Owen Sheers - Resistance

Two more this morning. One black, one white. Good strong ones, up on their legs straight away. Still some weak ones coming through, though. The crows find them before I do. They even took the tongue of one. It was still alive .

Maggie had a pair of twins joined at the head and back. That shook her up bad. She broke one up to get the other one out but it was no good. She lost them both and the ewe too. She says she’s never known it before .

I come out yesterday and saw The Gaer bright as anything. Edith has done her whitewash new. Can you believe that? After all these years .

Still no one come into the valley. I don’t know why they don’t. They must see our smoke. But they still stay away. Maggie says it’s best that way for now. Until we know for sure what’s going to happen .

I don’t know if you can see the hawthorn where you are, Tom, but it’s come out full here again. Even some pink down by the river. Bluebells coming through early in the wood too. There’s a woodpecker in there somewhere. I haven’t seen him yet but I hear him every day .

I put that orphan in with the dogs but she still didn’t take it so he’s here now with me, wrapped in your shirt by the fire. I never thought I’d be doing this without you, Tom .

I hope you are safe .

Sarah

Sarah found the writing easier now, the words running smoother to the pen, but her letters still weren’t complete. They still didn’t translate the days she lived. Like the poet’s watercolours they were representations but untruthful. She didn’t tell Tom everything; no longer because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to.

Just as their husbands were absent from the valley, so the German patrol had become absent from her letters in the back of the accounts book. They were there, but unseen, shadowing every event. It was Otto who had whitewashed The Gaer in preparation for Edith’s return. It was Sebald who had broken up Maggie’s conjoined lambs. It was Albrecht who’d found the weak newborn with its tongue torn out at the root by the crows. It was Bethan’s responses to the attentions of Gernot that had persuaded Mary her daughter should leave the valley, and it was as much Albrecht as Maggie who’d been so concerned by her leaving.

Sarah had tried writing her days as they were, but it was no use. Her pen hung over the page and the words blocked in her mind. If Tom were here, she could explain it all. How it was just the way of things. How there was nothing to worry about. How without the help of the patrol they’d all have sunk under the weight of the winter.

But Tom was not here, so instead she told him about her days as if the Germans didn’t exist. It left her feeling unfaithful, to him and to herself, but she’d rather this than not write to him at all. Rather some words than none. Because anything was better than silence. She understood that now. Anything was better than the silence of the mute hills, the creaking quiet of her bed, the still hours before dawn. Any contact, any words written to him and him alone, even if they were hollow and echoed with the silence of all the words unwritten behind them.

They had kissed only once. No more than a brushing of lips, as light as swallows’ wings nicking the water’s surface when they dipped to drink. Even as he leant in towards her, she’d already been pulling away from him, shaking her head. But she must have paused, just for a second, because their lips did meet. And when they did it had felt so right, more right than anything he’d done since he left home a year ago. But now Bethan was gone. Her mother had sent her away. For what? A brushing of lips, a moment of shared breath, nothing more.

Gernot had first seen Bethan watching them over the winter. The thick snow on the hillside behind The Court seemed to absorb some of the light during the day and release it again through the evening and night. At least, this was how it had appeared when he’d looked out of his bedroom window at dusk that evening. The snow, faintly luminescent, showed up the darker outlines above it. The posts of a fence, the wind-withered thorn trees, and there, behind one of them, the shape of a young girl crouching at its trunk looking down at them. Gernot had not yet lit the lamp in his room so he was able to stand there, at a little distance from the window, and watch Bethan as she watched them. He didn’t move until she did, and even then, when he went downstairs to prepare the patrol’s dinner, he didn’t tell any of the others of what he’d seen. How the hillside had briefly birthed a dark-haired girl, a wood spirit who was watching over them.

The next time he saw her he was ready. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he rested his elbows on the bedside table and lifted the binoculars up to his eyes. The magnification of their lenses shut out whatever light the snow emitted, so although they brought Bethan closer to him, they also hid her further in the gathering night. The fading light became grainy and her face no more than an oval of shading, her features merely suggested by pools of black and grey, all framed in the deepening darkness of her hair. Even then, though, he could see her lips moving. Not all the time, just intermittently. A dark crease in her face mouthing silent words. He wanted to know what she was saying. He wanted to understand. And even then, through the opaque shreds of the dying daylight, he wanted to kiss those moving, then still, then moving lips.

He never caught her there again. When working in the vegetable garden or out the back of the kitchen, or even in the further-away fields, he’d look up at the slope, find the thorn tree, and search for her shape behind it. Although he never saw her, that didn’t stop him planning what he’d do if he did. How he would walk up the slope towards her, how he would speak the few words of English Albrecht had taught him. How he would take her in his arms and kiss her. Lying in his bed at night he re-created her shadowed face behind his closed lids, shedding light over it to illuminate her skin, her eyes, and those two moving lips.

A couple of times over the first weeks of the thaw Gernot had seen Bethan in the distance, riding out on her pony on the other side of the valley, but he’d had to wait until the first full weeks of spring before he saw her properly again. He’d worked at the women’s farms several times over the winter, and at her mother’s farm more than once, but Bethan had never been there. Then one day Albrecht ordered him and Alex to help Mary plough and plant a small field of potatoes down beside the river.

Alex worked the single-blade plough, his big arms floating it above the turning soil. Gernot and Mary followed in his wake, pushing the seed potatoes into the freshly exposed earth. There had never been much ploughing in the valley so Mary’s old cart horse was unfamiliar with the harness and the movement, with the weight of the yoke at his shoulders. This was why Bethan was with them. To walk at the horse’s head, one hand hooked in the rope halter as she talked softly into his ear or encouraged him on with short clicks of her tongue against her teeth.

Gernot watched her, eclipsed and then revealed over Alex’s shoulder as the plough rode its own furrow like the needle of the gramophone in the grooves of the records they’d listened to over the winter. Once again he saw her lips moving and again he could not hear what she was saying. As they repeated their gradual procession, up the field, turning, then back, he put words to her moving mouth. He imagined she was talking to him. First in English and then in German, but always words just for him, whispered into the crook of his neck.

On each turn their eyes met. It was a silent connection, a wordless thread spun through the clamour of each turn; the cart horse sucking his big hooves from the wet earth at the field’s edge, Alex ushering him on, the chains and hinges of the plough clattering and creaking. And yet for Gernot each glance drowned out the noise around him and seemed possessed of such a resonance that he couldn’t believe either Alex or her mother hadn’t heard them.