so much kindness when he had had to give her and all the other prostitutes servicing the Russian officers their regular check-up for venereal diseases. She would wash his uniform for him, a luxury many other men could only dream of, but that wasn’t the reason why he looked forward to seeing her so much. Jenny was the only person he could confide in. Sure, he had Horst a
nd Edgar too, and they were always there for each other in the way that brothers are, but the way he could talk to Jenny, and the way she talked to him, was different. It was because she was that rarest of things in wartime, a woman. And despite what others might tell him about the ways and minds of prostitutes, she was a sensitive woman. She often had a twinkle in her eye and would tease him terribly as he examined her genitals with the utmost professionalism, but despite his embarrassment he knew in his heart that she was only protecting herself from shame too with all her bravado. As soon as the examination was over and she was covered up again, they would always talk with an honesty, intimacy and concern for each other which he hadn’t known since… since Erika.

  And it was during those cosy conversations with Jenny that a feeling enveloped him, as if he were back in Erika’s student digs, snuggled up in the threadbare armchair with her, his blanket over them; or sitting on the stairs outside her door as she stood before him swinging flirtatiously on the bannister. They had talked then of friends and books and dreams and travel and he had found the shape of her waist irresistible. He just had to slip his arms around it. So he did. The similar ease with which he spoke to Jenny often had him looking furtively at her petite hourglass figure and had his brain instructing his arms to encircle it. But he didn’t of course. He would reprimand himself silently as he nodded at Jenny, telling himself to focus on what she was saying, and scolding himself for even noticing her figure, her incredibly slender eyebrows, her blonde hair and her beauty, which she managed to maintain admirably even in such dire conditions as the foul and cramped apartment block the Russians stuffed her and the other working girls into.

  He flinched as Erika leaned over, piercing his reverie, and turned the tap off. As his body twitched he felt the scars on his scalp tighten. Scars from the beating which had confined him to his own hospital for days. Days during which he gradually became aware of someone constantly at his bedside. And when he was fully awake and lucid he realised it was Jenny. And it was then that she kissed him. Not on the cheek like she did to congratulate him on his Iron Cross all those years before, but a kiss on the lips that told him that the fear of losing him had shifted her boundaries; a fear and a shifting which he felt too, but one which sent tears streaming down his numb cheeks, because somewhere in his soul was the realisation that this was the start of something that would cause both of them pain when the time came for change.

  And change came when all the prisoners were finally released. Then, from the back of the truck which shook his meatless bones as it thundered through town towards the border, he saw her standing by the roadside. And as he saw his life, the life he knew anyway, receding from view, he made one desperate attempt to cling onto a part of it and shouted:

  ‘Mengede. I’ll be in Mengede, Dortmund. Look me up!’

  Much to the shock and amusement of his mischievous friend Edgar, which set the other doctor tapping out a frenetic swing beat on his long bony thighs.

  He watched Erika’s arms as she filled a bucket with water in the basin to wash the mattress with. Practical arms, arms which trembled slightly, and jerked about with tired industriousness. The skin of the forearm which steadied the bucket didn’t seem to him as tight as it used to be, not as porcelain. He saw dark hairs on it which he didn’t remember being there before. His eyes drifted away, almost repulsed… no, not repulsed, just saddened by the change. He recalled the same arm as it swung her around the bannister. Supple, strong, playful, carefree, the skin so perfect. Or perhaps that was just the lighting in the stairwell then. No it was so perfect. Her arm, her raven hair, what she said, the time they spent together, everything was perfect then. He would tremble in anticipation of her touch, swell with pride that she wanted to be so close to him. Of all the men she could have had in the faculty, she chose him. He felt as tall as Edgar and just as confident in her presence then. The first words she ever spoke to him, in a bar with red lights and red décor, came bubbling up through the sound of the running water.

  ‘Every other boy here has asked me to dance tonight. Every other boy has flirted with me, except you.’

  ‘Well,’ he had said, blushing, ‘I’m not really one for dancing… nor for flirting.’ He jabbed his glasses further up his nose.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Not that you aren’t attractive,’ he had stuttered. ‘I mean, I understand why all the men here would want to flirt with you, it’s just that I’m not that confident, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh really? Well, my friend Edith over there tells me you’re tipped to be top of the class in all subjects this year so you can’t tell me you’re not confident.’

  ‘Ah.’ He raised a finger, almost confidently. ‘Confidence in medicine is not the same as confidence in situations like this.’

  ‘Like what? What is this?’

  ‘This. Parties, chatting. Women.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, there are hundreds of text books that tell you exactly what to do when it comes to medicine. All you have to do is memorise the facts.’

  The memory of that night in the bar threatened to make him smile or cry, he wasn’t sure which, so he blinked it from his mind as soon as it arrived to avoid the latter. Everything was so deliciously complicated from the moment they met. Now hunched here in the bath, incontinent and inarticulate, it just seemed complicated.

  Erika heard the floorboards creak outside the bathroom. It was Karin the housekeeper. Her room was in the attic too, opposite Erika and Max’s. She had heard them both descending the stairs and came to see what was going on; see if she could offer any assistance.

  The door was ajar and Erika saw Karin peering in at Max slumped awkwardly in the tiny bath. Erika was speared with jealousy in that instance. Not because Karin was younger and thinner than Erika – no, the girl may have been only nineteen, but she was unhealthily thin, and her short brown hair and the dark circles round her eyes gave her the appearance of a boy rather than a female rival. It wasn’t anything physical. It was the way she looked at the unseeing Max right then through the gap in the door with such sympathy. The kind of sympathy Erika found it so difficult to show. And who could blame her? This man was meant to be her brave military doctor, back from the war, undefeated by internment. The wonderful specimen she had shown photographs of to little Netta as she tried to get her off to sleep at night; to whose image they sang:

  If I were a little bird and had wings, I would fly to you…

  Whom she desperately wanted back – not just because she loved him, not to dampen her urges towards Rodrick even, but to help her share the unexpected and undeniable burden that being a parent was.

  Erika put herself in the gap between door and frame, ostensibly to protect her husband’s privacy, but actually to obscure her own lack of connection with the man in the bath.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Karin had the voice of a mouse. ‘Can I help at all?’

  ‘It’s all right, Karin,’ Erika said, reminding herself and the housekeeper who was the boss here. ‘We don’t need you. You can go back to bed.’

  To Netta it felt like flying. She wasn’t really sitting cross-legged in the big basket on the front of her mother’s bicycle; she was soaring over the treetops. That wasn’t the clicking of a greasy chain against the chain guard; it was the vigorous sound of her little wings flapping. She wasn’t a four-year-old girl from Mengede, but a beautiful blue swallow on her way back from a warm winter in Africa.

  ‘Netta, put your arms down. A truck might come past and slice them off.’

  And that wasn’t her mama being a bore and a nag; it was the twittering of her fellow birds, hundreds of them, as they danced and swooped in the spring skies.

  But the flight was over all too soon as they arrived at their first house-call. Frau Beltz.

  Netta was in charge of the leeches. At least she was after they had gorged themselves on Frau Beltz’s varicose veins and fallen with a satisfied plop onto the floor by her feet. Then Netta would pick up each one and put it
back in the big glass jar they lived in. She wasn’t sure what held the most morbid fascination for her down there on the floor: the leeches or the hairy elephantine calves of the patient. Up above the women were talking.

  ‘Settling in OK, is he?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s fine.’

  ‘Quite an ordeal he’s been through, though. Must be hard.’

  ‘Well, no time to mope around, Frau Beltz, he’s too busy working at the hospital.’

  ‘Isn’t he going to work with you at the surgery?’

  ‘He will, yes, but all military doctors have to complete civilian experience in a local hospital first. He came straight from university into the army, you see.’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose keeping busy is the best thing, isn’t it.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it.’

  ‘That’s if you can keep busy. I mean, what with the state Hitler left this country in, you two are lucky to have jobs at all.’

  ‘Well, it was the Allies that stripped the country of its industry, Frau Beltz, but thank God that’s all over now. There’s no shortage of jobs for the steel workers round here, now is there? Oh! There goes the last one.’

  Netta scurried across the tiles to grab the greediest black worm and before long she was flying over the treetops again with her flock twittering something over her head about a nosy old bag who should keep her opinions to herself.

  On the steep hill up to the next home visit, Netta’s mama had to get off the bike and push it up the hill. Netta stayed in the basket hoping she wouldn’t have to get out and use her legs like a lowly human too – she didn’t. It took a lot more imagination to see this wobbly plod up the hill as a dance among the clouds, but Netta was making a good go of it until a man’s moo-like mumble stopped her mama in her tracks.

  ‘Let me help you with that,’ he said.

  ‘We’re just fine, thanks. We don’t need your help.’ Netta thought her mama sounded almost rude and she turned to see who deserved such a response.