The Gates of Rutherford by Cooke Elizabeth

Author:Cooke, Elizabeth [Cooke, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-09T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Finally, the summer had come.

It seemed to Frederick that he had been living in the thick wool coat for years, and it stank to high heaven. Sometimes, in the camp, the guards would come and take their clothes to the laundry and issue them with others: ill-fitting underclothes and shirts and strangely shaped boxlike jackets of canvas. Frederick was wearing the boots that had brought him from France, from Munster, from home. He didn’t mind. They were good boots. He wanted new socks, but he took care to wash out the pair that he had.

Not to complain. Others did; it was their entertainment. He simply didn’t like the feeling it left in him: sour and scratched inside, hungering for home. He tried to think of other and more immediate things. The pattern of plaster cracks on the wall nearest his bed and a funny kind of map that they made, almost like the Mosel. He imagined vineyards growing on each side, and the terraced restaurants where his uncle had once taken him on his only holiday as a child. He tried to think of pleasant scenes. Of a music festival in their village where someone had played a violin, and there had been dancing, kicking up summer dust under the linden trees. He would like to dance again, and be happy. He didn’t want to lose the knack of being happy. He didn’t want to go home with his soul scoured out, grim-faced, resentful, pained. He had to keep something of himself clean. Still be able to stand up straight. That was how he thought of it.

And now, at last, the sun. He liked the light in the morning. So much light after the rain. It got light at five thirty, pale rims of apricot and pink outside the window. He would get up and look at it. It was important to remember that God still gave you summer mornings, and that it was man who had taken away the pleasure of them and made war on the green earth, churning it up and soaking it with slaughter. He looked at the sunlight and imagined it flowing over the battlefields. Grant them grace to stop, he thought. He was sure that for all the armies with their priests calling on God—and God was unerringly on the side of whatever priest was speaking, German or Turkish, Indian or French—he felt that God had no particular side at all. He just kept giving them summer and spring and winter; rain and harvest and darkness; water and sand and sea. It was man that made a mess of it all, and for that God’s heart must ache.

And so he looked hard at the dawns and tried to note them in his head. If he had a notebook he would keep a record, he thought. A record of pleasant days. He held them close in his head and ran his mind over them repeatedly to keep the memory fresh. He wished he could write things down.

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