Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

There was an argument going on next door. Malle felt weak in the knees, exhausted. She brought the new cover up over the pillows, smacking a crease beneath them, falling on the bed, pushing herself back up. Next she walked back to the kitchen and slumped down at the table, pushing back a wisp of hair, still blond despite her years, and, her brain racing, tried desperately to think what she should do next to protect Edouard. Maybe they weren’t after conscripts at all. Perhaps—

She saw two cups and two plates in the sink. She jumped up, washed one of each, and put them away. If they asked if anyone else lived in — no, they would know who lived in each apartment, but one dish and cup might convince them she was alone today. She chastised herself, told herself to calm down, get her story straight. She’d tell them Edouard had left for school. But it was too early. His bicycle — yes, his bicycle would have a flat and he’d had to leave early to walk to school. No, he could fix that. It had been stolen! But she’d have to give them its permit number, and when they checked downstairs in the racks and found it—

What about the Mustamäe’s being surrounded? He would have been stopped had he tried to leave. No — no, her grandson was — she would use the Russian word for “conscientious”— sovestlivy. Her grandson was conscientious and had left for school earlier than usual. She would have to stick with that and not mention the bike. She repeated “sovestlivy. “ After that she wouldn’t know what happened to him. Perhaps, she could suggest, he had become frightened, hearing police were at his parents’ apartment. That would explain him not arriving at school. But then-She stopped. She was galloping too far ahead, she told herself — one step at a time, Malle. She turned the radio on, put the kettle on to boil, and scrounged through the pile of newspapers in the kitchen corner, pulling out a copy of Pravda, hesitated, replaced it, and instead pulled down a worn Jaan Kross novel. Kross had been a proud Estonian, a nationalist — the Communist party newspaper would be too obvious a ploy to curry favor. People subscribed, but they didn’t read it. No, proud but not obstructionist grandmother would be her best bet. She looked about the apartment again, her heart thumping so hard, she instinctively put her hand on her bosom to catch her breath. She rearranged the old photo of herself as a young conscript graduate-radio operator in the Baltic Fleet. In Russian uniform. That might help.

She sat down again, biting her lip, looking about the apartment once more, trying to imagine herself as a newcomer there, for any possible sign of Edouard hiding. She heard a police klaxon in the distance. The troops were still about the housing complex, and she could see several armored cars she’d missed before parked under the linden trees. Ideal camouflage, she thought — but what of her own camouflage against inquiries about Edouard? Looking beyond the complex, she could see the medieval spires of the old town piercing the peaceful autumn air. She could smell the odor of herring wafting up through the vent, and now she realized no one was talking next door. For a moment it was possible to believe that there was no war. Had they left? Had the neighbors been taken away? She waited. There was no sound.

Suddenly she rushed toward the master bedroom and looked up at the trapdoor, remembering she had given Edouard one of her slippers to push up the cover. There might be a smudge of dirt on the plaster cover. There was no sign of disturbance. As she lowered herself to the kitchen table again, the kettle began to whistle. It had the force of an informer screaming. So heavy was her relief that for a moment she felt drowsy. Seeing the needle spire of St. Olav’s in the distance, steam rising in sharply defined clouds above the dome, Malle wished for a moment that, like her daughter-in-law, she could believe in God, in the Blessed Virgin. Her hands were trembling. Still she could hear no new noise in the building. Perhaps it wasn’t a conscript raid after all and they had come looking for deserters or to arrest only one family. Pray it was someone else.

From somewhere below she could smell cabbage being cooked. It surprised her — not that someone was cooking vegetables so early but that the smell was so powerful. She had long thought her sense of smell was diminishing with age. Soon she became aware of noises all over the apartment— the hum of the small refrigerator and above it a high, almost inaudible whine that she did not recall having ever heard before. “Tikho!”—” Be still!” she whispered to herself, but she was praying for Edouard.

Rosemary’s growing anxiety about visiting young Wilkins increased as she entered the antiseptic and musty foyer of the school’s old hospital. Resentful of young Wilkins yet obviously expected by the headmaster to be concerned as well as discreet, she had found the drive from Oxshott through the usually tranquil wooded countryside to be one of mounting tension. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about with her exhausting day-to-day chores of teaching a coed class of adolescents, and her mother, who, not surprisingly, was given to bouts of blackest depression over young William’s death. On top of this there was her own constant and growing anxiety about Robert, who had departed for Holy Loch in a rainstorm not unlike this.

Richard Spence, though fully occupied driving through the torrential rain on the winding, narrow road, was making reassuring fatherly noises about how the weather was bound to improve, seizing upon the weather as a metaphor for general improvement, even as the Audi was forced to slow more than usual around the curves because of the pelting rain. He swerved sharply to avoid a three-ton army lorry, the first of a long convoy en route to the south coast. “Reminds me of forty-four — D Day,” he said, looking across at Rosemary.

“Hardly,” said Rosemary in an uncharacteristically contentious tone. “You couldn’t have been more than five.”

“He would have been old enough,” said Georgina from the backseat, having invited herself along for the ride, declaring she “adored” driving in bad weather. “Children remember more than you think. Freud—”

“Quite right, Georgina,” said Richard. “I was six, to be exact. But I remember it very well. Lorries from here to London.”

“Well, I daresay this isn’t for D Day,” said Rosemary. “It’s more like Dunkirk.” There was silence in the car. Rosemary was sure Georgina had merely come along to get a look at Wilkins — no doubt he’d be a wonderful conversation piece, another “bourgeois victim” for a seminar at LSE. Richard said nothing to counter her uncharacteristically bad-tempered retort about Dunkirk. Besides, her gloomy assessment, in his view, was probably an understatement of the true military situation. A military disaster seemed imminent. Even the most conservative papers, including the Telegraph, not usually given to hyperbole, were conceding that the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was on the verge of collapse despite what seemed to be a pause in the progress of the Soviet divisions. It was as if they were gathering their collective breath before launching the death blow to the already badly savaged British Army of the Rhine, the American Fifth Army, and the decimated remnants of the German armored and motorized divisions who had fought a tenacious but losing rearguard action following the Communist breakthrough at Fulda Gap.

In the strained silence of the car, the steady drumming of the rain began to make Richard sleepy. He turned the radio on to BBC4 and picked up part of the prime minister’s speech. At first they thought it was coming direct from 10 Downing Street, but from the desk thumping and “hear, hears,” it was obviously being reported directly from the House. There were angry questions about failure of intelligence services at home and abroad to predict the Communist breakthrough and the extent of Communist subversion in both NATO and the European Common Market long before the war had broken out. Against this, Labour Parry backbenchers and Liberals were asking for assurances of individual rights — stating that they did not want to see the kind of “racialist-motivated internments” that had taken place in the dominions during the Second World War, most noticeably on the Canadian West Coast.