They are also told that the locals at the township are hostile. If anybody was able to make their way through the forest or across the bay the townspeople would be waiting for them. There is no need to say anything else. They are people whose sons and fathers and brothers and uncles are fighting in the trenches. Being shot by German artillery. Being bombed by German airplanes. Being killed by German soldiers. They have no reason to be sympathetic to any German they meet. “The Hun!” the people from South West Rocks call the internees. “A threat to the war effort.” “The enemy!” And Arno knows that no matter where he was born and how well he speaks English, he will always be one of the Hun to them.
Arno turns his head the other way, towards the end of the peninsula, where the prison walls stop just short of the breakwater. It cuts out across the bay and provides safe shelter for them on the beach. The waves here are gentle and slow. But out in the bay, they are told, the current is strong and dangerous. Many boats have been lost to it, they are told. It will drag a man right out to sea. It will even drag granite boulders out to sea.
Herr Herausgeber has an old photograph of the prison from the last century, in the tiny cell that is his newspaper office. It shows the convicts labouring on the breakwater. Breaking heavy rocks, dragging them to the ocean’s edge and tipping them into the sea. He has told Arno that the prison had been built as a public works prison, and that it was believed that the convicts would be rehabilitated by hard work. They were to construct a breakwater that would run almost half a mile across the bay, making it safer for shipping.
At the turn of the century, he has told Arno, just before the prison had been abandoned, the breakwater had only extended 900 feet out—less than half its planned length. But now, only 15 years later, it is only about 400 feet long. For over 20 years the convicts toiled to cast thousands and thousands of tons of granite rock into the ocean, working like an army, advancing forward slowly each day—but it was a futile battle, for the powerful currents of the ocean kept dragging it all away.
Arno has often wondered if they will still be interned here when the breakwater is finally worn away altogether, like one of those stories of purgatory where a bird flies to a mountain and pecks at it once every hundred years until it is all gone. For life in internment seems like a version of purgatory.
He leans forward on his crutches now, and watches several bronzed and athletic men on the beach before him, warming up for their morning’s exercise. Some walk briskly on the sands, admiring each other. On some rare days it is possible to see a few of the men completely naked, lounging on the sand with their hairy naked penises flopping on their thighs, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But not today. Today a dozen or so men, the camp’s official athletics club, assemble in a group for a photograph. Herr Dubotzki, the camp photographer, is quite skilled at his art. He had run a studio in Adelaide, it was said. Has even held exhibitions. He now instructs the men to move closer together. They hold their stomachs in tightly and stand in close military rows, mimicking the soldiers’ stance that they have never known.
Arno Friedrich makes his way down to the sand, skirting the men, keeping well away from the aim of the camera. He mocks the athletics club, as he knows they would never ask him to join them. Big men who play at children’s games and dream of being bullies in the schoolyard, he thinks them. At the water’s edge he slowly takes off his clothes, including his watch and his regulation white canvas hat, and places them all by his crutches. Then he limps awkwardly into the water on misshapen legs. It is warm for this time of year, he thinks. Like the North Sea, some of the men tell him.
“But isn’t the water warmer here?” Arno has asked them.
“No. The German water is just as warm as the water here!” they state. More fantasies, he thinks.
He makes his way out to where the water is above his knees and then, exhaling suddenly, lowers himself up to his neck. He feels his testicles shrink a little and press in close to his body. Feels all his muscles tighten. He moves his arms about and lets the water take his weight. Lets his legs float up behind him. He kicks and feels them propel him along. His feet no longer useless. He lets go a fart that sends bubbles up around him. “Photograph that,” he mumbles.
Then he turns and begins swimming. Strong slow strokes that carry him out past the other bathers who are splashing each other like people on holidays. He puts his head down and swims. Way out into the bay. Swimming in a straight line. Towards the small island that lies to the north of the river’s mouth. Freedom Island, it is called. A small green island, far, far away, with no buildings, no dark woods and no granite walls. He keeps swimming until he reaches a point level with the end of the breakwater. Then he stops and treads water. He can feel the strong grip of the ocean current around him, tugging at him, trying to coax him out to sea.
He turns around in the water and looks back to the prison. The low dark walls make it appear like an old castle on the rocky headland. He can see the guard in the southwest watchtower, but he can’t tell if he is watching him or not. He imagines you could stand in the tower there and could look out to sea all day long and never need to see even one stone of the prison.
He treads water for a few minutes more, as if trying to decide something. Then he swims back to shore.
Perhaps another day, he thinks.
Private Gunn stands in front of the small mirror in the guards’ barracks’ washroom. He tilts his head back to examine the red welt that runs across his neck. He admires the precision of it. It never broke the skin until just that little point at the end where a small blood clot has now formed.
It will be easy enough to pass off as a shaving accident to the other guards, he thinks. They’ll never suspect a thing. And to the other members of the Dark Knights, it will be a mark of pride. Something to show them how he had dared, and stepped close to death.
He takes up his shaver now and runs it slowly across the welt line. Tries to imagine what it felt like for the Sergeant to have his life in his hands. To know how easy it would be to cut his throat. And he wonders if he could ever do it? Could he grab a German by the throat and plunge his bayonet into the neck? Draw it right across so that the blood spurted out?
Not that it would be the first throat he’d ever cut. He’d slaughtered dozens of lambs and calves. Pigs too. Had seen the fear in their eyes as he approached them with the large knife. Listened to the squealing as he grasped them by the throat. Felt the sudden kicking as he plunged the knife in. Then slit. Long and hard. Let them fall to the ground to struggle helplessly in their own blood.
But they were animals. They weren’t men.
Private Gunn holds his shaver against this throat. Moves it softly across that red welt line once more.
At 11.05 Arno Friedrich is lying on an old and chipped white-painted iron bed in the small infirmary, looking down between his legs at Nurse Rosa. Every day should be so pleasant as this, he thinks. Her face, as ever, shows little emotion. Arno wonders what secrets she hides. Wonders what she might dream of. She is no longer young, but with dark hair and fine-angled features she is considered by all the internees to be quite beautiful—particularly so for men who only otherwise see pretend women.
She only ever hints at her past when talking to Arno and makes references to China and India and the mountains of Europe. She has a French accent, but speaks German well.
“How does this feel?” she asks, as she carefully works the muscles of Arno’s misshapen legs.
“Good,” says Arno. Although he wants to say, “Wonderful.” Her experienced fingers massage the pain out of his legs as if it was a physical thing she was able to draw out of him. She gives a mere hint of a smile, and puts his foot down and lifts up the other one. She holds it tightly against the starched white cloth of her uniform—against her lifted thigh—and begins massaging it. Arno closes his eyes. He does not want Nurse Rosa to see the things he knows in them.
; So many internees have dreamed of her, using brief glimpses to assemble her naked body, filling in the gaps of what they have seen with their imaginings. The shape of her upper arms. The freckles on her back. The shape of her clavicle. The way her neck slopes into her shoulders. The curve of her breasts. The alabaster slopes of her thighs. The dark forest between her legs.
For one half hour each day he is the luckiest man in the camp, some of the men have told him. Or they joke that they have a deformity in their penis, and wish that Nurse Rosa would massage it straighter for them.
He, in turn, tells them how he feels when she takes hold of his feet, presses them tight against her thigh and begins massaging them. Watches the agony grow on their faces. But today he feels more strongly the memory of Herr Eckert’s dead body, lying on the bed where he himself now lies. The thought makes him shiver and makes goose bumps appear on his skin.
He keeps his eyes closed and tries to concentrate on the sensation of Nurse Rosa’s fingers. Sometimes strong and hard. Sometimes soft and gentle. And a momentary dream image reaches him, of a man roughly taking her in the darkness, her face twisted in protest and pain. Another of the inmate’s dreams threatening to escape into the reality of daylight, he thinks.
He opens his eyes suddenly and looks at her. She smiles, a little quizzical, and asks, “What have you been up to today?” In German. As she asks it every day. They talk a lot, but always the same questions and answers.
“Swimming. Sitting in the sun.” The usual answers.
“You should get involved in camp activities more,” she says. “I hear your drama troupe is very good.”
“Yes. But I prefer to watch,” he says. She nods and turns her attention back to his feet. She turns one foot as she works, slipping it just a little further up her thigh.
“I prefer to dance,” she says.
This is new. “What type of dancing?” he asks.
“All kinds of dancing. As long as there is music and a partner to dance with.”
“Where do you dance? At South West Rocks? Kempsey?” He’s never known exactly where she lives.
“No. Not here,” she says.
And then Arno asks a new question. “You are not happy here?”
She regards him and says, “Here is a place that feels eternal, but is really only ever temporary.”
“Why are you here then?”
But she shakes her head. “That is too long a story.”
“Your German is very good,” he says. “Better than mine.” An old line. Safer ground.
“Yes. Much better than yours.” The safe answer.
He wonders if she has a German ancestor that she has hidden from the authorities. One French grandmother and one German perhaps? He imagines her as a young girl, wearing her red nurse’s cape, visiting her grandmother and listening to her telling her folk stories in German. He smiles at the thought of it. But he is also a little saddened by the thought of it, for he wishes he had similar memories.
Instead he asks, “Have you been a nurse long?”
“Long enough,” she says.
“Have you ever seen a dead person?”
She stops. Puts his foot down. Puts her hands to her hips. “What a question!” she says. “What makes you ask that?” He can see from her eyes that she has though. Another part of her secret life.
He opens his mouth to answer and Doctor Hertz walks into the room. “How are you feeling?” he asks Arno. As he asks every day.
Arno looks up at him and says, “Good enough.” As he answers every day.
The doctor motions for the Nurse to stand back and he takes up one of Arno’s feet himself. He looks at it carefully, as if studying it for any miraculous changes. He turns it a little to the left, then turns it a little more to the right. “Hmm,” he says, and then bends the toes backwards. Arno gasps.
“Does that hurt?” the doctor asks.
“A little,” says Arno.
The doctor bends the toes the other way. Arno says nothing through the pain. The doctor is smiling to himself, as he often does. He is a handsome man, Arno supposes. High cheekbones and fair hair. Well adaptable to the many heroic stage roles he plays.
The doctor picks up his other foot. He holds the two together, and sighs heavily. “It would be such a simple operation you know,” he says. “I could cut some tendons from behind your knee and attach them here.” He stabs at the foot with his fingernail. “And you would be walking like normal people.”
Arno thinks that he does not know any normal people, least of all the doctor. Though he has told Arno about the operation so often that Arno feels he could perhaps do it himself one day. An incision behind the knee. Cut loose some of the tendons there to loosen the tightness in his legs. Another incision in the foot. Long and narrow. Attach the tendons. Encase the feet in plaster. Let them grow. And then, perhaps a month or two later, break open the plaster, and like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, his bent and broken feet would be beautiful and wholly formed and strong enough to hold up his thin and weakened legs. And the first thing he would do, he thinks, would be to dance around the infirmary with Nurse Rosa.
“I think you are walking too much on your feet,” Doctor Hertz suddenly says.
Arno lifts his head and looks down between his legs again. The doctor does not meet his eyes, but keeps working on his feet. “I think it best if you keep off them for a while. Not too much exercise, hmmm?”
“What about swimming?” asks Arno.
“Swimming is fine,” says the doctor. “But not too much wandering around the yard at all hours. It might not be good for you.” He places Arno’s foot back on the bed. Leaves one hand on top of it. Pats it once, and then, still without looking at Arno, turns and leaves the room.
Lunch in the main hall is mutton and potatoes. Arno Friedrich sits by himself and eats and listens to some of the older men in one corner singing a song together. Some tune from their youth that takes them back over the oceans and the years to a country where Bismarck was a saint and German expansion their right. Arno Friedrich, with no such memories, watches the men as they finish their meals and wonder back out the yard again.
There are only a few men left still sitting at the tables now, chatting and slowly finishing their lunch. He sees two in particular, sitting alone at a far table. Not eating. Saying little. Staring around the hall. One is a tall man, Herr von Krupp, an aristocrat, with a long slightly-greying moustache, waxed in full flight. Arno’s nickname for him is the Eagle, as he has constant dreams of flying. And falling. Terrifying spirals to earth from great heights. The other, Herr Schwarz, is of less noble birth, but has a position of authority in the camp, running the athletics club. He is much shorter, his skin almost swarthy and his hair jet black. He dreams of marching along with a troop of young men in lederhosen, and suddenly discovering he has no pants on. His strong fingers are running back and forward on the table now, betraying his nervousness.
As they sit there, like two Prussian Lords, a pair of younger men come past. They are in high spirits and are slapping and elbowing each other, in a mock fight. One suddenly grabs the other in a headlock and wrestles him to the ground. His friend screams a little and flails his arms around trying to grab his assailant’s head and break his grip.
Herr von Krupp says nothing, but turns his head quickly towards them. And glares. The man applying the headlock releases his friend and stands up straight. As if snapping to attention. The other man looks up and then also jumps to his feet. Herr von Krupp says nothing. Still just glares. Both young men then bow their heads a little, looking at the ground around them. Herr von Krupp makes a small dismissive noise and the young men turn and walk quickly away.
The power of the high born, thinks Arno. But the higher the birth, the further the fall.
He watches the pair until they have left the hall and then looks around like he is surveying his domain. Th
en he looks back to his comrade at the table. Herr Schwarz blinks nervously. Finally he nods, just a little, and slides one hand across the table until he touches the taller man’s fingers. He draws his hand back quickly with a fold of money in it. Then, quickly, glancing around, he slides a single photograph back across the table.
The tall man places his hand upon it and draws it to himself. Then turns it over and carefully examines it. It shows a woman, standing by a pier. There is a ship in the background, sailing towards her. He examines the woman carefully. She is a little plump, and has a hat drawn down over the top of her face. But he can clearly see her eyes. Smouldering. And her lips are puckered towards him. Inviting. One strap of her dress hangs off her shoulder, and one hand draws up her skirts a little, showing a pale plump leg, the other is cupped under her breast. Her short stubby fingers, pressing into her flesh.
The tall man’s fingers shake a little as he looks at her and his eyes narrow. The small man looks away for a moment. Then glances back. The tall man has put the photo away. Now he smiles briefly, like the momentary glimpse of gold in a man’s purse. Then he stands.
“Ist es gut Herr von Krupp?” asks the small man.
“It is as good as you promised,” says the tall man, and marches out of the hall.
Captain Eaton has been working with his men to try and collect intelligence all day—though his troops and intelligence are not words he would normally consider in the same sentence. The bulk of them are rural lads, denied service for physical or other ailments that has deemed them as unfit to run headlong into the enemy’s machine guns in Europe. Asthma, weak eyesight, poor co-ordination, donkey-brained stupid. But they made up for each with brutishness, ignorance and racism. Those solid traits that made Australian troops such valued soldiers of Empire.
The Years of the Wolf Page 4
