Christopher Priest - The Separation

The images of my hallucination tormented me: they seemed so real, so plausible. I had felt the coarseness of the uniform’s fabric against my skin. The house was exactly as I knew it, as I saw it then. My brother Jack was someone I knew better than almost anyone else in the world. I began to tremble, unable to understand or accept what it meant, or what was happening to me. I put my arm around Birgit, pressing her to me. She cuddled up against me, clearly unaware of what was going through my mind.

After a while I left the bed and went along the landing to use the toilet. When I returned Birgit was sitting fully upright. Her hair was untidy from sleep, her eyes looked puffy. I noticed that she was resting one of her hands across her stomach.

I turned on the overhead light, scraped a chair across to the wardrobe and climbed up to reach inside the shelf at the top.

‘Joe, what is it you doing up there? Come back to bed.’

‘I’ve got to resolve this,’ I said grimly. By pushing my arm all the way in, I made contact. I felt the cap at once, then groped around for the rest of the garments I had imagined. There was one other garment, lying underneath the cap. I pulled it out, with the cap. The cap, a stiff shirt. Not everything.

Enough, though, enough to make the point.

‘Who put these in here?’ I said, shirt in one hand, cap in the other. I held them up to her, almost a threat.

‘Of course, I did.’

‘They’re JL’s, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are they doing here in our house?’

‘I’m looking after them for him.’

‘What? Why should you look after clothes for my brother?’

‘He ... he brought them one day. The shirt needed washing and the cap had to be cleaned. He asked me to keep them there for him. He has others at the airfield.’

‘So Jack’s been at the house? While I wasn’t here!’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s been going on between you two?’

‘Nothing going on! What do you think of it?’ She moved in the bed, shifting her weight on to her legs, which she folded beneath her so that her body was more erect. She tensed her shoulders momentarily, then relaxed. JL is your brother! You have been away. Week after week after week! What do you think I do? I have no friends here. No one in the village, in England. Everyone who meets me hears my voice and thinks I am a spy for Hitler! I am the Nazi with the husband who does not fight.

People whisper. They think I can’t hear. Your parents don’t speak to me. My mother and father are dead, so it is thought. I’m on my own here, all the hours in the day, then the night, then the day again. Perhaps there is a letter from you will come, perhaps not. If not, I can play music for no one to hear. Or catch the bus and go to the shops where there is nothing to buy. Some life I lead!’

‘What about Jack?’ I said. ‘You know how Jack and I feel about each other. Why has he been coming here while I’m away?’

‘It’s always away you have been! JL is on leave only here a day or two, here another day, what they allow him. He has no choice in the matter. Once, he wrote to me and asked me if he could spend his leave with you and me, with us both, because he didn’t want to go home. But you were in London. I didn’t know how to contact you in time and he sounded desperate. He wanted to be away from the air base for a while, so I said yes. He came.’

Just once?’

‘No, he has been here three times. Maybe more.’

‘You never told me.’

‘Maybe five times. You are never here so I can tell you.’

‘And he leaves his clothes in the bedroom.’

‘No! What do you think? What are you accusing me of?’

Something like this can rarely be resolved properly in a marriage. The stakes are so high that pursuing it leads to areas from which you cannot retreat. So, while I could, I did retreat from the terrible consequences of what I was thinking. Birgit and I were drawn together by larger events: the dangers of the war, the coming of our new baby, the love we had felt for each other for so long. I could not bear to think of anything or anyone disrupting them, least of all my own brother. My row with Birgit caused a long silence of bitter feelings that lasted all day.

Following that there was a quiet truce in the evening; that night we made love.

I spent the next two days convalescing as best I could and reported back to the Red Cross office on the following Monday morning.

Extract from Germany Look East! - The Collected Speeches of Rudolf Hess, selected and edited by Prof. Albrecht Haushofer, University of Berlin Press, 1952; part of Hess’s speech at Leipziger Triumphsportplatz to Hitlerjugend[Hitler Youth], May 1939, concerning the then Deputy Führer’s wish for peaceful co-existence with Britain and its Empire:

‘[For those of us who squatted in our dug-outs with our faces in the mud, for those who listened with stilled breath while the bullets of the English enemy sang through the air above our heads, for those who suffocated in our gas-masks, for those who lay in shell craters through the freezing nights, the Great War brought one passionate conviction. I carry that belief close to my heart even now. It is carried also by the Leader, who fought valiantly for the Fatherland in the same war. That conviction is this.

‘[War against the English race must not be fought by German people. Our argument is not with another Nordic race! Our argument is elsewhere!

‘[We saw, in that most terrible war, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young German men and boys. Each of them loved the Fatherland, as you and I love the Fatherland. Yet they died! They did not shirk their duty. They did not hide. They did not even ask why they had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

‘[It falls to us, this new generation of German national patriots, to give them the answer. England is not our enemy!

‘[We seek space to live. We wish the development of the German race. If the English give us the free hand we need, we will have no dispute with them. If war is to come, it will be their choice, not ours. We who survived the landmines and the shells and the gas of the Great War say again and again: we will spare the world another war.

‘[But only if England allows it!

‘[Heil Hitler!]’

I arrived at RAF Kenley in the early hours of the morning, with another Red Cross official called Nick Smith, after a lengthy and hazardous journey through the heavily bombed suburbs of Brixton and Streatham.

Our passes took us without delay through the security barrier at the Kenley air base. The driver deposited us beside a Nissen hut, in which we found several more civilians who were already waiting. I added my small suitcase to the pile that had been placed next to the main door, then went to stand as close as I could to the stove to warm up after the long drive. I was given a bowl of hot soup and I sipped it gratefully.

I had said nothing to Birgit about the journey I was to undertake, because a flight to Switzerland in the middle of a bitter land and air-war with Germany was obviously hazardous. In the days before the flight I had spent a lot of time studying a map of Europe, trying to work out in advance which route was likely to be the safest, the one that would take us the shortest distance over occupied countries or Germany itself. Landlocked Switzerland did not seem to offer many safe ways in and out. I guessed that the likeliest route would be a long dogleg: down the western coast of France, followed by a sweep eastwards across the area of southern France that was under the control of the Vichy government. The direct route across Germany would be much shorter, but seemed full of dangers.