Audrey Magee - The Undertaking

‘What nurse?’

‘At the station.’

‘I’m giving him a bath first. The water’s hot.’

‘I’ll get it ready,’ said Katharina.

She turned on the taps and looked at her reflection, tracing her fingers over her weariness.

Mr and Mrs Spinell raised Johannes to his feet and steered him to the bath.

‘Now, ladies, out please. I will take it from here.’

‘No, Günther. I will bathe him.’

‘Esther, he is a twenty-year-old man, far too old to be bathed by his mother.’

‘I need to check his skin, for lice, for infection. I want to see him, Günther. He’s my son.’

‘We’ll do it together, then. But not Katharina. That’s too much.’

She left them and sat back on the sofa to alter a maternity summer dress, in blue silk. The man in the pawnshop had kept it aside for her.

Her mother left the bathroom, hurried to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, closed it and headed back to her son.

‘He has lice. Though only in his hair. And no infections or frostbite, thank God.’

She closed the bathroom door, then snapped it open again.

‘Oh, Katharina, could you get his pyjamas?’

She rose slowly, her lower spine and pelvis feeling the strain of the day as she moved to his room. She ran her fingers over his awards, lingering over the brass horse on its wooden plaque, the city boy’s triumph over the country riders. She left his clothes on the floor outside the bathroom and knocked.

‘Pyjamas.’

He emerged, washed and shaved, blue cotton sagging from his shoulders, a parent holding each arm as he was led to the sofa.

‘I’ll make him something to eat,’ said Mrs Spinell.

‘Mother, we really need to put him in bed before the sedation wears off.’

‘Katharina, that boy has not eaten properly for weeks. I won’t let him go to bed without food.’

‘Fine, then.’

Katharina lifted his legs onto the sofa and covered him, over-riding his silence with her chatter about her new husband and baby, about the new apartment and the things to be found in the pawn-shops. He said nothing. Noticed nothing. The less he responded, the more she talked, relieved when her mother returned with a bowl of soft, milky, infantile potato. Mrs Spinell spooned it into his mouth, mopping away his spews and dribbles.

‘You like that, don’t you, sweetheart?’

Mrs Spinell scraped the bowl and spooned what was left into her own mouth, reassuring herself that he had eaten well.

‘Good boy.’

Katharina took both his hands.

‘It’s time to get him to bed, Mother.’

‘Katharina, I haven’t seen him for months. Leave us be.’

‘But the sedation will wear off.’

‘And what will happen then?’

‘I don’t know. I never asked.’

‘Just five minutes more.’

Mrs Spinell sang to him and, with her husband’s help, took him to the lavatory and then to bed. Katharina went to bed too, grateful for the rain clouds hanging over the city. The English would not be coming.

In the morning, in a warm, thick cardigan, she went to see her brother. He was motionless, but for his lips, which moved frenetically, feverishly. His eyes were open.

‘Johannes? Are you awake?’

She put a hand to his forehead, but found no fever. She sat on a chair at the side of the bed and folded his papery hand into hers, until her mother came in, a house smock already on.

‘How is he, Katharina?’

‘He’s awake and calm, but muttering to himself.’

‘He’s been doing that all night.’

‘Have you been up?’

‘Your father and I took turns to sit with him.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped.’

‘You have little enough rest as it is.’

‘Did he sleep?’

‘Not much. A little at the beginning of the night. For the rest of the time, he just lay like this.’

‘It’s so awful.’

Mrs Spinell sat next to her son’s feet.

‘What do we do, Mother?’

‘We’ll have to wait and see what happens. Your father saw this in the last war. Men tended to come out of it.’

‘Unscathed?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes not.’

‘How long did it take?’

‘Days, weeks, sometimes months.’

‘The nurse said three weeks.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘I forgot about her letter.’

Katharina retrieved the nurse’s envelope from the hall. Inside were Johannes’ paybook, leave pass and a letter addressed to their parents. She opened the paybook and looked at his photograph, taken at the start of the war. He was smiling at the camera. She turned the pages, tracking his clothing allowances, equipment, payments and route across Europe into Russia, the scrawled signatures, entry and exit dates, the institutional stamps. The names of three hospitals.

‘Johannes has been in hospital before, Mother.’

‘What? How do you know?’

She passed over the book and the letter from an army doctor who wrote that Johannes had been treated three times for trauma, without any success. It was decided that he would be better off at home and would, without doubt, recover quickly after a short break from the front.

‘How are we supposed to make him better if the doctors can’t?’

‘We can only do our best, Katharina. You should get ready for work.’

The bank was busy. Many of her colleagues had left the city to live with relatives in the country so she had been moved from the back room to the front desk, answering questions from customers wondering whether their money was safe, whether it could be hit by British bombs. She reassured them, often the same person several times a month.

When she got home, she went to Johannes. He was the same, but there was a sour smell in the room. She pulled back the sheets. He had wet himself, plastering the pyjamas to his skin.

‘My God, Johannes, what has happened to you?’

She took off her coat, opened the window, drew a couple of deep breaths and lifted him upright, stripping him down, exposing what had been hidden from her for over a decade.

In dry pyjamas, she led him to the living room and sat him on the sofa, in front of the fire.

‘What are you doing?’ said Mrs Spinell. ‘He’s supposed to be in bed.’

‘He wet himself.’

‘And you changed him?’

‘I’ll sort his bed out now.’

‘But, Katharina, you shouldn’t have done that. He’s your brother.’

‘Mother, I’m married and pregnant. I can manage.’

She stripped the sheets, washed them in the bath, and mopped the mattress with a towel before propping it against the open window to catch the end of the cold spring day. She sat beside him, picked up her sewing, and caught the smell again.

‘No, Johannes.’

She repeated the procedure, this time with her mother’s help.

‘He needs a nappy.’

‘He’s a grown man, Katharina. We can’t put him nappies.’

‘We need something, Mother.’

‘We’ll use towels.’

They ate chicken, beetroot and potatoes as Johannes lay on the sofa, his muttering running in parallel to their table conversation.

‘Dr Weinart has promised to visit over the next couple of days,’ said Mr Spinell. ‘He says that he has seen plenty of cases like this.’

‘That’s kind of him,’ said Mrs Spinell.

‘What’s going to happen to Johannes, Father?’

‘Let’s wait and see, Katharina. In the meantime, we must keep him calm and rested.’

She fell into a deep sleep early that night, unaware of the blustering wind that cut through the clouds and cleared the skies. The sirens blared and she groaned, resenting their harrying wail, their interruption of her sleep. She began to dress, methodically adopting a rhythm that would allow her to reach the shelter on time. Only when she was buckling her shoes did she remember her brother.