A Lily of the Field Read online

  “I’m Larissa Tosca, major, NKVD. And my German ain’t so hot.”

  “And you learnt your English in America.”

  “How ever did you guess? Listen. If we can work without an interpreter, it’ll be good. Gregor’s a guy. He thinks like a guy. He sees this as an . . . an interrogation.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Well . . . yeah. But later. Later. What would you like . . . right now?”

  Méret could not remember when anyone had last asked her a question with so much choice built into it.

  “Right now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have hot water?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then I’d like a bath, clean clothes, and a meal.”

  “In that order?”

  §59

  From somewhere, Tosca found bubbles and Méret sank to her neck in foaming hot water in a bathroom on the first floor. Eyes closed, skin tingling. A warmth beyond dreams but not beyond desire seeping into her flesh.

  Tosca came in and sat on the lavatory seat, took a packet of Lucky Strikes from her breast pocket.

  “You want a cigarette? I thought you might like a cigarette.”

  Méret just stared back.

  Tosca took out a Zippo lighter and flicked a spark off the wheel.

  “I don’t smoke,” she went on. “Most people do. Gregor does. I got him to hand ’em over, so if you . . .”

  “I gave up. I gave up when they sent me here.”

  “They didn’t have cigarettes?”

  “Oh, yes, they had cigarettes.”

  “Then why deny yourself?”

  Méret sank beneath the bubbles, surfaced, and wiped the soap from her face. Tosca still sat on the banks of Jordan.

  “When you were a child, in whatever country you were a child, did your mother have a drawer, or perhaps a box or a biscuit tin? Whatever it was, it would be near her sewing or perhaps in the kitchen, in the woman’s domain . . . and in this drawer, box, or tin she would save things that your father thought were useless and that he derided as eccentricity or folly or penny-pinching. She would save buttons that had come off shirts long since torn up for dusters, the elastic band with which the postman bundled the mail, the string that came off brown-paper parcels, the brown paper itself, an odd shoelace, a zipper from a skirt that no longer fitted, the stub end of a piece of sealing wax even though no one used sealing wax anymore, a blunt pair of scissors, a broken watch that someday someone might tease into ticking once more. To your father it was junk, to you a treasure trove to be tipped out, fondled, and tipped back. Was this not so? Of course it was. And your father was wrong and you were right. In Auschwitz, the contents of your mother’s biscuit tin were riches, because in Auschwitz everything became a commodity. There was nothing that could not be traded. You could sell butter with green mould on it. You could sell a piece of wurst as hard as bullets. You could sell sex. When could you not sell sex? But a cigarette cost more. You could use cigarettes like money. An egg? Put a price on an egg. Imagine how many fucks would buy you a cigarette. Imagine how many cigarettes would buy you an egg. I gave up. It was one less commodity to have to think about. It was one less craving, and in the absence of desire, one more freedom.”

  Tosca said nothing to this, but then Méret never thought she would. She just put the whole pack on the side of the bath, flicked the lighter one last time to see it worked, and set it down next to the cigarettes.

  Wrapped in a billowing white towel, she wiped at the film of steam across the mirror. She had not looked in a mirror since February the year before. She had caught sight of her own reflection in windows but had always turned away. She knew her hair was white but she’d never seen the full extent of it. She tilted her head this way and that. Her eyebrows were still black, and her eyes had that deathly sparkle that seemed to enhance the half-starved, but her skin was pale and papery. She turned away once more. Perhaps she could learn to live a life without a reflection, like a modern-day Nosferatu. There were bathroom scales on the floor but what would be the point?

  Tosca had set out clean clothes for her—a new Russian infantry uniform, without insignia and only slightly too big—and before she dressed a doctor gave her a once-over in the main bedroom. A vaguely floral-patterned room—a large dressing-table with its triptych of mirrors and a scalloped valance—and a lingering odour of whatever Frau Commandant sprayed herself with to deter the grease and stench of death. A haven of clichéd femininity at the arsehole of the world.

  “There will be no long-term effects,” the doctor said when he was done. “You will keep your teeth. The loose ones will probably firm up in a matter of weeks, and the brittleness and ridges in your fingernails will pass in about a year if you eat well. There’s nothing I can do about your hair. As far as I can tell your internal organs are fine. Again, if you eat well you may resume menstruation shortly. When was your last period?”

  “August.”

  “Then I doubt that you are barren.”

  She’d never thought about this possibility. Now she did, it did not bother her.

  In the kitchen, Tosca served an omelette with brown bread toast and butter. Méret had no idea whether this was lunch or breakfast.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Out back. The commandant’s wife seems to have kept chickens as a hobby. When your comrades looted the house they took the chickens but forgot to look for eggs.”

  “How many?”

  “Three apiece.”

  “Good Lord. A three-egg omelette. I don’t know whether I shall weep or choke.”

  “Do you think that’s likely? Eat slow.”

  She was eating slowly. She had eaten slowly for the best part of a year. She wished she could describe the sensation on her tongue to Tosca but she couldn’t. Egg was taste and texture, a plethora of taste and texture to someone who had grown used to all tastes being tainted by decay and most textures reduced to a greasy swill. Her internal organs were fine—she’d just been told that—her taste buds, too. The damage was to her vocabulary.

  Tosca said, “I wish I could have got you some real coffee. But our rations don’t run to that, and if the Krauts had any then the guys who tossed this place got to it first.”

  “They are welcome,” Méret replied.

  “Yeah, ain’t they.”

  §60

  That night she had a room to herself, a double bed and clean sheets. Finding that she could not sleep on a mattress, she pulled the clean sheets and bug-free blankets onto the floor and slept there.

  A three-egg omelette was not served again, and after a breakfast of combat rations and ersatz coffee, Tosca was ready to talk shop.

  Méret was savouring her barley roast ersatz. Despite what she had told Gregor, just to hold a china cup was a pleasure. Gregor was twitching to get on and Tosca was gently keeping him in line.

  “We were looking for you.”

  “I gathered. But I don’t know how you knew who or where I was.”

  “No matter—we found you.”

  “And I am grateful, so much so that I will risk asking what it is you want of me.”

  “Good. That saves a lot of time. We want you to work for us.”

  “Where? In Russia?”

  “No—you get the cherry on the top of the cake. You work for us in the West.”

  “Where exactly? And where is the West?”

  “The West is whatever’s west of the line made when our guys meet up with their guys. The way things are going that’ll be somewhere west of Berlin, sometime in June.”

  “And in the middle are the Germans?”

  “Do you really give a gnat’s ass about the Germans?”

  “No.”

  “When it’s all over, dust settled, borders redrawn, you join the refugee drift westward.”

  “Where? France? England? America?”

  “Not gonna tell you. Wherever you go we’ll keep in touch. In fact, that’s what we want of you—that you keep in touch
.”

  “Keep in touch without the police of France, England, or America knowing?”

  “Glad you got the picture.”

  “So I would be what? A sort of conduit?”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “I said I was grateful, but tell me . . . why would I do this for you? Why would I not simply go back to Vienna and pick up where my life left off ?”

  Tosca slapped a brown cardboard file on the table and slid out three photographs. Méret reached over and spread them with her fingertips, her incredulity growing with each passing second.

  “You know these people?”

  “Yes.”

  “They all work for us. We have them. And if we have them I think we have you.”

  Méret stared at the photographs. For a whole minute she could not take her eyes off them, then the right words came to her, not her words, but the right words.

  “The rule of possession.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You have me. That is all that matters. You have them . . . you have me. And if there’s one thing the Germans have taught me it is that possession is everything.”

  §61

  Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico:

  July 16, 1945

  Trinity

  After a fortnight of sporadic dry storms, the wet one arrived, as it had threatened to do since the beginning of the month. It rained all night. Midnight came and went with no test.

  He loved a good thunderstorm. He didn’t know a physicist anywhere who didn’t. You couldn’t spend a working life with the elements and fail to appreciate the show they put on for free.

  It was close to five in the morning before the wind drove the rain clouds away.

  Outside the shelter at South 10,000, there were shallow trenches and a raised ridge. Szabo sloughed off his rain slicker and lay down next to Frank Oppenheimer—his brother Robert was in the hut behind them where the countdown was approaching its final, automatic phase. George Kistiakowsky, the lanky, crazy Russian who had built the explosive casing, was buzzing too much to sit or lie down, and jigged up and down around their feet.

  It was close to dawn but with the floodlights behind them the night ahead, looking straight at the tower, seemed blacker than ever. Some had welder’s goggles, some had sunglasses, all of them had a small sheet of toughened, tinted glass.

  A figure slipped in beside him—sunglasses, a fedora, a waft of Indiscret. Zette in trousers.

  “Are you trying to pass for a man?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You might have left off the scent.”

  “Mea culpa.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be up a mountain somewhere?”

  “I’m not missing this. And I’m not watching from twenty miles away. I’ve been imagining this moment for years.”

  So had Szabo.

  He could project the equations involved onto a mental screen—the lines and letters and numbers of the formulae, the chemical symbols and atomic numbers of uranium and plutonium, of beryllium and polonium, U.92, Pu.94, Be.4, Po.84, and their reckless offspring, the alpha particles and neutrons that would uncork the genie from the bottle—they all appeared in the mind’s eye as a sequence of connection and causality.

  He had come to think of it with a simple logic as being like the old Negro spiritual he had learnt back in Tennessee. He had come across it in the cinema, an old flickering cartoon from the early days of sound. A song of the inevitability of connection and disconnection, of structure and destruction that had fixed in his mind the image of a dancing skeleton:

  Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone,

  Your thigh bone connected to your hip bone,

  Your hip bone connected to your back bone,

  Your back bone connected to your shoulder bone,

  Disconnect dem bones, dem dry bones,

  Now hear de word of de Lord!

  Im Anfang war das Wort? Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat . . . and the deed of the Lord was a silent flash that seemed brighter than a thousand suns. Nothing he had imagined came close. Night became noon.

  And although his scientific training told him that light would race ahead of sound, he had not anticipated such silence.

  A gut instinct overtook his curiosity and momentarily he put his face down in the sand. When he looked again, white light had turned to colour and a giant mushroom cloud was rising, twisting leftward, corkscrewing into the sky. The skeleton danced.

  He had imagined this so often—but he had thought in pale monochrome. The colours had been unimaginable so he had not imagined them. Now they rolled out, in half the colours of the painting box . . . clouds of red and pink, darting flames of orange, yellow, scarlet, and green, an arc of iridescent blue, a billowing mushroom in deep, threatening purple.

  Then the shock wave hit, and the boom of the explosion, bouncing off the mountains in an endless repetitive echo that seemed to him as rhythmical as the beating of some red Indian drum.

  A war dance? Why not? This was war. A mile into the sky, a three-thousand-foot mushroom danced its dance of death.

  Szabo looked at Zette, grinning as stupidly as he knew he was himself. He looked the other way to Frank Oppenheimer. At some point Robert Oppenheimer had slid in next to him. They exchanged glances, then Oppy said, “It worked.” And Frank finding no better summation repeated back, “It worked.”

  It worked.

  Kistiakowsky had been standing when the shock wave hit and it had lifted him off his feet. When they all stood up, he was laughing and beating the dust off his pants. One hand moved to slap Oppenheimer on the back.

  “That’s ten bucks you owe me, Oppy.”

  Szabo had no idea they’d bet on anything. There was a pool to bet on the tonnage of the blast—he had a dollar on 20,000—and he’d heard Fermi taking bets that the bomb would ignite the whole of New Mexico, but now it seemed that Oppenheimer had taken a bet that it would be a dud.

  Oppenheimer turned out his wallet to show it was empty. Such an odd gesture at such a frantic moment.

  “Kisty, you’ll just have to wait.”

  Failing to find a one-cent coin in his pocket, Szabo flipped a buffalo nickel into the wallet just as Oppenheimer turned it upright.

  “Penny for them, Oppy. Whatever you say next is history.”

  Oppenheimer picked out the nickel.

  “For five pennies, Charlie, you only get one thought.”

  “For sure.”

  “I was thinking of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ”

  By the time he’d finished speaking, and he spoke so softly, he was all but drowned out by the roar of congratulation, and as it subsided Szabo heard a voice behind him say, “We’re all sons of bitches now,” and he wondered if the two statements did not amount to the same thing, and whether crudity bore history somewhat better than poetry.

  Then Oppenheimer tugged at the brim of his fedora and walked on to shake more hands, the inherent sadness of his words offset by the Gary Cooper strut in his walk.

  It worked.

  Ezekiel connected dem dry bones and Oppenheimer disconnected dem.

  §62

  “Do you know what I’d kill for right now?”

  He tried not to take her literally.

  “A martini,” she said. “With real gin, not pure alcohol from the lab, and a real olive. And a twirly stick to make twirls in it.”

  “Okay. How about we take a night out.”

  “Santa Fe?”

  “I was thinking more of Taos.”

  “What’s in Taos?”

  “Not much. More Indians, more pottery, more blankets.”

  “But a bar, right? They do have a bar?”

  “I’m sure they do. It’s just that I don’t want to be hanging around the bar at La Fonda for one more night with our own people.”

  “And if Taos can’t make a martini?”

  “Then you can show them.”

  Months ago the arm
y had decided on a programme of disinformation. What this meant in practice was that the scientists should prop up bars in Santa Fe, and be indiscreet—letting any drunk they could converse with know that after a couple of drinks they were willing to spill the beans, and the beans were that they were all busy making rockets. “Rockets” was understandable as an idea and might quell speculation as to what was really going on. It was a PR disaster. No one had been the slightest bit interested in what was happening out at Los Alamos. Truth or lies. They were happier with their running gag—“they’re making windshield wipers for submarines.”

  The conversation he wanted to have with Zette he’d rather have anywhere but in a bar in Santa Fe. So they drove fifty miles on, to the Hotel Martin in Taos.

  “With a name like that I’d hope they make a damn good martini.”

  They did.

  She twirled her twirly stick and took a first sip.

  “S’truth . . . Booth’s gin! Wherever did they get that?”

  A second sip.

  “You know. I think you’ll be doing all the driving on the way home.”

  Szabo left his Mexican beer untouched.

  She gazed around the bar. It was mostly empty, and looked as though it hadn’t changed much in twenty years or more.

  “Does anything put this joint on the map?”

  “It attracts painters. And one of your famous English writers lived here. I believe he’s buried somewhere nearby.”

  “Well . . . it won’t be Byron or Shelley . . . and as I can’t guess you’d better tell me.”

  “Lawrence.”

  “Lawrence?”

  “D. H. Lawrence.”

  “What, the chap who wrote about going down the pit in Nottingham and fucking in the woods?”

  “The same, but he lived here . . . one of his novels is even set here. St Mawr.”

  “And you’ve read it?”

  “They had a copy in one of the camps I was in. It’s all about never being able to beat the desert. You can work the land, till the soil, and still the desert will come back to beat you. A rather large metaphor for life itself I thought. You can love the desert, as Oppy surely does, and still it will defeat you.”