The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “Lucky you.”

  “Captured is captured.”

  The other shook his head.

  “Surrendered is the worst. You sure you...?”

  “No.”

  “Only, I heard.”

  “Sorry. Wrong man.”

  “Too bad. I don’t mean to... It’s just that it’s a little lonely, you know. There must be a thousand men here, and you’d think you were the only one surrendered.” Karsten studied him then, the long pale face under a dark widow’s peak, the eyes searching the crowded cell.

  “Like I say,” he replied softly, “we’re in it together now, all the same.”

  “Appreciate that,” the other said. “If I had a smoke, I’d give it you.”

  Karsten smiled. “How’d it happen, anyway?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “No, really. I’d like to know... Can’t be that bad.”

  “How’d it happen? How do you think? How does anything happen in the army?” He spat. “Fucking officers! My leutnant shat himself, or he’d have used his drawers for a white flag. Ordered us to put our hands up.”

  Karsten shook his head.

  “Fucking officers! Should be shot, the lot of them. You know, I could swear I saw him here someplace, among the enlisted men.”

  “Who?”

  “My fucking leutnant! Wouldn’t put it past him to strip the uniform off one of our dead boys.”

  “But why?”

  “Wants to pass as a regular soldier, avoid interrogation. Coward twice over. What chance did we have with that kind leading us, I ask you?”

  “Not much,” Karsten whispered.

  “See any of yours—officers, I mean—mixed in with us?”

  Karsten shook his head.

  “Pity. There’s a bunch of lads wouldn’t mind giving some of them a few licks. They could hardly pull rank! Really, you haven’t seen any?”

  “No,” Karsten said. “I told you.”

  The other man had been scanning the crowd, as if for officers, but now he looked at Karsten.

  “No need to cut up so. Unless you’re one yourself. Are you?”

  “No!”

  “All right, I believe you. Just let me know if you see any, would you?” He got to his feet. “Fucking officers. Course”—he smiled gapingly—“I’d be dead right now if mine hadn’t given up.”

  Crazy, Karsten thought. Mad with shame. He watched the fellow move off among the rest, asking the same questions, looking for someone to blame, to hate, to fight.

  There’d been a scuffle at last—someone objecting to his accusations, or to his admission? Karsten wondered—and the guards had leapt in and dragged the fellow out.

  “Anyone know that man?” a barrel-chested corporal had called afterwards. “Anyone vouch for him? You? You?”

  “Said his name was Steiner,” someone offered.

  “Never met him before,” Karsten said when the man pointed at him. “What’d he do?”

  “Anyone know you?” the other demanded. “No? Well, don’t go asking any more questions!”

  They’d sat in silence then, the group of them, staring at one another warily until the guards had ordered them out and thrust them back into the flow of men shuffling out of the barn.

  Next, they’d been made to strip in the dank concrete corridors below the grandstand. Even in June it was cold down there, chilling the soles of their feet. They were hosed down, then dusted with clouds of bright yellow disinfectant until it clung to their body hair and they coughed it up, their tongues bright and bitter with it.

  “’Ere, are these Jerries or Japs?” the guards hooted to each other.

  Still naked, they were run across the grass to stand in long lines in the paddock, shuffling forward towards a brief doctor’s inspection. Yellow dust rose off them like fog.

  “Tongues, dicks, and arseholes,” the men who’d gone before whispered. “Stick it out, hold it up, spread ’em.” When it was Heino’s turn to bend over, he’d let out a long, spluttering fart and the doctor stepped back quickly. A guard brought up the stock of his rifle between Heino’s legs with a fleshy crunch, and those in line, to a man, cupped their own balls, as if suddenly modest.

  The others stepped around Heino where he lay, writhing and gasping like a caught fish, but Karsten knelt beside him, shaking his head. “What you gonna do, kiss it better?” one of the guards mocked, but Karsten ignored him. “Here.” He helped the boy to his feet, but when Heino wiped the tears from his eyes and saw who it was, he shook him off. Karsten let him go, Heino hobbling ahead, bent almost double, one hand pressed to his groin. Going to get himself killed to spite me, Karsten thought, watching him fall into one of the lines working it’s way towards the British intelligence officers, sitting at card tables on the grass.

  The rumor, passed through the ranks, was that the interrogators, with their accentless German, were Jews, refugees from Germany. The first Karsten heard of it was someone ahead of him muttering, “Traitors.” He’d been so preoccupied, glaring at the back of Heino’s head, he’d cried out angrily, “What do you mean?” Too late he’d realized his mistake. Men around him were looking at him strangely.

  “I mean, they can’t be traitors, can they, the Jews. They weren’t proper Germans to begin with.” He glanced around. “Besides, I’m not afraid of them.”

  And the fellow ahead snapped back, “Fuck off! I never said I was afraid.”

  “You should be,” a voice called. “I heard they’re putting them in with us to spy.”

  “Whoever said that probably was one,” someone else yelled. Karsten thought of Steiner, found himself twisting his neck to look about him. But wouldn’t Karsten have known him for a Jew? The ones in the newsreels, their appearances greeted with boos and laughter from the stalls, were always unmistakable, he thought—craven faces, shrinking forms, the stars on their chests gaudy redundancies. But Steiner didn’t look the part, nor did the interrogators awaiting him. He didn’t believe it.

  Besides, when he’d gotten closer to the head of the line and could overhear the questions being asked, there were just the usual three—name, rank, and serial number—repeated over and over like a litany. Karsten, braced for an interrogation, had felt faintly disappointed. The British seemed mostly interested in finding officers passing themselves off as enlisted men, though they hardly needed spies to do so. They pulled one out of the lines while Karsten waited; the fellow’s mustache had given him away among the clean-shaven noncoms and privates. The men watched him go in silence, sorry to see him caught, yet glad to be rid of him too. Only a few saluted, the officer returning the gesture red-faced, looking more naked than the rest in that moment. Karsten caught sight of Heino, looking back as the man passed, but the boy looked right through him.

  IT WAS THE LAST TIME Karsten had seen the boy—the camp’s big enough to avoid each other—but it hardly matters. The damage is done. He’s sure Heino has already told others the story of their capture, proclaiming himself innocent of surrender, as if it were a crime.

  Karsten’s not quite a criminal, but he notices the others keeping their distance. The only one who doesn’t shun him entirely is Schiller. Karsten tolerates his company—it’s decent of Schiller, he supposes—but in truth he doesn’t want the other to feel he owes him anything. Karsten can’t help thinking that he saved their lives at the cost of his own honor, and if he had it to do again, he isn’t sure he’d bother.

  But then he thinks of his mother, of her running the pension alone, and tries to tell himself he did it for her. He’s all she has left, after all. Karsten’s father’s loss has always had about it an air of desertion. “I told him he shouldn’t have gone out that night with the weather worsening,” his mother has often maintained, in a tone as much critical as sorrowful. His parents had fought all the time, mostly over money, it seemed to Karsten. But once his mother had sneered, “You might have had the decency to go down with your ship too!” There’d been a long silence—Karsten, supposed to be asleep, had held hi
s breath—and then his father said coldly, “I would have. Your father ordered me not to.” Which is why it seemed, after his loss, as if Karsten’s father might have finally gotten his wish.

  IT’S COMING ON for evening, the day’s heat lifting, the sinking sun tingeing the tents pink. At the end of the row of them, he sees men filing onto the makeshift parade ground at the center of the encampment. As he watches, a barking sergeant puts them through their paces.

  The drilling began three nights ago, led by a handful of NCOs, the self-appointed camp leaders. The men had rolled their eyes at first, called them zealots, 150-percenters. Why drill if you didn’t have to, if there were no officers to make you? It had started with a group of U-boat men. They’d been sucked to the surface in a bubble of air, their sub’s last gasp, when it had been split in two by a depth charge in the Channel, and pulled aboard a British minesweeper. They were men who’d been at sea for years, men who’d won victories. And they left the rest in no doubt that, had they been on the western front, the invasion would have been beaten back, or they’d have died trying. Only a couple of them were NCOs, but even the seamen among them acted as if they outranked the other men. They looked at Karsten and the rest—healthy, whole—and flashed them their scars, their burns, and laughed when the others looked away. They made Karsten think of old whores showing their wares to choirboys, and indeed, among the least offensive names they called them was virgins.

  Not that they stopped at name-calling.

  Several fellows had fallen foul of them, for criticizing the high command mostly. One mechanic had been beaten unconscious with a tin mess tray by a thick-necked ensign for having the temerity to blame the Leader. Karsten remembers the streaks of blood and gravy on the man’s face, and the tray, rocking gratingly on the floor, as warped and twisted as a piece of shrapnel.

  To think that Karsten had hoped to be a submariner like his father before him, had once, for the price of a round of drinks, bribed his way on board one of the long, dark vessels in port just to get a feel for it.

  During the day, the 150-percenters can be seen polishing their boots, brushing their uniforms, and for each of the past three nights they’ve led the drill. There’d been only a dozen men that first night, but now, as Karsten watches the formation wheel and turn, he sees rank after rank of men, perhaps a company’s strength. They look smart enough from where he stands, although it’s strange to see them come to attention, their feet stamping down in silence on the turf, no ringing parade-ground echo.

  “Enjoying the show?” It’s Schiller. “Looks like you want to fall in.”

  Karsten shakes his head. The camp leaders have called for all noncoms to assemble their men for drill, but he’s kept silent about his stripe. Now, he realizes, he’s tapping his foot in time to the cadence. Yet he can’t quite see himself falling in when he should be leading. He looks down at his scuffed, scarred boots and wonders when he last polished them.

  “Maybe you should,” Schiller says softly.

  “I suppose Heino has.”

  “Him? Haven’t you heard? Shipped him off to a youth camp, the Britishers did. For the underaged.”

  “How did they know his age?” Karsten begins, and then he sees the other’s wolfish grin.

  Schiller starts to saunter on, down the alley of tents, but turns back, fishes in his tunic pocket. “Almost forgot. They were issuing these outside the mess.” He holds out a bright square of paper, and after a second Karsten takes it. It’s a Red Cross postcard.

  He watches Schiller amble off, then turns the card over in his hands. It’s already preprinted with a curt message:

  Dear _________:

  This is to inform you that I am a prisoner of the British / American / Soviet forces.

  My health is poor / fair / good.

  Sincerely / Love, _________

  He’s furious at these words, thrust in his mouth like a gag. But then, he realizes, he’s hardly been able to think of much more to say for himself, despite his agonizing. He’s reminded again of those postcards of his mother’s guests—delightful, lovely, charming—their repetitious, interchangeable sentiments, and he’s suddenly relieved by the anonymity of the card before him, the impersonality.

  He looks down the row of tents, over their yellowing peaks and ridges, in the direction Schiller has gone, towards the drilling men, still going through their paces. He does want to join them, feels the pull, like gravity, yet he’s not sure he belongs. Too ashamed? he wonders. Perhaps also too proud, in his own stiff-necked way. Not ready to be forgiven.

  And it comes to him then that he had noticed a change in the guests’ postcards as the years went by. The views were no longer lovely or charming, but awesome, imposing, majestic. The Brocken was an “indomitable peak,” according to one guest, a comment that puzzled Karsten mightily since he’d led the fellow up it not two days earlier. More baldly, one young man, who’d appeared at breakfast on his first morning in shining, squeaking lederhosen, wrote that it was “a truly Aryan landscape.” Karsten had actually held that one up, studying it’s glossy picture, then staring at the familiar slopes above him, straining to see it.

  Eight

  ESTHER STEERS CLEAR of Arthur as much as possible in the days following the invasion. It’s not so hard. June is a busy time on the farm, between the dipping and the shearing, and during the days he’s mostly on the hillside with the flock. As for the evenings, she keeps out of his way by spending more time with Jim, helping him with his homework—he’s slogging his way through Great Expectations—chatting with him at supper in the quick slangy English her father has trouble following.

  The boy’s generally impatient with her concern, but he tolerates her checking his wound each evening with preening stoicism. When, after a couple of days, she tells him he’s healed and doesn’t need the dressing anymore, he tugs it back down firmly. Arthur says he looks a proper fool, but Esther indulges him, studies the small scab carefully, and says, well, yes, maybe they better keep it covered for one more day. “In case of gangrene,” she says, po-faced. And so it goes for a week. Somehow the shared fantasy has brought them together. She knows Jim reckons his bandage a badge of honor, a reminder of his bravery, but to her it’s a token of her care for him, however frayed and dirty. It slips off when he’s sleeping, but she smiles watching him fiddle with it in the mornings, settling it at a rakish angle over one eyebrow.

  “Who are you supposed to be,” Arthur asks, “the Mummy?” And for a moment Esther blushes, not sure whom he’s talking to, until he raises his arms before him and does the stiff-legged walk.

  Arthur’s always thought her a fool for bringing Jim home, but she knows why she did it. She’d been late to the station that time, reluctant to go, as if she were somehow being asked to replace Eric. When she arrived other families were already leaving with their evacuees, the children’s faces bright as new toys.

  “You missed all the good ’uns,” Jim said later with a grimace.

  He’d hated all the picking and choosing, he told her, the pointing fingers, and “I’ll take that one.” He took one look at the purse-lipped women lined up to receive them and pulled his gas mask over his head. “All the pretty girls went first, then the plain ones, then the boys who combed their hair, who stood up straight and answered ‘sir’ or ‘missus.’” When Esther got there, all that was left were what Jim called the “licorice allsorts”—the spotty kids, the snotty kids, the fat ones who looked like they ate too much, the ones who scratched, the ones who smelled of piss or sweat or, in Jim’s case, fags and booze.

  Along with his pajamas, his spare vests, and his Sunday best, his mother had packed the boy off with gifts for his host family—“swaps,” she called them, for their love. But as soon as the train had pulled out of the station, Jim rummaged through his dented cardboard suitcase until he came upon the hard chill of a pint of J & B and the stiff angles of a Players carton. Esther pictured him drawing these treasures out like rabbits from a hat and turning to the others in his comp
artment: “Who’s got a light, then?” They’d had a time of it, all right, he’d told her, half boastful, half querulous, until one by one they’d lurched to the door, as the train hammered through the wet green countryside, let down the window, gulped a lungful of the burnt air billowing back from the engine, and heaved over the side. Jim had had the misfortune to throw up as they entered a mountain tunnel, covering himself, the window, and the dusty livery of the GNWR in puke.

  When Esther arrived he was glaring through the steamy portholes of his mask, as the local women worked their way down the rows, asking questions: What’s your name? How old are you? Where are you from? The last answer, whether Liverpool or Toxteth or Bootle, gave them pause. “Slum kids,” the women complained. “No better than urchins.” It was taking an age for them to pick, a few even leaving alone, shaking their heads at PC Parry, the billeting officer. Mrs. Lloyd, moving down the aisle ahead of Esther, asked her daughter, Hattie, “What do you think, cariad? Shall we take this one?” The girl, so spoiled she was known round the village as the Princess of Wales, examined the tear-stained child in front of her and crinkled her nose. “Crybaby.” She shook her head. “And, she pongs.”

  Jim was refusing to answer any questions, letting the women finger the little luggage label pinned to his lapel. All the children had them, their names and addresses on one side, and on the reverse, “Further Information”: faith, date of birth, ailments. When Mrs. Lloyd and Hattie stopped in front of him, the girl seemed puzzled by his gas mask.

  “Take it off,” she commanded, but Jim shook his head, the snout of the mask swinging back and forth, the charcoal granules rustling inside.

  “Why not?”

  He leaned towards her, lifted the rubber seal. “Your mam farts poison gas.”

  There was a bark of laughter from the other evacuees, and Esther covered her mouth. But then the constable appeared, peeling the mask off Jim’s head, the straps yanking at his hair, giving him a clip around the ear hole.