Flying With Amelia

by Anne Degrace

  Armstrong looked up into Weiler’s affable face, long and narrow like the horses he often spoke of from his Manitoba homestead. Unable to manage it with the sons gone and no men to work, Weiler’s parents had drifted into melancholy before fire took what was left, including their tenuous lives. Weiler had told Armstrong this on night duty, Armstrong trying to stay awake and Weiler unable to sleep. Now he held onto the letter with both hands, unwilling to tear it open in another’s presence, but Weiler had moved on into the kitchen. When he came back ten minutes later, Armstrong was still there, the pages in front of him curling like onion skin.

  Armstrong picked up a page and set it down again. “It took a month to get here. Bloody censors,” he said. “He could be anywhere by now.” He waved the paper. It looked like ticker tape.

  Weiler sat down across from him, folding his long legs under the chair legs and resting his elbows on the table, hands folded down between them like a praying mantis. “I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said. “Must be tough.”

  All at once, anger seized him. “What would you know about it?” Armstrong snarled.

  Weiler recoiled, surprised. “I —”

  The anger left Armstrong as quickly as it had come. “I’m sorry,” he said. There was no point, and there was nothing to dislike about Weiler beyond the fact that he wasn’t overseas, as Stephen was.

  “We’re all sorry,” said Weiler.

  LATER, HALFWAY UP the steep slope, Armstrong felt the familiar ache begin in his left leg. Hirsch was striding ahead at the front of the column of eight men who had been introduced in turn when the group had rendezvoused at the cookhouse. Only two were familiar to Armstrong, those being, a short, square man named Koertig and another fairly young officer, Roehm. Armstrong remembered Roehm for his rendition of St. Nicholas at the prisoner’s pageant the previous Christmas, and it occurred to him then, as he struggled to keep up, that Hirsch had also been in the play, dressed as a fox. The play recalled the German children’s story of animals receiving the gift of speech at Christmastime.

  Hirsch called a halt, and Armstrong joined the group as they reached a rocky clearing. Under the shade of the pines, snow patches could still be seen, but here the sun shone warm with the promise of summer. The prisoners found spots on which to sit, setting aside the walking sticks they’d cut at the outset like eager alpinists on a holiday outing. Armstrong wished he had done the same for his leg’s sake, but in any case he had a regulation rifle to carry. He stretched the offending leg out in front of him, wincing. Hirsch came over and as he plunked himself down in an agile, youthful manner, Armstrong recalled the pageant again.

  “You were a convincing fox at Christmas,” he told Hirsch, who laughed.

  “If only I could find one to join my zoo.”

  “Your what?”

  “You haven’t seen? Ya, you have not been here so long, and I don’t think you have been assigned to the inspections. A few of us, we keep some pets. To pass the time. Small things: I have a mouse and a squirrel — the tree kind, and also the ground kind. What do you call them?”

  “Gophers,” said Armstrong, tucking his leg back under him. “Keep them in what?”

  Hirsch tilted his head back to catch the full force of the spring sunshine. Around them was birdsong, and the smell of earth and growing things. He spoke with his eyes closed. “Yes. Since we began just two months past it has been your colleague, Sergeant McGrath, ya? who is doing the inspections. He brought us an animal called a —” Hirsch searched for the word, “— packrat.” He brought his head down and scratched his short hair with both hands, then looked at Armstrong. “In cages,” he said, finally. “We keep our pets in cages that we make in the shop. There is a word for that. In German, we say ironisch.”

  It wasn’t a stretch to guess. “Ironic? Yes, I guess it is,” Armstrong offered, surprised he hadn’t heard about Hirsch’s zoo. It wasn’t that big a camp, after all. “No harm in it, though.”

  “It is permitted. And for us, it is interesting. There are some different animals here than in Germany. Here, it is wilderness! Out there,” he spread his arms to indicate the forest around them, “they get eaten, maybe.” There was a pause. “Like us. No one is happy to be locked up, but nobody is unhappy not to be fighting. It is not freedom, ya? But it is perhaps better than the alternative.”

  Armstrong thought about the miles of forest around them, imagined it full of soldiers, of noise, of the stink and sounds of battle. The misery.

  “I would like to find a little dog. Wild dog. I forget the name,” Hirsch was saying.

  “Coyote?”

  “Yes.”

  Hirsch stood up. “Shall we continue?” He looked at Armstrong, who would have preferred a longer rest for his leg. Armstrong rose as well, but it was awkward, far from Hirsch’s fluid movements.

  “If you like, I will run the men to the lookout point and then meet back here for you to accompany us back,” Hirsch said. “It must be boring for you, if you have climbed this mountain before. You are from here, ya?”

  “Ya — I mean, yes, I am. I grew up here, and after the war I brought my wife back. We raised our son here.”

  “Your son is also a soldier. You told me when we met first time, at the mess hall.”

  “Yes, a soldier. A private.”

  Overhead, the kew of a hawk hunting some small prey. Around them men were standing, screwing the lids back on canteens, picking up walking sticks, preparing to continue. Armstrong thought of the terrain, an hour of solid, rocky, uphill trail. “I got a letter at mail call.” He patted his breast pocket. “I think I’ll just sit here and read it again.”

  Hirsch nodded. Armstrong watched as the men found the path again and began the ascent. He did not take the letter from his pocket. There was nothing in it to read. Instead, Armstrong napped in the warm sunshine in the clearing, and after he awoke passed the time by entertaining thoughts of returning to camp alone, his charges vanished into the woods. He rehearsed explanations, imagining a situation in which he would crack himself over the head with something to make it look as if he’d been overpowered, perhaps lose his rifle in the underbrush. Although he hadn’t really expected an escape, he was nonetheless relieved when he heard a cheerful whistling and saw Hirsch emerge from the trees. It struck Armstrong as odd that Hirsch had come from a different direction than the path he had ascended some two hours earlier, and that Hirsch was out of breath and sweating, as if he hadn’t been descending the mountain, but rather climbing it. A shortcut? A moment later the remainder of the men appeared above them on the trail, and Armstrong, looking at his watch, managed an impatient tone and told them to get a move on.

  Hirsch leaned in. “Ach. You’re worried about that Jew? Block?”

  Armstrong looked sharply at Hirsch, but his face betrayed no venom. “Block? He’s not Jewish,” he said, affronted, then felt his affront oddly misplaced, and then, muddled and unsure of what to say next, found himself stuttering: “and anyway, it’s getting late.”

  “Ya, his name perhaps not —” Hirsch didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he turned to the men who had been talking among themselves. “Schnell!” he said, grinning. “Dinner is waiting.”

  IT WAS A week later that Hirsch didn’t turn up for morning roll call. Armstrong was positioned at the rear of the assembled men while the names were called in bunkhouse order. Roehm, standing ahead and to the right of Armstrong, startled when the guard touched his arm, but fell out.

  “I know. He is usually back by now,” Roehm told Armstrong when asked about Hirsch.

  “Back? Back from where?”

  Roehm leaned forward. “He has a girl,” he whispered.

  Armstrong didn’t have time to ask more. Roll call had begun. When Hirsch’s name was called, Roehm called “here!” and Armstrong said nothing.

  When Armstrong thought about it, it wasn’t such a
stretch. Several of the more trusted prisoners had access to trucks for deliveries and pickups in town. And last fall, local farmers had picked up some hundred men to assist with the harvest. With so many men away fighting, the help was certainly needed — in fact, the camp itself would buy many of the potatoes and squash. Some farm families virtually adopted the prisoners, treating them as family, and in return the men worked hard. Had Hirsch been among them? Armstrong could imagine a farmer’s daughter smitten with Hirsch’s blond good looks. Armstrong resolved to ask Hirsch about it the next time he had an opportunity, the way he’d ask Stephen about a love interest — ribbing him a little — had times been different. As for saying something to Col. Trevaine, he saw no point; the commandant would simply wait ’til evening roll call, and by then Hirsch would be back. Block certainly didn’t need to know.

  Later that evening Armstrong, coming off patrol, decided to drop in for an unscheduled visit to Bunkhouse 5.

  “Ho ho!” Hirsch said, looking up from his bunk where he had been sitting, a deck of cards in his hand and a spread of solitaire before him. Had there been a surreptitious movement? Armstrong couldn’t be sure. “Have you come to see our small zoo? Or maybe you have come to see our fine handicrafts,” he waved his hand to indicate a ledge above a row of coathooks on which sat the handiwork of his bunkmates: animal carvings, several ships in bottles, an elaborate whirligig. Most guards traded cigarettes and the spoils of packages from home for some of these prizes. “Rudi, here, is the best at putting the boats in the bottles.” He nodded towards Koertig, who was reading a well-creased letter. “Wilhelm prefers the real boats. It is he who makes the dugout canoes. You have seen them, down at the water?”

  “It smells like hooch,” Armstrong said. He hadn’t meant to say it; it was what he’d been thinking, and what he’d blurted.

  The men, who had been engaged in various pastimes — cards, wood-carving, letter-writing — looked up as one. There was silence, save for the small rustling movements coming from one of the makeshift cages in the corner. Armstrong could smell sweat, and wood shavings, a stench of something he recognized as packrat — he looked again towards the cages, at least a half-dozen, and — there it was again. Alcohol. He looked at Hirsch.

  “Ah, you miss nothing, my friend. We just poured from a new batch. You like?”

  After a beat, “Why don’t you show me your zoo,” Armstrong said.

  IF THE FRIENDSHIP was not cemented before, it was cemented that evening, when Hirsch, leaving the bunkhouse a few minutes behind Armstrong, found the guard sitting by the lake on the end of one of the overturned dugout canoes. There was still a bit of colour to the sky, and the air smelled of water and pine and the distant smell of skunk. Hirsch approached with enough noise so Armstrong would know he was coming.

  “Now, that is not an animal I would like to have,” Hirsch said, sniffing the air as he settled himself on the canoe beside Armstrong’s. He had a jar and two tin cups, and he handed one to Armstrong who took it and held it against his knee. Hirsch filled it.

  “No,” Armstrong said. “I’d stay away from porkies, too.”

  “Porkies?”

  “Porcupines.”

  “Ah! Yes. One fellow did try to get one. It was before you came. He saw it in a tree and climbed up with a sack. Came down looking like the — what is it called again? Porcupine. Doktor Schroeder spent most of the day getting out the sticks.”

  “Quills.”

  “Yes.”

  Armstrong was laughing quietly. The alcohol tasted strong, and a little sweet. He couldn’t tell its true colour in the waning light, but it tasted — brown. “What’s in this?”

  “Raisins. Some other things, but raisins, mostly. We tried potatoes, but raisins are better. Sugar, when we can get it.”

  They sat for a while, the darkness drawing around them. Armstrong slapped a hand gently against the canoe. “I was looking at this, before. Nice craftsmanship.”

  “Yes! Like the Indians. In Germany we are — fasziniert — fascinted?”

  “Fascinated.”

  “Fascinated by the wilderness of Canada, by the wild animals — and the wild Indians! This is why, partly, many of us volunteered to come and work here. We take the canoes out to fish — it’s good to have fish to cook — and we take the canoes over to that island, and there we pretend for a time we have no camp, no wood to cut. No war.”

  “Is that why?”

  Hirsch looked at Armstrong quizzically.

  “Why you volunteered to come here? You came from Lethbridge?” Armstrong drained his cup, and Hirsch refilled it from the jar.

  “Medicine Hat. Things there were —” Hirsch took a drink and coughed. “How is your leg these days?” he asked.

  “I heard there are Gestapo at Medicine Hat,” Armstrong offered. “Organizing within the camp.”

  “Ah, these things are often exaggerated.” Hirsch waved his hand dismissively. “But I asked you about your leg.”

  Armstrong realized he could not entirely feel his leg. And on the heels of that realization, he saw clearly the degree to which he had been compromised. The alcohol in his stomach turned acid. Who was this German, really? What were his motives?

  “What about you? Where did you fit in the camp — at Medicine Hat?” he asked Hirsch abruptly. He went to stand, but whether it was the loose beach pebbles or his war injury, he found he could not quite get his legs under him. His head swam. He turned to find Hirsch’s eyes on him, their whites glinting in the light from the waxing moon just rising over the trees.

  “It is not good to ask about politics in these times,” said Hirsch finally, firmly. “Only I will say that we will win the war. It is what we all know, in Medicine Hat, or here, it is the same.”

  Armstrong’s thoughts whirled against the fog of his lost sobriety, and he struggled to focus.

  “How long have you been here?” Hirsch asked.

  “What?”

  “Your father, your father before him, and so on. How long?”

  “I can trace one side of my family to Ireland. The Murphy side emigrated in the 1840s. The other side, English, a little bit later.”

  “A hundred years! Pppht. Nothing.” Hirsch leaned in, and Armstrong saw with alarm a new intensity in Hirsch’s eyes. “My people have been in Germany five hundred years. More. You are just children here. This is one reason we will win.”

  As Armstrong tried to grasp Hirsch’s meaning, around them rose, like a sudden tide, the unearthly yipping of coyotes. Hirsch laughed, breaking the tension. “Do you hear? They are singing. That is the sound of wilderness.”

  Armstrong, listening to the eerie, undulating sound, felt like crying rather than laughing. He saw his cup had been refilled, and he took a drink from it and coughed. The moment, whatever it was, had passed.

  “And you?” Hirsch asked. “Why did you volunteer to be here?”

  Over the next hour, any misgivings drowned beneath a warm and fuzzy lake of contraband liquor, Armstrong told him: about his war, the relentless noise and fear, about surviving with a shrapnel wound while his buddy died in pieces, about returning to Cynthia a changed man. About the nightmares, the suffocating melancholy. The hopes that a child would change things, and how it did, for a while. But every job ended badly. There was always the day when he could not bring himself to perform the simplest task, as if opening his mouth to speak was equivalent to lifting a building one-handed. Sometimes, he could not even leave his house.

  “There were times I would go as much as a year without any problem,” he told Hirsch. “And then something would happen, and it would start. Once, it was the sight of ketchup spilled across a white tablecloth.” He put his hands over his face and drew them downwards, feeling the numbness from the alcohol. “I volunteered because I thought that the duties would be straightforward. In the forces, you just follow orders. And
because Stephen was overseas, and I had to do something. But they sent me to Neys, first. Where the Black Nazis get sent. I — it was too much.”

  “Black Nazis? I don’t understand.”

  Armstrong looked at Hirsch, and saw Stephen, and was momentarily confused. And then he was back. It didn’t matter. He knew, of course, that Hirsch was the enemy, but he didn’t care: it felt good to talk.

  “There are three levels that have been identified: black, grey, and white. Neys is a real camp for Black Nazis: towers, barbed wire, Bren guns.” Armstrong paused and brought the cup to his lips. “I had some problems, there. But it was when my nightmares came back that I was transferred. They said it was bad for morale. So they sent me here.”

  Hirsch looked sympathetic, his face washed in moonlight. “You are better now?”

  “Yes.” He laughed. “For the most part. If I can stand, that is.”

  They walked together back to camp through the scrubby brush, falling into one another a little, trying not to laugh. Miraculously, they were unseen. As they approached the back of Bunkhouse 5, Hirsch reached for the cup that Armstrong still held, forgotten.

  “There is more than black and white and grey,” Hirsch said. “There are many colours. And of all the colours, you, my friend, I think you are green.”

  And with that, Armstrong turned towards a wild rose bush and threw up.

  AS SUMMER TURNED to fall, Armstrong saw Hirsch on several other occasions. Once he found Hirsch, reassigned to the barn as penalty for a missed roll call, mucking out stalls, and this led to talk and a discovery of a shared love for horses. There were more hikes; sometimes Hirsch slipped away, sometimes not. Once, when Armstrong’s leg became particularly painful, Hirsch piggybacked him down the last half-mile while behind him Roehm carried Armstrong’s loaded rifle. Just before camp, Armstrong regained his legs and his rifle, complicit grins all around. He trusted these men, he realized.