“No, no, no,” she said, as lightly as she could manage, as he proceeded to return the clothes to their boxes. “We have an important social engagement.” And with that bright message, she excused herself from the nursery, so he might dress himself in his first set of new clothes in . . . she could not try to calculate the length of time.
The suit made him walk that much more carefully, as he stepped out of the nursery. Miss Williams smiled her approval, though there was also a good deal of relief in her expression. She said nothing, however, for if she had ever thought of him as her creation, for her to outfit and amend, she realized that had been a frightening and distasteful notion. She returned to her usual composure, vaguely but faithfully cheerful. Sheehan took this as pride in what she accomplished, which made him feel uneasy only because the potential now existed for him to bring her disappointment.
“Lastly, we must do something with your hair,” she decided. “Unless you wish to keep it under your hat, even inside.” From another box she pulled out a new straw boater, but Sheehan held up his hands, as if to stop her; he was not going to take to it. “Well then, we need not cut your hair, just tidy it up a bit,” and then she was gone. When she returned, she had lifted the chair from the kitchen, and brought it into the room. “There,” she said, trying to sound authoritative.
“I will not displace a single curl,” she said, and she held her hands up to him open, empty, as if to show she would use nothing more than her fingers for the operation ahead. “I keep my promises, don’t I? I’ve been doing fairly well so far, right?”
He bunched his hair with both hands into a ponytail, and made certain it covered his ears.
“Shhhhhhhhh,” she said, and he felt her hands upon his head. He could neither hear nor see what was being done to him, as were the circumstances in the last such interrogation he underwent of this nature.
“Hush, hush,” she said. He felt something pulling at his scalp, and he was on his feet. He had jolted up with such force that the chair fell beneath him. There was the sound of an accident, a shelf breaking under the weight of the teapot it held, or an open window forced into closing. Miss Williams hopped backward, her hands in the air as if she was ready to surrender her fingers.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, her hands still in the air. “If I’m to deal with the knots, there will be some pulling,” she said. In her eyes and mouth, she appeared more curious than scared, he told himself, although there was the possibility he was more imposing in the new suit, a more threatening figure. He spied the chair, on its side at his feet, and set it right.
“All right?” she asked as she approached.
He returned to his seat without a glance.
“All right,” she said. “Easy, easy,” and returned to his hairline, and the gentle tension they shared between them. Her hands moved slowly, assiduously, through sections of his hair. She could have been testing the pages of an old and treasured book as she worked. “Ready?” she asked, and he knew he need not answer, because everyone—the prisoners of war and their guards, the commandants, the Red Cross monitors—knew what was to follow in the camps, when these plagues set in, how they began: the small discomforts that ratcheted themselves up invisibly, at night, during the day, whenever the initiative struck them. A tickle that leapt to prickling, then a searing brand, the body devoured by insects, from the crown on down. In the Holzminden prison camp, there were rumors of men who took kerosene to their scalps to stop the itching. In their sleep, they were consumed by fire, the fumes catching any spark they could react with.
“Steady, steady.” Miss Williams’s small reassurances came with more irregularity.
In their place was the imperiousness the Germans deployed as they sought out the offending creatures. The Jerrys used four commands in bleak and naked delivery, though their timing was perfect.
“Setzen Sie sich,” was the first, barked by a guard, so that the “sister”—how the English called the nurse—could go through their necks, collars, cuffs, and lastly, hair. She was pale and seemingly virtuous in her bright uniform, from where they could see her queued up in the infirmary. This being Holzminden, no one was permitted to pace in the queue, shift his weight, crane his neck or engage in any other natural human behavior that would have suited instinctual curiosity about the awaiting interrogation.
“Nach unten,” the guard continued, and, if a man didn’t understand, the sister took her hand to the back of his head, and pushed it downward. It was a trial, to sit so exposed, as if one’s neck was suddenly out there for the taking. Sheehan might have felt the hesitancy in the sister’s hands, as she lifted, tugged, peeled away his hair, looking for signs of infestation. The sister’s hands then scurried through his scalp and something flashed through his skin, from his forehead to his ears to the back of his neck, as if an unusually tight cap was being made to fit head entirely. He lifted his arms out of instinct, to touch what had been placed there. But the guard shouted, “No Berührung! No touching!” and the impulse was rescinded.
“Do you understand?” a guard shouted.
“Insecticide,” explained Lewis, their sergeant, who stood beside the chair. “Got it?”
He had to answer, so he grunted a curt “Sir,” and was done with it.
“Fertig! Aufstehen!” the guard shouted directly at him; then “Nächste,” to the man who had cued up behind him. “Setzen Sie sich,” the guard repeated, and the process began again.
“Take a deep breath,” Miss Williams was saying. From his new jacket, she extracted a handkerchief, and unfolded it so he could see his initials embroidered at its edge. When he did not take it from her, she blotted the cloth on his forehead, the back of his neck, to staunch the sweat. She then restored the fabric into its usual composure, before handing it back to him. “We are not quite finished,” she said, or perhaps he thought she said this. The clanging in his head had taken on the rhythm of his pounding heart.
His hair fell far past his shoulders; at Holzminden and the other camps, it had been rigorously maintained at regulation length. The Holzminden bunk sergeant saw to that, even if assigning the rank of “bunk sergeant” was an afterthought. They were all afterthoughts, as the camp had been staged for officers of the British Empire. The enlisted were assigned to living quarters of improvised huts; then they were assigned to serve the officers. Still the sergeant demanded they take pride in their appearances, the bunk as their own sweet soil, their uniforms and comportment the finest of examples. They were to take pride in their tasks: sweeping, dusting, pouring tea, and refreshing glasses, as if they had been born to service.
“Lice,” the sergeant informed them after the day’s inspection, although Sheehan and his fellows had already figured as much. By 1917, there was hardly a camp where lice had not made an appearance, if the talk among prisoners was to be believed. And Holzminden, they were told by the new arrivals, was the worst camp in all of Germany. It was a miracle they had not been infected elsewhere. Sheehan had been in three different camps. One for each year the war was supposed to end.
“You know what that means,” the sergeant said, and he pulled what passed for a mattress from his bunk and dragged it to the hut’s center. He threw his bedclothes, all his possessions—his kits and keepsakes, what he had of a wardrobe—atop the mattress.
“Now everything goes,” he said. “Everything,” he repeated loudly, although the emphasis was not necessary. The men, Sheehan included, immediately followed his example, though they knew such housecleaning to be a futile effort. Still they added their own bedclothes, the spare sets of undershirts and pants given to them by the Red Cross. The guts of packages from homes—jams, cigarettes, books and photographs—spilled to the floor, to be swept up with the rest of the contaminants.
“You’d rather I found it, than one of them,” he said, and he’d plunge into any suitcase, duffel bag, or bindle that somehow managed to hang onto its shape throu
gh this routing. The sergeant whipped out news clips from baggage, or a stack of playing cards; photographs of girls and mothers from mattresses, and sentenced all to the pile. “Everything of mine means everything of yours,” he continued. “Come on, then. Don’t be stupid.”
The insecticide that had been smeared into Sheehan’s hair and skin bristled in his nostrils, tart and antiseptic. He sat on the frame of his bunk, folded over into himself. He was an egg, or one of the bugs they found in the potatoes they were given: locked in a ball and doomed to roll in whatever direction he was prodded. Except Sheehan had no wish to be swept up, poked, set on any course, even if it was escape.
To the pile, Sheehan had already contributed his few letters from home, though the lot of them had been blotted out: first by the Germans, then by the English. Hello, prayers and love, easily committed to memory once filtered, thanks to the censor’s pen, of the messy business of being Irish. The thermals and the wool socks his mother had sent were also dispatched. He could hear, in the dreadful quiet, the procession of other men’s goods and earnings: cigarettes, empty tins. Books, pencils, caps, falling like grief onto fresh snow; so light as to be soon forgotten, unnoticeable.
They were sequestered in the bunk until lights out, when the Jerrys arrived with carts and wheelbarrows. The conveyances held the new clothes they would wear once they surrendered their current uniforms. The guards had them relinquish socks and gloves; anything that put a layer between their skin and the out-of-doors—pants, too, it turned out; the blue scarf the aviator next to him wore and folded up into his arms each night as if it were a pet or some other beloved object. Once satisfied there was nothing left, the Jerrys had the prisoners load their old clothes and the pile of artifacts onto the vehicles, and march with them to the yard.
For three days they were quarantined, dismissed from their duties, denied the privilege of washing, the duty of eating, except when the Jerrys felt obligated to cater their meals in the bunk. The Jerrys had sealed the bunk by locking the shutters over the windows. They didn’t want anyone to see in, apparently, or the men to see out.
They slept on the frames of their bunks the first night, and the sergeant forbade them from speaking from the start. Lest anyone would hear they were infected, he said, though the men exchanged notes, whispered opinions, and alliances. Altman told him there was no use for this confinement, unless the Jerrys meant to halt an outbreak of typhus. For lice it was just melodramatic. Everyone bloody well knew how diseases worked, Altman insisted, and it wasn’t like this. He was a tailor from Belfast, the only Brit who would deign to speak to a practically mute Irishman.
No one could tell it was evening when the commandant appeared. The Americans, newly arrived at the camp, christened him “Milwaukee Bill,” because he spoke English, Sheehan guessed; though he spoke fretfully, as if he was the recipient of the punishments he pronounced. Now that the Americans had entered the war, the war and his imprisonment might go on forever.
“This day, today, finally, and now,” the commandant said, and Sheehan would have complied but for the men around him. Through the shell he had made for himself, he could see the men looking to the sergeant. The sergeant did nothing, and the men maintained at ease.
“And now!” the commandant began again. “Today! We finish with this! Bei dem erstem Auftrag die Koepfe rasieren, Medical Officer. Now, I said!”
The sergeant rose, but to address the commandant directly in his ear.
“Nein!” the commandant shouted. “Today! Jetzt! Now. I hate sprechen mit ihnen English, bitte schnappt Sie, schnappt Sie!” and he stomped his foot, but in a controlled way; that was what scared them. Had he been having a tantrum: they knew how to react to his fits, by shouting their English at him. Now they had nothing to arm themselves with.
“Achtung. Montieren. I don’t give a damn if you don’t understand. Herren, herren! Herein,” he called to his own men. With the guards, they were marched through the shuttered camp, back to the steps of the infirmary; the sergeant had asked for a word before they were to assemble inside. But they were kept outside, in the roaring of the night: insects in the surrounding trees, the rye grasses, the birds and their vigils, for they would take the insects at first light. The other prisoners were shuttered in their bunks, banging their tins. Men were forced through the infirmary doors, but never out. The final transformation.
The men issued forth from the infirmary as Sheehan eventually did, bald as if brought naked into a new world. The Germans had changed him from a soldier to a prisoner, from a man to a creature, and now they had executed a branding, in case he ever had the means to change back into a man again. The night air was devilishly bitter, a battering of his ears and scalp that next sought out his extremities; he put his hands to his head, in a permanent state of surrender. Altman in particular was unnerved, something about his religion, he heard the others muttering. Sheehan might have approached him, had he the courage. Their bodies could be next on that pile. He resolved, if not for himself, then for Altman, to never alter his appearance. If he lived to grow out his hair, a beard, his fingers and toes to claws, until he was ape, or bear, or anything more natural than he was.
Vain creatures, they had been revealed to be, and the only cure for such vanity was to parade them through the open air, or so the punishment seemed. Surrounded by a new coterie of guards, the bunk was marched to where they had abandoned all their possessions a few nights earlier, to find them re-configured into a pyramid atop tree stumps and branches. Two guards escorted the sister to the pile, and she emptied the bag where she had collected their clippings and stubble.
The sound of the blaze was mesmerizing, a tremendous gasp and trampling, as if voices were being pressed into the ground. All they had accumulated in their privation and endurance: parts of themselves flattened by fire. For the walls of the pyramid, made with their mattresses, it was a slow collapse, punctuated by the puckering of tin, the crackling of bark and paper. Sheehan thought he had heard worse in the war, though being forced to listen to this was a far crueler score; the anatomy popping, final gasps and pleadings. The lice snapping, as if they were phalange and knuckle.
“Am I hurting you?” Miss Williams asked.
Sheehan had been returned to the cottage.
“Hold your breath if it hurts,” she said. She had taken up a comb and was pulling it through his hair, perhaps as a swan’s beak sorts through the feathers of her cygnet. On his head, his scalp, he felt warmth, the light that must have been funneling in through the window. He preferred to sense it rather than see it directly, with its noise and riotousness.
“There,” she said, resting her hands on his shoulders. Her touch through the jacket was muted through the suit’s layers. “You look imminently more handsome. See for yourself.” She stepped away as if to give him a wide berth before the hand mirror she had brought from her bedroom upstairs. He did not take it, and merely stood at attention. “Yes, yes, we’ll go now,” she said, and he could see that she was unnerved, suddenly, by the prospect of what she had planned. “Let me get my hat, and perhaps a parasol, it is warm, and we don’t want any fainting . . .”
Five
Miss Williams explained that they were to walk to the estate of a Lord Thorton, to deliver a book of poetry Miss Williams had inscribed. “Were there an empire of conjurers, of little worlds and fairy places, let it be here in this green soil, in the high sweet grasses the mares sort through for their colts and fillies, in the blue fire stoves with their hushed smoke, an island of pears and other orchards, generous with their shade and hours,” she had written; she recited it as they walked arm-in-arm. She prattled on about the birds they saw, the trees that hosted them, the smell of the air. Alfalfa and periwinkle, as she identified it. The sky was a deeply-seeded blue, she said—“a profusion of blooms in sterling.” This was how she wrote her poetry, she explained, auditioning lines to hear how they took to the atmosphere. She was not certain about that last one,
and asked him to remember it so they would not have to stop for her to write it in her book. She fell slightly behind, as though she had stopped to listen to it again in her mind. She used his arm to pull herself forward.
She fell behind again as they walked on more tenuous surfaces, particularly the polished stone that marked the walkways of the Thorton estate. Sheehan had not imagined she would tire so easily. When she stopped speaking in her trilling voice, he found it more difficult to muster any bravery. If he was not afraid as he had been in the war, it was only because he had so thoroughly drained whatever stores of fearlessness he had once accumulated.
“Listen,” she said, nearly breathless, as Lord Thorton’s manor came into sight. “Our feet on the rocks, like bells quickly stilled.”
He was sorry when the walk was over, for walking, or more properly, marching, had been a respite for him during the war. On marches, there was light, air, and when it rained, fresh water. In the camps, there was the darkness of too many men who no longer knew themselves; they did not know whether to be grateful for being removed from the front, or to be ashamed at having been taken away. There was space and distance on the marches, sometimes exquisitely maintained; in the trenches, there was no such guarantee of movement or privacy, given the mud, vermin, and men that stood at less than an elbow’s length. On the marches, there was quiet, the discipline of keeping up. In war there were whispers, men weeping, a raft of speculation breeding in the minds and bodies of his colleagues. Even after his capture, marching through a gauntlet of German towns, he had been more comfortable than he had been in other circumstances, knowing for the next stretch of moments what was expected of him. There were times townspeople spit on their parades, or threw their bed pots in their hair and faces, but they were to keep marching. He could even accept this abuse in principle, as he and the growing cadre of prisoners were anonymous. The fear did not begin until he reached the camp, and the hatred and deprivation would be slow and obvious.
The Hawkman Page 6