The Next Best Thing

In this original story by Graham Swift, a British soldier in Fifties Germany seeks the truth about the fate of his relatives

It hardly warranted his personal attention, but since his English was considered fluent – even sometimes “perfect”– and since it might involve an appointment with a British serviceman, Herr Büchner had decided he should handle the matter directly. It had landed on his desk anyway, as many things did that were not addressed to any specific person, in the form of a letter from the man’s commanding officer, a Major Wilkes, written, as it happened, in rather poor German.

How fitting that it should have fallen under the eye of a man with (almost) perfect English.

Certain useful English expressions had come quickly and freshly to Herr Büchner’s mind, such as “wrong channels” or “knocking on the wrong door”. But since the circumstances were peculiar – this wasn’t a German citizen, it was one of the Allieds – and since the thing had the backing, as it were, of the British Army…

After reading the letter and scanning the enclosures, including the sobering list of names, he had sighed and pondered. He could recognise self-righteous pomposity when he saw it. He didn’t like being ordered about, even indirectly, by this Major Wilkes, as if he were under the man’s command himself. This was Germany in 1959, not 1949. And his was only a department at the Rathaus.

“To whom it may concern.” Well.

True, it was the constant business of his department, almost, he sometimes felt, its principal task, to receive inquiries and applications that were none of its business and – politely, patiently and efficiently – to redirect them. He could see that he might have written a reply to Major Wilkes, in excellent

English of course, in the sort of chilly English the English were so good at, informing him, if not so bluntly, that he was indeed knocking on the wrong door and that the Rathaus, as Major Wilkes should know, didn’t handle such stuff. And generally reminding him, if not in so many words, that Germany was not an occupied country any more.

Herr Büchner could see that this might have been a justifiable response. But he could also see – he sighed again – that the correct response was to put on a show of exemplary concern and co-operation, and that this should even include his receiving in his office, even with something like subservience, the subject of the letter, the man himself.

And now the man himself, a Private Joseph Caan, from London N8, currently residing with the British Army of the Rhine, was before him, plainly unnerved to be greeted by an Amtsleiter who yet spoke alarmingly crisp English and plainly trying but failing to equate this interview with the one – demanding enough – he must previously have had with his “CO”, Major Wilkes.

Plainly out of his depth, but plainly out of his depth – it aroused

Herr Büchner’s interest – of his own choosing.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr Caan?” He shook the man’s hand in a merely routine way, but eyed him with a friendly smile. He had chosen the “Mr”, which might of course only have confused, but this was a civil institution and he was eager to put the man at ease, if not actually to say, “At ease.” Wasn’t that the British Army rigmarole?

“At ease.” Then, “Stand easy.”

“I’m not your commanding officer.” He smiled again. “You don’t have to stand to attention.” He had tried to control his tone carefully. He had stood himself to greet the man, then gestured to the chair in front of his desk before resuming his own seat.

“Won’t you take off your beret?” Herr Büchner was more than twice the man’s age and had been a soldier himself. It was long ago, but he retained from his military days the view that some men, perhaps most men, could both be and look like soldiers, even look as if soldiers was what they were meant to be, but some men could never look like, let alone be soldiers, even if, unfortunately, soldiers was what they were. He very quickly put Private Caan – Mr Caan – in the latter category. He once would have put himself in it, though this man before him might not have thought so, if such thoughts ever occurred to him at all.

But perhaps they were occurring to him right now. Wasn’t it still the standard repeated thought of any British conscript doing his time in Germany: What had this smarmy bastard done in the war?

The man took off his beret, revealing short but springily curly dark hair, which caused Herr Büchner to recall the English expression “short and curlies”, almost exclusively used, he remembered, with a phrase like “got you by”.

Herr Büchner – Hans Büchner – retained too from his military days the view that a great many things happened in life that were beyond your control and might even be aimed at taking control from you – for example if you were on the wrong side of a desk – but even when they happened in circumstances within your control and subject to rules, they really only happened, and whole futures might depend on it, because either you liked the look of the man’s face in front of you or you didn’t.

Private Caan’s face was likeable because he didn’t look like a soldier. Nor did he look, really, like a “Mr”. Would he normally be known as Jo? He looked like a boy. He was only 19. Along with the curly dark hair he had dark small eyes that peered effortfully in a way that suggested a need for spectacles or just for general clarity, but, evidently, hadn’t earned him an exemption on the grounds of a failed eye test.

The scant details in the file opened on Herr Büchner’s desk gave the man’s civilian occupation as “tailor’s apprentice”. Close work, from perhaps the age of 15, with a needle? But the eyes when they finally met his own were not feeble. They were even a little “needling”. The expressions all came back.

Joseph Benjamin Caan. Mother’s name, Eva Adele – maiden name, Rosenbaum. Father, Benjamin Franz – deceased. Major Wilkes had seen fit to point out: “killed in action in North Africa”.

Jo Caan, son of Ben Caan, from London N8.

The list that was the real matter in hand was mainly Caans and Rosenbaums. There was a Jakob, a Leopold, a Hanna, a Leah, a Lotte, a Bruno, an Elsa, a Ruben… There was even a Hans. They had mostly been, it seemed, residents of Hanover.

Major Wilkes had also seen fit to point out that Private Caan’s “intentions” were in accordance with his mother’s wishes, the implication being, Herr Büchner supposed, that the man was carrying out a task conferred on him by at least one elder and better.

But that suddenly sharp, not-to-be-fooled gaze told him otherwise. Private Caan might have said this was the case as if to give his intentions already solid backing, or rather Major Wilkes

He was a soldier now, like his father, born in Germany but killed in the British Army

might have asked him, pushily, if it were the case, because he couldn’t just let any soldier go skiving off after some trumped-up personal matter. And Private Caan had wisely said that yes, of course, it was because his mother wished it.

But bollocks. Herr Büchner used to himself another wellremembered and suddenly very serviceable English word. Bollocks. Herr Büchner was a shrewd judge of faces, even of whole people. The mother, Eva Adele, hadn’t put her son up to it, he felt sure. The mother, who would be perhaps in her early 40s, like himself, would rather forget the whole thing, push it out of her mind, the easiest and sometimes the best option. It was just unlucky for her that her son had first of all to get called up by the army, then get sent to Germany. Of all places. This was the nub of the matter before him, and hadn’t this Major Wilkes read it in this man’s face too?

It was rather unlucky for the son as well, but he couldn’t get out of it. It was where most of them got sent. Hadn’t both mother and son even reckoned on it? And of course there would have been the other, perhaps equally troubling factor: he was a soldier now, just like his father, Benjamin Franz, born in Germany but apparently killed in the British Army.

It was all not uninteresting. He would have liked to have a conversation with this Private

Caan, just a free and leisurely conversation, and here in his undisturbed office was the ideal opportunity, but it was not the matter at hand. Nor was it possible anyway, since this man before him clearly had very limited powers of conversation. If not of initiative.

He would have liked to say, with the right kind of smile, “Your commanding officer has quite a command of German…”

Private Caan wasn’t acting under his mother’s orders, he’d give him that – it was all in those eyes. He wasn’t a “mother’s boy”, as the English say. He was probably about as far from his mother right now as he’d ever been, or might ever be. True, he might not have been sent to Germany at all, then the matter would not have come up. He might have been sent to Hong Kong. But here he was, and here he’d be for several months, and Joseph Caan had decided he had to face the consequences, the “music”, as the English also say.

The man had taken off his beret promptly, as if ordered, but seemed not to know what to do with it. He clutched it in both hands, squeezing it (despite those combative eyes) like some comforting childhood toy. Something had come into his life, something big and pressing, unlike perhaps anything that had come into his life before, and Joseph

Caan had decided all by himself that he wasn’t going to duck out of it. He wasn’t going to allow his future self ever to say, when it would be forever too late: You went to Germany, didn’t you, you were in Germany, weren’t you, and you never did anything. You prick.

The words came back, the words of English soldiers. And didn’t this man have a perfect right, even a peculiar reason to wonder what this smarmy bastard – this “prick” too, this “arsehole” (no doubt there were also some colourful Anglo-Jewish words) – had done in the war?

Though how tripped-up he now seemed, to be spoken to by a German in English better than his own.

Private Caan, though he was a soldier constantly required to obey orders, was acting, if very awkwardly, by himself, for himself. He could see that. He liked not only his face, he liked him.

But it was all very depressing. What could he, head of his department as he was, actually do for him? Might they not simply have a conversation? If he smoked he might offer the man a cigarette. But he’d given up smoking when he’d returned to Germany. Smoking had been about killing time. He might invite the man to smoke anyway. Was that a pack of 10 nestling in his blouse pocket? “Player’s Please.”

Herr Büchner remembered when, long ago in another age, he had just become an officer. A real officer, not a cadet, if he felt still like a schoolboy. An officer of the most junior sort, but an officer. He hadn’t anticipated the invisible threshold he would still have to cross, the test he would still have to undergo. If he was an officer then he must act like one.

A man was standing before him, it was a moment just like this one, though it wasn’t in an office in a town hall and the man really was standing rigidly to attention with no option to sit. Though the man was many years his senior, he’d been obliged to salute and stamp his feet because he was before an officer, who was sitting at the time at a little desk, a good deal smaller and plainer than his present one, and who must have looked like a boy in detention.

He hadn’t anticipated being in a position of judgment, with the power to exercise either pitilessness or mercy, of being like God Almighty.

It was a trivial matter. The man would have liked, for personal reasons no doubt vital to him, an extra day’s leave. It was not an unreasonable request, and leniency would have been simple. Yet because he was an officer and had only just become one, he was not to be seen as a pushover. So he had dismissed the man’s request, then told him he was dismissed himself.

Why? The man – he even remembered his name was Krüger

– would hate him now. And he would hate himself, he would continue to hate himself. He wouldn’t forget the moment – he couldn’t forget it now – even when far worse things had come his way. His priggish little flaunting of power.

That was over 20 years ago. In Koblenz. Enlist, sign up. Even while you were still at school. Choose before you were chosen. That had actually been his covertly defensive way of thinking. That way you might be selected for an officer. See everything as an opportunity – that is, as a path always turning towards the minimum ultimate danger.

“Play your cards right”, as the English put it. And how cards had got played, again and again, to kill time, in sodden, rain-swept Lincolnshire, till the cards themselves became damp and tattered, each in their own forlorn way, till you could recognise every single one of them, if you were clever, if you played your cards right, without having to turn them over.

The man still clutched his beret. He seemed unable to transfer it, rolled up in the regular fashion, to his shoulder strap. Nor, it seemed, could he relax, sit back and cross his legs. Though how did you do that anyway with any sort of naturalness in those thunderous boots and those ridiculous things – what were they called? “Gaiters”. Yes, gaiters.

How demeaning it must be, even for a mere apprentice tailor, to be shoved into the botch of an outfit that was the standard

British soldier’s uniform. That absurdity called a “battledress”.

“Please smoke if you wish, Mr Caan.” And he pushed an ashtray to within his reach.

But the man said, “That’s all right.” Which he knew in this case was English for “No, I won’t, thanks.” Not “Yes, thanks, I will.”

Overawed as he was, perhaps even flattered, to find himself in such municipal (and German) surroundings, Private Caan was clearly expecting that after some “buttering up” – already happening – he was about to be “fobbed off ”. A standard procedure in life. And how right he might have been. And how little perhaps he would ever know how matters had tilted in his favour.

“You must understand, Mr

Caan – pardon me for putting this so directly – but you have come, you have been sent by your superiors, to the wrong place. Matters of this kind are not dealt with locally, on a basis of proximity. This is just an ordinary Rathaus – town hall. This is just its regular Records Department. Downstairs you will have passed what you would call a Registry Office. Birth, deaths and marriages. Your country always puts it in that strange order, I think.”

So there we are! The man’s eyes flared a little. He might

‘Births, deaths and marriages. Your country always puts it in that strange order’

have known! He’d turned up on the dot at 11 as if to be on parade. He’d had to seek permission, make special arrangements, no doubt, to get here from his base outside town. Now, even in fancy English (Herr Büchner remembered the word “poncy”), he was indeed being fobbed off. “Given the brush off ”, the “run around”.

It all came rushing back. “Matters of this kind are not even dealt with by the German central government, by the Bundesarchiv, they are dealt with – as your commanding officer should know – by the Tracing Service, the Suchdienst. In Arolsen, near Kassel. The Tracing Service is not even a German institution, it is run by the International Red Cross.” (He might have added, “As your mother, if she really wished to do something, might have found out long ago.”) “You should apply to the Tracing Service, that is the proper channel for inquiries like yours.”

But he had made the man suffer enough. Now it was the moment for leniency.

“Nonetheless… nonetheless…” How he had always liked those lumbering English conjunctions, “nonetheless”, “nevertheless”.

“Nonetheless, since you are here, or rather since you are with the local garrison, since your freedom is restricted and since your request comes with the – er – full support of your CO, I will do – I will be happy to do, Mr

Caan – what I can for you on your behalf.” He re-engaged his welcoming smile. “That is, I will contact the Tracing Service for you – I have some connections – and I will do what I can for you to find out the – fate – of your relatives.”

He hoped his smile was now fully benign, even a little melting. “Fate” was always a strange word to fling into any conversation, like a sinister intruder from an alien zone. Yet it was a highly adaptable and wide-ranging word. Fate, as in the turning over of a card, or the signing of a document, or a curt dismissal, or the pointing of a gun. Or – how many had once been doomed or saved? – the mere flicking of a finger.

The man now visibly altered. He gave away the fact that until this point he had been in a state of considerable tension and apprehension. He said, “Thank you sir,” almost like some excused wrongdoer.

It was a good word, “thank you”, a better word than fate.

“Please – I don’t need the ‘sir’. I am a public servant, I should be the one to call you ‘sir’. I will do what I can, I assure you. And whatever I can ascertain I will pass on to you, by writing to your commanding officer, I think that is the – er – proper channel, don’t you? But I must warn you that what I can ascertain, as I’m sure you will understand, may be very little. It may be little more than what – if I can put it this way – you may imagine already. Remarkably detailed records do exist. It is both shocking and useful that they exist. On the other hand a great deal was destroyed, you will understand, towards the end of the war.”

The man was now looking at him still gratefully, but with those sharpening eyes again.

“One thing I will say to you, Mr Caan, if I may… Whatever I may find out, whatever I may be able to pass on to you, I recommend that you follow through the matter yourself, while you are here in Germany, if you can. I recommend that you go to the Tracing Service yourself and see what there is and talk to the people. It is some distance from here, of course. There is the issue of getting the appropriate permission and assistance – but you have already got this far. I leave that with you and your – superiors. But you have my own assistance for now. In some matters, Mr Caan, I think it is important, while you have the opportunity, not to hold back, but to meet the thing – I think you would say ‘head on’. I’m sure you understand. You have already begun to meet it. Quite commendably, if I may say so.”

There. And spoken to a soldier too. Now the man would even feel virtuous and justified. On a Thursday morning, in an ordinary German Rathaus, he might even feel rather heroic. Even if nothing more of substance transpired he might always tell himself: I was in Germany and I didn’t simply sit on my arse.

He might even tell his mother one day.

And he might meanwhile tell his commanding officer (but this was Herr Büchner’s unspoken fantasy) that it was not for any British officer to snap his fingers at the local authorities any more and “keep them on their toes” and “make them jump to it”. Or imply such things in inept German.

Good God, Germany was actually starting to pick itself up again and look like it had a future, hadn’t this Major Wilkes noticed? And it was these poor creatures – his men – in their wretched battledresses, who’d once swaggered around like conquerors, who were starting to look the sorry ones, like so many refugees stuck out there in their camp. What must their famous Great Britain look like these days?

He wished this man was a conversationalist, so he could ask him that question directly and frankly. But it was plain that, for whatever reason – perhaps no more than having had to obey for several months the soldierly rule of only speaking when spoken to – Private Caan was not a talker. A thinker maybe, not a talker.

And he, Herr Büchner, or Herr Leutnant Büchner as he then was, had once had plenty of time – and might not this man take a mental leap and guess? – to see what their Great Britain looked like. At least in those days. Plenty of time to get used to their “Now look here, my man”s and their “Now listen here, my good chap”s.

But it was his last chance, and he didn’t want just to “dismiss” this man.

“I would offer you a cup of coffee, Mr Caan, if it was in my power. But as you’ll now be aware the Rathaus isn’t a place of great luxury.” He smiled and raised his hands in apology. “But a little better, I hope, than a barracks.” “That’s all right.”

The man kneaded his beret. And of course – how frightening, soldier as he was, to have to take coffee with an Amtsleiter. Let alone have a conversation.

“Well then, I have your – er – list. If there should be any other details you are able – might wish – to add…?”

He scanned again the sheet of paper, the names before him. This man would have known little enough about them anyway, he could never have met any of them. Against some was a once-known (now doubtless defunct) address, a guessed-at occupation. “Tailor?” “Jeweller?” “Leather goods dealer?” The scant particulars weren’t so much thinner than those that came with Joseph Caan. But the most important particular was of course self-evident.

What a terrible thing in itself could be just a list of names. Major Wilkes, when enclosing it, might have thought: So there!

“Your CO mentions that your father was killed in North Africa.”

He said it casually, as if he’d only just noticed it while rereading what was before him and not registered the remark as prominent, not to say provocative, the first time. It too was no doubt meant to deliver its “So there!” Its “So you’d better bloody jump to it!”

And no doubt this Major Wilkes had once done something praiseworthy in Normandy or, God knows, crossing the Rhine.

“Yes,” Private Caan simply said. Herr Büchner had the impression that he’d tried to make the word as flat and neutral as possible.

He smiled at him again, hoping that his smile – it was all so complicated – would not seem in any way patronising.

“Then I must tell you that I also served in North Africa. On the – er – other side, of course.”

There. He tried to gauge the expression on the man’s face. It looked no more than perplexed – and young. But at least he had now given him part of the answer to that unspoken question: What had this

‘I must tell you that I also served in North Africa. On the other side, of course’

prick done in the war?

And had he even graduated from being a prick? Herr Büchner hoped so.

“Is your father, is he – at rest, buried – in North Africa?”

What a challenging thing indeed was a conversation.

“In Tobruk.”

“Tobruk.”

How the word tumbled at him, even tumbled, suddenly and heavily, from his own mouth. He had always thought that it sounded like some piece of broken off masonry, like another word for “rubble”. It even sounded rather German.

But he didn’t say – and he couldn’t say why he didn’t say it – to the man before him now that he’d been at Tobruk himself, or very close to it. When, of course, it had been under German siege.

He didn’t say it. Might he regret not saying it? Would it be like failing to do the very thing he’d recommended – meeting the thing “head on”? He simply repeated the word as if he might be pronouncing it for the first time.

Fate: it was a strange intrusion, even a very awkward encumbrance.

And this man’s father had also been on the “other side”, if the expression now made any sense. That is – it was simple deduction – a German, turned British, fighting against Germans. As well as a Jew. “Tobruk. I see.”

Why had he said no more? Could not this man help him – take up the loose end, even the offered rope of this stumbling exchange? But he was only 19 and to be tongue-tied seemed his natural condition, even when another before him was uncharacteristically tongue-tied too.

Herr Büchner remembered the expression “that makes two of us then”. He could see anyway that the man before him had had, as they said in his country, “enough for one day”.

The heavy lump of a word had clogged his mouth. When had he last spoken it?

He got up, signalling that the appointment was over and held out his hand – less routinely, he hoped – once more.

“Well, you may leave it with me. And I’ll be in touch – through your commanding officer of course.”

Then the man left, recovering proper control at last of his beret and restoring it to his head. There was, fortunately, no automatic impulse to salute. When he emerged through the main entrance into the Platz outside he would no doubt take a good lungful of air and feel gratified and released. If nothing at all now happened, he might feel he had done his duty, to himself, had satisfied his conscience and had even honoured his missing, murdered kin.

And his mother may or may not be any the wiser.

Herr Büchner sat down again at his desk, his hands on the file still lying open on it. He had put up his hands once in North Africa and that was that. He had received his ticket, his acquittal, his alibi, call it what you like. His hands were clean – and Africa would even become known as “the clean war”. In fact his hands, his face, his eyes, his ears, his uniform to the point of obliteration, were covered in dust, his mouth even was full of dust. He’d never thought it was possible to be so caked with dust.

He had received his exit, his permission of leave, just as Herr and Frau Caan – Mr and Mrs Caan to-be – must have received their permission of leave some 20 years and more ago, taking the boat, from Bremerhaven or wherever, to London. Two of the lucky ones.

He, Hans Büchner, would eventually be put on a boat himself, one of the lucky ones too, and end up also in England, or

Great Britain, whichever you preferred. In Lincolnshire as it eventually turned out. And what was Lincolnshire like? It was not like Africa. It was green for a start and often very wet. And every night, though not when it was very wet, the bombers massed overhead, before crossing the sea, just to remind them, it sometimes seemed, down below in their huts, that their country was getting “what-for”. That was the expression used: what-for.

And one night one of those same bombers perhaps had released its bombs on Mannheim, or rather somewhere near enough, and that’s how – it would be a long time before he’d know it – his mother and father, Ernst and Clara

Büchner, had died, as fate would have it, in 1943 in the village not far from Mannheim where Ernst Büchner was the pastor.

But he, their son Hans, was out of it, none of it had anything to do with him. Here was his POW certificate of exemption. He could still feel those initials like a brand upon him – Pee-Oh-Double-You – as he could feel still that choking dust in his mouth and the word Tobruk – it was not unlike the word kaputt

– jarring against his tongue. The only cost, the only price of his certificate was six years of his life, his youth, the “best years of your life” as they say.

But tell this to those who had suffered far worse.

If he’d been really shrewd – practised spotter of opportunity as he was – he might have formed some risky liaison with a farmer’s daughter and gone into what? The pig trade? He might have turned totally native and become English, or British, himself.

But, as it was, at the end of one of the huts was a little section with shelves of books and even a workable stove. Good God, a library. Supplied by whom? What kind or stupid soul had thought that a shipment of German officers might want an offering of books, in English? A little propagandist taste of English literature. Dr Johnson. Pride and Prejudice.

So, while the rain poured down, he took the opportunity to improve, to master his English, supposing that one day, when the thing was over, this might be another kind of ticket. There must have been not a few like him.

All around him in the camp and when they were put to work in the fields – in Lincolnshire even with “a war on” you were never short of potatoes – was the common or filthy stuff and in the books was the cream. He acquired, in six years, almost immaculate (and when necessary, filthy) English, though what good had it in fact done him when he finally got home?

Until now perhaps, until this day, this ordinary overcast Thursday.

His English had had the chance to blossom, to shine, to come into its own.

And had come up against an Englishman close to mute.

One day they had been briskly told that Adolf Hitler was dead, that Berlin was flattened, that something unspeakable had been discovered near the small town of Bergen. So there.

One day, or rather night, the bombers stopped flying.

But it would be another two years, and so much the better perhaps, before they were returned, and when they returned they were frightened, truly frightened – and rightly – at what they might find. Then so many more years, like another imprisonment all over again, of being part of the national penance. Though their hands were clean. Look, perfectly clean.

But what had he discovered, even to his surprise? That he was a German, that’s what, and this was where he belonged. This was his long-lost home. Even though his actual home, along with his parents, was long gone, this was the place where he was born.

He stood and went to the window, from where he knew he’d be able to see Private Caan crossing the square, pausing for the trams. And there he was. He wondered how much Joseph Caan would remember this day, if it would stay with him, if it would always matter. If he’d remember, when he’d been a soldier once, crossing a German square – Karlsplatz – and feeling briefly not like a soldier (if he’d ever felt that), but, just for a while, despite the uniform, like a free young man. All his life ahead of him.

The English had that odd little guessing rhyme: Tinker, tailor, soldier…

Yes, people kept coming still to the Rathaus, to his department, wanting to find out, wanting to know, and having to be told that it was not the business of the Rathaus. They should apply to the Suchdienst, weren’t they aware of that? Here – here is a leaflet with the details.

Still they came, though it was 1959, and this was only one town. The evidence even seemed to be that more of them were coming forward now. Perhaps it took some plucking up, some confronting. Or perhaps in recent years there’d been so much else to do, to be getting on with. Or perhaps the passage of time simply posed an ever more pressing question: If not now, when? Are you ever going to do it, are you going to let your life slip by – your life – and never –?

He watched Private Caan reach the other side of the square and disappear beyond the new row of lindens.

Of course you could simply do nothing, turn your back, forget, live. It was a choice.

No, it wasn’t their job here at the Rathaus, he would say, but always politely and sympathetically, and always with his recommendation (though what should he, Hans Büchner know, what business was it of his?) that if they were going to take it further, then they should really take it further. Head on. Why did he say this?

It was not a matter of mere information. How could it be? They should go to the Suchdienst in person, talk to the people, they should see the documents – if there were any – the pathetic little scraps of paper, the lists, the cards that had been signed and stamped and had dates written on them. They should see, get – if this was the right expression – whatever was the “next best thing”.

What did they expect after all, what did they really hope for, these needy and haunted ones who still, after 15 years, kept coming forward, sometimes mistakenly to his own department, as if their numbers might only ever increase? To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual bones?

The heavy lump of the word ‘Tobruk’ clogged his mouth. When had he last spoken it?

© Graham Swift 2020. Graham Swift’s most recent novel is Here We Are (Scribner, £14.99)

EYES ON THE SKIES British gunners in Tobruk, Libya in May 1941