by Alan Cumyn
“Well!” I said, and shook the man’s hand. “Fancy seeing you. How have you been?”
“Yes, it’s been ages,” he said. It was Gil Jenkins from my old office. So we sat back at the bar. I collected my change since the keep hadn’t yet noticed it, and another whisky slid down my ragged and impoverished throat. Jenkins nodded at my portfolio.
“Trying to raise a little interest?”
He’d been keeping busy, he said, and had quite a few leads, and everyone knew the downturn wouldn’t last.
“The government won’t allow it,” he said. “I mean, we can’t just leave all these men on the streets with nothing to do. There’ll be work camps, I’m sure.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“You fought in the war,” he said. He was younger than me, much better looking even in this down-in-the-mouth, somewhat drunken state. “A lot of men fought, and now look at the way you’re being treated!”
Some of the others stopped to peer at us through their own hazy eyes.
Gil Jenkins lurched to his feet. He fumbled in his pockets, then thrust a much-folded piece of paper at me. “This is a job I heard about. They need a great bloody artist. I was going to go myself but you need it more than me. You’re married. And you’ve got a kid.”
I took out a small notebook that I carried with me and copied out the address, then handed him back his slip of paper.
“We’ll both go,” I said. “How old is this job, anyway?”
He pushed his slip back to me.
“Look, I’ve made a note,” I said, but he wouldn’t touch the paper. I took out my few coins once more to lay on the counter. As I turned to leave I felt him pulling on the bottom of my jacket.
“I haven’t worked all year,” Gil said, “and when I sit down to do anything now my hands won’t stay steady.” I watched them quiver as he held them out for me.
“It’s just the drink,” I said, and steadied them with my own hands.
“I can’t draw a bloody thing,” Gil Jenkins said.
“Crome has money,” Collins says. It is late and I am huddled under my filthy blankets, turned away from the glare of the lone light bulb hanging from the barracks ceiling.
“Crome has everything,” someone else says.
“Crome! Ramsay!”
I try to ignore them.
“Come on — we’re having a fucking contest and you’re the only rich one in the room. You be the bank, all right?”
I’ve been working days in the adjacent officers’ camp, painting the scenery for the production of Hamlet they are trying to mount. They are not made to work, of course, being officers, and are fed somewhat properly, and I have missed several days now of ditch duty to work on the flats and fill in at the officers’ kitchen.
Witherspoon shakes my shoulder. One side of his face has hardened into a squint, as if he is perpetually bracing himself to be punched. On the other side a scar stretches from the jaw hinge across to the front of his throat — an altercation with Sergeant Blasphemy that I didn’t see.
“I have very little money,” I say.
“Too good for us now? Going to move in with the officers and leave the likes of us to shovel frozen shit for the Fatherland?”
“Calm down,” Collins says to Witherspoon. “We want a man in the officers’ kitchen.” I’ve been bringing them what I can — bits of sausage sometimes, apples and potatoes, nearly edible bread. “Besides, you are going to join in, aren’t you, Crome?”
Reluctantly, I roll onto my feet. I haven’t been out in the bitter wind like they have. The relative warmth of the kitchen has made our ice-locker barracks that much harder to take.
Wilkens’s bed has been cleared. In the centre is a plate with a small round blue design in the middle. Already men are combing the seams of their filthy clothes for chatts — lice — to find the liveliest ones.
“If you don’t have cash, the ante is at least five cigarettes,” Collins announces. “We’ll accept almost anything: books, combs, chocolate, biscuits. Hurry up! Agony’s going to be here soon. Baldwin, are you in? I covet your mirror! Two chatts for Baldwin if he wagers his mirror.”
“How much for my wristwatch?” Findlay asks.
“Three! Three chatts for a wristwatch! Winner takes all.
Come on, Crome, you’re the rich man here. What can you put in?”
I rummage up some cigarettes to make the ante.
“Not good enough. Spread the wealth, man, give us all hope!”
“How about that jackknife the captain gave you?” Witherspoon presses. “Give us all a shot at that, won’t you?”
It’s a bone-handled beauty and perfectly illegal, and I’m happy to put it up for others to take off my hands.
“Three chatts for the jackknife,” Collins says. “Come on, who else is in? We’re starting in two minutes. Two minutes!”
I pull the knife out of a hiding spot I’ve devised in the floorboards. Others flood in now with their marks, their spare bits of food, their woollies from home. I am allowed three chatts to work with but can only get two from the seams of my shirt onto the central blue spot in time for Collins to start them off.
“That’s it! Bidding’s closed! They’re off, gentlemen, all hands away! You cannot touch the plate or anything on the bed. You cannot blow or —”
Collins is soon drowned out by the yelling. These German chatts are tiny, red, slow-crawling monsters that spit blood — and not their own — when cracked between fingers. But now they’re our racehorses, confused little beasts at whom we scream our hopes and agonies. About twelve begin in the centre, while three times their number in men crowd around to view the spectacle.
“Come on, you bastard! Move your fucking body!”
“Roll over, for Christ’’s sake! Get away from him! Get away!”
“That’s Crome’s chatt! Bite him! Bite him!”
The first to make its way off the edge of the plate wins the entire jackpot for its owner.
“Bleed a little! Run! Get going!”
The early leader is one of Findlay’s chatts, which seems frightened of all the noise. We scream, as if the sheer volume will force the chatts to flee in the desired direction. But Findlay’s chatt turns around, and two or three others edge slowly outwards past it. One of them is mine.
“Bite that bastard! We can’t let Crome win!” Witherspoon leans over the mattress and elbows me out of the way.
“No interference!” I scream.
Others too lean over, the plate is jostled, then straightened, and Collins hoarsely calls on everyone to move back.
“Fucking Crome is going to win,” Witherspoon moans.
But my lead chatt starts to turn back and someone else’s on the other side seems to have decided to move off the plate. More screams and urgings. We are completely mad with it. All the months of bitterness and deprivation are packed into this one small, capricious, arbitrary competition that none of us can win. Not really.
“It’s Crome’s again! Stop him! Stop!”
My chatt tumbles off the edge of the plate and all the winnings suddenly fall to me.
“He’s a fucking dago cheat!” Witherspoon spits, and in a second the plate is hurled across the room. The chatts spin off to find new homes amongst the crowd.
“Calm down!” Collins says.
“He’s a fucking bloody dago cheat!” Witherspoon’s fists are doubled now and he looms above me.
I gather up the eccentric winnings in my arms. “Take it all,” I say.
“Why is a fucking dago allowed in our barracks anyway?” Witherspoon says.
“Shut your mouth. Take the goddamn stuff. I don’t want it.”
“Why do we have to put up with a dago?”
Collins separates us. “Cool heads, lads,” he says. “Nobody cheated. Now Agony’s on his way and —”
“You have no right —”
“He smells like a dago, he’s got a dago fucking nose —”
I drop the loot, go for his head and m
iss with a right. Collins ducks out of the way just as Witherspoon’s fist ploughs into my stomach. I stagger back, my breath gone. Witherspoon crashes me once on the side of the face and again in the belly.
“Ten fags on Witherspoon!” someone yells.
I get in a few blows of my own, then am stopped again by a hard punch in the side. I fall to the floor. Suddenly everyone is stepping back to make way for black boots. Blasphemy and Agony. They haul me to my feet and I lunge once again at Witherspoon, who looks for all the world as if he wants to get hit, and harder than I can manage.
“Fucking puny dago artist.” He holds the knife, which looks like an odd extension of the ragged bones poking beneath his prisoner clothes. When Agony knocks him on the shoulder from behind he folds like a tent.
I see the blur of a rifle butt move towards me but can’t quite get out of the way. It smashes my bad elbow. I fall to the floor with the pain but am immediately returned to my feet, Agony yelling in my face as if the world has come to an end.
“Fucking dago bastard,” Witherspoon mutters to the floor as we are both dragged out into the bitter night.
Lillian was waiting for me on the stoop, Michael in her arms. She held a telegram and looked as if one more thing would break her. I thought to say to her: You are stronger than you think.
I propped my portfolio against the door and held the two of them in silence. I kissed Lillian as tenderly as I could, and I fought back a cough that was building in my chest.
“Is it my father?” I said finally.
You wait to receive the news, and you wait, and you expect you to know exactly how you will feel.
I pulled Lillian inside then and closed the door and brought her over to the bed, and she laid the baby beside us and looked at me with those eyes, which for some reason in the darkest corner of that sorry flat suddenly looked as blue as endless sky over a placid midday ocean.
“We will not be in this trap forever.” I loosened the buttons on her dress. She pulled at my shirt. The telegram was on the floor.
“I’ve been waiting all day to tell you,” she said sadly.
I kicked my clothes off and kissed up and down her face and neck, then her beautiful swollen nipples.
“Careful. That’s for Michael.”
The boy was sleeping like an angel. We all rocked together on the same bed. “I dreamed about doing this,” I murmured. “For years. For most of my life.”
It felt as if we were huddled in a lifeboat in the gentle rocking seas, in the high sun and the soft breeze of an innocent-looking world after some disaster has capsized and swallowed our ship.
“Ramsay. Ramsay, dear.”
As if we probably would not make it to shore but were safe now in this particular hour.
“Please, dear. Pull out! We can’t have —” I stopped, still inside her. She was pushing against my hips as if I’d forced my way in.
“I can’t have another child right now.”
I slid off her and stared up at the naked bulb above us. When I looked across the room Margaret had seated herself as she sometimes did. She looked completely sympathetic to Lillian’s cause.
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “I knew you’d understand.” There was a long, awkward silence while I held Margaret’s gaze. She seemed ready to laugh at some story she couldn’t tell me while Lillian was in the room.
I blinked and blinked. But she wouldn’t go away.
“I’m so sorry about your father,” Lillian said, holding me because she did not want me to go. And when I did not answer — Margaret was just sitting and watching us, waiting — she said, “What did the gallery owner say?”
Ten
The door was large but smooth to open, well oiled. I walked into a plain-looking meeting room with a square of tables, a stenographer, some assistants, and a lumpy man sitting in a wooden chair surrounded by papers. I suppose I had expected something on a grander scale, more judicial perhaps, with oak panelling and the weight and feel of old leather.
“Ramsay Crome? Private, Seventh Pioneers Battalion? 403776?” The commissioner stared at my submission through reading glasses.
“Yes,” I replied, and took a seat opposite him, though at a fair distance, the hollow space at the centre of the square of tables between us.
“Mr. Crome, as you are aware, this is a hearing to determine the possibility and extent of reparations due to you as a result of alleged maltreatment during your incarceration as a prisoner of war in Germany. I have here your statement of fact. I also have your service record, including your medical statement upon leaving military service March twenty-second, 1919. We will get to a full review of your claim. But first, do you have any further documentary evidence to submit at this juncture?”
He spoke like a clattering typewriter.
“No, sir.”
“You have no recent medical records, doctors’ certificates? Nothing to substantiate your claim to disability?”
“No, sir.”
He sighed, a marginal movement that told me all I needed to know about my chances. But in a moment he was back to business.
“All right, Mr. Crome. Let’s review your background material. You enlisted in Victoria, March twenty-fifth, 1915, were captured at Mont Sorrel June twenty-second, 1916. Is that correct?”
“I was captured June third, after some time separated from my unit,” I said. “At first I was reported dead and my pay was stopped. The twenty-second of June is the day my pay started again, when the Germans reported me captured. I was taken to the camp at Raumen, later transferred to Münster.”
“Released at Dover, November fourteenth, 1918,” he read.
“Yes, sir.”
“Prior to enlistment you were a machinist? What was your rate of pay?”
“Seventeen dollars and sixty cents per week.”
“And now you are an artist? What is your present rate of pay?”
“I am unemployed at the moment.”
“When you are employed, Mr. Crome, what sort of wage do you usually command, as an artist?”
His pen was poised to write down whatever I said.
“I have earned as much as two thousand dollars a year. I’m an illustrator, a graphic designer. I’ve worked for a few different companies. You just tell me what you want the picture to look like and I can —”
“Yes,” he said abruptly, cutting me off. “Are you married, Mr. Crome? You’ve left this section blank.”
“Did I?” I said and half-rose as if about to head over and see if it was indeed blank.
“Sit down,” he said. “Just answer the questions. Are you married?”
“Yes, sir. I was married in 1929.”
“Children?”
“One boy.”
“Right. Now, Mr. Crome, what is the nature of your claim of maltreatment?”
I hesitated. By then it seemed to me complete foolishness to be there at all, so many years after the fact, explaining such miseries to a man who’d probably never missed a meal in his life.
“My complaint is of nothing more brutal than what I’m sure you’ve already heard from hundreds of others, Mr. Commissioner,” I said. It had somehow stuck in my head that he liked being addressed that way. “During my time in the camps I was near-starved. Most days we received only a slice or two of the most worm-eaten, disgusting bread —”
“Yes,” he said impatiently. “Were you beaten in any way?”
“Sometimes.”
“Can you recall a specific occurrence? You’ve mentioned something here . . .” And he looked at my statement again.
“I was involved in an altercation in camp that included a beating by guards — two of them. That was followed by three days of solitary confinement.”
“Three days, yes,” he said dismissively. “What caused the altercation?”
“It was a fight involving gambling.”
“With other prisoners?”
I nodded.
“Were you punished for gambling or for fighting?” he asked
, as if there might be some important distinction to be drawn between the two.
“We were starved men,” I said. “And we were made to work long hours at labour that would have been exhausting even if we had been fed beef and roast potatoes. And they stood us in the rain and the wind and snow for ages until men collapsed and then they stood us longer. They beat men for failing to salute their non-commissioned officers. They beat men for not working hard enough. They beat us when our tools broke and withheld our food parcels even though we were starving. Sometimes they broke the parcels apart and trod on them right in front of us. The three days I was in solitary I stood in a hole in the ground. It was February, and snow fell on top of my head. They lowered a pail of cold, soapy soup once every afternoon.”
He was listening. But his pen had stopped moving, and the words halted in my throat. I felt nearly angry enough to pitch the table across the room and stalk out.
“What lasting injuries, if any, did you sustain from this ill-treatment, Mr. Crome?”
“I have weak lungs, sir, and get sick most years with bronchitis.”
“How long does it last?”
“Several weeks, sometimes.”
“Have you lost wages as a result of this illness?”
“I do my best to work through it, sir. When I have work.”
“And what is this you’ve mentioned in your form about your left arm?”
In the episode of the fight, sir, I was smashed on the elbow with a rifle butt, and the arm has been weaker than normal since then.”
“Are you left-handed, Mr. Crome?”
“Right-handed, sir.”
“So has the elbow injury restricted at all your ability to earn wages as an artist?”
“No, sir. I suppose not.”
“Many of the men have complained of neurasthenia. But you haven’t mentioned anything,” he said, hunting again through my papers.
“I have weak nerves sometimes, Mr. Commissioner, and sleep poorly. And I get agitated.”
