Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant

Author:Glenn Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical fiction
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Published: 2024-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

37

Almost every day, Alfred completed his pilgrimage to Hadamar after school. To hide his trips, he would lie to his mother that he had football practice with the school team. Alfred was not convinced his mother believed him, but he was still waiting for her to challenge him on what he considered a small deceit.

He could not shake a weight of sadness, which he carried like a satchel on his back. But when he was alone late each afternoon, in the expansive countryside north of the city’s limits, the sense of relief he experienced each time took his breath away, like the satchel on his back lifted in these moments when only the rural fields invited him forward, each step sowed with the tiny hope that today might be the day – the day he discovered Meike.

Alfred could inform her grandparents of her whereabouts, even perhaps his own parents. Then the matter would be settled, surely. Surely. Meike would return home. It had all been a simple administrative error, by a Party bureaucrat who had never known a Meike Richter, never cared to consider her. Alfred knew Meike used a wheelchair, of course, and he instinctively sensed that her legs did not work, but they had never discussed it. It was unspoken between them, like the happy hesitation before a first kiss. No need for words, complicating uncertain perfection.

Overhead, a sky hung grey. Its mood was not encouraging Alfred to complete the journey on foot to Hadamar and yet, as ever, he was grateful he had once en route. Looking up and filled with the energy of his trip, the grey and its complex beauty was more compelling to him than perfect blue. Those brilliant skies felt oddly flat now. Alfred felt trapped in an alternative world, side by side with the happy people and yet somehow hopelessly removed from them.

Alfred looked heavenward and he felt so small and yet significant in the same breath. Something about him had always preferred the cold. The wind buffeted him, sweeping in from the fields and making him hunch his shoulders and turn the collar of his coat up as high as possible. He still had ground to cover before the road to the right, arrowing through thick woods which hid Hadamar from Berlin.

Today was Monday, which, Alfred now thought, was a good day, a day representing a whole week of opportunities. To know, finally, he daydreamed as he strode forward. The wind was whipping up and Alfred increasingly felt the cold, forcing him to hunch his shoulders higher and higher to defend himself, but there was little he could do against such elements. Like Party transmissions each evening, the chill insidiously crept under your skin. Alfred knew it would be hours before he was warm again.

He tucked his chin into his chest as another gust punished his face and he felt the rutted mud, caked by cold, crunching beneath the soles of his beaten school shoes. He knew his mother would be furious, he smiled in another new emotion he was discovering – gallows humour.

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