2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  And perhaps because it’s so poor a meal, and his gratitude so sincere, she takes the pack of cigarettes she has stuffed in her pocket and offers him one. Even in the gloom his eyes light up. He fumbles out a smoke, scrabbles with the matches, and only after he’s taken a long drag does he relax. He catches her staring at him, and she looks away.

  “Please,” he says, gesturing to the pack, inviting her to join him, but she shakes her head. Something about his face when he drew on the cigarette. It was as if she recognised him, saw him as a young man, a boy, really, like any other, lighting a cigarette at a bus stop, in the queue for the chippy.

  “Where did you learn English?” she asks, to change the subject.

  “Cinema,” he tells her.

  “It’s lucky,” she says.

  He gives a stiff little hike to his shoulders. “Lucky for my comrades. There was so much smoke in our bunker we couldn’t find anything white enough for a flag. So they sent me out, because of my English. Now some call me Weisse Fahne — White Flag—behind my back.” He laughs, as if daring her to join in, but instead she feels a shiver pass through her, as though a distant door has been opened and a draught slipped in.

  “I meant lucky because we can talk,” she says carefully.

  “I suppose,” he says, and then simply, “Yes. That’s so.”

  “So you did surrender?” she asks shyly, and he winces as if she’s touched a wound.

  “We were overrun. We had no choice. Or so it seemed at the time.” He tips his head back to blow smoke at the sky.

  “Do you wish you hadn’t?” she whispers.

  “I’d be dead.”

  She nods. “But still. Do you wish?”

  He sucks deeply on the cigarette, his cheeks hollowing. “Every day.”

  “But now you’ve escaped.”

  He snorts. “Do I look so free?”

  “That’s why you must go,” she urges. “Go and don’t come back.”

  As if for emphasis, she presses the crumpled pack of cigarettes into his dry hand. But when he’s halfway out the door, she runs after him and holds out the matches.

  She watches him go then, trotting through the long grass, body bent low, her heart rattling like the box of matches in his shirt pocket.

  She spends the rest of the day wondering if he’s left, looking up at every flicker of movement, every stirring in the breeze. At lunch Arthur asks her, “What is it?” and she stares at her plate, waiting for him to read her guilt in the part of her hair, until he goes out again. It comes to her that the German must have been watching them, waiting for Arthur and Jim to leave, and she goes about her afternoon chores, self-conscious as an actress. It’s thrilling at first, this sense of being observed, as if she’s never alone, but as the day wears on and he doesn’t show himself, it begins to feel oppressive, as though he’s spying on her.

  She should be more worried about the scrutiny of others, she tells herself. That night she keeps her head down as she goes about her work. So preoccupied is she that it takes her a while to sense the change in the place. The local men are back, for the most part.

  The German’s been loose almost a week and his threat seems to have dissipated, the consensus being that the fellow’s long gone. But it seems to her that the new ease in the pub isn’t due just to the German’s being gone. It’s because the guards are largely absent—out on the search still, or stuck at the camp (the major has doubled the guard since the escape)—and for the first time in months there are more villagers in the pub than strangers; Welsh is the loudest language. Looking round, she can see it in the men’s eyes. It’s their pub again, their local. It’s not until her father comes in an hour later—ruddy faced from the wind, but grinning, so that he seems to still glow with the pride of having driven the guards and their dog off his land—that she recognises the same look on the other men’s faces. Why, even the constable looks happy, despite the escape, or perhaps because of it, vindicated in his warnings and somehow elevated, better than the guards he’s been chumming up to lately, his own man again.

  Jack’s telling a story about throwing out a soldier who came in late the night before: “Some joker—a captain, mind you—but he was no captain of mine, I told him when he started banging on the bar for service, and then he got all up on his high horse, said he’d get better service if he was the escaped Jerry himself, or some such rot.”

  “Said he was a Jerry!” the constable cries. “I’d have shown him the door meself if he hadn’t taken himself off to the Prince.” And Esther laughs with the rest, as if by some miracle of nerve it had actually been him, here.

  Perhaps, she thinks, looking around in wonder, the German’s done them all a favour, drawn off the English, freed them in some modest way even as he’s freed himself. They should raise a glass to him, she thinks, feeling better about helping him, when another thought overtakes her: This is what it’ll be like after the war ends. But the sudden glimpse of the future makes her stomach tighten, as if she were seeing it not from behind the bar but from behind a closed window.

  The next morning, she goes to the barn with two hard-boiled eggs tied in a hanky, but there’s no one, and she thinks, Well, good for him, though not without a pang—she’d hopped back and forth while the eggs boiled, as if she were the one in hot water—and immediately hurries to town in case there’s any word of his having been captured.

  That afternoon, though, he’s waiting for her again, and she finds herself beaming as she sees him. She produces the eggs—she’s saved them, even thought to wrap a little salt in a twist of newspaper—and he closes his fists on them tightly.

  “You know, you really have to go,” she tells him again.

  He’s rolling one of the eggs gently between his palms, as if afraid to smash it, and he doesn’t look up until the white starts to show through the cracks.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asks. “Why stay here?”

  He bites down on the shining egg, and she looks away. Between swallows, he tells her, “To let the search pass.”

  It makes sense, she supposes. It’s as good a spot as any, wild, remote, and the guard dogs can’t track him. But more than anything she feels relieved—he’ll come again. As for Mott and Mick, she gives Karsten slivers of bacon rind to feed them until they know his scent.

  He sleeps in the quarry, and she realises that he must have followed Arthur home one morning. Now he creeps up on them each day, watches the comings and goings, and then when she’s alone, he appears.

  One afternoon she’s looking out for him when she sees the clothes on the line dancing wildly, bucking and writhing in the gusty wind. As she watches, one of the pegs pops off and her navy dress pulls free, streams downwind, leaping and twisting.

  She should hurry to catch it, a breeze like this could carry it, soaring, out to sea, but all she can do is labour uphill, wading through the long grass. Breathless, she makes it at last, buries her face in the bundle in her arms, and when she looks up, he’s there behind her, chasing after a billowing scrap of white. He snatches it out of the air, holds it overhead where it snaps like a pennant as he brings it on to her. It flies in his face—her silk slip, she sees—and she grabs it from him, blushing.

  “Someone will see!” she cries, not sure if she means him or her slip.

  He comes three more times that week, fleeting visits—the first interrupted, along with her heart for a beat, by Arthur, rising early and calling for his breakfast—and each time she resolves to send him away, to refuse him food. If she keeps him here, he’ll be caught, she’s sure. And yet she can’t stop herself.

  When she heard Arthur’s cry, she pressed her hand over the German’s mouth. He was in the middle of saying something, and for a second she felt his breath on her palm, the odd softness of his lips in the midst of his stubble. Then she saw his eyes widen, and she drew her hand away, and they listened together.

  “I have to go,” she’d whispered, and he’d nodded, licked his lips.

  “Where were you
?” Arthur had asked. She looked away at first, but when he asked again, she looked into his eyes, told him, “Nowhere,” and he just shrugged.

  Only later, pouring her father’s tea, did she recall the German licking his lips, realise she’d felt his tongue, too, for a flickering second, slipping between her fingers.

  The second visit, there are no interruptions, and after she’s fed the German there’s an awkward, desperate silence until she asks him what it’s like under the water.

  “I’m not a submariner,” he tells her with a slow shake of the head. “My father was.”

  He’s silent for a moment. “I did go aboard one once. A friend smuggled me on during a training drill. Cold.” He shudders. “And wet—from all the leaks, I mean! Everything drips, everything tastes like salt and oil.” He makes a face.

  “But are there no windows?”

  He laughs, and then, seeing her disappointment, recovers himself. “We heard a whale—singing, you know. My friend said it thought we were another whale. And sometimes, I swear, I could hear schools of fish swim past us, a fluttering sound like…stroking the hull.” He halts, embarrassed. “The others said it was only kelp, or bubbles.”

  “I wish it were fish,” she says, and after a moment he nods.

  Only at the end of the week, sitting in the gloom of the barn, watching the dust float like stars through the sunlight slipping between the gaps in the wood, does she ask him his plan.

  He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you.”

  “You don’t trust me!” She stares at him. After all this! Just that morning Jim had asked for another egg, and she shook her head. “The guards,” she tells the German icily now, “have reduced their patrols. They’re back at the bar. This is your chance. Isn’t it your duty?”

  “And your duty?” he asks sullenly. “Why do you betray your country?”

  Why indeed, she wonders. But then isn’t it her second betrayal? Perhaps it comes easier. But no, she knows that’s not so. It’s that the second betrayal, so much larger than the first, overshadows it, almost erases it.

  “Would you rather I didn’t?” she manages. “Besides, it’s not my country, not in the way you mean.”

  He frowns. “You do not feel this…die Vaterlandsliebe? Fatherland-love. Der patriotismus.”

  Patriotism? She’s never seen before how love of country is so wrapped up in the love of fathers, but it suddenly seems so typical of the way men would ask for love. No, not even ask. Demand, as a duty.

  “Do you?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  She feels upbraided somehow, defensive, and then she recalls what Mrs R said on the hillside the day the Germans arrived:

  Fatherland! How did the women ever let the men get away with that one?

  “And if it were called motherland-love?” she asks.

  He stares at her as if she’s asked something else, then slowly nods. More in thought than in agreement, she thinks, but what he says eventually is “I do trust you.”

  He still sounds like he’s trying to convince himself, but she nods in turn.

  “It’s just safer for you not to know,” he adds. “In case of questions.”

  “But you do have a plan?”

  “Of course.”

  She feels a flutter in her stomach. “It’s Ireland, right? That’d be best, I think.” She can’t look at his face as she says it. She turns and stalks to the barn door.

  “Is that what you’d do?” he asks softly, following her.

  She raises an arm without looking at him, points downhill to the lacy fringe of surf along the coast. “On a clear day you can see the Wicklow Hills from here.” She nods. “That’s where I’d go.”

  There’s a long silence, and it occurs to her that he might ask her to go with him, the two of them swimming to Ireland, Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams, matching each other stroke for stroke. Could he pass as Irish? she wonders. Could she? The thought is somehow seductive. And from there, where? Germany? Could she learn German, act German? She doubts it. America, then—yes! Who knows, in America he might even pass as Welsh, with her help. What did they know of Welshness there? She’d be free to invent it. They’d travel as far as it took, find some place where the people had never heard of Wales. And not to escape Wales, she thought, but to be Welsh, him too, because no one else would know otherwise.

  She gazes at him, waiting, but the question he asks at last is “Do you want me to go?” and she breathes, “Yes.” It’s the only answer, though for a second, such is the earnestness with which he asks, she imagines she’s replying to that other imagined question.

  He stands there for a moment, swaying slightly on his heels as if in a breeze, and then he leaves her, stooping against the dusk as if the descending dark might crush him. She watches him go with a sense of release, as of a secret finally spoken.

  That night, she tells herself she’ll be glad to be rid of him. Yet there’s some misgiving nagging at her, nibbling at the edges of her satisfaction. She tries to concentrate on it, isolate it in her heart, and then it comes to her. She’s jealous, of course. She wants him to escape, but most of all she wishes he could have taken her with him.

  It makes her remember Rhys, her jealousy at his leaving. Is that why she didn’t stop him? she wonders. Did she want him to go, to go for her? And suddenly it seems as if the Rhys who left, the Rhys who went—why, she’d have married that Rhys.

  Poor thing, she thinks, he couldn’t win.

  But then it occurs to her that that Rhys, the Rhys who left, might not have wanted her any more.

  The next day, she doesn’t see the German, or the next, or the next, and by the fourth day—watching Arthur cutting the rams out of the flock and penning them for another season—she concludes he’s gone at last. But instead of filling her with the expected relief, the thought only makes her despair. She dreams of him that night, imagines him on a little boat out at sea. The boat’s oddly familiar, and it comes to her that it’s the ship in a bottle he gave to Jim, and then she’s on board herself, looking up at the frayed grey sail overhead, which reminds her of the hole in his shirt, and she wonders where it is. And then her hands are moving over his chest, his arms, looking for that little hole. He’s stretched out before her on the sand now, waves lapping at their feet, and she’s kneeling over him, lifting his limp arm, hunting for the hole in the folds and creases of his wet shirt, thinking, I can mend that for you, I can mend it, if I can only find it.

  Twenty

  Escape, it has come to Karsten, is as complicated as surrender. Not one act, one moment, so much as a process. Escape followed by escape followed by escape, just as one surrender succeeds another and another. It’s exhausting to think of.

  From within the wire, he recalls, freedom always seemed so limitless, so infinite in its possibilities. The men in the barracks would while away the sleepless nights talking of what they’d do after their release—the beers they’d drink, the schnitzel they’d eat, the baths they’d take. Freedom in their minds was silk sheets, pressed shirts, obliging women. Karsten loved to listen to them, imagining them as guests at the grand hotel he’d manage one day. But of course, like his fantasy of a hotel, their dreams weren’t of any life they’d lead, but of a life they promised to themselves after release. They were dreams of escape from the camp, to be sure, but also from their old lives. More than that, he thinks, lying in a ditch by a deserted lane, they were the dreams of conquerors, of the spoils of war. None of them had come close to such things at home—only briefly in France, for forty-eight hours at a time.

  In fact, escape, the here and now of it, is poverty, not luxury. It’s being cold and wet and hungry. Oh, there’d been a brief moment of elation: the breeze in his hair at the top of the fence, the lurch in his stomach as he’d dropped to the ground, the look of naked astonishment on the faces pressed to the wire. And then Karsten had bolted into the night, dodging the guards and following the boys, bumping against them, laughing with them, unrecognised in the night. Aro
und the bend they’d scattered in the darkness and he’d gone his own way. He’d climbed at first, with some idea of getting to higher ground, some faith in his ability to move faster in mountainous terrain than anyone he knew.

  There’d been no sign of pursuit, the guards charging after the boys if they could be bothered to go after anyone, and he thought that if the other prisoners kept quiet, he might not be missed until the next morning. But he’d been idle for so long, his muscles felt stiff and tight as he strode up the dark slope, and dropping down the far side, he began to realise that he had no food, no shelter, no idea what he was doing. He might have broken his ankle, even his neck, that first night, sliding down a long slope of scree in the dark, but he’d been lucky, had stumbled upon what he thought was a cave mouth, and pulled himself inside. He’d lain there that night, and only then had it come to him, what Jim had whispered at the wire, a name, her name. Esther.

  Why of course! he’d thought, laughing at the perfect dreamlike inevitability of it. And then, miraculously, he’d slept, his deepest night of sleep in months, and on a bed of stone at that, only to be woken by the baying of dogs on the breeze, wondering if he’d merely dreamed her name. He’d drawn back into his lair and discovered that the cave he’d imagined was no cave at all, but a tunnel, a mine shaft. Praying the dogs couldn’t track his scent over rock, he’d retreated underground, only to get lost in a series of galleries. He’d stumbled around in them for hours, maybe a day or more, until he’d made out a dim light, hurried towards it, to find an old man snoring at the foot of a tall ladder, a bottle beside him.