The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  The man with the limp succumbed, finally, at one of the hospital camps near Cologne. This was what the guard seemed to have said when the limping man was not there one morning. Sheehan was shackled to other prisoners; more and more Russians, the deeper they poured into German territory. The language the Germans heaved at them—nein, nicht schleppen, staerker, viel—was shrinking. There was another morning he awoke moments before the prisoners ahead of him in the column, but he did not lift his head. Instead he watched, terrified, as a set of guards, unfamiliar to him, slapped three prisoners awake. Before they could rise to their feet, the guards dropped all their biscuits and rinds, then poured water from the canteens on these rations. Just so they could see the prisoners claw and scrape and roll over one another to get at the food. For the chance to rescue something from the dirt. Na-ja, sehr traurig, wie munter, the Germans urged them on, in the language the Jerrys made coarse. He knew what was being demanded of him; what it portended, and so he forgot the words meant to ask for more subtlety in the timing, nuances in volume. Instead he learned the predation of the language.

  There is one hunk of bread for the five of you, one potato for the ten. There is coffee for those who don’t step out of line, cigarettes for those who do not try to escape. You can count your sips of water on one hand. If the man in front of you should fall, slip up, find the yeast of his wound blurting out, forget it. He might only get you infected.

  The green mold, he heard the other prisoners talk about; the green mold that overtakes a man’s initiative when he’s been in the camps as long as they have. When he forgets women, his family, his place at home, food. Although one never forgets whether he was Regular or New Army. Stay away from mold, from staying still, from growing anything, or anything that grows. It would be better to be reptile-skinned, cold-blooded, to shiver alone with one’s sorrows than to be locked in the fortunes of others, one’s fate tied up in his comrades’.

  Upon arriving at Merseburg, they were stripped and sorted; the Jerrys were always sorting men, into sizes, abilities. Sheehan was taken to the commandant’s office. In his own language, he was asked how he might make himself useful. The scent of the place, low and fetid, as bad as the trenches. He looked for a window, but he could see nothing, his eyes unable to adjust to the bright new circumstances. So how could he have been useful, in any way, shape, or form, the commandant asked again. “Kannst du mich hören?” the man asked; frustration had sent him back to his own language. He meant to take his hands out of his pockets, to show what they could do. But his hands were ruined.

  “He’ll adjust,” he eventually heard in English. He was taken to a cot, given a blanket, and ordered to write to his family, to tell them what happened. He could ask them for food, clothing, more blankets, tobacco; if he didn’t smoke, he could use it as currency. “I am safe,” he wrote. “I am sorry.” Now everyone would know: his parents, siblings, colleagues at the music school, perhaps even his students. His students had given him jams and tins of meat before he left, so he would not have it so bad. Now all they’d get for their good deeds was a tale of his rank foolishness.

  His fellow prisoners asked him the same question again: how could he be put to use? He didn’t want to be the only Paddy in the barracks. If he spoke, they’d hear his accent. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, said nothing, and followed them as they walked along another set of wires. Barbed and woven, separating the prisoners from the conscripts across a moat. The prisoners walked in twos, side by side, and he walked behind them. He might as well have been a mile away rather than just out of earshot. He walked in fear that they would find out. He would talk in his sleep. He would reenact the whole debacle. There weren’t many English prisoners compared to the French and Russians. He was English to them; it wouldn’t matter to them how he was captured.

  There was an English lieutenant to command them in the camp. He seemed to be of a good sort, concerned with packages and morale. His name was Wilson. Perhaps he was from the south of England, from Dorset. He said to stay away from the kommandos, if possible, and the reprisal camps, although those camps were closest to Holland. They were all aiming for Holland. In the meantime, he could surely find something to do. Write letters for other men or put hammer to wood and nail.

  He lifted his hands out of his pockets for Wilson, held them out as if he were a child, for inspection. “Piano. I played, a bit,” he said.

  “And where . . .?” the English lieutenant began, and perhaps he finished his question. Sheehan could only assume that he did.

  “Gloucester,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange, as if the ringing blocked out random letters. “Gloucester,” he said with more force, to cut through the obstacle. “Manchester before then, sir. I trained there.”

  “I see,” Wilson said. “I’m afraid you won’t . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered. He closed his eyes, hoping it would stop the clanging, but it went on like a beating, the landing of punches.

  “You’ll want for no lack . . . we’ll see to it,” Wilson said. The lieutenant picked up a clipboard. He was assigned to the kitchen.

  There was no working with food. That was for the Jerrys. The prisoners might steal it. He washed dishes, mopped floors, hauled rubbish. The prisoners slept and ate with only their own kind, the better to reinforce the Jerrys’ tactic of dividing and conquering. But the kitchen staff was international if it was to function. His supposed kind was not having him as he was, so he knew he’d have to throw in his lot with the French or the Russians.

  The French ate whatever was put in front of them. Like dogs, so happy to get anything. They played pranks, stole light bulbs and utensils, sabotaged doorknobs with grease. But the Russians seized upon the potato in each day’s consommé and threw it at their captors. They threw entire bowls at the Germans, or they smashed the potatoes with their feet at the evening’s roll call in a fit of disrespect. They kept at this protest, even as they were jailed in solitary. They were indomitable, better equipped than the Europeans: solid caps, thicker, longer coats. This war would go on like a Russian winter, until every last soldier was peeled and boiled, thrown into a pot of nothingness, and wasted by the Russians.

  “You, musician,” one of his fellow dishwashers asked, in discernible English. He was Russian, bearded, one eye a ruin of white with blue smearing. Sheehan ignored him.

  “You play,” the Russian continued as he approached Sheehan to leave behind a sink drowning in dishes. “What you play?” the Russian said, and his voice became louder, through the dint of language, Sheehan guessed. “You play what?”

  Sheehan raised his hands and pantomimed the keys with his fingers. The Russian grabbed at his hands.

  “Let me see,” the Russian commanded. His breath was sour from starvation. He flipped Sheehan’s hands, and his single eye searched them over.

  “You play different instrument.”

  “No,” Sheehan insisted. “Piano.” He repeated the pantomime, much to the Russian’s dissatisfaction.

  “Different instrument,” the Russian persisted.

  He shrugged, and nodded.

  “You come,” the Russian said. “After dishes.”

  The Russians had to steal him into their bunk, and once he was installed within, they pushed a squeezebox into his hands, as though it was a contraband loaf of bread.

  “You play different,” his one-eyed friend instructed, and Sheehan took a moment to feel the weight of the thing, finger its buttons on its sides, the give in its bellows. As he tested its tones, he felt as though he was holding something small and important in his hands, a living thing amid all this mortification.

  “I can teach you,” Sheehan said, and he tapped out a scale. “I don’t know yours but,” he said as he tried a few notes of “God Save the King.” The one-eyed Russian took the instrument away, and led him to the far side of the bunk. But there was nothing but a wall, until the men standing on either s
ide raised it, as if it were a curtain. It was a false wall, to hide the hole the men had either dug or, possibly, inherited from the previous inmates.

  The Russian’s broken blue eye lolled as if he was trying to focus on something far away—the bottom of the hole, and the tunnel that led the way out underneath their feet.

  “Do you play the big one?” the Russian asked, and he pantomimed with his fingers just as Sheehan had done earlier.

  “Organ,” another Russian said, although it sounded like two words when this man said it, as though he were pronouncing a specific man’s name. When the word did not register on Sheehan’s face, its speaker came closer, his blood-red eyes boring into his own. “Organ. Do you play it?” he said, and he clapped his hands in a wide motion. “We need air,” he said, pointing to the hole. “Air,” he repeated again with the exaggerated clapping. “Do you know air?” he asked.

  Sheehan threw in his lot with the Russians.

  It may have been early September, still temperate enough for an escape; the men wanted out before the first snowfall. That might be six, eight weeks away. After such time, the forests would be impassable, or starvation would be the only fate they held for men on the run. This Sheehan understood as the Russians explained through hand signals and their consonants. He had to listen carefully, so as not to get swept away by their stunning pronunciations, as if they were chiseling out each letter with their tongues. He nodded and made his own signals for the material he’d need.

  Leather and wood was the sum of it. Wood of so many kinds, and door hinges, glue, tacks, screws, nails. They needed air, but he needed to make a device that was airless, airtight; he did not know if they understood this explanation, and he was tempted to write it down, make a list. He went for a pencil on one man’s bunk, but the Russian who had introduced him grabbed his hand, shook it until the pencil dropped to the ground.

  “Nyet,” he said, and Sheehan understood.

  He found the Russians to be a creative sort, as they would try anything—stealing, sewing, building, demolishing and rebuilding—to get their work done. They were neither competitive nor craftsmen, and the deadline set by the weather was the most salient influence on all of them. Sheehan marveled at their impossible speech, like pieces of green wood, wedged and latched into each other. They offered up their boots for the leather that would be the bellows, and their coats and jackets when their shoes could not provide enough. They’d run through the winter to keep warm, once they escaped, they promised. They brought him wire for thread, bits of fencing for the bellows’ springs. The raw potatoes they stole were ground into flour and then water was added, when he asked for paste, to stiffen the bellows. They dug with spoons, the bowls they ate with, their hands and fingernails, and the excess dirt they could not nonchalantly plant in the yard went into their pockets, or the latrines. The Jerrys could not account for why the latrines at the Russian barracks filled up so much more quickly than the rest of the camp’s, and took to ordering deeper holes dug in the uncooperative earth. In this way, they were able to get a hold of proper digging equipment.

  The Russians gave him the squeezebox, whether as payment or a model for study, he could not figure. It became clear fairly quickly that he did not know how to build a bellows, but together they improvised as they took apart the squeezebox and fashioned it back together. When they pressed it into his hands the final time, the bellows secured over the hole, he shook his head, no, no, and told them to keep it; it gave him a plausible excuse to come back to their bunks, he said. God only knows the suspicions they had raised among the Jerrys, to say nothing of his own kind. Stashing the instrument with the Russians gave him excuse to visit them each evening.

  Because it was a bellows designed for an organ—and then some—it was controlled by pedals. The Russians set him up on a stool as if he were to play at a pub, and he stepped on a beam at the base of the contraption. The bellows expanded in height but declined in width until he released the pedal, and then it descended as it expanded around the middle. Another man had to hold it in place and still another, with a pail of the potato-paste and a paintbrush, watched for leaks or any other slippage. But it worked.

  The bellows worked as long as he could keep his foot going: toe on the pedal, then heel off, in 4/4 time. Its operation was more akin to driving a car than it was to playing an instrument, he thought. Three men climbed into the tunnel, testing the premise the bellows was built to power. It had him think of his mother, at home, at her Singer, tapping out the stitches she made in his shirts and trousers. The sound was one of a window opening, the shade drawn over it, the wind jabbing to draw the shade back against the wooden frame. The looms he saw once at Tralee, what remained of his father’s people. Warp and weft—a blanket, a shawl, sweater, and scarf.

  The wall that was like a curtain: it rose up in silence. But he did not sense it. Instead he felt the immediate space around him enlarge, as if he were pumping air into the room, not down below it. He might have heard shuffling, friction in sawdust, but he could not be sure if it was a true sound, or leftover or anticipatory noise, the howl that would engulf the bunk once they’d escaped to Holland. Suddenly the room became awful with light, and he put his hands to his ears and shut his eyes. When he released his hands and opened his eyes, he saw that the Russians had withdrawn from his side, and opened up a clear path before him.

  “Prisoner,” the commandant was shouting. “Sheehan. Achtung! Halten!”

  Sheehan drew on his breath.

  “Du kommst als erster,” the commandant said, and the guard next to him motioned with his bayonet. “You go,” the guard ordered, the rest of his instructions dropping off into the hole, now airless and fatal.

  They first wanted the names. Then they didn’t. His was not the only name they needed. Others didn’t matter. Everyone was guilty. Everyone would be punished. But if he gave them names, it would go easier for him. More food, more rest, more time outside: the offers were vague, and, in his hearing, unfinished. The names they wanted: first the Russians, then the English. The English must have been involved; otherwise how could he have spent so much time with the Russians? Just give us the names, and we will prove it.

  But he did not have the names of the Russians. He could not say what they sounded like, the concluding syllables. He did not know the ranks, their honorifics—all fell outside the span of his hearing.

  “What about their uniforms?” the interrogator asked. “You can still see, read, interpret military dress?”

  Sheehan closed his eyes, as if to feign effort. He shook his head, and chose silence. For a method of lying, it was the least offensive.

  In the background, behind the desk where the interrogator was sitting, a procession of administrators debated with their whispers, although all speech had long since begun to sound this way. He heard the word “English” quite crisply on many occasions, and more infrequently “Irish,” but he could not confirm anything. There may have been a tussle going on over how he should be disciplined, but he could not say. Surely they were not worried over what protocol they might ignore, or the protestations of other governments, despite what it meant for their own prisoners in the custody of the Russians or English. But who would be held responsible for this lapse, whose head served to whom on a glittering platter?

  The English lieutenant, Wilson, was brought to him. “You’ve done it now,” the lieutenant said. Wilson was not angry with him, if jealousy is not anger; he was not affronted, if bewilderment is not indignance. “How do you propose . . .?” the lieutenant began, but Sheehan proposed nothing and kept to his reticence.

  Someone turned on a light; it was devilishly loud, submerging all speech that challenged it. Gradually, Sheehan felt himself withdrawing from the situation—not a retreat, precisely, because that action was not an option, but a kind of drift overtook him. He became more reliant on his other senses, so the alarms and battering between his ears would not pitch at him so harshly
. He watched, tried to feel the eyes of his commanding officer upon him. Scalding with a heat that splits the flesh, but tentative, remorseful, as though it knew what the soldier had already been subjected to.

  Wilson was reading to him from a document. The man handed him the paper, and a pen to sign it. “I had warned you,” the lieutenant said. The good of the unit. The morale of his fellows. A jangle of piano keys, as if a hand had slipped out of its proper positioning. Sheehan did not take the paper or the pen. He made no movement to sign it.

  “Congratulations, man,” Wilson said, although he might have said something else entirely. Sheehan was being lifted by his armpits, pushed out of the commandant’s office. The yard, the barracks, the familiar settings were washed out suddenly by a roving searchlight, louder and more powerful than he had ever observed it; he heard in bunches about the harm he was causing others, the lot of good that he had done to the Russians, what awaited him, and the bets that were being taken on whether he would survive. At the end of the march, Sheehan and his escorts came to a row of cinderblock buildings. Inside it appeared divided into separate water closets. They opened the last door in the row and hurled him inside it. The light was switched on, and the blur of anarchy began in his head.

  The noise that the light forged—Sheehan felt as though he had been placed within a piece of artillery. Soon it would be winced open, as if in a blast. Sheehan set his hands to his ears but that only made the constant drone more prominent. He fell to his knees, curled his head into his chest. He was taking cover against himself. It might have worked, if not for the vibrations of his heart and breathing. To hide away from the clamor was to invite another kind of disturbance, so that it would not be the Jerrys who would be administering torture. It would be his own soul and body.