Perhaps that, he thinks, is why they never talked about love. Why, even when there had been girls—respectable girls, local girls, German girls (and he’d had his share of crushes)—he hadn’t spoken of them to her. On his last night before the army took him, he’d made a plan to meet a girl—Eva. She was a little older than he, twenty maybe, a rosy, round-faced thing with plump little hands. He’d watched her from afar for years, it seemed, always on the arm of some fellow in uniform, but he’d only had the nerve to ask her out, to the cinema, after he’d joined up. It was the bravest thing he’d ever done, he thought at the time. He stared into her dark pupils while she thought about her answer, and then he’d told her, “I’m shipping out tomorrow,” and she’d pursed her lips and said, “Well, then.” She called him a patriot. She said that there was no higher love than the love of one’s country, and he nodded mutely. Her own patriotism was well known among the local boys, who called her the Recruiter. Karsten had laughed along with the rest, thought her a gullible romantic at best, at worst a slut for the swastika, but now he saw what she felt most was pity. Knowing it, he still planned to use it against her, pitiless himself. But as he’d gone downstairs that evening, he’d found his mother alone in their cramped kitchen and he knew she’d been crying, and so he’d stayed with her. Perhaps, he’d thought, squeezing her hand, there was no distinction between pity and love. That’s when she’d told him his father would be proud of him. She squeezed Karsten’s hand. “Don’t disgrace us,” she said, and he’d nodded and sworn.
He wonders now if his mother still thinks him a virgin—the very worst thing a soldier can be, other than a coward, he thinks bleakly. And yet he finds himself, despite himself, hoping she does.
As for Eva, he’d written to her to apologize, but of course she’d never written back.
KARSTEN CONSOLES himself that the Welsh girl’s fleeting appearance at the wire at least scared the boys away, but before long they’re back, and to his surprise he’s actually pleased to see them. He recognizes the one she grabbed, asks his name, but the boy ignores him. Ignores him yet lingers, as if fascinated by Karsten’s English, as if the language issuing from him were as improbable as a talking sheep or dog. The boy is slightly built, with a watchful look about him, and seems always on the fringe of the crowd. A follower, Karsten intuits, a tagger-along, tolerated by the others, perhaps bullied by them.
“Where’s your sister?” Karsten tries again the next night, but the boy bristles.
“She’s not my sister! I’m an evacuee. My dad’s in the navy!”
He sticks his chest out as if for a medal. There’s a challenge in his voice, but Karsten doesn’t want a fight.
“You must miss him,” he says kindly, but it’s a mistake. The boy’s face clouds, and Karsten sees too late how he’s trapped him. The boy can’t admit he misses his father in front of the others, can’t say he doesn’t for fear of seeming disloyal.
“Shut up!” is all he can cry, and his shrill belligerence only makes the older boys laugh.
The gang as a whole is losing interest in the camp. Fewer boys come each night, and when they do, they chat amongst themselves, bored by the prisoners. No longer afraid of us, Karsten thinks.
He’s reduced to entertaining them to maintain their interest. When he sees one of the older toughs, an albino by the look of him, lighting a cigarette, he brings two fingers to his own mouth, raises his eyebrows.
“You must be joking, sunshine.”
“Not to smoke.” Karsten struggles for the word. “For a... trick, you know. Magic.” He cuts his eyes towards the slight boy, the one he’s really doing this for.
The tough frowns, but Karsten can see he’s intrigued, and in his own good time he strolls over, offers a cigarette jutting from his pack. “You’re really not going to smoke it?”
“No matches,” Karsten tells him, pulling his pockets inside out.
“Fair enough. I’ll go along.”
The albino waves the others over like an impresario, and they stand before Karsten as he twirls the cigarette in his fingers. He has a modest repertoire of sleight of hand, with which he used to entertain his mother’s guests as a boy, but he’s rusty, his knuckles stiff, and on his first attempt the cigarette slips through his grasp. He has to fumble to catch it.
“Oooohh!” The older boy rolls his eyes. “You’re good, you are. Know any others?”
Karsten ignores him, trying to still the sudden panic he feels. He used to have a line of patter to distract his audience, but he’s so gripped with stage fright he can’t think to translate it. He pushes his sleeves up, concentrates on his next pass, one hand slipping over the other, and to his own mild surprise the cigarette vanishes. He turns his hands back and forth before them, smiling in triumph.
Even the albino is impressed. As for the little lad, his eyes are huge. He’s surely never seen anything like it before.
“Where is it?” he asks in hushed tones, looking at the albino as if he might know.
“Gone,” Karsten says. He puts his two empty fingers to his lips in a suave smoking gesture. “Unvisible!”
“Invisible,” the tough snorts, but the little one, enraptured by the trick, breathes, “Unvisible,” as if it’s the magic word.
Instinctively, Karsten reaches out to him with a twirl of the wrist. He means to produce the cigarette from behind the boy’s ear, but for once he’s forgotten the wire and has to let his hand fall quickly to hide the cigarette.
“Come on,” the tough says, suddenly suspicious, as if Karsten intends to keep the cigarette. “Where is it?”
Karsten mimes forgetfulness, rubs his face thoughtfully, and then draws the cigarette from his nostril, to the delight of the younger boys.
“Oi!” the albino cries. “That’s disgusting.” Karsten holds out the cigarette but the other shakes his head. “I ain’t putting that in my mouth!”
“You can’t always believe your eyes,” Karsten says, smiling.
He holds it out again, but the boy isn’t having any of it.
Besides, the others are clamoring for him to do it again, and Karsten obliges, running through the routine twice more, three times, balancing the smoke on the back of his hand, making it vanish with a clap, then pulling it from thin air with a flourish as he gets his feel back.
He slips the cigarette between his lips as he saunters back to the barracks that night, wondering if the boy will tell her about the trick, if she’ll believe him. And abruptly he hopes not. That she’ll want to see it for herself.
But the next night brings only the boys again, and by the end of the evening they’ve seen all his tricks a dozen times.
He’d feared the little one would vanish with the rest, when they lost interest, and yet there he is, one day all by himself, looking around as if for company. Perhaps the others haven’t deigned to tell him of a new meeting place.
It’s the chance Karsten’s been hoping for.
He pulls a pair of toy planes from his tunic. He’s been working on them all week, fashioning them from a couple of bed slats with a blunt penknife. They’re crude things, not much more than crosses of wood lashed together with twine and painted with boot polish, but each has a golden propeller, cut from flattened shell casings he’s begged from a guard. They’re not much, but he’s proud of those propellers, has polished them to an oily shine, the first thing he’s polished since his surrender. He’s bent the soft metal blades at an angle, so when he swings the planes through the air before the boy, they swirl with a soft ticking sound, glittering in the sunset.
Karsten can see the desire in the boy’s eyes. He can’t take them off the planes, one in each of Karsten’s rough palms now. He lifts them towards the boy, but the lad hops back like a bird.
“Would you like them?”
The boy nods emphatically.
“The girl,” Karsten says cautiously. “The girl who fetched you. Tell me her name and you can have them.”
The boy stares at the planes, their propellers winki
ng. He’s torn, Karsten sees, but finally he shakes his head.
“Come on.”
The boy’s shoulders drop and he turns away, and Karsten finally relents. She’ll just have to remain the Welsh girl. Much as he wants her name, there’s something about the boy’s loyalty that moves him.
“Here, then.” He pushes the planes through the fence before he can change his mind, and the youngster snatches them out of his hands, darts off.
For a slow moment Karsten feels bereft, as if he’s given up a treasure. The boy wanted them so much. Karsten’s hands, which cradled the toys for days, feel abruptly empty. But when he sees the boy running uphill, the planes whipping over the long grass, banking around tree trunks, sailing towards the crest, it comes to Karsten that this is what he has wanted all along, for the planes to go where he can’t. Into a home. He thinks of them crossing the threshold like the flights he’d watched in France racing across the coastline; he imagines them roaring around the kitchen, flashing past whitewashed walls; pictures them diving through the steam from a kettle as if it were a low cloud skimming over the lake of the sink, shooting across the long, flat field of a dining table, past bucolic scenes on the china ranked along a dresser. He thinks of them buzzing through the dimness of a hallway, banking sharply, gradually gliding in for a safe landing on the broad, smooth strip of a well-made bed. And he thinks of the girl finding them there, or among the plates on the dinner table, or on the boy’s desk. Thinks of her reaching for them with surprise, wondering where they’re from.
Perhaps she’ll ask the boy; perhaps he’ll tell.
And he realizes, They’re for her. Somehow, he’s made them for her.
HE DREAMS OF HER coming to the wire the next day, but he’s still pleased to see the boy, even alone, hurries to meet him at the wire, smiling. But the lad is grim-faced, empty-handed. Karsten feels a brief pang that the planes have already lost their appeal. Or perhaps he’s simply lost them, or had them taken from him by some bully at school, and the premonition fills Karsten with indignation.
The boy won’t look at him at first, pacing back and forth before the wire, staring at his own scuffed boots.
“Those planes,” he blurts out eventually. “Those planes you gave me.”
“Yes.” I’ll make more, Karsten thinks. A whole squadron. Enough for the boy, for a whole village of boys, if need be. Anything to make him look less distraught.
“They were German planes, right?” He looks up sharply into Karsten’s face as he says—spits—the word.
Karsten searches for an answer, his smile curdling. A part of him has forgotten the war still going on somewhere.
“Not really,” he says at last, guardedly. “They were just planes.”
“But you made them,” the boy insists.
“You didn’t think they were German planes when I gave them to you.”
“At school they said I joined the wrong air force.”
“They’re any planes you want them to be.”
“No! You made them. What did you mean them to be? It doesn’t matter what I think; it’s what you meant them to be. You were thinking of German planes, I bet.”
Karsten begins to deny it, and stops. Of course he’d been thinking of German planes. But what he really wants to say is that he’d been thinking of freedom. The freedom he’d heard in the planes overhead, the freedom he’d felt thinking of the toy planes, something from the camp, something he made there, existing outside of it, outside of his reach, his sight.
“Anyhow, they’re gone now,” the boy says with a sigh. “I chopped them up with the hatchet and stuck them in the fire.”
Karsten pictures the brass propellers twisting in the heat, blackening, falling through a sooty grate.
“They called me a traitor,” the boy chokes out.
“I’m sorry,” Karsten says softly, overwhelmed by a wave of grief. He begins to say he’ll make him something else, but he can’t think what.
HE LIES IN HIS sagging bunk that night, long after the barracks grows still, staring up at the coarse timber joists of the roof, impatient for sleep to ambush him, yet constantly vigilant. He was never this alert on guard duty. The hut stinks of men, of sweat and feet and damp wool and arseholes, and he rolls over to catch the sporadic scent of the sea. He can make out the smell of the damp trees on wet days, or of dry heather on fine ones. Nights are the worst, he thinks. He dreads nine o’clock, when they’re ordered off the parade ground and herded back to their barracks. The evenings, once it gets too gloomy to play football, once the dusk deepens and the white dots of sheep on the hillside vanish, are a slow, anxious prelude to this confinement. It makes him feel like a punished child, no older than the boy, sent to bed early, and he dreads the winter when the days will get shorter and they’ll be locked in even earlier.
He wonders if his mother is punishing him by not writing. She considered it unladylike to strike a child—that was a father’s place. Not that she didn’t hit him on occasion, but more commonly she would give him the silent treatment if he disappointed her.
Recalling his childhood and her punishments, he’s reminded that he did once see her turn away a suspicious couple from the pension. He’d have been just seven or eight. This was before he understood the nature of trysts. He remembers it because he overheard her telling them there was no room, and when they mentioned the Vacancy card in the window, she said her son must have forgotten to take it down. He’d thought it was a mistake and hurried out to tell her that no, there were vacancies, but when she persisted, he grew indignant, as if he were being blamed unfairly. The man, he remembers, became impatient. “Are there rooms or not, madam?” And his mother shook her head adamantly. “The boy is mistaken.”
“But Mutti,” he’d cried, and she snapped at him to shut up, and he burst into tears, the injustice of it too much to bear. “It’s not fair,” he sobbed, and the young woman had crouched down beside him, taken his hands in her soft ones. “There, there, little man.” Her head of brown hair was as glossy as a fresh chestnut, and he’d reached out for it. But then he felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him to her. “Don’t you touch him!”
The woman had stood stiffly and told the man they should leave. “Otto, please.” She put a hand on his arm, and as Karsten watched from his mother’s skirts, the woman stroked the man’s sleeve lightly. “Don’t make a scene,” she said softly, as if it were just the two of them, and the man turned to her then, and without another word they’d left.
His mother had gone to the parlor window and snatched up the Vacancy sign, as if she’d rip it in two, and then stood there trembling, just behind the curtain, until they were gone.
“But there are rooms,” Karsten growled accusingly, actually stamping his foot. And she nodded curtly, slipped the sign back in the window. “Not for them.”
“You lied!” It was the first time he’d ever caught her.
“They lied to me first,” she said. “Herr and Frau Wagner, indeed. Very funny! As if I was a fool, a bumpkin! They’d never have tried it if there was a man about the place.” She hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the week.
They were Jews, of course, he thinks now—probably married, in truth, something about the way the woman had touched the man told him so even then—but trying and failing to pass. Except, as a child he’d not known them.
THE NEXT EVENING, the boys are back, all of them, even the little one. He’d not expected to see them again. As he approaches the fence, they hold out their hands through the wire as if for a toy, a gift. But when Karsten raises his own hands, empty, they hurl abuse, and the night after they’re gone again, the little loner too, and Karsten feels oddly abandoned.
In the dusk, the full moon opens above him like the mouth of an impossibly distant tunnel.
He wonders how his father handled his own captivity all those years ago. He never spoke of it much, or of the war in general. Indeed, when Karsten thinks of him, he can barely remember his voice. His father had been gone so muc
h of his young life, sometimes for days at a time if the fish were running, and then gone for good before Karsten turned seven. All he recalls are glimpses—his father bent over the model of a ship in a bottle at the kitchen table, patiently explaining what he was doing. Karsten had asked him how he’d learned all that, and his father had told him a fellow prisoner had taught him. His last model had been unfinished at the time of his death, and Karsten had whiled away the long, still hours of mourning finishing it.
Fourteen
ESTHER CAN hardly believe it was her, running down to the wire like that, scattering the boys, confronting the Germans. The thought of it, in retrospect, makes her heart race. What had she been thinking? What was it about the boys’ mean joke?
And it comes to her that it wasn’t what they said, but what she thought they might say next. She’d imagined it rising in Pinkie’s throat, forming wetly on his tongue. That’s what she’d had to stop. That word Colin called her.
Cunt.
It’s such a furious-sounding word, so low and guttural, like a grunt. She rolls it around her mouth like a salty pebble, saying it, harsh and fast, under her breath. It’s a word you can rush through, over almost before it’s begun. It starts to slip out of her now in moments of anger or pain. When one of the hens pecks her foot, when the axe jars her arm as she splits kindling. It reminds her of Colin, but each time she says it she feels a little stronger, as if the odd male power of the curse accrues to her with each utterance. When Pinkie jeers “Jerry-lover!” in the queue for the pictures the next week, she leans close and calls him the name, and when she steps back, he’s beet red under his shock of snowy hair, as though she’s bloodied his face.
The Welsh Girl Page 18