Owen Sheers - Resistance

“Do you really think they’ll come back if we go?” he said quietly, trying to suppress the anger in his voice. “Do you really think they’re alive at all anymore?”

Sarah’s eyes didn’t falter. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think Tom’s alive. I know he is.”

Tom. She used her husband’s name like a needle to pierce him. Albrecht broke from her stare, his eyes falling upon the plates, leaflets, and books on the dresser. They came to rest on Sarah’s wedding photograph. He let out a sigh. “I hope for your sake you’re right, Mrs. Lewis,” was all he said.

The single heartbeat of the record was slowing as if the pulse of the house was weakening. Albrecht crossed to the gramophone, lifted the stylus and swung the arm back into its clip. Placing one hand on the record, he stopped its turning, then stood there, his head bowed, as the silence seeped back into the room.

“You think they’re dead, don’t you?” Sarah said quietly, her voice her own again.

Albrecht closed the gramophone, then leant against it, both his hands on its lid, his head hung low between his shoulders, his eyes closed.

“Maybe not,” he said. “They know this area well, I imagine.” He paused, clearing his throat. “And from what I’ve seen, men like your husbands have been well prepared.” He thought of the bunker he’d visited outside Oxford, the rows of glowing jars filled with urine, the stacks of supplies under the bunks. “And God knows,” he continued with an empty laugh of a sigh, “this war might be full of terrors, but it’s full of miracles too.”

“Like here?” Sarah said.

“Yes,” Albrecht replied, his eyes still closed, nodding his head. “Like here.”

They remained like that for several seconds before Albrecht straightened up and turned round. “I should leave. I am sorry if I’ve upset you, Mrs. Lewis.” He fastened the latches on the box and slid it off the table. He was walking to the door when Sarah stopped him with her question.

“Why d’you come here? In the first place I mean. Why here? Was it t’look for them?”

Albrecht turned to face her, a faint smile playing on his lips. “Oh no, Mrs. Lewis. We came here to look for something much more interesting, I’m afraid.”

“And did you find it?”

“Yes,” Albrecht said, his eyebrows raised as if surprised by his own answer. “Yes, we did find it.”

Sarah frowned and shifted in her seat. “So what was it?” she asked. “Or can’t you tell me that either?”

Albrecht rested a shoulder against the door frame, the gramophone box still held in one hand. He looked down at his feet for a moment. When he looked back up at Sarah, his face had changed. There was, once again, some of that lightness Sarah had seen when she’d first answered the door.

“Something my superiors wanted,” he said. “Something they wanted very much indeed.”

He appeared on the verge of laughing at some secret joke. Sarah was both irritated and intrigued. “Here? They wanted something from here?”

“Yes,” Albrecht replied, nodding his head deliberately. “Yes they did.” His smile slipped for a second before returning with a new energy. “Will you let me show you?”

Again he looked like the younger man who’d come calling for her on a blustery spring morning. “It’s not far, and I think perhaps it might prove a better present for you than this,” he said, lifting up the battered leather case. Lowering the gramophone again he watched as the nick of a frown-line appeared between Sarah’s eyebrows. Remaining at the open door, he stood there, motionless, waiting for her answer.

It was sacking cloth. Sarah could see that now, its folds and pleats longer and smoother than the jagged stone walls around them. As Albrecht moved towards it the torch beam lit up its coarse surface. Sacking cloth. Just like she’d put about her shoulders all through the winter.

Albrecht took hold of the corner and pulled. The cloth slid off whatever it covered and fell to the floor with a slow slump, like thawing snow breaking from a cornice. There was another sheet underneath, tarpaulin this time, like the tarpaulin Reg used to cover his hay ricks. Albrecht pulled at this and it too fell away. At first Sarah could see nothing but the glare of the reflected torchlight. She squinted away from it, the beam sudden on her eyes after the darkness of the cavity they stood in. But then Albrecht shone the torch at the wall instead, and when Sarah looked back she saw the pale wood of the packing crate raised on a pallet, and then the darker wood of the frame within. Inside this frame she could make out a lighter surface that almost filled it, shaped like the gable end of a house and stained with darker patches. She moved closer and saw this surface was covered in illustrations and blocks of written text.

“What is it?” she asked.

Albrecht’s voice came from behind her, out of the darkness. “The world,” he said. “Or at least an idea of it.”

Sarah had not come here easily. Although she’d eventually agreed to let Albrecht show her why his patrol had come to the valley, she’d grown nervous once they’d left Upper Blaen. She didn’t trust him and as they’d walked up towards the head of the valley, then around its western wall above Maggie’s farm and The Court, she’d stopped several times, shaking her head, telling him she wouldn’t go any further. But in the end something had brought her here. Something in his tone, in his look had convinced her she needed to see this. To make sense of things, to explain what had happened to her life over these past four months. So by the time they reached the Red Darren, a sandstone cliff jutting from the head of a scree slope high up the valley’s wall, Sarah was ready to follow Albrecht as he collected a torch from behind a boulder and stepped inside a tall, narrow crevice in the rocks.

Although the stone of the Red Darren was most often split horizontally, making it look from a distance as if it had been built from massive rough-hewn bricks, several vertical rifts like this appeared irregularly along its half-mile length. Sarah had never been inside one of these rifts and she was surprised how quickly the only light was that of Albrecht’s torch illuminating the damp, angular walls. She gripped the hazel walking stick she’d taken from her porch, the V at its head worn smooth as glass by the pressure of Tom’s thumb over the years, and hoped the dogs, which she’d left waiting at the mouth of the crevice, would still come to her if they heard her calling.

When Albrecht had stopped in front of her and shone his torch at the back wall, her heart had begun racing once more. There was nothing there. He had lured her into this cliff and now there was nothing there. She gripped the walking stick with both hands and leant her weight towards the entrance, ready to run back towards the light at any moment. But then Albrecht had moved closer up to the rock before stepping sideways and disappearing into a larger cavity. Sarah followed him, coming out into a man-made hollow with wooden struts and a brattice running along its sides. The struts were split and splintered, as if they’d been hammered into place in a hurry. Sarah looked around her, remembering how Tom had once told her how soft this stone could be before it was exposed to the air. “Like butter it is,” he’d said on one of their early walks together as he’d slipped his hand into a crack in the cliff and pulled out a clump of crumbling rock. Albrecht shone his torch about the hollow, following Sarah’s gaze with its beam until she finally saw the sacking cloth that had fallen away to reveal this frame and the world inside.

“It would have had more colour when it was first made.” Albrecht came up beside Sarah and ran his fingers along one of the long brown channels penetrating the lighter parchment like roots through soil. “These rivers were blue,” he said. “Bright blue.” He moved his hand down to a larger patch of brown. “And the seas were green.” His hand went to the top right-hand corner of the frame. “Except for the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. These were red. You can still see traces of the original colour.”