by Alan Cumyn
Collins winks at me and nods slightly, his face a strange mixture of restrained fury and kind humour. I fall into line beside Cuddihey and try to stand somewhat straight. But I’m exhausted from just that short walk out of purgatory.
And into something else.
Agony marches in front of us, his face flushed, spouting more harsh words while Collins provides the appearance of translation. “No sick days, either — nicht Kranke besuchen! Because of the wonderful food. Steady, men, humour him. And more things that he’s saying, nein, nein, no to this and to that or we’re going to have to answer to Herr Kommandant Farmer Bob. Don’t laugh at my jokes! Stay British or it’s Strafe, Strafe, Strafe!” Peering between the shoulders of the men ahead of me I see in the distance a ghoulish gang of prisoners forming on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Ragged as we may be, they are in tatters, the skin shrunken around their skulls, eyes dull as caves, shoulder blades propping up the worn fabric of their uniforms.
“Who are they?”I whisper to Cuddihey beside me.
“The Russians,” he whispers back. “They’ve been here the longest. They only have what the Germans give them.”
What the Germans give them is the same as what the Germans give us. At dinner I line up with the others for another round of anemic soup and half-slice of petrified bread. The water comes from a pump in the compound and smells of sewage.
“Easy on the champagne, there, fannigan,” Collins says to me. We are sitting with our backs to the hut, faces in sunshine, as if the heat of the afternoon might make up for the paltry and disgusting food.
“You can call me Fannigan if you want, but I’m not Irish.”
“Everyone’s fannigan here,” he says, smiling. “Kriegsgefangene! Prisoners of war.” He dips his bread in his soup then rolls it around in his mouth to soften it. “Don’t eat too much of this swill — not that you’ll ever get a chance — but never skip a meal, either. If it’s horrific just have a little. You have to keep something in your stomach.” He has brought some forms for me to fill out. “They want to know what you are in real life. Be careful what you answer. They’re looking for miners, machinists, farmers — anyone who might be useful to their war effort.”
“I’m a lion tamer,” Witherspoon says. “And Milne is a magician, and Findlay —” he searches among the group of lounging men till he catches Findlay’s eye. “What are you, Findlay?”
“A dance instructor!”
Others begin calling out their professions.
“Butler!”
“Bullfighter!”
“Bellhop!”
“Sausage fitter!”
“A what, McGuire?” Collins calls back.
“I fit the sausage into the skin,” McGuire answers. “And if you don’t believe me, give me a whopping big helping of sausage and I’ll fit it into my skin before you know what’s happened.”
Good-natured laughter. Great God, I think, we are almost men again. A band of fannigans.
“So what are you, Crome?” Collins asks.
“I’m an artist,”I say with pride, and write in the word, then look at it in the hard sun of this dismal place.
Four
Justin Frame kept his offices in a tired little building off Dorchester, about a forty-minute walk from our cold and crummy flat. In the slush and ice of that winter, in an old pair of shoes with rubber galoshes, my hat pulled down, coat collar scarfed and buttoned, I made the trip a perfectly round twelve times per week. I could have taken the trolley car, but I was saving to move us up in the world. When I was single I used to buy lunch quite often with the other fellows from the office — with Gil Jenkins and Howard Lineman and old Bruce Bannerman, who’d been working for Frame for twenty-two years. Bannerman could sketch a woman’s face, hat, dress and gloves for a quarter-page advert in the Gazette in eight minutes while carrying on a loud conversation about last night’s boxing matches. Almost all Bannerman’s women had the same face — those imperial eyebrows, the hard lines of their cheeks and lips — so they became known as “Bannerman girls.” Clients asked for them specifically.
Yet he was the first one old Frame let go. In the winter of 1930 all kinds of businesses were throwing out the engine coal to keep from sinking further. Bannerman had a soft, pillowy face red from drink, a nose that looked punched-in ages ago. Everything for his retirement had been in northern Ontario gold stocks that had evaporated the season before. But his daughter had married a banker, still employed, and they were going to take him in. The day old Frame told us the news we stood around Bannerman’s cluttered desk and drank Scotch, and I thought about other winters I’d endured in other years.
“These times are not so bad,” I said to them, and we all grunted and agreed. Even old Frame stood with us and drank. We might have been a herd of bison gathered around the water hole, shuddering out of the wind. I’d told old Frame about the pregnancy months before, and he’d shaken my hand and said how much he’d like to help. He would look at the books and see. If I’d just be patient . . .
Jenkins went next, towards the end of March. He’d been the last one in the door, hired in the spring of ’28 when Frame was turning away contracts, we were so busy. Frame gave him the news at the end of the day — and mid-week at that — and there was no Scotch, we did not stand together like bison. “Oh no,” Gil said simply, in a scared little voice, and his face grew pale the way I’d seen men’s faces blanch in other circumstances. “Oh no,” he said again and again.
A hard, late-season snowstorm had blanketed the city and clogged the streets and sidewalks. I walked Gil partway home. The snowbanks rose above our heads, and we slithered and slipped like slapstick figures from a blurry movie.
“You’re lucky!” he said to me bitterly. “You’ve got Lillian and the baby on the way. Old Frame would never let you go.”
“You’ll find other work,” I said. “I’ve seen this before. While everyone else is moping around, you figure out what needs to be done. It’s panic and black thoughts that are so defeating.”
“It’s never been this bad.”
“Of course it has. And worse. I know.”
We floundered together until we reached his street, then I shook his hand and said that we’d keep in touch, though I knew I’d probably never see him again.
When I told Lillian the news she wiped her hands on her apron but did not turn to me. She was at the counter dealing with dinner.
“I think that will be it for the layoffs,” I said lightly. “Frame’s keeping the rest of us pretty busy.” And I told her what Gil had said to me about my position in the firm, even though I didn’t fully believe it. Howard Lineman had five years of seniority on me, three children and a sick wife. Frank Wilbrod had four kids. John Kent was looking after his mother and three aunts. But I thought perhaps Lillian would take heart.
“We should move to the farm,” she said. “It’ll be spring soon. Papa needs the help and we need to save money, in case.” She didn’t finish the thought but changed gears instead. “You were going to get us out of here anyway.”
“I am. Just not yet. The price of everything’s going down. Men with jobs look pretty shiny.” I kissed her on the neck from behind and put my hands on her belly, which was in its first swollen bloom.
“You’re all wet!” She pushed me away and I stood looking at her, so radiant with life.
“I want to have this child on my family’s farm,” she said in her plough-pulling voice.
“But Mireille is nowhere. It’s got hardly anything — a few streets, the mill, if that’s even still going.”
“Of course it’s still going!” “But what else? What’s there for me?” “Everything it had last summer! You could still paint and fish and walk the trails. I thought you fell in love with Mireille when you fell in love with me.”
“I did. I did. But let’s not rush into anything. The patient man keeps his head.”
“In the meantime what’s his wife supposed to do?” I held her then and waltzed her out of tha
t darkened little kitchen. “Dance with me,” I murmured in her lovely, tender ear. “Dance with me and enjoy the day.”
We shuffled for a time. My dancing years were spent doing other things, and it showed. And there was no music, and the potatoes started to boil over on the stove. The whole worthless apartment smelled of the wet, of our bodies and clothes and our cheap, steaming food. Of our closeness, and of the hard, smelly city leaning in on us from all directions.
Lillian left my arms to tend the dinner. Sometime later she looked up and said, “What are you doing?” I suppose I looked as if I was just standing there, gazing off at nothing.
In the swampy fields outside of Raumen my prisoner clogs sink into mud and slip from my feet, until I kick them off and carry them. We have shovels on our shoulders and walk at a dead-slow fannigan pace.
“Drag your heels, boys,” Collins says. “Slouch those shoulders. Bellies out!”
The air is slow, my limbs sluggish from hunger. Breakfast — awful acorn coffee and not much else — ran through me like a greasy splash of rain. At the far end of the field we come to the manure pile and the row of empty carts. A farmer greets our second German sergeant, Blasphemy the Great, a meaty slab of a man far larger than Sergeant Agony, who has stayed back at camp. Blasphemy confers with the farmer, while we lean on our implements and three guards with rifles watch us from a distance.
Then Blasphemy sputters his orders to us, pointing at the manure, the carts, the rutted pathway over to another field. Collins provides the translation.
“Now that’s pretty clear, gents. We move the manure into the carts, and the carts along to the next field, then we empty the carts and return. Nicht langsam, understand? No foot-dragging. Our dear sergeant doesn’t want anyone to lose their shovels like the last time. Williams, what’s wrong with you? Where’s your shovel?”
Williams looks around in bewilderment.
“It was here just a minute ago, Sergeant.”
Collins sputters off in his own crippled German to tell Blasphemy that Williams has already lost his shovel. Blasphemy strides over to Williams and screams for a minute in his face, while Williams gazes around like a dumb animal. We all begin looking for the shovel.
“Now gents, we mustn’t start losing the Kaiser’s equipment like this,” Collins says. We search under the empty carts and along the edges of the fly-ridden manure pile. McGuire and Witherspoon head back, slowly, along the path we’ve just come on.
“Halt! Halt!” Blasphemy yells, and then three guards train their rifles at them. They stop, their hands raised, and peer around innocent as crows.
“We thought he might have dropped it back here,” Witherspoon says.
Blasphemy orders us all to start work immediately. Williams will have to dig and carry the manure with his hands. We head listlessly over to the pile. I stop to put my clogs back on. Some others lean on their shovels. Findlay carries a load of manure over to one of the carts, but spills the contents onto the side of the wheel.
Blasphemy explodes, with Collins beside him. “Careful, gents! I don’t want to see any more spilling of manure, and all of you there, schnell, schnell!”
Some minutes later Witherspoon announces that his shovel is gone, too.
“Es ist verloren,” Collins says to Blasphemy, shrugging his shoulders along with Witherspoon. “Has anybody seen Witherspoon’s shovel?” Collins calls out, so we all begin looking on the ground. Findlay grabs my elbow, and together we start back down the rutted track.
“Halt! Halt!” Blasphemy yells again, and we stop and throw down our shovels, thrust our hands in the air.
Witherspoon’s shovel is found, eventually, snapped off at the neck.
“This is certainly what I call shoddy materials,” Witherspoon says, holding the broken handle and the shovel blade in the air for all of us to see. “Look at that. Rotted right through!”
“How can they expect us to shovel manure with faulty equipment?” Jenson says.
We all gather around to look at the miserable excuse of a German shovel. It’s too much, finally, for Blasphemy. He races into us and grabs Witherspoon, then strikes him across the face with the back of his hand. Witherspoon staggers back, his nose bloodied, and smiles dopily at Blasphemy.
“Gently! Gently! Back up now, lads. Take it easy!” Collins says. The three guards with rifles ready surround us while Blasphemy vents.
Witherspoon picks up the broken shovel blade, sticks it into the manure pile and carries the slop over to one of the carts to dump it in.
“That’s the spirit, gents!” Collins says. “Nicht langsam! We must fill up eleven carts of horse shit today. Eleven! That’s elf! Elf! All in one day!”
Slowly we carry the shit over to the carts. For every two or three of us working, another four or five lean on their implements and share a smoke. Blasphemy goes over to stand with the three guards, who smoke and watch us with contempt.
We shovel and dump, shovel and dump, as slowly as we can get away with.
“I heard from Beatrice,” Witherspoon says to me dreamily. “She’s aching for me. Aching. She said she was walking down the street to her new job. She’s doing the figures in the office where I used to work. Got a great head for figures.” He is conjuring her for us with his singsong voice, as if the words could bring her out of this boggy field. “And the kind of figure that turns heads. She glimpsed some blighter in a uniform across the way and this is what she wrote. ‘My knees fall a moment beneath me, to think it might be you.’” Our shovels deep in it, the flies building now because we are here. Witherspoon turns to me. “How about your Margaret? Are her knees falling beneath her when she thinks she catches a glimpse?”
“All the time,” I mutter. “I cut such a romantic figure.” I throw my load onto the cart with extra vigour. The sweat seeping down my skin feels like the closest thing to a bath I’ve had since London — the dream of another lifetime.
“Don’t we all cut romantic figures?” Collins says happily. He grins through a smear of slime on his cheek.
I stop talking because she — Margaret — is standing by herself some yards off, looking at me in her way, her face tilted as if about to ask a question, her gaze steady and firm. She shimmers in the air and does not speak, so neither do I.
The first of the carts is finally filled, and Witherspoon, Findlay, Kingsley and some others volunteer to push it over to the next field.
“Hurry up, lads! Come on!” Collins exhorts them with more dash than usual. “You can do it!” They burst into a run, the cart bouncing and chasing down the rutted lane.
“Sprint, you lazy bastards!” Collins calls, and the rest of us start cheering them on as well. Halfway to their destination the cart suddenly pitches into a pothole. Then, as the men keep pushing, it tips over and spills its horrible contents onto the grassy banks of the lane.
“Oh no. Oh dear!” Collins says, and with him we all trot over to view the disaster. For a time, Blasphemy simply stands at a distance, apparently unable to believe his eyes.
“How are we ever going to make our quota for the day?” Collins asks, while two wooden wheels of the upended cart spin slowly in the air in opposite directions.
I turn to see if Margaret is laughing. But she’s gone, of course. Sunk into the rot of my brain.
Five
Mid-August, the sun so close and streets so cramped and steamy that all of Montreal felt like a kitchen endlessly boiling jam. It was a Saturday just before noon and I walked to the station directly from work. I tried hard to stay in the shade and strode as a man fleeing the city. The streets that day seemed even more filled than usual with milling, luckless men whose faces I did not want to see — men who shuffled dirt with their toes and stuffed hands in their pockets as if somehow holding themselves up, and who, from time to time, glimpsed themselves inadvertently in darkened shop windows.
“Ram!” someone said, but it did not seem possible that anyone could know me there. Not that particular day, when Lillian was meeting me at the
train station, and we were heading down to Mireille for probably our last visit with her father before the birth. Lillian’s belly was the size of a late-season watermelon by then, but she’d insisted I didn’t have to come all the way home for her. There wouldn’t be time anyway. The Mireille train left at 12:25.
“Ram!” the voice insisted, so I turned, although I didn’t stop walking. And I didn’t see anyone who appeared to know me, so I walked on. But then a big hand on my shoulder brought me to a full halt, and attached to it was a strapping fellow in a fine suit, wide as a barn door, his meaty face covered in sweat, as if he had run several blocks to catch me. “It is you!” he said. “I thought so. Good Lord, I don’t think I’ve seen you since Trafalgar Square. Your brother Rufus said you were here in Montreal, but I guess you don’t go to any of the right parties.”
I couldn’t for the life of me remember him. Trafalgar Square? I’d only once in my life been in Trafalgar Square. For a moment I thought it was Johnson from my old unit. I’d met him in London that week of leave, but not at Trafalgar. Anyway, Johnson died in the slime of Mont Sorrel along with everybody else from my platoon. Everyone but me.
“Bill Kelsie,” the man said, finally. “I was skinnier way back when. How are you doing?” It came back to me, but he kept talking anyway. “I lived just down the street from you in Victoria. I was a couple of years younger. And when I ran into you in London you were just back from — where was it?”
“Ypres.”
“And I hadn’t gone over yet.”
I really had to keep moving. But Bill Kelsie was holding me still on the sidewalk.
“Isn’t it funny what you remember?” he said. “When I met you that time, you were with three of the loveliest ladies I’ve ever seen. All to yourself! I wasn’t going to bust in, but you could’ve given me a little something to work with —” He was kidding, squeezing my shoulder still.