A House on the Rhine Read online

  Hank had met her creeping back to the house at dawn one morning when he himself was returning from setting rabbit-snares by the river. When he had heard about Leo’s gang—and he had forced it out of her by giving her “the works” as he called his tortures—he had insisted on being let into the whole thing himself. Katie had been terrified of Leo’s displeasure, but to her surprise Leo had been rather pleased. He could use another tough one, he had said. Hank was tough. He had proved that all right. Hadn’t he been the head of the gang that had waylaid cyclists on the Grune Ring at dusk and coshed them while the others stole their purses, wallets or even bicycles? Wasn’t it Hank who had been the leader of the gang of boys who had gone round putting insulting letters in the doors of the Occupation? Hadn’t he led the gang who had painted notices telling the Occupation to go home? Leo had been delighted at this new acquisition. On his advice Hank had disbanded his own gang. Things had got too sticky. Besides, the Occupation were on their way out now—or at least it looked like it. Hank had so far proved a success, and Leo was pleased with Katie. Tonight she and Hank would slip out as usual and join the others as the usual meeting-place.

  At the thought of the coming evening her spirits rose again, and she began singing. After the raid planned for tonight was safely over she would have Leo to herself. She loved Leo. She loved him passionately and jealously. He was king of the gang and could pick and choose. All the girls wanted him. She had seen his eyes on the others, Maria, Leila and Trudi. She was not blind, and she knew that his feeling for her was transient and as nothing to the violent passion she had for him. He was cruel, too, and quite ruthless in attaining his own ends. But tonight would be hers. He had said so. She would have to arrange about Peppi. Krista would take the child to bed with her. Krista was soft and dumb. At the thought of Krista’s love for children Katie’s lip curled.

  The boys’ meal was ready. She shouted to them to come and get it. Her red hair gleamed in the sun as she stood there waiting for her brothers to emerge from the summer house. Shrieks and giggles came from them but they did not come out. Her thoughts were still on the coming evening. She would wear the new frock Leo had bought her. She hated her red hair. While Moe’s was a lovely tawny treacle colour and Anna and Carola were blonde with black eyes, her hair was a brilliant red. In this village they thought it shameful to have such hair. People with hair that colour were not to be trusted, they said. Katie had endured taunts and jibes all her life about it. The Belgian, Henri, had loved it, had run his hands through it and said it was beautiful; and it seemed that in America and England there were film actresses with hair of this hateful shade. Katie loathed it. She wanted it black. The first thing she intended to do when she had enough money was to have it dyed.

  The four boys, charging suddenly out of the summer house, broke ruthlessly upon these reflections and almost knocked her down. She set about getting them served. Hateful things, brothers, she thought as she watched them snatching the food which had taken her so long to prepare and gulping it down so as to make sure of a second helping. Food, food, food. It was endless. So many mouths to fill. In the evenings Pa, Hank, Anna and Krista added to the number. Krista helped to prepare it, certainly, but Anna considered that paying a share towards the household expenses more than justified her having her meals set before her. She would not lift a finger to help Katie unless Moe or Pa ordered her to do so.

  Most of the food had disappeared before Katie realized that her youngest brother Franz Joseph was missing. He was a fat sturdy sloe-eyed rascal of four who attended the convent kindergarten next to the church by the river. He had a constant habit of straying, as some dogs have. The villagers were accustomed to hearing strident cries of “Franz Joseph! Franz Joseph!” from early morning until dusk fell.

  “Where’s Franz Joseph?” she asked sharply. “Didn’t you fetch him from the kindergarten, Robert?”

  The child had apparently come home as usual and then disappeared again. Katie was furious that no one had remembered to keep an eye on the wanderer.

  “Go and call him!” she ordered. “He’s probably miles away by this time.”

  No one moved except Robert. Ever sweet and docile, he went off, sausage in hand, and in between bites howled out his brother’s name much as the mongrel dog Lumpi howled when tied up and left alone to guard the house. Katie went and listened at the door of the lodger’s room. There was complete silence. She supposed they were asleep.

  II

  JOSEPH got to the factory to find that he had what they called a free day. His name had been on the notice-board amongst those whose output called for special reward, but he hadn’t seen it. Anyway, he didn’t want a day off and said so to the foreman. He didn’t care about this new notion of the worker management’s to encourage the rebuilding drive. A good workman liked to work; he needed no reward except his pay. That was Joseph’s view, said the foreman. Others thought differently. Times were changing.

  Changing? They had changed. What a fool the man was if he thought Joseph hadn’t noticed that.

  “I don’t want the day off,” he said dourly, pulling on his dungarees. “I’ve come in as usual and here I’ll stay.”

  But he wasn’t allowed to stay. He was surrounded by his teasing mates. “Old Joe don’t want his day off,” they laughed. “Too many blooming kids in his home! Go on home, old chap, and get busy—your wife’ll get another medal yet!”

  This oblique reference to his wife having received a medal for having more than ten children infuriated him. He had been rather proud when she had worn it to Mass every Sunday with all the children walking behind her. Today he did not take kindly to the chaff round him.

  “Shut up! That’s enough!” he said roughly, and they fell back in sulky surprise. Joseph could usually be counted on to act as the butt of many jokes and sallies.

  “Anyone want my sandwiches?” he grunted as he removed the dungarees. “I’ll get a hot meal today.” That started them off again.

  “Good old Joseph! Get a steak man, a good red steak! That’ll help on the good work. Seven sons! Make it eight, man, make it eight! Eight soldiers for the European Defence Array. Ha, ha, ha!” He did not answer them and their voices followed him as he passed out of the checkgate, where the timekeeper teased him about his not having wanted his free day.

  “Mind your own business!” shouted Joseph. The man looked after him in astonishment. He was usually only too ready for a chat on the ever-burning topic of Rearmament and the European Defence Army. After all, to a man with seven sons the matter had some importance. Wasn’t he always complaining that with no army, no kind of military discipline, the present-day youths were insufferable? And today the papers were headlined with the subject and the upheaval the question was causing in the whole of Europe.

  Joseph went and sat on a bench under a chestnut tree in a street off the main one where the factory lay. His mind was in a turmoil. He had wanted to smash his fists into the silly grinning faces of his work-mates. It had been all he could do to keep them off the timekeeper. He looked at his hands. They were large and strong yet curiously gentle. He had never wanted to use them for violence before. Not even in the war. What he had done he had done reluctantly under orders, never from love of violence or killing. Never, until now. Beads of sweat were running down his face, not from heat, but from some emotion which still swept him, and which he now recognized as hate. He hated them, all of them, and the grinning old fool of a timekeeper most of all.

  He took off his cap and shook himself impatiently, then relaxed on the bench under the chestnut tree. The chestnut flowers swayed slightly in the breeze above him. The pattern of their leaves as he looked up through half-closed eyes moved him strangely. The fact that beauty was impressing itself upon his mind was beyond his understanding. He only knew that he had suddenly seen a chestnut tree, not just as a tree, but as some moving living force, and that somehow he got comfort from it. The sun glinting through the spreading leaves reached him on the hard bench. The sky deepened its blu
e. Looking up, the chestnut blossoms were strong thrusting candles pointing up to the heavens. Hundreds, no thousands of them. Whenever he rode down the street in the tram these blossoms jerked his gaze from the dirty noisy traffic, the gutters, the dust, the petrol fumes, and the creaking oily tram-lines—up, up to the blue heavens.

  At the very end of the street, far above the candles, the two spires of the cathedral pointed even higher up to the vaulted blue. Joseph’s eyes were caught and held by the spires. They dominated the landscape for miles round the town. He could see them from the village where he lived now with Moe and the children. He’d pictured them often when he had been away fighting, and when he had been a prisoner. He’d visualized his family after their home had been demolished in the bombing, safely sheltered in the bunker under the cathedral’s massive foundations. Everything else might be swept away in dust, as indeed it appeared to have been each time he came back on leave, but the cathedral had stood solidly, a monument to God in the midst of a shattered town. Every time he had gone into action on the interminable campaigns, no matter how exhausted or utterly dispirited he had felt, his last vision had always been of these spires, twin fingers pointing up to the God who was surely looking after his family safely housed in the shelter under His church.

  The great clock boomed out the hours, but Joseph sat on as if drugged. His thoughts raced round in contrast to the immobility of his body. Why didn’t he go home? That was the normal thing for a man to do on a free day. Why not? He pushed away the nagging certainty about Moe. He didn’t want to face it. He knew—and yet he didn’t know. He was too dispirited to care much. Once he knew for certain he would have to take positive action. Action—he hated the word. He had heard it too often. What had happened to Moe? What had made her change so much? Was it because he had been away for so long? Or was it Carola? What was it?

  Thinking back it seemed to him that she had changed from that day when the child had suddenly sickened. Only a headache and lassitude—then suddenly she could not use her legs then the rest of her little body became useless. By the time she had been rushed to hospital Carola was desperately ill with the dreaded poliomyelitis. And Moe seemed to think somehow that it was his, Joseph’s, fault that her favourite child was stricken down. He went now impulsively to a telephone call-box and rang up the hospital where she still lay helpless. It was not visiting day. No, he was told firmly, he could not see her now. She was having treatment, and it was the time when the specialists came. They were sorry, the Sister answering the telephone was apologetic, she would tell the child her father had telephoned, but rules were rules. If he liked to come this evening, he could see her. Joseph rang off without promising. He was disappointed. In this turmoil of mind for which he simply could not account, the sight of his little daughter might have calmed him. She was of a sweet, patient disposition, and lay there without complaint. To no one would Joseph have admitted that it cost him a tremendous effort of will to bring himself to visit her. The sight of her suffering brought back so many vivid recollections of the war. Of children lying just as she lay now, but motionless or apathetic from hunger, not from paralysis. Greece for instance—that had been Hell. Something he would never forget.

  He returned slowly to the seat under the chestnut tree and took out his pipe. Why was he in this agitated state of mind? What had made him almost want to curse the Sister who had regretfully refused him the sight of his child? She was a nun, a woman to whom the child herself was devoted, and for whom Joseph normally felt awe and respect.

  The great clock of the cathedral boomed out twelve long deep strokes, and he got up. Knowing that his workmates would soon be swarming out of the factory, he moved, as if impelled, towards the building itself. Under its deep foundations had been the home to which he had come on his few army leaves, when he had bribed the attendants to be allowed to creep in with his wife on the women’s side of the shelter.

  He went through the garage at the back of the great church and down to the bunker. Still open, years after the end of war, the sexes still segregated, a dour-faced woman attendant asked him roughly what he wanted. The place was clean and smelt of disinfectant. When his family had lived here it had smelt only of dirty humanity. Disinfectants had been non-existent and water very scarce. He wondered who the place was used by now. Students, hikers and mostly refugees from the East who did not want to go to any of the organized centres, he was told. Accommodation in the town was still at a premium in spite of all the rebuilding. Travellers stranded without a bed for the night often slept here. Joseph shuffled up the steps, back through the garage to the front of the cathedral and followed the stream of tourists and sightseers up to the main entrance.

  The noise coming from all the scaffolding in the square was deafening. Everywhere one looked there were workmen perched up on scaffolding, hammering, chipping, drilling and hauling up bricks. Even in the faintly-scented gloom of the chill church the sound of rebuilding could be heard. It was impossible to get away from it. One woke to it first thing each morning and heard it last thing when the night-shifts with their great acetylene flares took over. Clank, clank, clank, went the hammers. Chip, chip, chip, the chisels. Build, build, build, the bricks, as they were unloaded from the lorries and passed by human chains up to the scaffolding. Even Sundays were not free from this nuisance in the devastated town. And not even here in God’s house. The work was going on behind a false screen erected to shut off the damaged end. The knocks and thuds came through the barricade like muffled ghostly echoes as the builders strove to repair the interior beauty of the noble edifice whose fair outline had been almost untouched.

  Joseph was swept ruthlessly forward by gangs of schoolchildren and their teachers, caught in a swirl of chattering noisy brats being taken over the church. Trying to disentangle himself he pushed as relentlessly as they did, only to find himself one of a group of tourists being given information by a guide.

  He did not hear one word of the man’s monotonous talk; he was shaken again by the same violent emotion that he had felt for his workmates. He hated these people, hated them, unreasonably, violently and urgently. Breaking away from the goggling faces and the rubber-necked listeners he passed his hands over his wet face, then wiped it with his handkerchief.

  He was in a chapel, quite alone. It was the lovely chapel of the Crucifix. He sat down blindly, then knelt, fixing his eyes on the head of Christ of the Gero cross, but to his dismay he could not pray. He was still shaken with this horrible, wicked emotion. Gradually the tumult began to die down. He felt curiously limp, almost as if he had been running or taking violent exercise. As he got up a man came into the chapel.

  “They say that Crucifix is a thousand years old,” he said to Joseph. “They say the date’s on the back and it’s nine hundred and something. Think of that, when everything new round here has gone up in dust.”

  Joseph said nothing, but he turned and looked again at the Gero cross.

  “I’ve come a thousand miles to see it,” said the man. He moved forward and fell on his knees before the carved figure, sublime in its sculptured suffering.

  Out in the main aisle Joseph was caught up again in a stream of sightseers; they were making for the Treasury and he was pushed and shoved in their midst to the entrance where one paid a fee. He followed the party into a world of wealth and beauty of which he had never dreamed.

  Wonderful objects which the devout had given as offerings for use in the church. Given to God. Golden caskets full of priceless jewels, caskets containing relics of the saints. From one to another the visitors hurried and pushed and craned as the guide pointed out each exquisite treasure. Crosses, chalices, rings; sceptres set with gems of world-wide fame given by names renowned in history for the glory of God’s house. Down in the vaults there was four times as much again, there was no place to show all the wealth, said the guide. Joseph hated the man for harping on the value of the objects. For just as he had realized the beauty of the chestnut trees, so he now awoke to the breath-taking beauty of
these man-made objects. But what about storing up these treasures? Wasn’t there a verse about not laying up treasures on earth where thieves could break in and steal? Hadn’t Christ himself said that? How could the priests reconcile that with all this wealth? They could. They could explain everything. All those questions he used to ask the old priest when he had been a boy—they had all been explained. Or had they?

  It was a long time since his mind had questioned anything. In the army one just didn’t. A man was there to obey, promptly and blindly. Perhaps that was why he had accepted everything as it had come all these last years—ten years doing blindly what one was told was a long time. None of his lot had understood what they were fighting for. What they did understand was obedience. Stand, they said. Attention, they said, listen, they said, march, march, march—take cover—throw, throw, throw—fire, fire, fire—take cover, take cover and so on and on in country after country. They had killed and killed. Why? For what?

  The sharp clang of the hammers on stone brought back the crack of rifles just as the heavy reverberating thuds of masonry being moved recalled vividly the guns and hand grenades. He hadn’t been wounded, not once during those appalling campaigns, and not one of his family had been lost or injured in the continuous heavy raids on the town.