Vanessa Haan - The Restless Sea

‘Don’t you come any closer,’ she says, jabbing the fork in his direction.

He stops there, half hidden. He is desperately thin. His top is grimy, and his trousers are torn down one side and stained with dirt. His feet are bare. He smells of stale sweat, filth, and fever. She would have thought he was a tramp, if it wasn’t for the unmistakeable insignia stitched on to the right side of his jacket: the eagle of the Third Reich, the Nazi swastika clasped in its claws. She remembers the two dead parachutists swinging in the Fir Wood. She thinks of Charlie’s letters and the poor men who never come back. ‘Pleez, Fraülein ,’ he says again. He rests his puny arms on his head, too exhausted to hold them up, surely too exhausted to harm her.

Still, she keeps her distance. She indicates that he can drop his arms. His thin face contorts into a grimace, and she notices that one of his eyes is swollen shut.

‘Who are you?’ she asks.

He says something she doesn’t understand, but then stops as he starts to cough, a rasping, phlegmy sound that rattles in his chest and makes him double over with the effort. ‘Shh,’ she says, holding up her finger and moving a little towards him. ‘Shh.’ He tries to stop, swallowing the coughs behind his hand as he collapses wheezing to the floor.

Olivia doesn’t call for Mrs Mac. She is surprised to find that she isn’t scared. He may be German, but this emaciated creature is no threat, and she remembers well the look on the men’s faces when they set off in pursuit of him. Which reminds her. Gun. He must have one somewhere. She makes the shape of a gun with her hand. ‘Revolver?’ she says. He scrabbles backwards into the dark.

‘No. I’m not going to shoot you,’ she says. ‘Your gun?’

He shivers, uncomprehending, staring up at her from his one good eye.

She runs to fetch a torch from Mrs Mac, telling her she plans to do a full spring clean. When she returns, she shines the light around the back of the stable, picking out the shadows of the old feed bins, buckets, ropes, shovels, all covered in a thick layer of dust, shed from animals and hay over the years. The German is huddled right back into the far corner, a shadow within a shadow. He has made a bed from some old straw, with a pillow – his life jacket – stuffed with more. Apart from the grubby clothes he is wearing, there is a leather jacket and some decent-looking boots, which are lying on their sides.

She can hear the breath bubbling in his lungs. She knows he needs warm clothes, decent food. She is fascinated and repelled. His puffy eye is weeping. He moves towards her and she backs away. He slumps into the corner, dejected, coughing, too weak to move. She immediately feels bad. ‘I’ll try and bring you some clothes,’ she says. He doesn’t look at her. ‘And clean water.’ He still doesn’t look at her, and then the cough starts barking in his chest again. There is a noise out in the yard. The German looks up at her, his eyes wide with fear. Someone is calling her name. Olivia puts her finger to her lips and then backs out into the light, leaving him alone in the darkness once more.

Olivia visits the German when it is safe to do so, sloshing the rancid water he had been drinking out on the cobbles and replacing it with fresh, borrowing a bale of fresh straw to spread out for him, removing the old straw when she is mucking out the pony. She lugs warm water in a bucket, leaving him to peel off his filthy clothes and scrub at his filthy skin. She finds some clothes that must have belonged to Uncle Howard in the dressing-up box at Taigh Mor. Eccentric, but at least they are clean and warm. She takes the man’s uniform and buries it far away, deep in soft peat. Once the grime is washed off and the sickly pallor has faded from his skin, she can see that he has hazel eyes and mousy-coloured hair.

At first they struggle to communicate in broken English, using hand signals and pictures drawn in the ground to clarify meaning, like a child’s game of charades. Slowly, Olivia learns that his name is Hans, and that his plane was shot down at sea. Somehow he managed to drift to shore and climb up into the hills. He has a revolver, but no bullets: he used the last the day he tried to shoot the stag. He missed because of the damage to his eye. He followed her tracks back to the stable and hid, surviving on a mixture of stale pony nuts and the occasional foraged vegetable from the walled garden. He is twenty. The same age as Charlie.

Hans lets her clean the bad eye with salt water, drawing his breath in sharply as she dabs at it. The eyeball was punctured by a piece of Perspex from the cockpit of his plane, and although Hans managed to pull it out, and the eyeball itself seems to have healed, the shard also cut the skin at the corner, and it is this that has become infected. Olivia washes it every day, but the skin remains hot and swollen, and she knows that Hans’s temperature is high. She raids the tack room, finding an old bottle of iodine, the brown glass marked with skull and crossbones. She dabs it on the wound, feels Hans’s body go rigid, sees his eyes water with unshed tears. She remembers how painful iodine is even on grazed knees. She stops, but he indicates that she must carry on. Tears come to her own eyes, because he is so very brave and he does not make a sound. She cleans it this way every morning and evening, until at last the wound stops festering and starts to heal, and now the cough begins to clear up, and finally colour returns to Hans’s pasty cheeks.

The fear of discovery grows less with each day that passes, and as they both relax in each other’s company, that corner of the stable becomes almost like home. They play cards: Pelmanism and rummy. Hans picks up English a lot more quickly than Olivia has managed to pick up Gaelic. He has a gentle, shy smile and calm manner. He is the complete opposite to what she’s heard and read about Germans. She feels guilty for liking him, but then why shouldn’t she? They can’t all be bad, can they? Olivia wonders how many of the Wrens and soldiers who career around the loch have ever met a real German. Is it just the uniform that gives the enemy away? Or is it something deeper?

Hans shows her the crumpled photograph that he keeps in his pocket. She studies it in the crack of light that slopes in through a missing tile in the stable roof. It is a picture of Hans, his mother and younger brother. A shaggy mongrel lies with its head on Hans’s foot. The little brother is wearing lederhosen, a serious expression on his face. Hans is smiling in his Luftwaffe uniform. His mother’s arm is linked through his and she is looking up at him proudly. She is wearing a flowery dress. She looks no different to Olivia today. In fact, Olivia looks more Germanic with her pale eyes and blonde hair. Hans gazes sadly at the photograph before putting it carefully back into his pocket. Olivia thinks how similar they are; both in a place they never intended to be; both isolated from friends and family.

‘What is your home like?’ she asks.

‘My home town is Dresden,’ he says. ‘It is very beautiful. Many old houses. Much history. Very different to here.’

‘It sounds like London,’ she says.

He nods. ‘It also has a big river. The Elbe. We live near it. I like to walk my dog there.’

‘I’m not sure it would be very safe walking a dog in London these days …’

‘So sad,’ he says. ‘I would like to visit London one day.’

‘If there’s anything left …’

He clicks his tongue, shaking his head as if he cannot believe the world. ‘I will help rebuild it,’ he says. ‘I will be an architect when this is over.’

‘Is that what you always wanted to do?’

He nods. ‘My father has – had – an architect business in Dresden.’