Owen Sheers - Resistance

Bethan had been walking since midmorning. At first, when Helen Roberts had called at her aunt’s house just before curfew last night, she hadn’t believed what she’d said. But Helen was adamant. Margaret Jones in Llanthony, clear as day, and her mother wanting her back, soon as possible. Once Bethan was convinced Helen was telling the truth, she hadn’t needed any more persuading. She’d left Hay-on-Wye this morning, carrying just the same bag over her shoulder with which she’d set out from the Olchon six weeks before.

Bethan recognised her pony long before she could see her properly. She’d ridden her since she was a girl and would have been able to identify her outline against the sky even if she’d been standing with a herd. It was only when she got much closer, however, that she saw Gernot, lying on his back in the distance. She went to the pony first, picked up the reins and led her over to where Gernot lay. Letting her go to graze, she went and knelt beside him.

At first, when Gernot opened his eyes and saw Bethan looking down at him, he thought he was delirious. But then he felt the touch of her fingers at the back of his neck as she lifted his head.

“Here,” she said, holding a bottle beneath his chin. “Drink this.”

Gernot opened his mouth and let her tip the bottle to his lips, which were dry and parched. He drank thirstily until she pulled the bottle away. “Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse in his throat.

Bethan stood up and looked about her. She’d been away for less than two months but it felt like a lifetime. During her stay in Hay-on-Wye she’d witnessed another occupation to the one she’d experienced in the valley. Before she’d left for the town her mother had made her swear on the family Bible to remain silent about the missing men. But that oath had been unnecessary. She knew now, all too well, after what she’d seen and heard in Hay, about what happened to families found to have links with the insurgency.

Her second cousin, Eve, whom Bethan had known only vaguely before the war as a childhood playmate at family gatherings, had become her guide through the realities of life under occupation. They’d shared a bed at the top of the house above her aunt’s grocery shop. Every night, before they went to sleep, Eve would tell Bethan another story about what the Nazis had done in the town, and in other towns and villages too. It was only recently, however, when she could no longer hide the swelling of her stomach from her roommate, that Eve had told Bethan her own story. Finding Bethan’s hand in the dark, she’d guided it onto her distended belly. She was, Eve told her, carrying the child of a German soldier. She had no way of knowing which one because there had been two of them. At this point Eve’s voice had wavered and broken. Bethan had stroked her hair and said it was all right, she didn’t have to tell her if she didn’t want to. But Eve said she did want to, very much, and so she’d continued.

It was early on, a few weeks before Christmas. There had been more sabotage attacks and all the men, including her father, had been rounded up in the town hall. That’s what they’d said, anyway. Eve didn’t believe them. She thought it was planned, that the commanders wanted to give their troops a Christmas present. Because she hadn’t been the only one that night.

The two soldiers were drunk. She and her mother were closing the shop, but the soldiers wouldn’t leave. Her mother understood a little German and she’d leant over the counter, straining to make out what the two of them were saying. “They say,” she’d said slowly to Eve, “what they want isn’t on the shelves. That they want … something from behind the counter.” It was only when she heard herself translate their words that her mother went suddenly pale, and that was when the dark-haired one flipped up the counter flap and led Eve out the back of the shop and up the stairs. She’d tried struggling but he held the barrel of his rifle jabbed into her hip. The fair one had stayed behind, watching over her mother, then later, when the dark-haired one had finished, they’d swapped. It was a small building above the shop, a cheap conversion with thin walls and floors. Her mother would have been able to hear but she’d never said anything to Eve since, except, that same night when she’d come and stood at the door to her bedroom. “Don’t tell your father,” her mother had said quietly, the streetlamp outside Eve’s window casting a sodium glow across her face. “It would kill him if you did.”

Even now Eve’s mother refused to acknowledge her daughter’s swelling bump. Eve said she was planning to go away, to Hereford. She’d heard they had places there where you could have your child, then leave it. That, she said, is what she planned to do.

Everything Eve told her made Bethan disgusted with herself. She felt like a child who’d only just woken to the adult world. The curses that had softened with her visits to the thorn tree above The Court hardened again, and every time she passed a group of soldiers in the street she muttered at them under her breath, energised with real venom once more.

During her time in the town, Bethan had also become disgusted with the other women in the valley; women older than herself who should have known better. Just the other day she’d heard that David Lewis, Tom’s brother, had been confirmed killed in action during the counterattack. And there was his sister-in-law, Sarah Lewis, allowing that German captain to visit her every day, taking walks with him beside the river, even letting him play her music records while her husband was missing and his brother had died fighting the fascists. She hated the world she’d discovered outside the valley, but she still wanted her mother to leave the Olchon and come back with her to Hay. Better by far to live in the truth and know it, however bad it might be, than hide yourself away behind ignorance and habit.

Bethan put the bottle of water back in her bag, slung the bag over her shoulder, and walked away from Gernot towards where the pony was grazing. When she reached her the pony nuzzled at her pockets, hoping for a treat of some oats or calf nuts. The reins were tied at her neck to stop them falling to the ground. Bethan undid them, then swung them over the pony’s head to lead her back to where Gernot lay among the bilberry bushes, his right leg angled awkwardly from his hip.

Gernot had closed his eyes again, the last of the evening light playing under his lids in bursts of orange fragments, just as it had across his vision that day he’d climbed the hill to find Bethan waiting for him beside the thorn tree. When he opened them again it was in time to see the pony’s legs passing his head. One of her hind hooves caught the back of the opposite foreleg with every step, punctuating the steady rhythm of her walk with the faintest of metronome ticks. He turned his head slightly and the pony’s legs swiped their shadows across his face as the tick, tick of her overreach passed by his ear, then faded away as Bethan led her back onto the track that dropped down towards the valley’s head. As she led the pony on down the slope away from Gernot, a pair of crows circled above her, cawing and tumbling in the last amber light of the day.

Sarah was sitting alone in Maggie’s kitchen with William’s shotgun loaded on the table before her. Maggie lay asleep upstairs, her pale cheeks sunken, breathing thinly through her open mouth. It seemed as if she’d aged years since last night when Sarah had watched her treat the colt’s cut in the stable. As soon as she’d seen her like this, looking small and fragile in the sidecar of the motorbike, she’d handed the note Albrecht had written back to Sebald and, closing the door of Upper Blaen behind her, told him to take them both to Maggie’s farm. Eventually Sebald had understood her, and with Sarah mounting the motorbike behind him, he’d driven them back down the rough track, Seren and Fly straining on their chains, barking behind them.