The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  There are cats in the camp too, half-wild creatures that have, some of them, taken a shine to a man here or there and been given names or ranks. Some are too wild to name, and those are unaccountably called roof rabbits by the commandant. In Alec’s barracks there’s a broad-shouldered gray-and-white tom who curls up on his bunk now and again, nestling down into the thin, infested blanket. The men in his room call the cat Jack because he’s big enough to take on a giant, and they jockey for a turn trying to get him to sleep at their feet.

  While it’s sometimes possible to move between the compounds, so that the Americans in the northernmost compounds and the British in the rest are not completely segregated, the capricious nature of some of their captors makes access to Smasher and the other Yanks unpredictable at best. Smasher is Alec’s friend and confidant as well as his scribe, and without him, Alec feels lost. So he keeps to himself, the slight progress he’d made with his hands now erased by cold and privation. Alec stays in his bunk most of the time, his back to the wall, trying to read the books the Red Cross workers bring in and stroking Jack’s stripes.

  * * *

  • • •

  When spring finally comes, it’s a nightmare, despite the beginnings of primroses in the courtyard of the German officers’ barracks. The primroses are too pale, as if this place has sucked the life from them as well as from the men. The wind has not died with the winter, and sometimes the cold from the sea is unbearable. And after six years of war, there are now too many rumors, each of which builds hope even while the world in which Alec finds himself destroys it. The Russians are coming, or the Americans. The war in Europe is winding down at last. The Germans are going to kill them all, or they’re not. Nobody knows.

  And they are all so hungry. It’s not long before there is nowhere near enough food to go around, January’s uptick in rations having proved all too brief. They’ve been combining their meager Red Cross parcels for months, but even so, it’s not remotely enough. The men are all sick, even at the best of times, their insides tormented and angry. In their badly ventilated barracks, men’s lungs fester, and often as not the latrines flood. There are rats and vermin in the walls now, and no way to fight them. For a long time, the cats had kept the worst of it at bay, but now the cats of Stalag Luft I are gone.

  Alec hates what they have made him, from his hands to the broken ache of his gut. He hates them. To be reduced from an officer to a creature who will eat a man’s cat to keep himself from starving . . . And as the details of death camps and wholesale slaughter come in across the hidden radio, the hatred sits harder and steadier in his chest.

  Even without the hunger and trauma, morale is lower than it’s been in the year and a half that Alec has been here. Access to the libraries or the recreation yards, such as they are, has been more sporadic than ever, and the post, already irregular at best, has nearly stopped. The letters that do come from home creep in five or six months beyond their postmarks, often closer to a year. Usually they are warm missives, the kind of thing a man tucks into his shirt and keeps close. Words of love and encouragement, confusing reminders of the mundane life to which they are all so desperate to return. But dotted throughout, like stars extinguished in the night sky, there are letters that bring heartbreaking news—women who had said they would wait and changed their minds or their hearts, parents who hadn’t lived long enough to see their sons come home. Alec would rather have nothing from June than those. He suspects those men, so eager to open the tattered envelopes, would have waited longer if they had known the contents.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the end of March, beneath a pale sky, Alec goes out to the ersatz football pitch in the hopes of catching a few minutes of the elusive sunlight. He has largely given up on being warm, ever, but on a day like this, when the sky is not the empty gray it has been for months, he has at least the hope of a few minutes of brightness on his face. He’s sitting in the dusty remnants of grass when a scuffle breaks out at one of the nearby fences, not far from the base of a guard tower. He shades his eyes with his hands, squints at the chaos. They’re all worn out and tired of being here, guards and captives alike, and tempers are frayed; it seems inevitable that the slow end of the terrible winter is signaled by squabbles. When he realizes that the man at the center of the skirmish is Smasher, Alec scrambles to his feet and goes to see what’s wrong.

  Smasher is standing too close to the tower, blood oozing slowly from a cut on his cheekbone. One of the other Americans, a turret gunner named Mike, is tugging his arm and trying to lead him back away from the fence, away from the tower, away from the guard prodding at him with the muzzle of his rifle. But Smasher is refusing, and keeps pushing close again. As Alec comes up alongside him, Smasher shoves at the guard.

  “I said, let me walk!” Smasher bellows. The guard reels backward, trying to keep his balance.

  Alec, glancing at the guard, steps in front of Smasher. “What’s happened?”

  Smasher focuses on Alec, his eyes narrowing. “Apparently an act of kindness is now some kind of threat to their precious Prussian honor.” He throws his arms out in a wide gesture Alec assumes is meant to encompass the guards, or the camp, or possibly all of Germany.

  “He was already pissed off, and then he gave his bread to someone else,” Mike says, “and this son of a bitch”—he points at the German—“is giving him a hard time about it.” He takes Smasher’s arm. “Smasher, c’mon, we gotta go.”

  Smasher shakes him off. This is the first time in weeks Alec has had the energy to go out into the camp, and he hasn’t seen Smasher in a while. He isn’t prepared for how gaunt his friend is, or how angry. He reaches out, meaning to join Mike in leading Smasher back to the Americans’ barracks, or at least away from here. The guards won’t pursue them into the barracks, usually, and most of them don’t care what the men do, as long as it won’t come back and get any of the Germans in trouble. But Smasher is immovable.

  The German soldier stalks up and shoves Alec out of his way, going face-to-face with Smasher. “Ich sagte jetzt!” He raises his rifle. “Now!”

  Smasher pauses, trembling with rage. He steps back, his eyes resting on Alec and Mike, and he shakes his head. Very slowly, he bends and unlaces his boots.

  “These should fit you,” he says to Mike, who takes them with his brow furrowed.

  Alec says, “What are you doing, old son?”

  Smasher says, “Here,” and pulls a stubby scrap of pencil and a small, ragged Bible from his pocket, handing them to Alec.

  Alec looks down at them, trying to make his hands clutch them better. “I don’t understand.”

  “Just practice,” Smasher says. He puts his hand over Alec’s, pressing the pencil against Alec’s palm.

  The soldier elbows Alec away again, yelling at Smasher in German, and Smasher pushes back at him. By now there are guards and prisoners standing in a circle around the two men, all of them tired and dispirited. Everyone has taken a side, but hardly anyone cares any longer what happens to them. The hell of Stalag Luft I has taken its toll.

  A German officer with a colonel’s braid and pips on his epaulets pushes through the crowd, slaps the soldier’s hands down, and murmurs something to him. The soldier flushes dark red, salutes, and takes a step back. Smasher pauses, and there is a moment in which Alec feels time stretching in all directions. Here, now, is when everything else will spool out into infinity. He steps forward again, raising a hand to quiet Smasher.

  The colonel looks Alec up and down as if he is something he has found on the bottom of his boot. He smiles and pulls out his Luger, polishing the barrel on his sleeve. And then he slips off the safety and puts the Luger to Smasher’s head. Alec, his chest iced with horror, cries out, and a German soldier lunges at him, shoving him into silence with the hard rifle stock.

  Still smiling, the colonel pulls the trigger.

  “There,” he says, his English
lightly accented. “Now that is done.”

  The Germans walk away, and Alec and the Americans stand over what’s left of their friend, the shot echoing in their ears. Mike kneels and murmurs a prayer over Smasher’s body, brushing Smasher’s staring eyes closed beneath the perfect smoky circle of the bullet hole. Two German soldiers break through the knot of prisoners, and slowly the men disperse. The Americans go one direction, Alec the other, his chest numb as he struggles to breathe. He can’t tell whether he might weep or if what he’s feeling is more rage than grief, or some maelstrom of both. That night, curled into his infested blanket with his knees jammed against his chest, he tries to let himself cry, but there’s nothing there. One dense sob escapes him, but there is no release there, no mourning.

  * * *

  • • •

  The ice that rimes the shore of their blunted peninsula has melted away by the middle of April, when news comes to the camp of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The Americans gather together, shocked and mournful, pressing the guards for more news. Alec is stunned too—they have all tracked the Allied progress across Europe with considerable interest, even sometimes with hope, and it’s hard to reconcile the waiting with the loss. The kriegies have a radio hidden in the walls in the West compound, cobbled together from spare parts by a pair of RAF boys; sometimes Alec thinks about the radio and the rest of it, everything the Yanks and Brits have pulled together to fight back, and he knows how it sounds. Secret radios and newspapers? Milk tins with false bottoms and wristwatches with no insides but a rolled-up transcript? It sounds like the sort of thing he would have admired at the cinema a lifetime ago, entirely invented.

  Rumors of the end of hostilities continue to swirl, and sometimes the men stand at the fences, looking out across the miles of barbed wire and guard posts, wondering when their liberators will find them, and who they will be. The dark pine forest to the west is full of crows the Germans shoot at when they get bored. Alec can’t hear the crack of rifle fire without thinking of Smasher, and sometimes he thumbs through the Bible Smasher gave him and tries to make sense of the verses. He has never been a man of faith, exactly, and the loss of first Cobber, Tim, and Charlie, and now Smasher has only made that more clear.

  On the rare occasions that the world around them is quiet, Alec can almost hear the sea off to the north and east. But he can hear the whispers too, accounts of atrocities and genocide trickling through the rumor mill as the Americans and Russians converge on Berlin. The whispers say millions dead, and camps full of living skeletons and industrialized murder. It is beyond him that the world has let this happen. And when he has a telegram from his aunt’s solicitor in Fenbourne telling him that Constance has been killed in a bombing along with June’s parents, and the vicarage largely destroyed, his faith dwindles further. He carefully tucks Smasher’s Bible away with his letters in the rucksack the Germans issued him when they took him out of Italy. He struggles with how to understand what’s happened—without Constance he would not have had a home. And that home would not have been the same without Cyrus and Imogene Attwell, who had shared their household so generously. The loss leaves him numb, especially the idea of all of them gone in an instant. And when he thinks of June, he feels even worse. What must it have been like for June to learn that her parents were gone, her family erased in the space of a moment? He can only imagine her shock, the bafflement of grief. It aches at him that she would have had to endure the funeral alone, unless Roger had been able to get leave to go. He doesn’t even know where Roger is, if he’s safe.

  It feels like the world is spinning along without him. He should be with June, keeping her close and helping her work through the sundering of her heart. How is it possible June is an orphan now, too?

  * * *

  • • •

  He wants to go home, but he doesn’t know what that means anymore. Fenbourne? Anywhere in England? Wherever June is, if she can still want him like this. He thinks of going back to India, where he hasn’t been since he was eight years old. But he can’t go there with the RAF now. He can’t go anywhere with them. And in any event there are rumors about India too, that the British Raj will clear out soon and leave the country to the locals. He doesn’t know what to think of that.

  The sound of waves reminds him of the RMS Jaipur, but also of the year he was seven, when they went to Kashmir. He waits for the Russians, or the Americans, and thinks of the houseboats and chinar trees on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, and the turbaned Sikhs selling scarves and textiles in the markets in the city. He thinks of his mother and the stories she used to tell him, or the way Kipling’s tales sounded when she read to him, each character taking on a voice of his own as she read. In the trenches in the first war, men had recited Tennyson and Keats back and forth, trying to stay whole and sane. In Germany, without Smasher to help him, Alec finds himself lost in “The Ballad of East and West.” He hadn’t known he’d remembered it, but now, digging deep into the wells of his memory to find his way through this nightmare, Kipling’s cadence comes back to him like the hoof-drumming of the dainty red mare at the poem’s heart. It’s an anchor, the same way June is, the poem holding him fast to those days in India with his parents, or in Fenbourne with Roger and his mare Noor. He has had two letters from Roger, and Alec hopes the anchor will hold Roger safe too, as the conflict wanes.

  And then, at the beginning of May, when the camp is ruffled with a new set of rumors, he has a letter from June dated almost a year ago. It’s too short, and it makes him feel the lack of her in ways he’s afraid to acknowledge, but she tells him she loves him, and she tells him they will be together again after the war. Something in him loosens, like the weeds that used to tangle into willow branches along the River Lark. As of last summer, she hasn’t forgotten him. She hasn’t given up or let go—their tether is intact.

  So he turns his face to the horizon and waits. Someone will come soon. It’s time to go home.

  BOOK THREE

  1945, Fenbourne

  June hikes across the esker, pausing at its highest point. The village and the countryside around it unfold almost as she’d imagined. How many times has she drawn it, the cluster of precise asterisks and squares to indicate buildings and rubble, the sheep she can hear nearby. Her eyes seek out the old monastery, the ruin of stones on the distant opposite hillside. In the bottom of the valley, where the stream has wound down out of the mountains on its way to find the sea, she knows there will be a small stucco cottage, shadowed by a copse of myrtle trees and what’s left of the monastery’s broken church. She’s seen the cottage in aerial photographs, nearly invisible even with the jeweler’s loupe she’s carried in her pocket since Bletchley Park. All those months of knowing there must be something here.

  She’s looked so long. How can it feel sudden to have found the valley? How can it feel so unexpected?

  She wakes before she finds him, the dream shattering as it always does. She has dreamed so often of going to Italy, even Germany, to bring Alec home, but now there is more urgency, awake or asleep. Now she doesn’t know where she would even go to find him.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the morning June struggles to pull herself together, shaken by the dream, but real life is not much clearer. Without the vicarage, she is unmoored. She has a room for the moment in the Rose and Crown. Fenbourne has gone back to the low hum of activity she remembers from half a decade ago, but its scars are enormous. The ruins of the vicarage, all that broken stone angling up to nowhere, the mullioned windows shattered and dangling from the skeleton of the conservatory . . . Her childhood home destroyed. Once she had known every thread of carpet, every knot in the wooden floors and banisters. It is impossible that all of it has been erased.

  Worse, though, is the dizzying, endless loop of realization that the wreckage is also where her parents died. Try as she may to stop thinking about it, she can’t help imagining what it must have been like—a quiet evening in th
e drawing room, the two of them sitting with Constance, their conversation interrupted by the sudden hiss and shriek of the German bomb. Thunder and fury, and then silence.

  The void created by her parents’ absence is unfillable. They had been more than just June’s mother and father, or the vicar and his wife. Cyrus and Imogene Attwell had been part of every facet of Fenbourne society—her father the shepherd at its helm, her mother a force of nature, coordinating volunteers and bringing aid wherever she could. Now the village is full of places where they can no longer be found. June had not been ready to see St. Anne’s standing alone and nearly unscathed alongside the ruins, not ready to stand in the churchyard and see their names on the raw slab of marble. Not ready for any of it.

  If Alec were here, she would not feel so alone in her grief. But he’s not. She doesn’t understand that, either. It seems impossible that he is not back—the war in Europe has been over since May, and thousands of men have been repatriated. She had followed that news as well as she could in Ceylon; she had expected to find him here upon her return. Even through the fretting about what she would tell him about where she’d been—the idea of having to make something up, create even more layers of deception, had burned in her chest—she had wanted nothing more than to come home and find him. They would have mourned together, just as they had done everything for so long.