Hannah & Emil by Belinda Castles

he had never left Germany, that he had been allowed to simply go from his studies into work as an electrical engineer, to marry Uta. There was no pit burial, no faces to be sprinkled with lime. He felt movement near him in the deepening dusk. It was Captain Hass, gentle behind the lines, softly spoken, yet Emil had seen him shoot an able-bodied Turk for coming back with wounded in the midst of an attack. The captain looked him up and down. ‘You’ve been declared fit, haven’t you, Becker? You can go out tonight.’
    â€˜Yes, sir.’
    â€˜Half an hour.’
    There was a rumour that Germans were a prize to the Australians on the beach. They did not really know for certain that they were there, it seemed, or how many, but if they found one they had no interest in taking him back down to the pen. It was said the Australians had been promised extra leave for whoever brought back a German head on a stick.
    In half an hour, if he chose to, he could end every sensation in his body: the lice running up and down his neck into his hair and shirt, the dried mud caked around his feet, the rod of electric fear in his back, the hunger that made him dream in his scarce moments of sleep of the cinnamon rolls in the Konditorei on Unterstrasse, the noise of the guns that rattled his brain and made every thought an effort. The memory of Thomas lying in the mud, over the lip of the trench. Afterwards, while Emil’s body remained here among the Turks, or was dismembered as a trophy for the Australians, some other part of him would travel to the fields on the edge of the Rhine, away from the factories and the town, where all you could hear were birds and the wind in the leaves. Hares running in the fields, more than you could fit in your rucksack.
    But that was not the plan he had formed as he emerged from delirium in the medical tent. He stirred his legs, gave them a little shake, went along the tunnel to wait with the Turks. The insects swarmed and dived. He could hear them in the quiet of the ceasefire, and men’s voices, just talking. One he knew, Faisal, gave him a cigarette and they chatted a little in the Turkish he had picked up from the men between actions. A group was returning to the trench from the burial, quiet. He took his position. Can I do it? he asked himself.
    The machine gun in the trench started up along the line and he climbed to the lip, ready to go over. He wondered how bad the pain was going to be. And now the Turks were running forward, he with them, firing, some falling. Their voices in the night, the strange words and rhythms, helped him not to believe that anything in this world was real. He let his rifle slip towards the ground. He waited for a mortar flash and looked down, took aim—that is my knee, there are my toes, not those, wait for dark, now, do it —and fired.

    He came to in the dark. His leg lay against another’s that did not move and was hard. God was talking to him. He was asking him how you fix a Howitzer that has ceased to fire. Quickly, while they come forward with rifles, how do you fix it? No, not God. Father. He always wanted to learn what he could from Emil’s education, wanted to add to his own understanding of machinery, and Emil loved to explain to him the smallest details of how a machine worked, how you might fix it when it failed. His voice came, as clearly in the dark as though they were sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table. ‘Ah yes, I never would have thought it was something so simple.’ But Emil could not answer him. His throat was very dry. The blackness was like velvet across his eyes, and the hard leg did not move.

    There was no time for gentleness for the Turk who dragged Emil over the pocked mud to the medical tent. The firing had ceased but it was never safe in the open. The Turk let Emil’s leg slam and bounce along the ground. Every impact sent a shock the length of his body. The astonishing pain . So this,