Free Unexploded by Alison MacLeod Page B

themselves at the hot pane.
    It was not within her power not to love Geoffrey, but for this – this fear of herself that was now hers to carry – she could not forgive him.

9
    For the first time, he could not say the old words. After everything he’d known and seen, he gave up the habit here of all places, in the tranquillized quiet of a makeshift infirmary on the remote edge of a seaside town.
    He didn’t open his eyes. He could hardly bear to see the four walls of his failure. It was enough to smell the bleached lino again and the wood of the cheap hut baking in the heat of June. He reached to his back and ran his fingers over the bandaged lump where his left arm met his shoulder. The bullet was as long and wide as his little finger and burned as if someone were pressing a cigarette to his flesh.
    Years ago, of course, Otto had ceased to believe in the prayer’s potency, but he’d murmured it each morning anyway for its mundane comfort; for the memory of his mother beside him in his narrow bed, stroking his head as he slipped into sleep. Each night for weeks, she had taught him the strange words – the only Hebrew he would ever learn – and he’d fallen asleep to the scent of her hair on his pillow.
    ‘Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha.’
    Now, his stomach lurched at the impossible coincidence of the words rising in the space of the infirmary. He managed to turn. Themumbled prayer belonged to the old man in the bed next to his, the only other wretch ill enough to be abandoned to that airless hut.
    For four days they had woken side by side on their metal camp beds in the overcrowded barracks without exchanging a word, for Otto had refused conversation, and it was assumed he spoke little English. Relative silence was the only permissible form of privacy. Today, once again, they were side by side, this time in the room that passed for an infirmary, and his neighbour’s ears, Otto realized, were far better than his lungs. The old man – a Jew, evidently – must have overheard his murmured recitation each morning and recognized it. ‘ Modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam shehechezarta bi nish-mahti b’chemlah, rabah emunatecha .’
    ‘I give thanks to God for restoring my soul to my body.’
    This morning, the old man was saying the words for him.
    He would have laughed mirthlessly were it not for the pain in his lungs. Didn’t his neighbour know? In places like this, small acts of kindness were cruel as razor wire. Nor did he need his pity. Yesterday had not, in fact, been a day of despair. The light had been extraordin-ary; the horizon opalescent where it met the sea; the open air a balm. After months in the barracks, he could hardly believe he now found himself standing on a beach on the very edge of England.
    He sucked at the stale air. His wound still burned. But at least all was finally still, apart from the buzzing and ringing in his right ear – the phantom whizz of the bullet. Stillness, of course, is not the same thing as peace. The quiet was strained, brittle, like that quarter of an hour each morning at Sachsenhausen, before the pretty nurse with the doe eyes arrived with the injection. Who, who, they’d wonder, would it be this time?
    That sickbay had always been stuffed full with the infected, the tormented and the broken, while this room was strangely emptyexcept for their two bodies, each pitiful beneath the cheap regulation blanket. From time to time, the old man’s bronchial gasping turned to a retching that echoed in the rafters above them, but otherwise: silence.
    At the door, a dull-eyed guard, a new face – new to Otto in any case – rubbed and scraped at the mud that caked his boots; perhaps one of the men who had been digging the latrine-and-shower block yesterday when the pipes burst. Otto watched him, fascinated by the comparative ordinariness of this man’s morning; by his frowning attention to the insult of