Owen Sheers - Resistance

“What are these?” Sarah’s voice came from above him. She was peering at something at the edge of the frame, dimly lit in the faint spillage of light from his torch. He straightened up and shone the beam where she was looking. “This,” she said, laying her finger beside an O encased in a roundel outside the main boundary of the map. “An’ this one too.” She bent to touch the glass over an R in a similar position lower down. Both letters still bore traces of their original gold leaf. The flakes caught the torchlight and shimmered against the sepia parchment like fool’s gold in base rock.

“Everything within this boundary,” Albrecht said, running his fingers around the outer circle of the map. “Is God’s creation. This is the world. These letters,” he said, pointing to the two letters and another pair that faced them in the same positions on the opposite side of the map, “spell ‘MORS’. They represent death, which dwells outside God’s realm.”

Again they were silent, but in a different way than before. It was a deeper silence, the silence of waking, as if that one word had made them remember everything again. Everything that they had, for the briefest of moments, been allowed to forget.

“You do understand why I wanted to show you this, don’t you, Mrs. Lewis?”

Sarah couldn’t see his face, but his voice had changed again, returned to the voice she’d always known.

“This map is why I came here, into your valley. And it is why I am still here too. This map.” He turned towards it once more. “It deserves more than a castle in Wewelsburg. It deserves light, not darkness.”

Sarah shifted her feet in the dry earth. She felt afraid again but this time she didn’t know why. “I should get back,” she said at last.

“Yes,” Albrecht said. “Of course.”

He lifted the sacking cloth and tarpaulin from the floor and pulled them across the packing crate, obscuring the world within. Then, taking the lead but shining the torch behind him so Sarah might see her footing, he led her out of the cavity into the natural crevice, and then out of the Red Darren altogether onto the hillside and its steep slopes of scree. Outside, Seren and Fly were on their feet, stretching their backs. The blustery day had pushed what few clouds there’d been over the Black Hill and as Sarah emerged from the crevice she had to squint in the brightness left in their wake. She looked down the valley, and for the second time in her life saw everything held within its steep walls cast in an unfamiliar light.

It was a week after Albrecht had shown Sarah the map when Atkins, half-blind and missing all the fingernails on his right hand, came stumbling down the valley’s west wall towards The Court. Stopping at an outcrop of rock he crouched behind it and peered down at the moss-covered slates of the farmhouse below him. His vision rose and fell with his heavy breath. There was a milky cloud always drifting across his left eye, the watermark of a blow from one of those unseen hands that had, for months now, assaulted him every day.

Atkins was exhausted but still energised by the ebbing adrenalin of his escape. By the sheer luck of it. The bullet in the back had never come, however much he’d expected it as he’d scrambled down the railway embankment and rushed headlong into the trees at the edge of the siding. He’d lain in the drainage ditch for the rest of the day, motionless but for his shivering, the water making his joints ache with cold.

A toolshed in a cottage garden on the edge of the village had supplied him with the file with which he’d spent most of the night, running the chain of his cuffs across it as slowly as he could for fear of the noise it made. The cuffs themselves he’d had less luck with. He’d never been much good at picking locks and so he still wore them on each wrist, a few links of chain hanging from each one, still tarnished with the blood of the guard from the train.

Just before dawn he’d set out for the valleys. There were Auxiliary Units out there, or so he hoped. He didn’t know for certain. The Special Duties Section had always been his only responsibility, but he thought it was likely that somewhere in those remote hills there’d be a bunker and men who could help him. Or at least, if not a unit, then this, a local farmhouse so isolated even the Germans had left it alone. And inside, people like this young boy coming out to feed the chickens. People who could also help him. Who could feed him, hide him, until he made contact with the units.

Atkins watched the boy scatter the mash inside the chicken pen then stand still in the midst of the stabbing of the birds’ beaks at his feet. Slowly, the boy crouched lower until he was almost at their level. Then, just as slowly, he reached out an arm to stroke the oil-spill feathers of one of the cockerels. The bird let him do this, tame to human hands, and only gave the lightest of resistance when he picked it up and carried it out of sight around the corner of the house.

The boy didn’t come back and Atkins had to wait for over an hour before he saw another person. This time it was an older man, dressed in a similar way to the boy, in a farmer’s way, clothes that Atkins had come to know and trust. An old tweed jacket, a flannel waistcoat beneath, and heavy corduroy trousers pulled tight at the waist with a thick leather belt. The boy’s father perhaps. Atkins watched the man pull a fork from where it was stuck in the ground and begin working over the soil of a vegetable patch. He felt a wave of tiredness wash over him. These were the people he was fighting for, for whom he’d endured these months of pain. Men of the earth, men who knew their landscape as intimately as they might a lover. This man, he would understand.

Standing from behind the rock, Atkins began walking down the slope, the chain of each cuff held in his palms so as not to alarm the farmer. He felt as if he was walking towards the gates of Eden. A rare sanctuary just when he thought the game had been up. The man continued with his work, absorbed in his digging. Atkins walked on, the dew from the longer blades of grass soaking the bottoms of his trousers. He filled his lungs with the fresh mountain air, with freedom, with life. When he was near enough, he paused in his descent, took a deeper breath, and called down to the man below him.

“Hello there! Good morning!”

Sebald looked up from his digging to see a tall man standing on the slope above him, raising one hand in the air. He was speaking English. Any soldiering instinct still silting somewhere within him failed to show itself. Dropping the fork, he ran back inside The Court, clattering through the back door into the kitchen and on into the front room where Alex and Albrecht were eating their breakfast.

“A man,” Sebald said to them, the air gulping in his throat. “An Englishman. Outside on the hill.”

Atkins knew he’d made a terrible mistake the moment he saw Alex’s boots. Surprised by the farmer’s reaction, he’d walked a little further down the slope hoping to put him at his ease and so was closer to the house when Alex came round the corner. Even through the cloudy patch of his left eye he saw immediately that the man’s boots were not those of a farmer’s but regular Wehrmacht issue. It was all Atkins needed to know and he was already turning to run when Alex swung a machine gun from behind his back and aimed it up the hill.

Atkins felt a sudden burn of energy flooding through him as he half ran, half fell up the slope, grasping at roots, branches, rocks, anything that would propel him up and away from that gun behind him. As he ran he once more waited for the crack, for the momentary bumblebee whine of the bullet as it sped towards his back. But it never came. Just the scramble of loose stones and soil falling away behind him and the panting breath of another man, drawing closer and closer. Suddenly the breath became touch as he felt a grab at his trailing ankle that brought him smashing into the ground and sliding backwards. Then another hand on his other leg. He kicked out, made contact, then felt his ankle gripped again as he was dragged down the slope. Then more hands on his back, pinning his arms, on his head, pushing his face into the sweet smell of the young bracken, its fronds still curled like the fists of a foetus in the womb.