The Children's War by Monique Charlesworth

Author:Monique Charlesworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428240
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Near Dortmund, January 1941

Even the inside of the carriage had iced up. Frost had eventually silenced the tongue of the heavy fellow who got in with them at Hanover. After Bielefeld, they and he were the last ones left in the compartment. The fat man wiggled a jar of goose fat from his coat pocket, smeared it thickly onto bread with a pocketknife and crammed great chunks into his mouth, rapidly chewing and gulping. The rich smell in the small space was a provocation. Nicolai and Lore exchanged a look. Poor hungry Sabine cried herself to sleep, her breath a cloudy mist. The train inched to a halt just outside Dortmund station. Stamping to warm his feet, the black marketeer heaved down his case from the rack with self-pitying exhalations; it was so heavy, it had to be full of similar jars. He dragged it along the corridor. Nicolai sprang up, pulled the blackout blind down over the compartment door, held tight to the chilly handle. The station came, doors slammed, the train moved on. Nobody tried to come in. He sat.

“My husband hates such men,” said Lore. “They make him shake with anger, literally shake.”

“He made me feel hungry.”

She smiled wearily. “Rest, Nicolai. Try and sleep.”

Sabine slept on, cheeks scarlet in the knitted bonnet. The train juddered, buffeted by one passing the other way. Easing up the blackout blind by the width of a curious finger, Nicolai peered out. A long black troop train slid by, an eel through dark waters.

Lore was drooping. He sat, conscious of her head on his shoulder, the weight of a woman’s body, slight but definite, her warmth. He sat still and upright, so as not to disturb her. In February he would be fifteen. Already the height of a man, he towered over her. Everything about her touched him: the faint shine on her good stockings, that she had dressed up for the journey, the scuffed shoes, her hand, with a hard bump on the thumb from sewing. He looked at the way her hair fell from the parting, the hairpin, which was working its way out from under the little hat. One side of him was warm, where she lay against his heart.

All through that Christmas of victory celebrations, he had been conscious of her holding herself together, waiting. She was desperate to go to Wuppertal and seek news of her daughter, but had only the statutory day off. Magda was celebrating the coming of Christ with her brother at their farm in the Eifel. The temporary cook was not accomplished; tempers wore thin. Fräulein Lore held their household together. His mother said she could not go away now; she complained that the party season was the worst possible time, that her annual holiday was not yet due. It was true, but she was, as usual, missing the point. The alternative was to lose her altogether. Nicolai had chosen a morning when the house was quiet.

“I’ve had a wonderful idea, Mutti,” he said, smiling broadly.

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