The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  When she turns back, Jim is staring at her, clutching his cheek and ear.

  “Well, you deserved it,” she says, but more gently, offering her hand. It’s still warm from the blow, and as she opens it she expects it to be red, as if she’s the one who’s been struck. “Oh, come on.” She hadn’t hit him that hard, had she? “Look at it this way. You’ll be able to wear your bandage for another week.” But he shakes her off, pushes past her. “Not funny!” She feels his hand on her hip, moving her. “Broody cow,” he breathes, and then he’s past. “And you can keep your bloody bike, too,” he shouts from above her. The cry rolls down the hillside. She sees the sheep stir. And for a long moment she freezes, unable to move, to look up. Her dress, she sees, is muddy where he’s touched her.

  She thinks of the first time she gave him anything, after burning his clothes. She’d dressed him in an assortment of her father’s things—the trousers rolled up until the cuffs were fat as sausages. He looked so forlorn, she’d run back to her room and returned with a jumper. “This was Eric’s,” she said—they’d used it as a blanket once to sit on the hillside, and she still liked to press it to her face sometimes—and he asked, “Who’s Eric?” and she told him. “And he was an evacuee and we loved him,” she said, trying to win his trust. But something in Jim’s eyes, a slight recoil, had told her he didn’t want to be loved, or more importantly, not by her, and something in her had answered his flinch. And now she knows: she picked Jim because he wasn’t Eric; she picked him because he was as different as a boy could be. She picked him because she could be sure she’d never love him.

  She glances back at the camp furtively for a last sight of Colin. She’s sure now it wasn’t he who hit Jim—the boy would never have gone so close to him otherwise—and she tries to decide if she hates him any less. But she can’t make him out down there in the crowd of men, finds herself focusing instead on a couple of the Germans. They’re standing, hands on hips, looking up at her, and all at once she feels very exposed on the hillside. She turns and pulls her cardy around her, hurries to join her father.

  “Well,” Arthur says with a grim smile, jerking his head back to where Jim has disappeared over the ridge, “at least he didn’t get caught by them this time.” He gestures to where a lorry is pulling into the lane, and she realizes it’s the sappers, leaving.

  She takes a deep breath. So it’s her secret, she thinks. As if it never happened.

  Ten

  IT MUST BE the new bunk, Karsten thinks, his first few nights in the new camp, the cloying scent of freshly sawn timber, and the thin mattress, through which he can count the slats beneath his back, buttocks, thighs, and calves.

  He can’t sleep.

  It’s not fear, at least. This new camp has come as a relief to the men. Karsten feels it himself, this slackening. It shames him, but he understands it.

  The journey by truck from the transit camp at Dover had seemed interminable. Twelve hours? Fifteen? He’d lost track sometime in the night, the dread growing with each mile. The worst moment had been just after dusk, when the column had pulled over in a dark culvert and they’d been ordered out. Not a man had moved. Karsten had listened to the latches on the tailgates being snapped open, so like the sound of a rifle bolt being drawn back, and seen the fear in the faces around him. He’d finally slapped his own thighs and climbed down, pushing the tarpaulin aside like a curtain. Others, though not all, had followed, and they’d been herded to one side, lined up facing a low stone wall... and ordered to piss. Back in the truck, Schiller had leaned over and whispered, “Haven’t you had enough of leading?” but then Schiller hadn’t gone when given the chance, and within an hour, his bladder aching like a wound, he’d had to beg the guard at the back of the truck to let him go over the side, clinging to a rib of the roof with one hand, his dick with the other, his piss a jumping silver stream in the headlights of the truck behind.

  Karsten might not have been worried about being machine-gunned in some field—at least it’d be quick—but he wasn’t without his own fears as the men jounced along. The watery dawn light seeping through the truck’s tail flaps revealed, when the wind lifted them, fiercely rugged mountains, jagged peaks cutting across the sky like a piece of paper torn in two. He stared at the boulder-strewn hillsides, the cascades of grey scree tumbling into lakes like mirrors, and thought, A thousand years’ hard labor. Though when someone gave out a low whistle at the view, he called out staunchly, “It’s nothing compared with the Harz.”

  “At least you’re loyal to landscape,” someone else had yelled from the other end of the truck, and before Karsten could reply, Schiller had hissed, “Shut it,” though whether to him or the other man, Karsten wasn’t sure. He’d spent the rest of the trip in grim silence, though even he couldn’t resist the general air of giddiness when they’d disembarked at the new camp.

  The barracks certainly looked more comfortable than the moldering tent town at Dover, and even the distant audience of locals on the hillside, so disquieting in their stillness, were easily driven off, like so many sheep. Karsten had exulted in throwing back their filthy cigarettes, though he’d gotten dirty looks from the rest, and Schiller had pulled him aside in the mess line and demanded, “What are you trying to prove?”

  They’d set out to explore the camp as soon as they’d eaten, mapping it minutely, discovering which showers had the best flow, which bunks were in a draft, which latrine seats were the least splintery. And like explorers (like conquerors, indeed, Karsten thought bleakly) they’d named everything they found: the barracks after the grand hotels of Europe—Savoy, Adlon, Ritz; the guard towers—Eiffel, Pisa, London, Babel. The barracks were palatial compared with the tents they’d come from, yet the men fretted over them, bouncing on the thin striped mattresses, opening and closing doors and shutters, tut-tutting about the rough finish. “I hope everything’s to your liking?” Karsten, no stranger to picky guests, asked sarcastically, looking down at Schiller, perched on the lower bunk, and the older man grinned and told him, “I’ll take it!” Schiller even persuaded the others to name their barracks after Karsten’s mother’s place, the Pension Simmering—a joking kindness, Karsten supposed, though the reference made him more, not less, homesick, and he had to force himself to smile.

  He’d written of it to his mother that evening—they’d all fallen to letter writing as soon as they’d been issued stationery after dinner—telling her that he was still in the family business and pointing out at least that every bed was filled with a long-term guest. And then he’d crossed that out, sucked on his pencil. Around him men were scribbling away, the barracks as silent and concentrated as an exam hall at the gymnasium. “What are you writing?” he’d asked Schiller, and the other had said, “Just about the shitty weather, the lousy food.” The weather had turned, a persistent drizzle settling over the camp like a mountain mist, and the offerings in the mess had been poor—better than Dover, but much worse than their own mess in France—but Karsten told him, “You can’t write that.”

  “Why not?”

  He’d searched for an answer, aware that men in the nearby bunks were waiting too.

  “Who’s that to, your wife? What’s she going to think, reading that? It’s going to worry her, make her cry. Is that what you want?”

  In truth, it occurred to Karsten, it probably was what Schiller wanted—sympathy, pity—but not even he would admit that.

  “So what should I write?” he asked, half impatient, half humoring.

  “I don’t know. Tell her they feed you decently, that the camp’s humane.”

  “Propagandist! Is that what you write? You should be ashamed, lying to your own mother.”

  “What else?” Karsten told him sharply. “It’s all we can do, isn’t it? The only way left to protect them.”

  Schiller stared at him for a long moment, and Karsten realized that he’d crossed a line. The men around them were watching carefully. And then he added, “As if you never lied to your wife,” and Schiller’s tight fa
ce broke into a crooked grin.

  He listens for Schiller’s breathing now, tries to decide if he’s asleep, but he doubts it. Judging by the sounds from the other bunks, they’re not alone. He imagines them all lying awake, waiting for the last light of the summer evening to fade from the cracks around the windows. The heavy silence is punctuated by the men’s frustrated sighs, or the sighs of their farts. Here and there too, as Karsten listens through the night there is, amid the sporadic thumping of pillows and rustle of blankets, the quietly insistent rhythms, the short smothered breaths and creaking bunks, of masturbation. Karsten’s heard it before, back in basic training or in the barracks in France. Yet it shocks him now. Once, he hears someone hiss gruffly, “Come, if you’re going to!” and there’s a snort of laughter. But he’s silent when he feels his own bunk tremble, thinks he’s giving Schiller his dignity, what little he has left. It’s the inevitable male remedy for sleeplessness, he thinks, and he feels a sullen envy when Schiller stills.

  He touches himself experimentally, but there’s nothing. He tries to think of Françoise. Fifi, as Schiller liked to call her, the whore he’d been half in love with in France. She’d been his first, though only Schiller had guessed (after seeing Karsten emerge so quickly on their first visit and whistling “Blitzkrieg!”), and he’d sworn to keep it a secret. The rest would never imagine it, Schiller reassured him. “You’re their hero, remember. You’re good at everything.”

  Still, Schiller had made ribald fun of him over Françoise, encouraging the others to tease him—not about his inexperience, but his devotion. “Camouflage,” Schiller had whispered to him once. “If they make fun of one thing, they’ll never guess the real joke. Besides, it’s good for you to have an Achilles’ heel. They’ll like you more for not being perfect.” So Karsten had tolerated the jokes. Besides, he’d been such a fool for Françoise, he actually liked to be mocked on her account. As if the jokes made her more his, even when some of the jokers had probably had her themselves.

  But then he didn’t want to have her like the others. He’d lost his virginity to her, but afterwards it felt like an anticlimax. As if he still needed to find something.

  And so he’d set about wooing her, doggedly faithful, as if, having paid for her that one time, he had to prove he loved her. How he strove to prove it! He used to wait for her, for hours if he had to, while the rest took their turns with other girls. Françoise would come halfway down the bowed stairs, see him sitting there, and greet him wearily. “No rest for the wicked, hein?” And all he’d do is take her for a drink, or if it was early enough, for coffee. Once he’d persuaded her, besought her really, to have dinner with him. “You have to eat, don’t you?” She’d been taken aback, as if it were an indecent suggestion, but that glimpse of real emotion, the thought that he’d finally touched her, had only made him redouble his efforts, until she’d relented, calling him a nag, mon mari—my husband—which, even in jest, filled him with hope (though she’d also been sure to make him promise to buy her dinner and her time). But when he thinks of her now, all he can see is her pouty picture in the hands of the Tommy on the beach.

  They used to call their trips to the brothel “maneuvers.” Going on maneuvers, they told each other with a wink when it was their turn off-duty. Trench warfare. Bayonet practice. It was the language of victors, Karsten thinks now, of conquest. Back then, of course, the girls were the ones who surrendered.

  The truth, he tells himself, making himself exhale, is that he never loved Françoise. It was the waiting for her in the brothel, the scrape of feet overhead, the opening and closing of doors as he sat in the parlor. The whispery bustle of a full house. Once, he turned to find Schiller staring at him, and he realized he’d been straightening the antimacassar on the arm of the sofa.

  He rolls over in his bunk and lights the candle on the bedpost, pulls out another sheet of paper, and sets to writing his mother another letter.

  AT LEAST in the morning there’s something to take his mind off his sleepless night. Someone wandering over the parade ground has found the hard-packed remnants of painted white lines, the traces of a football field. Karsten watches as men follow the marks hastily through the scrubby grass, dragging their heels through the dust until they meet at a corner, then another, until finally an entire pitch is unearthed. For a second, they stand around stunned, marveling as if they’ve dug up the remains of Troy alongside Schliemann. Football, here! And then there’s a flurry of calls to the guards for a ball. In the end, it’s the 150-percenters who secure one, appealing to the commandant—a grey-haired, florid-faced veteran who’d lost his right arm above the elbow—and cementing their position as camp leaders in the process.

  A game breaks out at once, and Karsten finds himself in the midst of it, nudged forward by Schiller. Karsten’s not a skillful player, but his size and strength allow him to acquit himself respectably and as the game wears on, men who’ve hardly spoken to him since their capture are passing him the ball, calling him by name. Schiller, on the sidelines, takes bets and bellows encouragement, claps Karsten on the back during a pause when the ball flies into touch.

  “Played.”

  The ball comes to rest against the fence, and the men stare at it—the players and those gathered to watch the game. There’s a single strand of wire, a foot off the ground, that runs inside the fence, set back ten feet. They’ve been warned not to cross it.

  “Let someone else,” Schiller says softly. Karsten hasn’t even been aware of the thought, but as soon as Schiller says it he can’t not run forward, stand at the wire, squinting up at the guard towers, a hand to his brow. They see him, he’s sure (the guards have been hanging out of the towers watching the game), but they make no move, and he’s damned if he’s going to ask their permission. Instead, he takes a deep breath and steps over the wire.

  “Oi,” someone shouts, “stop right there.” But Karsten strides forward, pretending he doesn’t know English—“Halt! Bollocks, what’s German for ‘Halt’?”—his head down, intent on the ball. When he bends for it, he can smell the damp grass in the ditch on the other side of the wire, and as he rises again—“Halt!” “Yeah, what’s the German for it?” “Halt!”—he looks up at last at the land beyond the fence, the trees and then the bright steep slope of pasture. He’s been here for more than a day, he realizes, but he’s barely dared look beyond the camp, over the tar-paper roofs of the barracks, through the scribble of barbed wire topping the fences, and then only in glances, as if the outside world were too glaring to look at for long.

  “No, idiot. The German for ‘halt’ is ‘halt.’”

  “Fuck it is!”

  Above and behind him there’s the dry snap of a rifle bolt, and he stands very still, staring at the view.

  A shiftless, slovenly lot the guards seem to him, more jailers than soldiers. Karsten knows the kinds of men who draw such duty—shirkers and backsliders, the dregs of an army. There’d been one in his squad in basic training, Voller, the broad arse of the platoon, always bringing up the rear. he’d eventually been transferred to some sort of cushy guard duty. There’d been grumbling among the men, but Karsten had told them, “It’s for the best. You wouldn’t put a fellow like that in the front rank of a parade any more than you’d put him in the front lines. You wouldn’t want us judged by the likes of him. Stick him in the rear where he’ll be invisible.” He’d been relieved, in truth, to see the back of him, as if Voller were some shameful secret.

  And what does that make me, he thinks, to be guarded by the likes?

  He takes one more look through the fence, glances back over his shoulder at the guard tower and the other prisoners lined up silently. And then there’s Schiller, clapping impatiently. “Come on, it’s not halftime. Let’s get on with it.”

  This is the form his gratitude takes, Karsten finally understands as he heads back. Looking out for him, vouching for him with the other men. All the little jokes to show that Karsten can be a good sport. All the little warnings.

 
He’s distracted during the rest of the game, letting the ball slip under his foot and then lunging into tackles. One clattering collision ends with the other player springing up, shoving Karsten—“Now you want to fight, eh?”—the foul escalating into a dusty, panting tussle until the other man’s teammates pull him off. Karsten looks up from under his brows, hands on knees, and sees his own side standing back, watching. None of them have come to his aid. Even Schiller is silent.

  The next time the ball flies out of play, Karsten jogs to the sidelines and tells Schiller to take his place. He doesn’t wait for the other’s reply, just turns away from the game, back towards the fence.

  The camp is at the high end of a valley, he sees, spread out across a deep shelf. There are the remains of a slate mine to the north, the hillside scraped back to the purple stone, a pile of waste slate like a burial mound beside it. The slope to the east, craggy cliffs interspersed with steep spills of scree, isn’t much less barren. But to the south, separated from the longest side of the parade ground, by a narrow lane and a stand of hawthorn trees, a grassy hillside rises to an angled ridge. It’s here the locals gathered, and it’s here that Karsten finds himself drawn. What’s over that ridge? he wonders as he drifts back and forth along the wire.

  HE’S THERE, one evening later that week, when he spots the local boys, hiding in the trees, spying on them. Something about their furtive scrutiny enrages him, almost as much as the obliviousness of the other men. They’ve been prisoners for less than a month, and already they’ve relaxed their guard to the point of being ambushed by children.

  He glares into the trees as if to say, I can see you! And when that elicits nothing more than a shivering of leaves, a shifting of shadows, he cries out, “Show yourselves. Little cowards!” Cries out in German, as though speaking to himself, not them.