by Anne Degrace
It was the next evening, at roll call, that everything changed. Block was in charge. The men assembled in rows in the yard, Block at the front with a civilian guard alongside. It had been a warm day for late September, and the men who had been out cutting were tired in a happy, relaxed way, jostling and joking with one another. Armstrong was stationed at the west side of the group. Probably he thought, they’ll be happy to get roll call over with and go relax; they’ve earned it. The cut that day had averaged to just over a half-cord each, the best so far. Armstrong reflected that as a young man working one summer for the railway he’d felt the same after a good, productive day of physical exertion: pleasantly tired, reasonably fed, at ease.
At the front, Block paced. “Attention!” His voice was knife-edged. Walking up and down the rows, Block stood in front of each man in turn until the prisoner assumed the rigid stance expected. No prisoner was found acceptable; it was agonizingly slow. On top of that, it was beginning to rain, a fine, cold drizzle. Armstrong could feel the tension thicken like ice on the lake.
Block got to Hirsch. “Straighten up, prisoner!” he barked. Around them there was no movement, not an intake of breath nor an exhalation.
“I am straight,” Hirsch told him, stiff-backed, hands at sides, eyes forward. “But you, sir, are crooked.”
Everyone in the front row looked at Block. There were a few suppressed snorts, and then laughter erupted. The men in the further rows strained to see. By the time Armstrong realized that Block had, in fact, mis-buttoned his uniform, the hilarity was universal.
“Take over, Carter,” Block hissed to the civilian guard beside him, who was, himself, trying not to laugh. Block glared at Hirsch. “I’ll deal with you later,” he muttered.
As Carter called roll, getting through the names as quickly as possible so as to release the men before pandemonium ensued, Armstrong caught Roehm’s eye from his position at the west edge of the assembly. Roehm winked. They both knew that the incident would not be reported.
TWO WEEKS LATER Armstrong encountered Hirsch in the infirmary. With eight fresh stitches from a slipped axe, Hirsch was delighted to be off work for a few days and allowed to rest up for the rest of the afternoon, and said as much. Armstrong had had another bad night, and as a result, was suffering the vice-grip of a headache and came in looking for aspirin. Finding the doctor away and Hirsch alone on a cot with a book of German verse, he stayed, stretching out on the next cot and closing his eyes. The pillow was cool against the back of Armstrong’s skull, and he gratefully fell into the ease of conversation to which they had become accustomed. Soon, talk turned to Hirsch’s girl.
“She is very sweet,” Hirsch told Armstrong. “Very loving. I think that after the war is over I will ask her to come home with me.” Hirsch lay in his underwear, fresh bandage around his calf, smoking. The flat afternoon light was filtered through windows that had likely not been cleaned since the camp was erected. The doctor, Armstrong heard, was over at the far cut block where a man had been struck by a falling tree. There had been too many accidents, lately.
“How did you ever meet her?”
“At a dance. A few of us go to a dairy farm just at the park’s border, where we dug potatoes last fall, ya? He’s a good man, this farmer, his name is Bourek — a Yugoslav. He plays the violin — you call it fiddle. He plays for dances. He takes us in his truck.”
“Aren’t you recognized?”
“No, no, he gives us clothes.”
Armstrong considered this. “Why?”
“There are not so many men, I think, for the girls to dance with. Sometimes we bring rations, things we get in our packages from home and even from the stores here.” Armstrong raised his eyebrows but let it go; Hirsch continued. “And besides, we are friends. Like you and I are friends.”
Armstrong felt a welling in his heart. There are not so many friends, he thought, for a lonely ex-soldier to talk to. “What’s her name?” he asked.
“Josephine.” Hirsch smiled and rolled his eyes skyward, sighing. “We are too many men in one place,” he said. “We think about girls, we talk about girls, we dream about girls. You? What do you think about?”
Armstrong wished that girls were what he dreamt about. The nightmares were back; he’d been waking in sweats but, so far as he knew, had not called out. He’d lie there in the dark, heart pounding, surrounded by the snores of his fellow guards.
“I think about my wife sometimes,” he said. “I’m not a young man. These things change. And,” he turned his head to the afternoon light, now waning, “I think about my son. His name is Stephen.”
“That is me.”
“Pardon?”
“Stefan. My name is Stefan.”
Armstrong had never asked.
FALL ADVANCED, THE mornings chilly. It was hard to get the prisoners going; production had fallen to a quarter-cord per man per day. The civilian guard didn’t seem to care, and there had been reports of prisoners and guards alike socializing over cards together in town, or at dances. If a prisoner missed roll call, the excuse was invariably that he had gone for a walk and become disoriented, lost; he’d have a story about a night spent in a barn or haystack, heading back at first light like a good prisoner.
Block, apparently with Col. Trevaine’s blessing, responded one evening with a raid on neighbouring farms an hour after evening roll call was over, giving prisoners and their keepers time to get the evening’s social event underway. As a result, four prisoners spent twenty-one days in detention, and the guards were docked pay. Hirsch was not among them, but Koertig was. Hirsch was furious, and he was not alone. There was a three-day strike, and when the men finally agreed to return to work, production had clearly dropped. Then, privileges were reduced; the entertainment room adjacent to the dining hall was closed except for Saturday afternoons. Even meals appeared smaller.
“Things are changing around here,” Block told Armstrong and McGrath while they waited for Carruthers at the card table a few days after the raid. “There’ll be no more of this bullshit. Heads are gonna roll. We’re at war, goddamn it.”
The prisoners responded with work to rule, the guards with increased inspections. Block appeared gleeful with every confiscation of equipment or contraband, and Armstrong worried for his own supply. There was no clear solution in sight, the tension palpable. Guards doubled up for perimeter duty; prisoners fell silent when camp personnel approached. In the midst of this Armstrong felt himself falling, as if at the crumbling edge of something high, above an abyss he couldn’t fathom.
One evening Hirsch saw in the shake in Armstrong’s hands the hard edge of a sleepless night and offered to fill his canteen.
“It is a bad time, ya?” he said. They were behind the barn, the smell of pigs and manure mingling with the smell of dry leaves and dust. “It becomes harder to know who your friends are.”
Armstrong took a long drink and felt the relief of it flood his body. “What do you mean?”
“Not everything is black and white.” Hirsch slipped the bottle back into his jacket and walked away.
ONE EVENING, AFTER a bad night and a rough day, Armstrong caught Hirsch’s eye following a long and particularly onerous, somewhat humiliating roll call and afterwards caught up with Hirsch behind the commissary store.
“We are without supplies,” Hirsch told Armstrong without preamble.
“Pardon?”
“You think there’s just a tap we turn on? It comes out, whoosh, straight from the pipes and into your cup?”
Armstrong was taken aback at the tone. “What do you need?”
“You get us some sugar. One pound. No, two pounds.”
“That’s a lot of sugar! Have you noticed there’s a war on?”
“Yes. I have noticed.” Hirsch leaned closer, his face inches from Armstrong’s, and Armstrong could see the twitch in Hirsch’s jaw.
He looked nothing like Stephen, and Armstrong wondered how he had ever imagined any similarity between this prisoner and his son.
“Yes, there is a war on,” Hirsch hissed. “And when we win the war, we will have all the sugar we want.” He stepped back and crossed his arms. “Meanwhile, this is what you must do.” The affable, smooth-talker was gone. “Because you want the liquor, ya? And you keep your friend Block away from me.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Just keep him away. I meet you here tomorrow night.”
IT WAS MCGRATH who told Armstrong that Block had been harassing Hirsch relentlessly. They were lingering in the mess hall after supper, neither on duty for another hour. Armstrong, sleepwalking through the day after a night of terrors, most often drunk these days when not on duty, hadn’t noticed, but didn’t say so.
“He’s on him all the time, watching,” McGrath said, “wearing him down.” He tilted backward in his metal chair and shook his head. The cook staff was in the kitchen; they were alone in the big hall, but McGrath kept his voice down nonetheless. “Today, Block even told him he can’t keep his animals. His gophers and such.”
“What? Col. Trevaine allowed it. Said it’s good for morale. He hasn’t changed the rules about that.”
“I know. But Hirsch doesn’t.” He paused. “You know how he sneaks out of camp pretty regular. I don’t think he’s been able to for a couple of weeks — more, maybe. You haven’t noticed? He hasn’t said anything? I know you two are friends.”
“You do?” Armstrong’s mind was scrambling. He hadn’t seen Hirsch lately. It had been Koertig who made deliveries the last two times.
“Everyone does, Charlie. Block does. I’d watch my back if I were you.”
“What could Block have on me?”
McGrath made a motion, cup to lips, and raised his eyebrows. “Everyone does it,” he said. “Mostly, nobody cares. But Block’s got something against Hirsch, and he knows you two are chummy. So by extension —”
“What’s he got against Hirsch? I mean, besides that incident with the buttons. It can’t be just that he sneaks out every so often; half the camp does. And in any case, what’s he got against me?”
“You’re friends with a Black Kraut. That’s enough.”
“He’s not.”
“Yes. Yes, he is.”
It was Block who had dug up Hirsch’s past, McGrath explained, thanks to a friend in the right place in Ottawa. He’d found more than he’d even hoped for. Hirsch was as black a Nazi as they came, working swiftly up the ranks in the Afrika Korps and heading for promotion to Hitler’s elite before his capture and imprisonment at El Alamien. He had been sent by the Medicine Hat Gestapo. Befriending guards was one part of a larger strategy.
“Strategy for what?” Armstrong was genuinely perplexed. McGrath didn’t answer directly.
“When he played a fox in the Christmas production?” McGrath leaned forward. “It was a reference to Desert Fox. Rommel. That whole play was a metaphor — and a message.”
Armstrong recalled the lighthearted production, remembered the warmth he felt sure was shared by prisoners and guards alike that first Christmas he had been at the camp, so relieved to have Camp Neys behind him. It had felt almost like family. For a full hour — more — he had thought of neither Cynthia nor Stephen.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. He wished he had a drink.
“Block has evidence. He’s ready to take Hirsch out.”
Weiler came into the hall and began clearing a few stray dishes. Armstrong rose to leave, but McGrath placed a hand on his arm and leaned in.
“One more thing. Hirsch’s girl? The father called Trevaine. Peabody was in there waiting to ask for leave, and he heard. I guess she’s got a German bun in the oven.”
DEAR STEPHEN, ARMSTRONG wrote that evening. He was in his upper bunk in the quarters he shared with McGrath, Carruthers, and Horgan, the squat black stove in the middle of the room holding back the chill of the fall night. The letters were spidery on the page, and he gripped the pencil hard to keep steady. He could not have managed a pen. Do you remember the camping trip we took when you were ten? I taught you how to gut a fish. I remember how proud I was at how quickly you learned. What a feast we had that first night, and then later you had a bellyache. We lay on the beach and looked at the stars and I showed you Cassiopeia and Orion. Later, there were coyotes, and I told you not to be afraid. They were just talking to each other, like you and me.
Sometimes I think that when you were ten was the last time I knew anything. I am fifty-five years old, and I don’t even know where you are.
Abruptly, Armstrong crumpled the letter and fed it to the fire. McGrath looked up briefly, but he was lost in his own letter. It was after ten o’clock. Armstrong rolled a cigarette and stepped out into the night air.
There were no lights on in the mess hall. It took only a moment to slip in using the spare key he’d borrowed from Weiler earlier that day, on pretext of need, to make himself some warm milk on sleepless nights. Weiler was always a sympathetic ear. It took a moment more to locate, in the dark with just the compound lights shining dimly through the window, the store of dry goods in the large cupboard at the back, and the sugar. Civilians under wartime rationing would be rightfully outraged to see what the camps sometimes had. If he was caught there would be no hiding two pounds of sugar. Armstrong was thankful that there was no moon, making it easier to keep to the shadows where buildings blocked the lights.
Approaching the store, he would not have noticed the silhouette that was Hirsch had he not been looking for it. Hirsch took the sugar without comment, and Armstrong let it go. We are all sliding, he thought. This war has gone on too long. He wished, again, for a drink.
As if sensing Armstrong’s need, Hirsch, softening, put a hand on his shoulder. “We will have a batch ready soon. We were not able to finish today. We are being watched; there is nothing to be done. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next day.” He shrugged. “It is not a good time.”
Armstrong tried to see Hirsch’s face, but the darkness obscured his expression. A thought occurred to him. “You wouldn’t —”
Hirsch shrugged again. “It will all be over soon. We will win, and I will go home.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Armstrong told him. “Your Rommel —”
“Lies.” He shifted the bag to his left arm. “There is always more to the story. And we will ultimately win.”
Armstrong, unsure of what to say, watched as Hirsch slipped around the building’s side, the bag of sugar tucked neatly under his arm.
THAT NIGHT, AND the next day, were bad for Armstrong. He had little sleep, and sleep, when it came, was coloured by his own private war. Two more letters he began to Stephen were abandoned. When the mail arrived and there was still nothing, Armstrong knew he would have settled happily for all of two words in his son’s handwriting to have made it past the censor.
He saw Hirsch twice during the day, at supper and again as the men came back from the woodlot, but Hirsch gave him no sign, and Armstrong felt a rising desperation. After roll call, Armstrong mustered his courage and strode between the bunkhouses as if on a mission of some assigned purpose, keeping an eye out for Block, and when he was alongside Bunkhouse 5, slipped quickly inside, surprising Roehm.
“He is not here,” Roehm told him. “He has gone to see his Josephine.”
He would not be back that night.
“We have nothing,” Roehm said. “Nothing has been possible.”
Armstrong’s hands began to shake involuntarily, and he stilled them in his pockets as he walked back to the staff house, head swimming.
AT MORNING ROLL call, Hirsch was not there. Neither was Block.
“Block’s really been stirring things up, and now Ottawa’s taking notice,” McGrath told Armstrong. “Trevaine’s in a corner. H
e sent out a search party early this morning. RCMP, too. It’s a manhunt.”
Armstrong looked across the camp in the direction of Dauphin. Of course, Hirsch could be anywhere. He thought of Josephine.
“They went to that girl’s farm first,” McGrath said, as if reading Armstrong’s mind. “Seems she’s gone to visit an aunt somewhere.”
Armstrong closed his eyes. Unbidden came the memory of the afternoon in the sick bay, the pale light, the easy companionship.
“Oh, and the still?” McGrath continued. “Block found it. It’s gone now, destroyed. What they haven’t figured out is how the prisoners managed to steal all that sugar.”
As Armstrong turned away, not trusting his expression, McGrath fired a final shot, speaking softly and not unkindly. “They set all the animals free. They destroyed the cages.”
How ironisch, thought Armstrong. He felt his own walls closing in.
THE EDGINESS IN the camp was pervasive, and it took some time to assemble the day’s work crew. When the camp was finally empty, save for those working in the shop or barn or kitchen, Armstrong walked towards the lake. Both canoes were still there; he had hoped to find one gone. Better still, hoped to see Hirsch paddling towards him, having spent a quiet night listening to coyotes. Instead, the surface of Whitewater Lake stretched before him, still. He sat for a long time, until the hard underside of the canoe had left his seat numb and his leg cramped. At least with a leg like his, he thought, he was never a contender for this morning’s manhunt. As Armstrong stood to leave he caught something in the periphery of his vision, a movement. An animal, doglike. His imagination? He could not be sure.
He returned to a quiet camp and found Weiler in the mess hall, sweeping. There was an air of waiting, as if the camp held its breath.