The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

already. Others he hadn’t bothered to log) so her equipment was not simple. She was no pirate of the airwaves prating for the fun of it, though if she had been a classical pirate he could imagine her making people walk the plank, counting them one by one down to the sharks in her deliberate, impersonal, cold-hearted voice.

      And yet, and yet, perhaps she was misjudged. By eternally speaking numbers she was merely doing her job, and not for much money, either. Occasionally the frequencies were closed down, and she was off the air for a time. Then it could be she had caught the bus like any ordinary person, and gone home to feed her children – after shopping on the way to find what treats she could buy for their supper.

      She bathed them and put them to bed and sang them songs and told them stories in a voice utterly unlike that with which she shelled out numbers on the air. Her husband had left her years ago because he couldn’t stand the numbers voice being used in their quarrels, the ruthlessly catalogued recriminations of his misdeeds. Life on her own was hard. With the children in bed she cleaned her tiny flat, darned and washed their clothes and, if there was half an hour to spare before sleep time, and she wasn’t too done-for (she never was) she would play some Mozart or Beethoven on the record player.

      Family who would have helped in her lonely life had been killed, or sent off to camps by the Russians at the end of the war, or were maybe lost in one of those air raids Howard had taken part in, sitting hour after hour at his TR1154/55 Marconi on those cold and terrifying nights during the last winter of the war, the happiest moment when, driving through the flak, the tonnage went down and the bomber lifted, and they could turn for home.

      And now someone called Ingrid von Brocken came on the air to taunt him with his guilt at having, albeit at some risk, unloaded the wrath of God on her family, though she would have been only a baby at the time.

      The headset brought her clearly into mind, queen of the shortwave spectrum naked under a red plastic mac reading off numbers from a pile of sheets by her left hand, the voice as always loud and precise. Maybe there was no woman at all, only an endless leftover tape playing in a forgotten East German bunker transmitting instructions to various agents. No one had thought to switch it off, current still pumped so that it would go on forever, even when all the spies were dead.

      The German Numbers Woman made him sweat, so he couldn’t listen for long; but she filled his darkness with Brünnhilde eyes, and a gleam of red hair which she tied back at work, though made into braids on Sunday. He couldn’t think she was all that fearful because she made him see, thought no ill of her because in his world she was real and he knew her well, his only fear being that she might become bigger and more immediate than Laura. But that’s another matter, he soothed himself, one between me and my conscience, letting me enjoy whatever secret compensations are available.

      Somewhere she must exist, and could be utterly different to the way he imagined her, but that did not matter, because whatever he made out of the voice was solidifying grist to him. He switched on the tape recorder so that he could play the voice to Laura and ask what she thought of it.

       She was knitting a beige cardigan for the winter, had been on it for weeks, the body and one arm done, halfway through the other. The work settled on her lap. ‘German, isn’t it? Numbers?’

      ‘Yes, but what does it suggest?’

      ‘I can’t say. She’s counting, by the sound of it. I’ve no idea what it can be.’

      Ingrid would smile if she could hear this. ‘You don’t wonder what she looks like?’

      ‘Well, I can’t imagine. Ordinary, I suppose. Plain. Could be middle aged, but you can’t always tell from a voice, can you?’

      He switched the machine off. ‘No, I don’t suppose you can.’ He had done his duty: no secrets between them. No secrets on the airwaves, either, even when items came through in morse. Someone was always listening, so who was the person, or people, writing down the text from the German Numbers Woman? What did her figures mean? Were they weather codes, or spy instructions? ‘There’s no way of finding out,’ he said when she asked.

      ‘Does it bother you?’

      ‘No, but I’d like to know. Two receiving stations can get a cross bearing on the transmitter to find out roughly where it is, but I don’t have the equipment to be one of them. If I knew another shortwave listener we could talk about it, and maybe rig something up.’

      She held the knitting to her chest, and fetched a pattern from the other side of the room, thinking how often an advertisement for the local paper had gone through her mind: ‘Wireless operator, ex-RAF, blind, would like to meet similar with sight to send morse code and talk radio matters. Two hours a week. Terms, if necessary, can be arranged.’

      A hint to Howard that she would put it in showed that he needed all his self control not to be angry. And she couldn’t think why, except that he saw it as a blow to his pride, an assault on his privacy which he prized above all else. She regretted not having strength enough to force the issue, put the ad in anyway, make up a story so that the meeting could take place – not having acted courageously and broken the barrier. Howard talked sociably enough to people in the pub whenever there for a pint – his maximum intake on a walk – because she had once met him as arranged, and even before pushing open the door heard his laughter and easy responses among the loud chatter.

      Alone, he was king of his world, no territory of greater expanse than in his mind when assisted by varying and multiplying noises coming into the earphones. Aether sings, is never silent, indecipherable morse lost in vague ringing tones or a low roar as of the sea suddenly punctuated by a rogue whistle coming and going, the momentary growl of a button-message, arrowing from where to where? With such noises he could see, and the universe surrendered to him, at least that part between the earth’s crust and the heaviside layer, where no part of him was tied to the yoke of his blindness.

      Mysterious morse signals, in plain language or in code, ragged beyond comprehension and impossible to grasp, suggested a ghost wireless operator somewhere, wild eyed and stricken with eternal panic, the shirt half flayed off his back by the wind, the only other man besides the captain still on the Flying Dutchman, sending messages on an ancient spark transmitter, the ship forever caught in savage gales south of the Cape of Good Hope.

      Distress signals from the ship came and went into Howard’s earphones, mercilessly chopped by interference or atmospherics, weakened by distance, containing harrowing accounts of the Flying Dutchman’s plight but impossible to make sense of. Maybe lightning had shattered their eyes, but both captain and wireless operator thought they could see perfectly well, yet were unable to distinguish between dark and day in the howling torment of the waves. Signals from the ship turned up all over the spectrum, vague, hardly recognisable, trying to break through and make sense to someone with the superior knowledge, intuitive skill and power to release them from their spellbound circuits around the waters. Maybe they prayed for a Nimrod aircraft or a fast destroyer to rescue them from their plight. Masts gone, at times waterlogged, the ship struggled to stay afloat, and they couldn’t know that nothing would make it sink because the eternal powers of the universe would not allow it.

      The captain in his travail had gone insane and, roped to the wheel, drove the ship on automatically with declining yet always-renewable strength, while the wireless operator in his cabin sat hour after hour tapping out his unreceivable messages of distress, hope and no hope fusing an addled brain that gave no rest.

      At times Howard knew he was close to the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman because nothing could be done for him either. His fate was settled. The vessel was adrift and could not make port, but the man persisted in his task, no thought of saving himself, because staying on was the only chance of survival, making life ordered even in damnation.

      He never stayed long on one frequency, and in any case the Flying Dutchman’s signals always drifted away, impossible to follow, too painful to chase. Shrieks of static and dying whistles ate into the eardrums and conjured bad pictures, so he settled on the clear top-strength machine morse of the station giving the Mediterranean weather forecast, pulled over the typewriter and touch typed on his beloved elderly machine that, having