Owen Sheers - Resistance

Taking the ice from his lips, Albrecht twirled it once through his fingers, then with a delicate pressure across his thumb, snapped the stem in two. He pushed himself off the stone and began to pick his way down the slope, the broken rod of ice melting in the warmth of his fist. As he neared Steiner he began to drift left, away from the course of the river ricocheting between the rocks. Steiner was armed. He’d spent the last month in constant conflict. Albrecht didn’t want to startle him.

Reaching a buckled thorn tree, he paused and watched Steiner again, one hand resting against its trunk. The young soldier still hadn’t moved, transfixed by whatever filled the figure-eight view of his binoculars. Albrecht found himself mimicking this motionlessness; a hawk hovering above a hunting hawk until eventually Steiner broke their mirrored stillness, unfolding his right elbow, and lowering one hand to his waist, as if looking for something in his pocket.

Albrecht walked on, sweeping his legs through the bracken hoping Steiner would hear his approach. But still he didn’t move, the binoculars held to his eyes with his left hand, the right still searching on the other side of his body. Albrecht moved further down the slope again and it was only then, when he was on a level with Steiner, that he was able to follow the line of his gaze. There, further down the valley below the bracken line, one of the local women was moving through the low-lying heather and bilberry bushes, a wicker basket hung over the crook of her arm.

“Guten tag, Steiner.”

Steiner’s whole body jolted as if shocked with a sudden voltage. Dropping the binoculars he spun towards Albrecht while reaching at the same time for his rifle, his right hand coming up to the stock of the gun, already half off his shoulder.

“Hey! Steady!” Albrecht stepped back, holding both his hands before him and for a frozen moment the two men faced each other like that: Albrecht with his hands out and his knees bent as if braced against a boulder, Steiner poised between flight and defence. Slowly Albrecht straightened up again, allowing himself a breathy half-laugh. “I didn’t come all this way to get a German bullet, private. Could have got that at home a long time ago.”

Steiner returned a weak-eyed smile, slipping his rifle back over his shoulder and making a half turn away from Albrecht as he adjusted himself. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You caught me by surprise.”

Albrecht walked up beside the young soldier and looked down the valley.

“It’s so quiet,” Steiner added, as if by way of further explanation.

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” Albrecht said. “Admiring the view?” He raised his eyebrows at the pair of binoculars hung round Steiner’s neck. He was careful to keep his voice light. He still didn’t know Steiner, not like he knew Alex or Sebald. He also had no idea why Steiner was here, out on the hill so early in the morning.

“Yes, sir,” Steiner said, his eyes playing over Albrecht’s face trying to read his expression.

“Mind if I have a look?” Albrecht held out his hand, his palm still dewed with the melted ice. Steiner lifted the strap over his head and handed the binoculars to Albrecht. Albrecht lifted his glasses onto his forehead and looked through the binoculars. They were Russian, the rubber about the eyepieces perished at the edges, cracked like the skin of drying lips. Turning the dial at their centre, he brought the view below into focus, drawing the valley from an Impressionist myopia into flat precision. Making small movements that brought the landscape sweeping across the lenses, he found the woman, still moving and bending among the bushes. He knew who she was before she lifted her face. The young wife he’d met at the last farm on their first night in the valley. He recognised her hair but he’d known it was her before that. When he was standing by the thorn tree, he’d known then. She was picking bilberries, methodically pulling them from the undergrowth and dropping them into the basket. She obviously had no idea she was being observed.

Albrecht watched her small hands deftly searching under the tight leaves and branches. She was wearing a large, shapeless coat, her hair tied back from her face. Putting the basket down, she stood up and arched the small of her back, working the muscles there with the knuckles of her fist. Even then, from this distance, there was little apart from her long hair and the finer bones of her face to mark her out as a woman. The coat hid her shape and her skin was ruddy in the cold of the morning. He felt nothing and was, in some rational part of himself, relieved. But somewhere else, somewhere within him still untouched by the war, the questioning continued. Had that piece of shrapnel numbed him completely? Had it taken not just his taste and his smell but his desire too? He could see why Steiner would be watching her, and yet he felt empty. A lifeless but moving machine, possessed of enough residual knowledge to recognise what he once felt, even if he was no longer capable of sensing it anymore.

He lowered the binoculars and turned to look at Steiner. The young soldier looked back at him, the embodiment of everything he was not. His face had changed while Albrecht had been looking at Sarah. Albrecht recognised his new expression. Just like he’d recognised the stance of a man looking through binoculars, so he’d seen this look of Steiner’s on the field many times before too. It was a different kind of searching. Steiner knew Albrecht no better than Albrecht knew him. He was waiting for permission, for licence, for the official nod to the unofficial operation. For the blind eye. How many times had a young soldier like Steiner looked in this way at a superior officer before? And how many times had that officer given the slightest of nods, or just turned away, as Albrecht did now. He breathed in deeply, looking out to the distant hills framed in the valley’s broad mouth.

“Do you have any sisters, Steiner?” he asked.

The young soldier was wrong-footed. Albrecht couldn’t see his face, but he knew his expectant expression had suddenly dropped.

“Yes, sir,” Steiner said.

Good, Albrecht thought, then this will be easier.

“I had two sisters before the war, sir,” Steiner continued. “Now I have one, Hilda.”

Of course. That genetic subtraction all of them made these days. Families tapering to single figures, brothers and sisters diminished to the past tense. This would not make it easier.

“I’m sorry,” Albrecht said, still looking out over the view and wondering how it was you could live with a man for over a month and not know about the death of his sister.

“It was a British raid,” Steiner said, his voice clipped. “Margaret was always last to the shelter. The sirens were faulty that night. My father looked for days afterwards. For anything. Some hair. A shoe. Just something. But there was nothing.”

So many stories like this. That’s why he hadn’t known. Because they were no longer unusual. So many ways for someone to leave, to be extinguished. Albrecht lowered his gaze to follow Sarah again, now just a pale patch without the binoculars’ magnification. That would make it easier, he thought. From here, from this distance, it would be easy. And after all, why shouldn’t he let Steiner have his revenge and his pleasure all at once? Give the young man his sympathies, then walk on, stepping over his own prints, edging around the valley back to The Court. Walk on and let Steiner descend the slope behind him, waving casually to the uncertain, unnerved farm woman. Let him hold her face into those wet bushes, one of his hands spread against the back of her head. Let him lift that shapeless coat and the skirt beneath. Let him empty his grief, his anger, and his sadness into her. Let him leave her, alive but with her life suddenly taken. Let him introduce her to the war with which all of them have had to become so intimate these past endless, dragging, unforgiving years.