Saturday 24th – Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941

The officers have gathered at the edge of the field beyond the verge, where they have set up their folding canvas chairs in a loose crescent, facing west. On the other side of the road the woods are sinking into shadow, and the smoke pall from the still-burning town helps bring down a premature darkness. But the western sky is mostly clear, just a few ribbons of cloud drifting across the late grey-blue.

Mechelen’s adjutant arrives clutching a batch of arm-thick salamis to his body, and he’s accompanied by two soldiers sharing the burden of a large crate (champagne and vodka) and some netting bags full of local bread.

“There’s cheese following along behind, and pickles,” the adjutant promises.

A few minutes later, as he drains the last of his champagne from his standard issue white enamel mug, Captain Thomas (?) says, “We really need to get things better organised. We need proper glasses, and ice buckets. Proper glasses, at the very least. And cigars.”

Lieutenant Fisher, behind Thomas’ back, rolls his eyes in that ‘here he goes again’ way, and catches Jan’s eye, winks, and raises his eyebrows. Smiles. Fisher finds Thomas’ small-bore carping far more irritating than he knows he really should, but it’s one of those repetitive little annoyances that gets under your skin, and which you only need a tiny glimpse of to reawaken the dozens of previous iterations that are lodged in your memory – poisonous little pellets of ire.

Fisher has larger issues to think about. He hasn’t seen his Gabriella for three months, and the last time he had sexual intercourse – six weeks ago on home leave, with his wife Beatrice in the dowdy fawn-coloured guest bedroom at her parents’ house at the foot of the mountains – is vivid in his mind, distancing him from happier memories of making love with Gabriella. He tries to hang on to the memory of that golden time – just three days! – that he and Gabriella spent together in Prague in the summer of ’39: the sunlight in her beautifully cut blonde hair, the smooth sheets, his taut belly slapping against hers as they moved together, the way she pinched her lower lip between her teeth as she looked frankly into his eyes. But Beatrice…he keeps remembering Beatrice’s brown hair plastered across her sweaty forehead in that little bedroom, with the bed creaking worryingly and his left hand damping down the oscillations of the headboard. And afterwards, the pair of them lying there drying, not touching each other, and the irritating sound of Beatrice sniffing and not-quite-clearing-her-throat. There were little bits of dust or dirt on the threadbare sheets, and he could feel them, gritty on the damp skin of his back and buttocks, whenever he shifted position. [That sense of something unsaid in the air above the bed – the sense that they’re both staring into that shadowy space, knowing that there’s something that they both want to touch upon, each knowing that the other person is lying there thinking about it, and not wanting to speak into that void…]

Ella, Ella. Fucking hell.

Here’s Mechelen’s adjutant again. This time it’s cigars, “Courtesy of Colonel [?] Mechelen. He’ll be along soon, gentlemen.”

“With the cheese, presumably?” says Thomas, and Fisher nearly chokes on his champagne.