by Alan Cumyn
“What disease?”
“It doesn’t matter! You don’t need to know about it!”
“I hate being a child around you,” she said quietly.
“There are particular diseases that a man can get from a woman — and vice versa — from sexual contact. That’s what he was talking about. I’m sorry I brought it up. That’s all.”
Lillian shivered but made no sign that she wanted to move inside.
“Will you be like your father, do you think?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it, really. The discipline was good for us, I suppose. Whenever Father arrived home after a long absence he would line us up and make us bend over. He would say, ‘This is for the grief I’m sure you’ve been giving your mother —’”
“So will you do that too?”
“Father never beat my mother. No matter how long they spend apart, whenever he comes back they are like two rocks cemented together in the same wall . . .”
Lillian was shaking her head at me, and slowly her meaning began to penetrate my skull.
“You’re not — you aren’t — ?”
Her nod was almost imperceptible.
“But how do you know? Have you been to the doctor?
When did you — ?”
“I know, Ramsay,” she said softly. “Tomorrow you’re going to bring me to the doctor. But right now you’re going to tell me . . . everything about the war. About being a prisoner.”
“Darling, I —”
“I want to know the man I married,” she said, slow and steady, powerful beyond her years. “I want to know the father of my child.”
Three
We slipped inside the apartment, but I did not feel like taking off my coat; the chill was gripping me as it did in those bitter days. But this time it was a frigid wind within, and I felt as if there was no withstanding it. Lillian boiled some water for tea and we sat at the rickety table and clinked cups. “To our child,” she said, and then added, “Drink quickly, dear. You look like you’re going to break of cold
.”The first sips did warm me somewhat.
“How were you captured?” she asked.
“I was taken in the Battle of Mont Sorrel. Are you sure you’re interested in this? There’s hardly anything to say —”
“Mont Sorrel was after . . . oh, I wish I’d paid attention in class! I remember Second Ypres, and the big one, the big Canadian victory —”
“Vimy Ridge,”I said. And I thought, it’s just names now, facts for people to forget. “Mont Sorrel was in early June, 1916. Near Ypres. It was just before the Somme, our big offensive that went so badly, so it has mostly been forgotten now. But Mercer was killed — he was a major-general, our commander. And a brigadier was captured — Williams — and Ussher, a lieutenant-colonel. They came by and inspected our positions that morning. We’d been up all night working on a dugout, and Shipley came round with the rum ration and told us we were going to be inspected. Well, bloody hell —I’m sorry, Lillian, I can’t talk about this in completely polite language.”
“Just talk about it, then,” she said quietly. She was warming her hands on the cup, and she looked small and terribly pretty. Let’s stop this, I thought. I’ll get my sketchbook. We’ll think about what’s really important.
But instead she asked, “What’s it like being in a battle?”
I hardly had to think of a reply. “Like being in an avalanche. There was nothing anyone could do, really. The earth is suddenly moving all around you. I was buried for a time in a hail of bombs —”I was conscious of the inadequacy of such words, as if they could come anywhere near describing it.
“Did you kill anyone?”
“Some. I manned a Lewis gun for a time. And the Germans were pouring over the fields by the thousands, it looked like. You know, you imagine for a moment it’s the end, you personally are losing the war. Slip past us, then the town of Ypres would be open. So yes, I killed some. Then I got blown out again and I wandered around — I must have been unconscious for a while — and then it was as if I was in a dream. I was staggering and eventually was taken.”
She was hanging onto my words, but I couldn’t really tell her, not so that she’d know.
“A German fellow called out to me. Who was I? A Canadian? Then: ‘Have you ever fished the Chemainus River?’ He was a baron and he’d spent many years in British Columbia, and he loved fishing.”
She couldn’t possibly know. Not from these words. Not from anything I told her.
“So you were held in a camp?”
“Raumen was the main one, then I got transferred to a different one near Münster. We were starved, mostly. The food was a disgrace. And we were made to work, though we dragged our feet a lot. You see, I can tell you, but —”
“Who was Margaret?”
I was so stunned I sat with my mouth open.
“You say her name sometimes at night. When you get in your sweats, and I am lying awake listening to you. You say — sometimes you say, ‘Margaret!’”
Lillian was studying my face so closely that there was no use trying to lie.
“My cousin. In London. I stayed with her — and her family — for a short time before Mont Sorrel. It was my only leave in London.”
“Were you in love with her? Do you love her now?”
“Why would you ask that?”I said, incredulous. How could she possibly come to that conclusion from a few things mumbled in the night? Yet she was looking at me as if she knew a great deal more than that, even. As if she’d taken out and laundered my thoughts and now was set to wring them clean and dry.
“You say her name,” she said slowly. She looked away and I guessed it even before she could mouth the words. “And there are those paintings.”
“What paintings? What are you talking about?”I said, as if I could take back what her eyes obviously had examined — without permission. Without a thought to my privacy. “I’ve shown you everything I thought you should see. You had no right —”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” She stood up then, and so did I. “This is my home! Am I not supposed to go in the closets? Should I ask your permission every time I want to get the broom?”
“That’s my work! You had no right — !”I grabbed her. She would have had to move several boxes to get at those canvasses, which I’d never told her about, which were mine and mine alone. She would have had to untie the strings and separate them one by one, then tie them again and replace them at the back for me not to have noticed. All while I was at work.
“What are you going to do?” she blurted. “Hit me?”
I pushed her aside to get her out of my grasp, to try to keep a grip on myself instead.
“You painted her naked! Picture after picture. Was that Margaret? Did she pose for you? Getting out of the water like that? Sitting on the rock? What kind of cousin is she? It’s the same girl over and over. It must be Margaret, and you must love her or you wouldn’t be so upset!”
“She never posed,”I said. Burning coal sat behind the space between my eyebrows. “She knows nothing of those paintings. They are not for you or the world. They were . . . exercises . . . ”
“They’re indecent!”
“They’re not that, either. I know you can’t understand. But in private I need to be able to go anywhere . . . freely . . . in my imagination. There can’t be closed doors. That’s what my art is for. If I lost it —”
She started crying, her fists at her sides. “They’re horrible, Ramsay. If I thought you were that kind of painter I wouldn’t —” Wouldn’t what? I thought. “Everything you showed me was so beautiful. The stream. The rocks and flowers. You painted me. You made me look so beautiful.”
I took her in my arms, for she was sobbing now and I could see it was my fault. She was carrying our child, and she was so young herself, and this was such a shock. And clearly she hadn’t looked at all the paintings, for she would have mentioned them by now — the Russians standing like starve
d cattle by the fence, the hollows of their cheeks empty caverns, and the bunkhouse at night in deep shadows with the hunching fannigan forms like lumps of men on every bed, and the twisted grey corpse by the side of the road with the single empty boot glistening beside the stump of an arm — all those images torn from memories no sane person now wanted to witness.
If she’d seen them she might not have asked with so much energy about the German camps.
“You love her, don’t you?” Lillian said. “This Margaret. This cousin of yours.”
I tried to brush the tears from her face.
“I did love her. Yes, of course I did. I would have fallen in love with any young woman I met in London in that week away from the front. It would have been inhuman not to. And the thought of it, the memory of it —” her I thought; I should at least say her — “did help me through some terrible times. More than I can say. But it was ages ago, and I love you. I’ve married you. And we’re going to have a child. That’s all that matters. Let’s talk no more about it. We’ll move forward from here. It just stirs things up for me to think about those days, and it’s upsetting for you. Yes?”
She buried her face in my shoulder, and I had a hard time keeping the waterworks from my own eyes as we stood in the middle of the draughty flat and did our best to keep away the world.
“Tomorrow we go to the doctor’s, and after that we’ll see about moving. I don’t want our child’s first view to be this sorry box filled with bad air.”
“But we have so little money!”
“Maybe I’ll sell some of those paintings. Spread a bit of Margaret around this dirty old town —”
She gazed up at me then, aghast that I might actually do it.
“Not to worry. Enough said. We’ll find another way.”
“Maybe we could move to Mireille,” she said. Her voice was suddenly far less timid, and I realized she must have been thinking of this for some time, just as she must have been thinking of the paintings, choosing her moment to be most upset. “There’s room with my father. We could save the rent, and he certainly needs me.”
I felt my dander rising again. “Lillian, I couldn’t just walk away from my work. Not now, not when most of the commercial artists in the city are out banging on doors —”
“There’s the train,” she said. Another card falling. Another calculation.
“Riding in every day and night, how much would that cost us?”
“A lot less than rent. And the country air’s better. We’d have our food and so much more room than here. And Papa’s not going to last forever —”
“No!”
“He wants us to take over the property. You wouldn’t even have to farm it. We could hire others —”
“My work is here! I don’t want to be travelling every day and night and never see you and the baby. Frame is a decent man, he’ll push me more salary. I’ve been with him eight years. That’s settled. All right?”
She looked ready to say more, but I didn’t want to argue, not on a Sunday, not this day in particular.
But the murk in the water had been stirred, stirred.
“What are you doing?”
As soon as I speak the needle drives far into my wound and my spine whiplashes, though my legs are being held firm. I have a vague sense of the darkness of the room, how shadows stretch along the ceiling like mounds of earth waiting to cover me up.
He unleashes a torrent of German, and for a moment I see his dark, heavy hair, the cowlike eyes, too big even for such a large head, the hands that look meant to steer lumber down a fast-flowing river.
“Jesus!”
The pain settles like fish hooks inside. His whisper is the gentle sliding of a knife being withdrawn from its scabbard. I close my eyes, lie as still as possible, as if such stillness might fool him. But someone shrieks in another room, followed by other wails of distress and the cursing of ill men too pained or hungry or bored or scared to sleep.
She’s in the room somewhere. I can’t see her but I know she’s here.
Later I hear a voice whisper in the gloom beside me. “He said you’re lucky to still have your feet.”I look over at a bandaged wreck, one arm suspended from above by a wire stretching towards the ceiling. “I understand a little German. They were going to amputate when they first brought you in, but Schreider wanted to try you out on something.”
“Try me out?”
I don’t remember arriving here at all. The last I know I was stumbling along the roadside, bleeding into the dirt.
“He has things he wants to test. That’s what I heard, anyway,” the man says.
He sounds British, but not from London, perhaps. Somewhere else. I introduce myself and he replies, “Bill Chesterman.” He blinks hard — the small section of face around his eyes is nearly his only unbandaged bit of flesh. “Caught a taste of the new gas,” he says. “How about you?”
I tell him I’m all right, practically ready to be up and at it. “Who told you this doctor wanted to cut me up?”
“The last guy in your cot. They took him out yesterday dead as a post. Nice chap, too. Australian.”
And he starts to laugh, a wheezing, slightly crazy gurgle.
She’s in the room but I can’t see her, can’t turn my head enough for the bloody straps.
“He came in with a broken jaw. Some fight or other. Herr Doktor Schreider mucked about with his mouth. We could all hear the screaming. Crushed a bunch of teeth with a pair of fancy pliers, then rooted around with a nail to get out all the scraps. Blighter died of fright.”
Towards morning Herr Doktor comes back and pumps my other leg full of something equally excruciating. He rubs the feet up and down, digs his fingernails into the wounds. “Ya? Ya?” he says. I scream to blow the glass out of the windows.
“Ya? Ya?” he says.
If I had a saw or knife or a stretch of sharp wire I’d hack off my own feet to stop the pain.
I don’t tell him about my arm. I don’t tell anyone.
Some days later the poison subsides, and gradually my feet begin to heal to some semblance of working order. Schreider brings in a phalanx of white coats to surround my cot and examine the miracle of my limbs. They’re stern, quiet, respectful men, all but one younger than Schreider. Some have bloodstains on their coats. All have eyes that look as if war is teaching them more than they want to learn. They prod and sniff and turn my feet from left to right and back again while Schreider talks at them in his way, a machine-clanking sputter. Some of the words are directed at me. Schreider waits for a time, sneering, evidently expecting a reply.
I don’t say a word. But Schreider and his colleagues leave finally, and Chesterman translates for me afterwards. “You’re lucky to be alive. But now your feet are healed, and Herr Doktor said it’s time for you to work for the Fatherland.”
Sometime later a British sergeant arrives, trailing a scowling German guard. “Crome, is it?” the Brit says, and shakes my hand. He is carrying a bundle of clothes for me but turns to chat with Chesterman first. “How are they treating you then, Bill? Rotten as always?”
“And always rotten,” Chesterman sings back. “How about you, Collins?”
“Hardly keeping my head above the shit,” Collins says cheerfully. He’s a small man, even shorter than me, though less wiry. Perhaps in his forties. The crescent of his hairline sweeps to the rear of his head.
“Collins has been in camp since Second Ypres,” Chesterman says. “Practically runs the place.”
“Oh yes,” Collins shoots back. “And you’ve been delusional ever since they wheeled you in. When was it?”
“The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
I swing myself out of bed and totter on shaky legs.
“I was told you were fit for duty,” Collins says.
“I’m fine,”I mutter. “Are those for me?” Collins has brought a faded dark tunic and black trousers painted with a red stripe down the leg, and wooden clogs to replace my ruined boots. I hold onto his shoulder and lif
t one leg at a time, doubtfully, while he helps me. Fortunately the trousers come with rope for a belt. The clogs have no splinters — that’s perhaps the only good thing about them.
“Can you walk, Crome?” Collins asks. “Or should I try to make the case for you to stay here?” He nods ever so slightly in the direction of the guard who’s taking it all in with malevolent silence.
“I’d sooner roast in hell.”
“Let’s not rush ahead of ourselves,” Collins says.
Chesterman laughs painfully. “You two get out of here,” he gasps. “Before I bust a seam.”
I take a few tentative steps, which brings upon me a flood of verbal abuse from the guard. But Collins bolsters my arm. “Just keep walking,” he whispers. “I’ll fill you in.” We march beside the guard along the grey corridors, out of this damn hospital. While the guard sputters Collins says, “You’re going to Arbeit, see, raus raus, like a good englischer Schweinehund, and some more things that he’s talking about, or there will be Strafe, understand, punishment for all the Kriegsgefangene. Not just you, but all of us. Nod your head, yes, that’s it, since England kaputt! And keep your nose clean or it’s the hoose-gow for you. Verboten! Precisely. Now we all understand.”
Down the stairs and out into the blinding sunlight, and along more passageways between high fences of barbed wire. Across an infinite distance to an open section near what must be barracks — squat, sorry-looking cabins with black-topped, shallow-sloped roofs. Towards about thirty ragged men at attention in the dirt compound, watching us approach. Even from a distance I can see Witherspoon towering above the rest. I hope they’ve not been standing long on my account. I hurry, try to keep up with Collins and the guard. I spot a machine gun trained on us from an overlooking tower, as if we might bolt en masse and fling ourselves at the barbed wire.
“So you will salute the lamppost beside Sergeant Agony here. Yes, not at him but at the lamppost, good, and march over by Cuddihey in the rear of the second row. And if we’re all good children we won’t have to stand here for hours listening to more of his prattle. Now raus! Yes, make a show of hurrying, but not too quick.”