Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  “They were my cousins,” I said. “My aunt and two cousins.”

  “Even worse!” He laughed as if it was unforgivable, our little moment in London on the far side of everything. I looked at my watch impatiently. I really was going to have to start running soon to get that train.

  “Listen, Bill —”

  “Rufus said you were taken prisoner. Same as happened to me, practically.”

  “I have this train to catch. My wife and I are going down to see —”

  “It was before the Somme.” Nothing was going to stop that mouth from spilling over. “I was doing some extra bayonet training with my friend Hayshaw. I figured we hadn’t practiced enough, you know. Nothing can prepare you for what a real battle is like. But we had this freak accident. His bayonet went right through some important bones in my foot.” He lifted up his shoe to show me, as if I might be able to see through the shiny black leather. “It’s never been right since Hayshaw. They had an inquiry and everything. All above board. Everyone was cleared. Just one of those things. So in a way both of us got lucky. We both missed the worst of the war.”

  For a second I wanted to stamp my worn heel on his fortunate wound. Something in my face must have telegraphed my disgust.

  “Anyway,” he said nervously. “I do get into town from time to time. I’m in import-export.” He fished a card out of a silver pocket case and thrust it at me. I took it and resumed walking towards the station. I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t have too much trouble keeping up. His wind started to go before his foot. “And I heard about the new commission that’s been set up to give you boys compensation,” he said.

  “Commission?”

  “Government operation to get money from Germany for the prisoners who were mistreated. Apparently some were. Mistreated.”

  I told Bill Kelsie again about the train, about Lillian.

  “You hurry on then,” he said. “Don’t want to hold you up. But you weren’t mistreated, were you? Rufus said —”

  “Great to see you, Bill.” I shook his meaty hand, then legged on past him.

  “Might be worth applying anyway,” he said. “You never know. Nothing like government money in tough times. Rufus said you’re working as an artist. That must be some trick!”

  “I wouldn’t touch it with iron tongs,” I said to him, meaning the government money.

  At the station Lillian was sitting all alone on a big, polished bench surrounded by our bags, biting her cheeks and staring at the door. When she saw me she dipped her head and rose — two hands under her belly to help lift herself up. “Sorry I’m late!” I said.

  “I would have bought the tickets,” she said in a quiet, angry voice, “but I didn’t have enough money after the cab.”

  I picked up the bags — four suitcases and a hand basket — and hurried off to the wicket. I couldn’t think of why she’d packed what must have been half the house. But I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I stayed as quiet as I could.

  “If only you’d left me enough money this morning,” she went on. “But you said you’d be here in plenty of time.” She was working up to a good, hard blow. I knew it yet couldn’t help myself.

  “I ran into someone on the street and couldn’t get him to stop talking,” I said.

  “Who was it?”

  We were almost at the wicket now. Two elderly women stood in line in front of us, chattering like a couple of crows on a telephone line. I glanced at the station clock: 12:22.

  “Excuse me, ladies,” I said. “My wife and I are late, and it’s all my fault. I wonder if we might be allowed ahead of you? Our train leaves in three minutes.”

  They turned to eye me suspiciously. But when they saw Lillian in her enormous print dress they stepped aside.

  “Bien sûr,” one of them said. “Après vous deux.”

  I paid for the tickets in a heat of urgency, but even as the ticket master was handing me my change I knew we weren’t going to make it. “Let’s wait for the next,” I said.

  “But we can still make it!” Lillian cried. She started struggling with the luggage herself while the crows and the ticket master looked on. I threw him a questioning glance, and he checked his watch doubtfully.

  “You’d have to run.”

  I opened my hands. “Lillian, you’re in no con —”

  But she was already scrambling, with most of the bags clutched to her. I grabbed the basket and the one small case, which she’d left for me, and galloped after her. When I caught up to her I tried to wrestle some of the other bags from her, but dropped the basket in the confusion. Instantly, Lillian stopped to pick it up.

  “We can catch the next train!”

  “You catch it if you want!” she hurled back, then she was running again. She had the basket now, so I took the heavy bag. I was conscious of a crowd watching us with too much interest. At the platform the Mireille train was already pulling out, but slowly. I sprinted ahead and threw on what bags I had, then ran back and took what I could from Lillian and threw those on as well. She just had the basket now, but the train was speeding up.

  I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. But our luggage was leaving. “Hurry!” I said. A conductor blew his whistle at us. Then I had her arm, and the car slid by us with no time to decide. I leapt for the moving step, pulling Lillian with me.

  “Ramsay!” she said, struggling. She seemed to be trying to pull away. But then she grabbed the handrail and I hauled her up. Just in time as it turned out: the platform ended a few yards further on.

  I hadn’t been watching that part of the near-disaster, but Lillian had. Somehow we’d gotten away with it.

  We found seats, and I hurried off to secure the luggage in a proper rack. When I got back Lillian was staring out the window as if she might never speak to me again.

  “That was bloody reckless and stupid,” I said. “I’m sorry for my part of it. We should have just waited.”

  “Why didn’t you just give me enough money this morning?” she said, without looking at me. “You treat me like a child. Why couldn’t you just come on time?”

  My heart was still hammering and I found myself clenching my fists. “I might have left work early. But I don’t want to give Frame any excuses —”

  “Thank the Lord we’re all still in one piece.” She stared relentlessly out the dirty window as we chugged past the baking, steamy streets of the city, the tenements with their laundry waving over the fire escapes, the darkened, still factory buildings with half their windows broken in, the dusty patches of weed and rock lining the railbed on the way out of town. I explained again about Bill Kelsie and the delay. When I finished I listened to the blessed clattering of the rails, and for a moment I thought she’d just leave it. But finally she said, “London again. Everything happened to you in London.”

  “A lot of things didn’t happen in London.” I was too riled up. I should have just stayed quiet.

  “You yearn for her, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She turned her gaze on me full bore. “Why didn’t you marry her if you wanted her so much? Is she too close a cousin?”

  “I married you,” I said in a quiet fury. “I love you.”

  “Yes, the fat cow!”

  We were picking up speed now, climbing the bridge over the St. Lawrence before hurtling south. The sun on the wide water shone painfully silver, and all the ships looked rusted and old. We wouldn’t get to Mireille soon enough. Not for me. I could not stay quiet and I could not fight. I took Lillian’s hand and held it warmly between my own. “You are more beautiful, more full of life now than even when I met you, and when I met you I thought I’d never seen anyone so radiant. Anyone. All right?”

  She looked down at our hands together.

  “But still you pine for her. What did she do for you?”

  “Nothing!”

  She turned her gaze out the window again, and I turned my body away and glimpsed, with my rattled eyes, a man I was ce
rtain, for a moment, was Collins making his way up the aisle. I almost called out. But it wasn’t the Collins I first met who’d come to get me in the hospital, or the Collins at the manure pile leading the lead-footed fannigans. It was the later Collins, after the guards had beat him for our schoolboy pranks, after his days in solitary. It was Collins suddenly old and spent, Collins in defeat, Collins broken but still standing, a sad rumour of himself.

  The ghost of that Collins shuffled past. I stared at the space where he’d been, Lillian kept her eyes trained out the dirty window, and we did not say another word the next fifty miles.

  “Now then, lads,” Collins says softly, his weak voice barely carrying to the back row where I stand out of the bitter wind. I’m trying to stay still but my limbs are in a ragged retreat from the cold. “There is mail, apparently, but we must earn the right to see it. If we can all stay still and silent — ”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Witherspoon kicks at the dirt two rows ahead of me. Others turn their heads and mutter.

  “Shh! Quiet!” Collins pleads. “The more fuss we make, the longer we’ll have to stay out here. I was told — ”

  He is such a small man, and his cheeks have fallen in from the hunger of this winter, from that and worse, what the guards have done to him, but his eyes are in a desperate dance like the last candles on a Christmas tree.

  “Why the fuck aren’t Agony and Blasphemy standing with us, then?” someone challenges. I crane to see who it is: Napier, a new arrival who stands half a head taller than even Witherspoon. It’s a wonder either of them survived the trenches.

  “They want us to think about our conduct,” Collins says, pronouncing the words carefully. “Now, we can stay out here and freeze or we can get our mail fairly quickly, I imagine, and go back inside to read it. Which would you rather do? Let’s pick our battles, gents.”

  The moaning and muttering dies down. It’s impossible to stand still, though, in such a wind. We have to shuffle our feet to keep from freezing, slap ourselves and shove our hands into pockets. Our ranks close slowly, unconsciously, as we become one organism against the cold, one man’s heat reaching out to another’s, a wall of backs sheltering those behind.

  With Collins standing bent and alone out front. I don’t know how he stays upright. Even the Russians have gone inside to get away from this chill, and they’re so desperate they usually stand through anything just to watch us get our mail and parcels. Someone always slips them something.

  A man collapses in our front rank — Lennox, who is pulled to his feet again but can barely manage to keep standing. Collins orders Williams to shift places with him, and some of the others help him back to the relative protection of the inner ranks.

  “There better be bloody good mail,” Williams mutters, and the rest of us take it as an excuse to begin talking again, to openly stamp up and down, to slap our arms and blow breath on our freezing fingers.

  “Lads! Calm now,” Collins says in alarm, almost ready to shout. “I’m sure it won’t be too much longer.”

  It is long. It’s as long as the war, as any of our lives. The dull excuse for a sun crawls its way across the painful sky, and our teeth clank together, our blood abandons all but the core of our most vital organs. In one of the windows of the administrative building across the compound, tucked safely behind barbed wire, we spot the two tiny figures, Agony and Blasphemy, who appear from time to time to look out at us.

  We call. We yell. We scream our lungs out and jump and wave our hands.

  “Lads, lads,” Collins says again in a failing voice. “We’ve been out here this long. I’m sure they’ll come. A few more minutes!”

  “Who gives a shit about mail?” Sherwood says.

  “There probably isn’t any after all,” someone else calls.

  “They threw it away. If I know those —”

  Two grey-clad figures appear in the distance, slowly marching towards us. The larger one, Blasphemy, has a sack over his shoulder.

  “Steady up, lads!” Collins says.

  The closer they get the slower they walk and the colder the wind seems to blow. Collins salutes just over Agony’s shoulder, straight to the lamppost, and reports in his fractured German. Blasphemy lets the mail sack slip onto the ground. Then Agony begins one of his standard harangues, pausing occasionally to let Collins provide a minimal translation.

  “It’s all about obedience, boys,” Collins says. “Discipline. A modern army is based on discipline and we haven’t any, which is why we’re all prisoners and why Germany is winning this war so handily. Humour him, lads. It’s all about Arbeit, this life is Strafe, Strafe! We’ll make it much easier on ourselves when we learn to follow orders. And on and on, more words than I can follow. Look concerned, lads, look like the sharp fighters you are. That’s it. That’s bloody it. If we weren’t such bloody fannigans we’d have our mail by now.”

  Agony begins pacing, and even Blasphemy starts to look uncomfortable in the biting wind.

  “Now we’re on to the Fatherland. Bear with it, boys, it can’t last forever. But the Fatherland is full of genius scientists, you see, and other great minds . . . and they know about discipline. They’re all champion athletes, you get the idea, yes, yes, the Fatherland. Look reverential.”

  “Why don’t you cut the fucking crap?” Napier calls out.

  My eyes are on Collins, on how his shoulders shudder at this new trouble.

  Blasphemy drags the offender out of the ranks and throws the tall man on the frozen dirt. Three times quickly he kicks him in the groin, then methodically, several more times, in the stomach and ribs. Napier lies groaning and spitting blood and we stand and watch, unable to move.

  Collins turns his gaze slightly away in the practiced manner of a veteran fannigan.

  “The German soldier,” he says softly a little later, when picking up the translation, “Is so much superior to any English mercenary swine. That is why the war will eventually be won by the Fatherland.”

  Hours later, it seems, the letters are distributed. Blasphemy hands them one at a time to Agony, who examines each envelope minutely, then hands it to Collins, who reads out the name. Then the soldier marches to the front, salutes the lamppost, receives his envelope and marches back. The name on the next envelope isn’t read out until the previous man is all the way back in ranks, even if that next letter belongs to the very same person.

  “Crome!” Collins calls finally, and I march out, determined to make a show of it. But my limbs feel stuffed with frozen straw, as if they’ll crack away with too much movement.

  The halt, the salute. I look steadily past Agony’s face. Wait for the proffered envelope before extending my hand. Not Mother or Father’s handwriting. Hers. In a second it’s as if hot oil has flushed through my system.

  I march back, the envelope waving in the cold wind like a talisman to ward off all evil. My first letter from Margaret. I’m dying to tear it open immediately. To hell with it all! A letter from Margaret!

  Instead I stand still as a post. Napier remains on the ground, moaning dully, and Witherspoon has received three letters from Beatrice. He is muttering beneath his breath, “Come on, fuck, come on, get this over with.”

  But only when all the mail is distributed are men allowed to carry the fallen Napier off to the clinic, to read their messages from home.

  Finally we march into our smelly compound with the one bare light suspended from the bleak board ceiling, the oppressive rows of rough lumber bunks, the overflowing shit buckets fore and aft. The paper of the envelope is so thin and delicate I am fearful of ripping it to shreds in simply holding it. But I manage to pry it open and then gorge myself on her words like a starved wolf tearing into a carcass, swallowing down whole paragraphs without reflection, just to taste the fact of it: a letter from Margaret has arrived here in hell.

  Then slower, slower, I read the words again, sitting on the edge of my straw mattress, up above Witherspoon with his mound of mail, over which he is weeping like a man who has
dug up lost treasure. My one blanket is wrapped around my whole shaking body.

  Dearest Cousin Ramsay,

  I have written to your father in Victoria and now he writes back with this new address for you which I hope is the correct one. As soon as we learned that it was possible that you were captured rather than killed, Emily, Mother and I sent off packages in your name to a number of different camps that we know of. You will remember that our foundation has been involved in sending packages to prisoners, but I can tell you that is no guarantee of our knowing anything or being able to help promptly. It is often a nightmare to get packages to the proper men even when we know for certain where they are.

  I can’t tell you how overjoyed we were when we learned the news that you had survived. Father paced up and down the hallway bellowing (in his way), “He’s alive! He’s alive!” when the cable came from your mother. We cried and laughed and Mother spilled the potted plant she was holding.

  So much bad news arrives by cable these days.

  The first word (perhaps you have heard this) was that you were dead. Father was certain you had given your life defending General Mercer. The accounts of the battle in the newspaper were at the same time horrific and so sketchy as to drive one mad for want of facts.

  I am devastated to learn of Thomas and Will. I know your parents have written to you already and so this is not news. But I regret terribly that I never met them, and — as you well know — that this awful war ever had to take place. The losses for all of us are incomprehensible.

  But you are safe! Please know what joy the news has brought us, even though we are concerned for your health and welfare. I am sending under separate cover a package of food and basic necessities. Please write as soon as you can — I fear I cannot believe the news until something has arrived in your hand.

  I am sorry this is such a frazzle. I will compose something more worthwhile at another time. But let me speed this to you with all our love.

  Sincerely, your cousin Margaret

  p.s. Emily is sending her own letter separately, and I imagine you will hear from Mother as well, and perhaps even Father, who was so taken with you while you were here, Ramsay. He would never say it but I’m sure he now thinks of you as a son.