SURPRISE IN THE CEMETERY

‘Do you still want to do this?’ I asked Lisa as we left the scenes of horror behind us.

‘Do you?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t …’ I wasn’t sure what I thought. ‘It’s just that, after the raid and … and that …’ I looked behind me and felt as if I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong any more. ‘That could have been my mama,’ I said. ‘Or yours. So maybe it’s not right to do this. I mean, we should stick up for our country shouldn’t we?’

‘Of course we should, but we stick up for Germany, not for the horrible people who live here. And there’s nothing we can do about the enemy. I hate them too, but there’s nothing we can do. Nothing we can even do to show them we hate them. But we can show Wolff that we hate him.’

‘You’re right,’ I said, strengthening my resolve.

‘Of course I am.’

Feldstrasse was close to the church, so we cut through the cemetery, leaving the sounds behind us and making our way into the eerie darkness. The gates were open, just as they had been the other night, so we went straight in, keeping to the road.

‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Lisa whispered. ‘There’s a story about a nun who got walled up inside part of the church and people say you can see her ghost if you come here at the right time. The Shrieking Nun, they call her, because of the noise she makes.’

‘Oma used to bring us through here on the way to the river to catch fish in our nets and Stefan always used to try to scare me with that story. It never worked though; there’s no such thing as ghosts.’ But walking through there in the dead of night, it was easy to believe there might be.

‘I’ve heard noises in the night,’ Lisa said. ‘Like screaming.’

‘Probably just foxes.’

‘They say that if you look into her eyes, she sucks out your soul and you’ll never speak again.’

‘Sounds like rubbish to me,’ I said, but a shiver ran up my spine and I cast a glance over my shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed.

‘I’ve never been in here at night,’ Lisa said. ‘Do you think we’ll see her?’

‘I’ve been in here at night and I didn’t see her.’ I tried to change the subject. ‘This is where I hid with Jana. Over there, by the graves.’ I pointed into the darkness where the headstones were just visible.

‘Stop!’ Lisa grabbed the back of my jacket.

I was still looking over at the dark shape of the gravestones, and had walked a few paces ahead of Lisa, not noticing that she had stopped.

‘Stay where you are!’ She pulled me to a halt.

‘Why? What’s the—’

‘There,’ she said. ‘Up ahead.’

‘What is it?’ I whispered, almost too afraid to know.

Lisa raised an arm and pointed, and I peered into the darkness ahead, half expecting to see the Shrieking Nun, right there, floating above the ground with her eyes glowing red and her mouth open wide as she prepared to suck out my soul.

But there were no ghosts in the cemetery.

Instead, there was something far more dangerous.

Just a few steps away, right in the centre of the road, there was a dark shape protruding from the ground. It was thick and almost as tall as me, but set at an angle as if it had … as if it had dropped from the sky.

‘You were going to walk right into it,’ Lisa said.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ I took a step closer.

‘Don’t,’ Lisa hissed. ‘Stay where you are.’

‘I just want to look.’

‘You might set it off.’

I took another step.

I had seen pictures of bombs at school and I’d heard them whistling in the sky, felt the shudder as they exploded when they hit the ground, but I had never actually seen one close up.

‘Come here,’ I said. ‘You can see it better.’ I held my hand out to her and beckoned. ‘Really. It’s all right.’

She hesitated, shaking her head.

‘I’m not going any closer,’ I told her.

After a moment, she sighed and came to stand beside me.

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my torch, then pointed it at the unexploded bomb and flicked it on.

‘What are you doing?’ Lisa pushed my arm down so that the beam was pointing at the ground and she looked about in alarm. ‘Someone will see.’

‘There’s no one here.’ I pulled my hand away and shone the torch at the bomb once more, pointing it at the place where it had thumped into the ground and half buried itself. It wasn’t a big bomb; I guessed it would have been about shoulder height to me, but it was probably big enough to destroy a house. As I passed the beam over its length, I saw two words written on the side and, though I couldn’t speak English, I was fairly sure I knew what FOR ADOLF meant.

‘Imagine if it went off now,’ Lisa said. ‘We’d be blown to pieces.’

‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘Just keep still.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off it. In the back of my mind I saw the houses on Feldstrasse, reduced to rubble by one of these bombs, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. I couldn’t move away from it. All that energy closed up inside that metal shell was hypnotising. And so were those words. It seemed that it always came down to words.

Maybe that’s where the real strength was.

‘What if it’s one of those timer bombs?’ Lisa asked. ‘It might go off at any minute. I think I can hear it ticking.’

I listened carefully, but all I could hear was the distant sound of the rescue operation on Feldstrasse.

‘Please,’ Lisa begged, so we carefully stepped away from the bomb, moving backwards, watching it as if it were a predator waiting for us to let down our guard.

Once we were a safe distance away, we moved onto the grass at the side of the path, intending to carry on with our plan.

‘Shouldn’t we tell someone about the bomb?’ Lisa said. ‘What if someone else walks down here, or comes in their—’

‘We haven’t got time,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it on the way back. We’ll … I don’t know … we’ll think of something, but we need to go now. We need to do this.’ Too much had already interfered with our plan, and I was afraid that we were on the verge of backing out.