There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett

Author:Favel Parrett [Parrett, Favel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780733630095
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Vilém

SEPTEMBER 1942

The shelter is crowded. Maybe it’s another false alarm, but the air raid siren just keeps on screaming. It won’t rest.

‘It’s okay,’ he says softly to Máňa. He speaks in English.

There are a few men in the shelter who he works with. Neighbours. He recognises them in the yellow glow of torchlight. They only speak to him at work. In the street, they might make eye contact and sometimes they even nod, but that is it. There is never a smile, never a polite question asked about the day, about the weather, about family. No questions. No handshake. He is not one of them.

But he understands. He has heard it all so many times before.

‘He’s all right I suppose, but that one, that Marie or whatever she calls herself – hardly any bloody English for a start. I don’t care what they keep saying about Czechoslovakia. They could be Germans for all we know.’

He can feel Máňa shiver now and he holds her tighter. It terrifies him to think that he might not have met her, that he might have missed it. This one good thing in his life.

At home, alone in their flat, they are happy. Work is fine and Máňa is relieved they finally have their own place. But she must practise more English.

She tries. She listens to the radio all day and she understands every single word that is said. But her accent – it is stubborn. It does not want to leave. Maybe she can’t let it go because it is the one thing she still has from home. The one thing that totally belongs to her.

There is crying from somewhere in the shadows. A woman crying. Everyone is waiting for the big explosion that will blow up Hendon Aerodrome. Everyone is waiting in this shelter to die.

He touches Máňa’s face, runs his fingers along one cheekbone. He loves her face – her strong face. They talk about her face, the women in the street. About how it is so different. So foreign. So strange.

Sometimes he wants to yell out that they have boring, flat faces that no one will ever remember or stare at or even notice at all. But he never yells out anything. He keeps quiet. He is polite. He gets on with his work and is grateful for that.

Anyway, none of these people matter now because they have to move again. All foreigners are to be moved away from Hendon Aerodrome. A year ago, they were moved so he could be close to Hendon Aerodrome and the factory.

He does not know where they will live now, he only knows they have to pack and be ready. More neighbours that will hate them, hate their height and their cheekbones and their names and their accents.

Máňa must work on her accent. She looks up at him.

Vilém, she mouths silently.

Nobody knows his real name.

He had practised this new one, saying it over and over, Wwwilliam. Wwwilliam. He had concentrated on the strange sound of W, witnessed how it made his mouth move in the bathroom mirror.

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