The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

It’s been less than three months, Karsten thinks—and he has to calculate the dates a second time in his mind before he can quite believe it—but already time hangs heavier on them than a field pack.

  The other men, he knows, have been fitfully energized by the new weekly film show that the commandant has instituted at their pleading. They’ve had two shows so far, a frothy aquatic musical and an ancient horror movie. They watched the former nonsense with rapt awe, so long had it been since most of them had seen a woman. Esther Williams was all they could talk about for days—Karsten even found himself picturing his Welsh girl in a sleek swimsuit—until the 150-percenters began to sneer, “What kind of a name do you think Esther is, anyway?” Frankenstein, shown the next week, drew a still larger audience, probably because the story was easy to follow without knowing the language, though also, Karsten suspected darkly, because it allowed the men to be afraid, gave them license to experience those fears they could never talk about to each other. It’s escapism, he knows, rather than escape, but he’s gone along with all the rest, if only to watch the newsreels.

  They’re the price of the films, of course. Propaganda, the camp leaders have warned, encouraging the men to talk back to them, or over them, to throw Heil Hitlers up on the screen, or shadow puppets—yapping dogs, snapping crocodiles. The men greet the Pathé cockerel with sounds of frenzied clucking and shotgun blasts, like a crowd of schoolboys. When Churchill appears, or the long-faced King, they boo; when it’s de Gaulle, they hum the cancan. As if the war were some vaudeville show, Karsten thinks. He doesn’t believe the newsreels any more than the rest do, but they’re a forceful reminder that he’s only an audience for the war now, no longer an actor in it.

  He picks up his letter again, touches the pencil point to his tongue. It’s a whole month since he’s last written. Not that the other men are any better—after the initial flurry of letter writing, they’ve all fallen off. Still, he feels dogged about it.

  He might write her about the boy, he supposes.

  Karsten hadn’t expected to see him again after the little planes had proved such a failure, but he’d been back within the week, hanging around the wire. So lonely, Karsten thought, even we’re company. Poor company at that. At least the boy had told him his name—Jim—if not the girl’s. Even as he’d slipped him the ship in a bottle, which he hoped might make the boy feel a little closer to his own father, he’d feared it wasn’t much of an offering. He’d watched Jim carry the bottle away with a sinking sensation, and when he didn’t return for the next couple of days, he presumed the worst—smashed to bits.

  But then there he’d been, running to the wire, right up against it, shaking it so hard it rang, beads of rain flying from it. And he’d been shouting, bawling. Karsten had started forward before he’d made it out. “Murderers. Filthy bastard murderers!” He paused then. It was clear this time the curses were in earnest. His father, Karsten thought. But he went on nevertheless, and the boy actually backed away from him, though the wire stood between them, as if Karsten might somehow strike him dead anyway.

  “What is it?” Karsten asked, and the boy told him, spitting it out, so breathlessly Karsten could barely follow.

  “And you killed him,” Jim cried. “You lot.”

  And then he’d started flinging stones, mud, and Karsten had been driven back out of range, shamed as much as anything by his initial relief that it wasn’t the boy’s father, at least. But then it came to him, watching the boy’s fury, that perhaps one death was a harbinger of the other.

  Karsten had felt so terrible he tried to talk about it to Schiller in the mess the next morning.

  “You didn’t kill him,” the other told him between mouthfuls of porridge. “Can’t be guilty for something you didn’t do.”

  Karsten nodded, though somehow the very awfulness of it was that he felt guilty for something he hadn’t done. “Not guilt, then,” he tried. “Pity perhaps? Sorrow?”

  “For the enemy?”

  “For them. For us. I don’t know! Sometimes it feels like they’re all linked somehow, the losses, like a chain, one death coupled to the next, and the next, whichever side they’re on.”

  Schiller sipped his coffee, made a face. “I often think how when Willi went down, he spilled his coffee. It must have been on the ledge below the firing slit, until I felt it splash me, you know, the warmth soaking my sleeve. The tin cup bounced across the floor. You don’t recall?”

  “No.”

  Schiller nodded. “Because it wasn’t coffee, of course. There was no cup. I only imagined it.” He stared into the oily blackness of his mug, gave a little shudder. “I don’t want to be a link in a chain.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “That’s why we surrendered, isn’t it?”

  Jim had been back that night, joined by the rest of the boys, one of the gang again, standing right next to the albino, the crowd of them hurling abuse, mudballs, fallen branches. The men had hung back, weathered the storm until the guards had finally ordered the lads off.

  Jim had kept coming, though, night after night, with the others and eventually alone again, growing quieter, glowering rather than raging, but still bright with hatred. It had been a week before Karsten could approach close enough to call out what he’d been thinking for days: “But you said he was missing. You don’t know he’s dead.” The boy blinked. “He could be a prisoner like us. My own mother thought I was dead when she didn’t hear. My own mother.”

  Jim’s face had stiffened, grown masklike. He’d said nothing, but he left earlier than usual, and the next afternoon he’d been back at the wire, waiting.

  When Karsten got close this time, he saw Jim had a black eye, a real shiner.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “Some lads,” Jim said sullenly. “At school.”

  “But why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because of what?”

  “Because I told them about Rhys, about him maybe being a prisoner.” He looked down at his feet, twisting in the dirt of the lane, and then up at Karsten. “What you said.”

  “And they didn’t believe you?”

  “No, they did. They believed it.” He glared at Karsten. “I didn’t say you’d told me.”

  “But why did they hit you?”

  And Jim said fiercely, “I started it. ‘A prisoner?’ they said. ‘Doesn’t that mean he surrendered?’ They said being captured meant he was a coward. So I fought them.” He raised his small bruised fists, and for a second, before waving them aside, Karsten felt a thrill of pride in the boy.

  “And they gave you that?”

  “You should see them.”

  Karsten put a hand on the wire. “You know, I only said your friend might be a prisoner.”

  “But it’s the only explanation,” the boy said. “The only hope.”

  The way he said it—like a general—Karsten knew he believed it. Maybe there had been moments of doubt. Maybe others had tried to change his mind. But fighting for it, being beaten for it, had convinced him somehow, proved it.

  On the other side of the wire, the boy was looking around, past Karsten, to the men on the football field, the barracks behind.

  “What’s it like being a prisoner?”

  “Dull!”

  “What do you do?”

  “As you see. Play sports, write letters, walk.” Karsten shrugged.

  “Aren’t you planning an escape?”

  He laughed. “Escape? I don’t think so. Where would we go? Who would help us?” But the boy, he saw, wasn’t laughing. If anything he seemed disappointed, and it moved Karsten to add, “Besides, what makes you think I’d tell you about it?”

  “So you do think about escaping?”

  “Are you trying to trick me?”

  “Tell me!”

  Karsten leaned down and whispered, “All the time.”

  He wasn’t sure what to expect. Perhaps that the boy would be frightened, but instead he beamed. They were silent for a minute, not looking at each other.
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br />   “Are you,” Jim asked shyly, “a coward?”

  Karsten hunched his shoulders, as if for a blow that had already fallen.

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  He was serious, Karsten saw, the answer deeply important to him. For just a moment, he wanted to cry yes! and have done with it. For just a moment, he could feel the cool relief of admitting it, even to this child. He was almost certain the boy would rather have his friend alive and a coward than brave and dead. All he had to do was say it. Yet something inside him recoiled. Some pride, some recollection of those dreadful steps down the passage out of the bunker. He recalled Schiller, of all people, back in training when he was still their sergeant, saying once that the thing cowards were most afraid of was being found out: “Which makes them act like fucking heroes.”

  The boy was still waiting, an almost pleading look on his face, and finally Karsten told him, “I hope not.”

  Jim nodded.

  “I’m glad.”

  And Karsten felt a lightening inside himself, though he knew the sentiment was more for the other man, the boy’s friend. “Cowards don’t get taken prisoner, do they?” he added. “It stands to reason. A real coward just runs away.” And for a second he actually believed it.

  OF COURSE, he can’t write any of this to his mother, he thinks, glumly. Funny how he could say such things to a boy, a stranger, the enemy, and not to his own mother. She’s as much as told him she doesn’t want the truth, but having not told it to her, he doesn’t know what else to write. One thing you could say for your enemy: there was no danger of betraying him. The paper in his hands is wilting in the heat, still blank, but looking as if it could hardly support words any longer.

  Behind him some fellows have started a football game; others to bet on it. In short, it’s desultory business as usual. He’s asked to play, but shakes his head. Twice the ball bounces through the crowd where he’s sitting. To his right, a group of men talk about the upcoming film. They’ve been promised The Invisible Man this week, and anticipation is high after seeing a clip of it in the coming attractions—that bewitching image of a man, head swathed in bandages, slowly unwinding the white gauze, gloved hands passing around and around his head to reveal nothing, no hair, no features, just those glasses hanging in space above a bandaged jaw line.

  What an image for prisoners, Karsten thinks. What they wouldn’t give to be invisible, to just walk out of the gates.

  The fellows beside him are speculating about whether such a thing is possible, and he can’t help eavesdropping. The 150-percenters have put about rumors—secret weapons, armies in reserve—to keep their spirits up. Were such things so much more unlikely than the astounding flying bombs raining down on London? What if the Führer’s scientists had discovered how to make a man disappear? someone asks. Mightn’t there be secret armies of invisible men waiting in special camps to be unleashed, hundreds, thousands of men made to disappear by the science of the fatherland?

  Childish hopes, Karsten thinks, turning away, though he wishes he could share them. Those pictures of the bandaged man only made him wonder what kind of terrible wound the fellow had suffered. What kind of hideous disfigurement could only be healed by making it’s victim invisible? It makes him think of the flamethrower casualties, the bandaged wounded they’d seen carried past them on the beach at Normandy. That could have been him, or Schiller or Heino, if he hadn’t surrendered. He’s wondered what lay beneath those dressings—melted, scorched flesh—but he’s never imagined emptiness, nothingness. It’s an odd kind of healing, he thinks, that makes both wound and man vanish.

  The ball bounces into their midst again and Karsten sets the letter aside. He folds the paper into his pocket, relieved, and goes after the ball. But when he turns to kick it back to the players, he sees they’re looking the other way, towards the guardhouse, where a crowd is forming. Somewhere he hears a radio playing, a tune he recognizes. Slowly it comes to him: La Marseillaise. It was banned in France, but more than once, on patrol, they’d heard it faintly in the village, clattering through the streets after it’s fugitive strains, trying to determine which house it was coming from, never finding it’s source.

  Still holding the ball, he starts to follow the other men, hurrying towards the guardhouse, the radio playing inside it. Something has happened, he thinks, his heart racing. But before he gets there, the news spreads towards him, called from men on the fringe of the crowd. Paris has fallen, and as he hears it, he slows to a walk, a stop. Paris has fallen. He pats the pocket of his tunic, feels the paper there, crinkling. At last, he thinks, news. Something to write to his mother. But then, by the time it reaches her, she’ll already know, of course.

  IT’S JUST MORE propaganda, the camp leaders insist the next morning. Paris? Impossible! But if it is a lie, a fiction, the men see that their guards believe it. The Tommies, who themselves have seemed stunned by the drudgery of camp life, are cheerful for a few days, giddy even, suddenly generous with their cigarettes and chocolate. The men accept them hesitantly, as if they might be tainted, but eat and smoke them anyway, scowling.

  Karsten can barely believe the news himself. All his dreams of escape have been of France, of getting to France, and now it’s not enough. He tries to imagine the fall of Paris, but all he can think of are the images of German forces taking the white city. He thinks of his mother, her words as she watched the newsreels of the conquest in ’40. The end of the war. They thought they’d won. So now what does it mean? He remembers the Arc de Triomphe, standing beneath it, the marble bright but cool, almost chilly on a warm spring day. Our triumph. Their triumph. As if the stone itself were fickle. When he pictures the arch, only the direction of the marching men is different, as if the newsreels he remembers have been run backwards through the projector. He hopes it’ll be as easy to reverse again.

  And then there it is, at the end of the week, on the Pathé News. The raucous, cheering crowds in the familiar, flickering streets. Smiling, waving Tommies astride their tanks, and the girls throwing garlands, kisses. He feels a pang of jealousy, but what haunts him afterwards, what he sees most vividly in his memory, are those other images, not of celebration but revenge, the pictures of the French women shorn in the streets. The women who slept with Germans. Les collaborateurs horizontale. He thinks of Françoise, of the dinner he pleaded with her to join him for. The meal, he hoped, would make their relationship normal, like a courtship. Proper. And for the first time he sees that she had taken pity on him when she agreed. Pity on him, the conqueror, the occupier! He’d insisted on the finest food, the best wine. Called for music, left a generous tip.

  “I’m in love with you,” he’d told her, and she’d nodded perfunctorily, not even looking up from her dinner.

  “Do you think you could ever love me?” he’d asked.

  She’d chewed and swallowed. “Jamais!”

  “But why?”

  She’d searched for the words. “We are enemies, hein? Anything other”—she rubbed her finger and thumb together—“would be surrender.”

  He cringes at the thought, but makes himself imagine her, the hair tumbling around her ears, the locks bouncing off her narrow shoulders, wafting to the floor like feathers. He hears the women have been stripped in the streets, but it’s this nakedness, the nakedness of her head, a nakedness he never imagined, that appalls him. To be seen so! “Forgive me, but she’s just a French whore,” Schiller tells him. “She’s had worse done to her.” But the shame of it seems unbearable, intolerable to Karsten. He can’t imagine how she’ll possibly survive it. It makes him think of basic training, the way they’d all been shorn that first day, their heads looking so shrunken, so white, as if the skulls beneath them had been revealed already in all their thin fragility.

  And he’d been worried about her in the arms of a Tommy! Such selfishness. He hopes now that she has a Tommy, a big, loving one, that she clings to him, drapes her tresses around him, sweeps them across his chest in the night. Someone who ca
n save her hair.

  Karsten had once begged her for a lock of it. They’d been in the corner of a bar, and she’d reached a hand beneath her skirt and pulled out a single pale loop, held it glistening before him, laughing at his stricken face.

  It was the only thing she ever gave him for free.

  In the night, when he can sleep, he dreams the smell of Françoise’s hair. It’s there, faintly, though he can’t quite inhale it, can’t quite capture it. He dreams of holding her, aches to protect her, cradling her head, feeling it’s hard ridges instead of curls, the scabs from the scissors, the raw, torn places. Her crown is hard under his chin.

  He lies there then, rigid, feeling his erection subsiding in tiny staggering flinches.

  Just a French whore, he tells himself. But that’s exactly what terrifies him. He can’t even protect her. The thought of a single hair on her head being harmed shakes him.

  And then he finds it’s not Françoise he’s thinking of, but his mother. He’s never felt more imprisoned.

  THE BOYS, who’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, appear again in the wake of the news from France, inspired no doubt by the newsreels. Karsten studies them with a kind of dull fury, Jim among the rest, but does his best to ignore them. He feels like a fool for trying to befriend the boy.

  They’re not interested in him anyway. Since the fall of Paris, the camp leaders, the NCOs, have been trying to set an example, polishing their boots and buckles, brushing their uniforms, and resuming drill each evening, bullying as many of the others into joining as they can. It’s this spectacle the boys are transfixed by, watching the massed ranks file by on the parade ground, and then seeming to join, forming a column of their own that marches up and down the lane as if the fence were a mirror, in emulation, it seems at first, and then gradually in shambolic parody, bumping into each other, kicking each other up the backside. When the men give their Heil Hitler, the boys all offer another salute, putting a finger to their upper lips, a ragged line of dirty-kneed Führers.