The German Numbers Woman

He knew the various radio operators also by the tone of their equipment, whether it came from the steely precision of the Royal Navy’s sublime telegraphists, or the bird-like slowness of machine morse giving airfield weather conditions from the RAF. He could tell Soviet operators on ships and at shore stations bouncing telegrams to each other by the ball-bearing quality of the transmitters and the record speed at which they were sent, too fast to write but not to read, though he suspected the messages were tape recorded on reception and slowed down at leisure for transcription. He knew the various nationalities from the language used, able to read (but not understand) Greek, Turkish, Romanian and German, though French was easy enough.

Fingers on the key called for a flexible wrist. The amount of energy pulsing from the elbow varied as much as a snowflake or thumb print. Energy was fed from the heart and backbone, an engine sending power to the hand, so that he could tell when a man (or, who knows, a woman?) was tired, or irascible, or lackadaisical, or slapdash, or indeed calm, competent, conscientious, and incapable of exhaustion. Maybe the latter played tennis, or went swimming, or sawed an uncountable number of logs to keep his fire going. The difference was minimal but always detectable. If a man was tired he might be unhappy, or at the end of his stint. If someone was easy and competent they had no worries, or they had just come on watch and weren’t yet jaded. Some operators had a natural sense of rhythm, and rattled on like talented pianists, while others, a minority, laboured in such a way as made them tiring to listen to, and he couldn’t imagine why they had taken up such a job, though it was certainly better than working on a motorway or building site. The behaviour of the fist was mysterious, but with earphones clamped Howard became a remote and all-knowing god, skilled in interpretation but, like a true god, unable to help anyone avoid their fate, even supposing he would want to.

He knew from experience that the most difficult place from which to send morse was an aeroplane. Though seated at a comfortable-enough desk, albeit most of the time cramped, your fist was at the mercy of vibration and turbulence, not to mention the vagaries of height and aerial. He had heard Chinese operators flying between Peking and Urumchi sending hourly position reports, a fluke of reception because after a few weeks the signals faded. The Russians also had radio men on board civil and military aircraft. He understood them because they used – as did the Chinese – the same international Q signals which he had used in the Air Force, detailing times of arrival and departure, height, speed and geographical locality.

The station most persistently monitored was that of the direction-finding system near Moscow, which he first came across during a morning’s idle trawl. The operator in a plane would tap out a request for latitude and longitude, and the man in Moscow would ask him to press his morse key for ten or so seconds of continuous squeak. This the man in the aircraft willingly did, and a minute or so later, Vanya (as Howard called him) on earth near Moscow, had worked his technological magic and the position was sent.

After recording each message Howard fixed a metaphorical pin on a map of the Soviet Union displayed in his mind. In the beginning he’d had to ask Laura for help in placing such coordinates, until he became familiar enough with the geographical graticule to do without her. The operator who communicated the result of his bearings did not have the lightning dexterity of his marine counterpart, and an aircraft would often have trouble making contact. The fist of Vanya on the ground was sometimes erratic, while his correspondent in the plane was occasionally affected by turbulence.

Such interceptions allowed Howard to play a game called ‘Spot the Bomber’, and if Laura came in to say lunch was ready he would laugh: ‘Shan’t be a moment. I have a bomber on the line.’ She read him an item about Soviet planes trying to manipulate the weather over the Arctic Ocean, and he heard some from that region asking for their position. Others were so far north they must have been on ‘Bear Patrol’, and he’d even heard the hesitant squeak of planes on the Vladivostok run.

The Moscow operator suffered from ennui, because in eight hours of keeping watch not more than a dozen planes would ask for their position, and each transmission did not last for more than a few minutes. Howard assumed that Vanya closed his eyes now and again, for a plane would sometimes call and get no reply. On the other hand either the plane didn’t hear the land station, or the land station didn’t hear the aeroplane, which could happen if the latter’s equipment was a few kilocycles off frequency. Cannier airborne operators would try to catch Vanya out by sending a single letter V, but he would invariably shoot back rapidly with:.’Who’s calling me?’ and contact would be made, with no evidence of sloth at all.

He pictured Vanya, at his direction-finder’s Consol, as a man with cropped fair hair and, of course, blue eyes. He was underpaid, and became more and more bored as the hours went by and the airwaves stayed empty. What kind of person was he? When a contact was made he displayed a very individual style, would start by sending with painful slowness and then, suddenly, maybe to fox or catch out the other operator, whom he considered to be an interloper till proved a friend because he had need of his services, speed along like a virtuoso, overall erratic but good even when bad, unwilling to be constrained by the age old parameters of Samuel B. Morse. Perhaps he even wished at times that the genius inventor of the telegraphic code had stuck to his painting and had not come up out of nowhere with his disciplined style of communication.

Laura had taken a biography of the great man out of the library, and read a chapter a night to Howard till the book was finished – the only entertainment she had known which had kept him away from his ‘precious wireless’. ‘More about Samuel,’ he would say after supper, knowing she smiled on reaching for the book.

Samuel B. Morse had been the white hope of American classical painting, and earned a fair living covering enormous canvases with the dignified faces of the worthy.

Returning from a tour of Europe on the steamship Sully in 1832, Morse conceived the idea of an electric telegraph, and a couple of years later he had devised a working model which sent letters from one side of the room to the other. As a concept it seemed to others a step into the white and empty spaces of the unknown, the blank future that their imaginations could not envisage, and certainly not colonise with science. But Morse had a practical mind and overcame the setbacks. ‘If we knew the how and why of such a brain even the secrets of the universe might one day be revealed,’ Howard thought, after the author of the book had said: ‘His inventive brain, nurtured by painting, putting what the eye can see onto canvas, helped if not actually propelled him to make the leap, art being ever the precursor of invention.’

From that point the narrative became thrilling, and Laura was sometimes persuaded to go on reading till nearly midnight, taking him through the inventor’s struggle to have his idea accepted by the US Congress, though it didn’t happen till 1843, by which time he had constructed the famous code ‘which will forever bear his name.’ Howard lived, as the code was put together, in the light of inspiration, Samuel no doubt making a chart so that he could alter and modify, until the perfect arrangements of dots and dashes for each letter and number was fixed for all time.

The triumph of the first transmission on a line between Washington and Baltimore, a mere thirty nautical miles, called forth the immortal phrase from the Bible, which Morse chose to send: ‘WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT,’ because he modestly believed, like all artists, that neither praise nor responsibility could be accepted whatever was achieved in his name.

Howard used the phrase from then on as an exercise when his key was plugged into the oscillator, a way of flexing his fingers and warming his spirit, on no better concept than Morse’s chosen words.

The vision of Morse was of the earth being circled and criss-crossed by lines of more-or-less instant communication, and this eventually came about when cables were laid under the sea. A more complete girdling of the world – which Morse imagined but did not live to see – occurred when the equally great Marconi invented a method of signalling without wires. The ability to send news and save life at sea was achieved.

After Vanya had tapped out the plane’s position, thanks to Morse and Marconi (in some sort of homage, though he didn’t know it) boredom once more threw its woolly blanket over him. When no requests came for his assistance the sky must have been clear across the vastness of the Soviet Empire, all navigators knowing where they were by looking out of the window, only asking the radio officer to use the facility as a final resort, when cloud went from nought to forty thousand feet over Siberia and the Northern Ocean.

Most of the time Vanya sat with earphones around his neck instead of clamped where they should be, and brooded at not having any money in his pocket. He didn’t give a damn anymore, tilting his chair so far back and knowing that the legs would eventually break, but telling himself there were plenty more where that came from, and if not, so what? He looked boggle-eyed at the morse key and receiver needle, and hoped for another call on his expertise to stop him going berserk and breaking up the table as well.

Listening to the uninhabited wavelength was, for Vanya, like being blindfolded in a room with no roof. A hissing phase of atmospherics scribbled across the sky, and then for no reason – Howard tried guessing at the import of what came next – a rising crescendo of noise filling the earphones like being inside the thrust of a passing comet, gathering power until tipping into diminuendo, when its disintegrating tail vanished into the firmament, beyond all range, as if God had been about to say something but had changed His mind. He was coated with the irradiating and gaseous pitchblende of despair, when a quick whistle passed like a bird, mocking him in his blindness.

Behind the static, what seemed like a ghost plane would start sending morse, indecipherable, too distant perhaps, tinkling to someone on the far side of Moscow. He listened for a while, till he doubted anyone was there at all. Some wizardry of atmospherics was deceiving him, as a mirage would trick the eyes of one in the desert who could see. He thought, when the signals again floated towards him, that because he couldn’t read the message it must be one of the most important ever sent. Meant for him alone, it was unreachable, he had missed it, had not been sufficiently alert, or he had been maliciously deceived.

Vanya, leaning forward and putting his cigarette in the ash tray made by himself from an old tin lid, tapped the key, as if he had got the pip, you might say, sent a dot, one squeak into the aether which flitted over half the world, a single pulse liberated, picked up by Howard with a smile, the letter E, for Easy when he’d been flying, but now E for Echo in the modern phonetic alphabet.

Then Vanya went back to musing on the charms of his girlfriend (we’ll call her Galya, Howard decided) or he resumed reading his magazine until, fifteen minutes later, he tapped the key three times, three dots in a row, and artfully spaced, rhythmically plinked without reason but as if to show he was still alive, was impatient in fact, and craved to be communicated with.

His idea of heaven would be to have a dozen aircraft calling at the same time for their position, the wavelength sounding as crowded as if a big buck rat had gnawed a way into the parrot house at the zoo, but the most Vanya ever got was when one plane came on a few minutes after the other, and then he had to pay for the luxury by waiting more than an hour for the next client.

Goaded into action by an unquiet spirit he sent random dots, yet diffidently now because Big Brother (Radio) might be listening for such infringements. You couldn’t be shot for it any more, but might be posted to one of those remote mosquito-infested places in the Tundra which, from ten thousand metres above, he was occasionally called to give a pinpoint. Best not to take chances, however, by letting yourself go completely but, oh! if he could, what a tale Howard might hear! Such pips and squeaks were not necessarily proof that Vanya was an alert listener, though Howard assumed he was, but it seemed obvious that because the dots were so brief, albeit chirpy, he could be a very smart sender whenever called on to communicate.

Such operators were easily bored, and jittery when alone for too long. Having the spark gaps of the morse key only a foot or two from ever itching fingers, the temptation to give a tap now and again is more than flesh and blood can tolerate. Howard recalled flying over Germany as a long period of monotony, because radio silence had to be kept in case some German listener picked up the signal and beamed guns or fighters onto you. He had yearned to give a tap or two, even to call up a nonexistent station and send a fictitious message, but aircraft keys had a wider gap in case the bouncing should close the contacts and cause a ripple, and to tap the key meant a positive press, thereby discouraging the impulse.

Laura had read that every telegraphist in the Japanese fleet, on its approach to Pearl Harbor, was wisely ordered to put a slip of paper between the contacts in case an operator accidentally touched the key and revealed the presence of their ships before the surprise attack.

Vanya had received no such order because Russia wasn’t at war. Maybe he knew an operator in one of the planes, a woman perhaps, because the pattern of his dots, three in a row, like the tiniest of sparks, were as quick as if coming from a half-burnt log which had rolled off the fire. It was merely Vanya’s form of identification, to let her know he was on watch and thinking about her. Perhaps he would come out one day and make his statement of intent, go mad, in other words. No chance of that, so Howard had to do what he could by thinking for him, building a 3-D identikit picture, which could only stay in his world because no reciprocal chit-chat was either permitted or possible.

Every wireless operator lived in Ionosphere Gardens, and Vanya was no exception. Maybe he didn’t have an airborne sweetheart, but he sure had one, if not several, in the place where he was born. He goes there every month or so. At the bus station, having not quite shaken the radio dust off his feet, he drums morse with his fingertips on the window pane, scorched with impatience. If he’s lucky he can stay a few days in the village, where he earns extra roubles repairing the peasants’ broken radios, being a dab hand at finding valves and even transistors from street markets in town. With Marconi fingers he is seen as a young man made good, and everyone loves him. The aerial blues don’t get at him in the countryside, a magic bucolic heaven compared to the grim buildings near Moscow surrounded by aerials.

When the bus lands him back there and he sits down, and tunes in, atmospherics make sounds as if someone is sobbing far away, the breaking of a heart in deepest misery. You need earphones to hear the fully nuanced music of the spheres, so he puts them firmly on, even living out a pestilential itch in his groin to keep them there in case he should miss something. No distraction of family, neighbours, traffic or sweethearts until Grushenka, the station slavey in headscarf and baggy clothes, brings him, halfway through his stint, a slice of black bread and a glass of lemon tea. Whenever she does he manages somehow to touch her bottom, and she slaps his hand before going huffily out – though Howard couldn’t spill this part of his fantasy to Laura, because even the blind must have their secrets.

It took Vanya some time to get sense out of a plane with a faulty transmitter, a dull and rusty note, albeit sharp enough for him, fitful mews morsing from the outer world. He pinned it down like a butterfly in the specimen box and, still on a lover’s wavelength, sent a position report to set it free.

Laura tapped the shoulder of someone on a comparable wavelength, so he stood for a hug-and-kiss, glad to be released from his peculiar bondage.

‘You were a long way out,’ she said.

‘Too far, maybe. I’ve got you to thank for bringing me back. I often wonder where I’d end up if you didn’t.’ He would sit without food or sleep for days until he died, except that he would have to come away from wherever he was to go out to the toilet, she reminded him, as he followed her into the kitchen for tea.

‘I had a puncture coming back from Bracebridge, and a very pleasant man changed the wheel for me.’

Even when she only went to the bottom of the hill he would hear about all that was seen and heard, every incident no matter how minor or irrelevant, she decided, to keep his mind alive with things other than radio listening. Sometimes by a slight downward movement of his lips, he showed impatience at such trivialities, maybe thinking she ought to invent a few occurrences to make her revelations more interesting. But that kind of talent would be too close to lying, and common sense hadn’t equipped her for it.

The lid made a satisfying clunk onto the big teapot, then the sound of the cake tin being opened. ‘He was a gentleman, then, to help you.’

‘He was. It was a muddy lay-by. I’d never have got the wheel off. When he’d done he asked me to have a drink in The Foxglove, though I suspect he only wanted to wash his hands. He was about forty’ – she made a picture for Howard to see, of more details than she remembered. ‘We chatted over the drinks – I had an orange juice – and do you know, he told me he’d been a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. When I mentioned your hobby he said he’d like to meet you one day. I didn’t know what to say, but couldn’t really rebuff him. He’d been so kind.’

Howard, on his second cup of tea, decided that listening was thirsty work. ‘You should have said yes. Anyone who is good to you is my friend for life.’

‘Oh, I didn’t put him off. Couldn’t really. He said you and he belonged to a fraternity. I liked that. We exchanged telephone numbers. I suppose he could have some fascinating things to say.’

He assembled crumbs from around his plate. ‘What’s his line of work now?’

‘He didn’t say exactly. We weren’t in the pub for long. But I gathered it was something to do with boats.’

‘Would be, I suppose. Did he tell you when he’d call?’

‘He didn’t promise. Seemed uncertain, because of his work. But I think he was quite keen on it, because he said he would as soon as he could.’

He had wondered why she was so long away, often did, though in this case the adventure was worth it if he could one day gab with an ex-Merchant Navy key-basher. He often had the dread that Laura would go out and never come back. Just like that. She would be spirited away forever. Hard to know why he should think so, though if you’d had one disaster another was always possible. Maybe that was it, no other reason at all. To make it unthinkable he told her about his fear, and they laughed at such an impossibility, an evening taken up with speculation as to what he would do if left alone in the house with no money. The fantasy enthralled them through twilight and into supper. He was inventive, as if he had heard the solution suggested by a message on the radio.

‘If I was alone, and had to get by, you know what I’d do?’

‘Can’t imagine,’ she said.

‘Nor me. But it’s just come to me. I’d take my morse key and oscillator, and a groundsheet, which I’d sit on outside the big supermarket. I would have a notice on a bit of cardboard beside me, having got Arthur the postman to write it, saying: “GOOD LUCK AND LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL.” I’d sit there, and send it in morse at maximum volume over and over again, my cap in front for passers by to drop money into. It’d be such an original way of begging that I’d be bound to make several pounds a day for my food, especially if I went into the supermarket at closing time to scoop up stuff that had passed its sell-by date.’

‘A brilliant idea,’ she laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be a beggar, though, you’d be a busker, an entertainer. Perhaps you’d be spotted, and you’d make a tape, and get into the top ten. You’d be interviewed on the radio. You might even go on television.’

‘Well, you never know, do you? Maybe I should do it anyway. It wouldn’t be a boring life, because I’d hear some very interesting remarks from people as I sat on the pavement. Children with pretty young mums would be the best givers. They’d be spellbound at the music from my morse machine, and have to be dragged away screaming because they wanted one to play with as well. Maybe an ex-service wireless op would be so intrigued he’d drop me a quid, and even stop for a chat. What a life it would be, as long as the police didn’t move me on.’

‘You could go somewhere else,’ Laura said, ‘couldn’t you? Outside the church, or the library. I’d certainly put something in your cap. In fact I might be so amazed by your act that I’d fall in love with you and carry you off.’

‘And we’d soon be back where we started,’ he said, ‘which is no bad place to be.’