Hannah & Emil by Belinda Castles Read Free Book Online Page A

were part of the untiring mechanism, of the rifle itself, enough came through to fill the beach and he watched them disappear into the gullies, wondered when they would reach the top, if they had killed enough to prevent them from taking the ridge.
    As he loaded he took a moment to look at Thomas. It was hard to believe that they were here. Emil was awake in every cell, his lungs full of gunpowder, the sun growing warm on his neck. There had been fear but now he found he could do it. He was a soldier. He could go on and on, if asked. He would shoot them even as they drew closer and he could see their faces. Whatever he was ordered to do he would do. His body was ready, sprung.
    By nightfall it was hard to know just where the British were, but he was ordered to rest for a few hours and he ate his bread and lamb fat in the dugout he shared with Thomas. It was lined with sandbags and they had built a roof of pine logs and dug long shallow dishes in the soil, filled them in with pine needles for sleeping. They lay in their trenches facing each other, the earth rumbling with mortar fire, the lantern on the shelf flickering. The sound was more incredible when you were not physically involved with the firing, when your body was separate and the guns existed outside you.
    â€˜Tell me what Uta let you do. I don’t want to die without knowing.’ Thomas was shouting but it was through lip reading and long familiarity that Emil understood him. He had known from his smile, before he opened his mouth, what he was about to say.
    â€˜I promised not to tell anyone.’
    â€˜Come on. It’s me.’
    â€˜No, Thomas, rest.’ He snuffed out the lantern and they turned away from each other. He could not imagine sleeping ever again. It was only decorum that made him turn away, to allow privacy for his friend in the night. He smoothed a patch of soil in front of him with his hand and thought again of Uta, who lived in the apartment building across the road from his parents. The day he told her he had been conscripted, he had waited on the street as she trudged slowly across the road, tired from her work hunched over a sewing machine in the glove factory. She was too far away for him to see her face but her step quickened when she saw his shape in the shadow of the building. There was no one in the apartment. Her parents were visiting relatives. When he told her, sitting on her narrow bed in her room surrounded by dolls, she let him briefly put his hand up her skirt and touch the thin strip of flesh between her stocking and her corset. The skin was cold from her walk home, his fingers warm from his pockets. He had tried before but this time her hand did not stop his until it was there, at her thigh.
    He did not want to lie here like this; his body was drawn to go back out and take the gun. He held his watch in front of his face and waited for shell fire above to illuminate its face. An hour until they took over.
    They had lost that position, soon enough. This dugout, in which he watched Thomas shiver silently, was further back. He no longer lay impatiently, waiting to take up his gun. He reached out a hand and laid it on Thomas’s shoulder. He could not stop him shaking.

    In the quiet times, leaning against the pine-log wall, eyes closed, face in the sun, when any of them might go mad with the memory of what they had seen and their fingers had touched, Emil took to writing letters to his father in his head. Two months since the British and their friends had landed and he had not written a single real letter, though all around him, even now, the Turks were hunched over scraps of paper, smoking and frowning. He could not manage the performance. It was a gesture he could not make, a falsehood: to have them read a letter, to see his handwriting, to believe these were the words of the boy they knew. Still, he had the same urge to tell as anyone.
    Dear Father, he wrote in his mind, Thomas did not want to go out that night. He