At the edge of the first field, my mother demonstrated the correct use of a scythe. Two men hardly watched her at all, but Bill showed keen interest, mirroring the movements she made. I guessed he was a city boy, and this was new to him. She made them practice until she was satisfied that they would do a good job. The two who hadn’t been watching had obviously harvested plenty of fields before, but Bill and his friend made several blundering strokes before either managed to cut anything. I felt hot with embarrassment for them, but my mother was patient and stood behind Bill, lowering his right elbow to the correct position until he swished cleanly through the stalks and looked up to me in delight and triumph. I couldn’t help smiling back.
The guards had done well to rouse the prisoners early, because the heat was soon hammering down from a cloud-free sky. We were cutting hay, and it was tiring, thirsty work, trying to get it all into the barn before any rain came. There was always a danger of thunderstorms on these hot days. One by one the men asked permission to remove their battle dress jackets and the shirts beneath. I was shocked at how thin they looked, with ribs standing out like those of a neglected horse. Some, including Bill, wore tattered vests. Ignoring the guard who was shouting at him to hurry and get back to work, he carefully tied his shirt into a makeshift hat and cover for his neck and scrawny shoulders. Looking at the blue-whiteness of his skin, I thought, I bet he burns really easily. I would only turn brown in the sun, not burn.
My mother and I worked with them to make sure they did everything in the way she liked. Who knew in what strange ways such things were done in England?
Four of the men, including Bill, were working down the rows with scythes, cutting the sweet-smelling hay, while mother and I and the fifth man went along behind, bending to swish the hay into sheaves, tying them roughly with one stalk and standing them together to dry in the air. We worked slowly and steadily, not talking, and every now and then mother and I would straighten our backs and look around.
She was checking on the men with the scythes, whether they seemed to know what they were doing, whether they were missing anything, whether they needed the whetstone to sharpen their tools. I was looking at the gold of the field, the china blue of the sky, and—out of the corner of my eye—the easy swinging movements Bill was now making with the scythe. I could see how all the muscles in his back and shoulders worked together in the swing. There was something quick and fluid about his movements. Bright and mercurial.
As Bill worked, he whistled tune after tune, swinging the scythe in time with the music he made. I didn’t recognize any of the songs, but sometimes the other men would join in and sing a chorus.
When it became apparent that the guard expected them to work all morning in the heat without anything to drink, mother sent me back to the farm for water, which I took around to each of them, pouring some into a tin cup and letting them drink. Bill smiled a wide, joyful smile. One of his top front teeth was chipped.
“I wish . . . beer,” I said in my halting English, and he beamed even wider.
“I’ll pretend it is.” He grinned, smacking his lips appreciatively. I could see him trying to think of something to say to extend the conversation. “Do you make beer here?” he asked.
I nodded. “We grow . . .” I didn’t know the word for “barley.”
“You grow beer?” He playacted amazement. “I’ve died and gone to ’eaven.”
A laugh escaped me, and the guard strode over to poke Bill hard in the ribs with the barrel of the rifle in a way I knew would bruise, and he shouted at him in English, “Get back to work. Lazy swine.”
I learned quickly that I mustn’t laugh out loud or draw the guard’s attention to the prisoners.
* * *
The guard stood at the edge of the field in the thin shade of a straggly tree and watched us all work, fiddling with his rifle and his tight collar. Sweat poured down his face. He kept batting away a persistent horsefly or mosquito, and I willed it to bite him. He was a postern rather than regular army—perhaps happy to have work guarding POWs rather than being on the front lines again. I’m sure he knew how easily this bunch of young men could overcome him, if they chose. All that lay between them was his rifle and his sense of self-importance. And the fact that they were deep in the heart of Nazi Europe, more than a thousand kilometers from the neutral countries of Switzerland or Sweden. I felt Bill watching me watching the guard, but I didn’t look at him.
The prisoners were allowed to stop at noon for lunch, and pulled tiny squares of bread from their packs. Mother took one look at their rations and signaled to me to go back to the farmhouse for the loaf she’d baked yesterday, for farm butter and cheese. I brought beer too, for the guard, to keep him sweet and make sure he would continue to bring the men back to us. I was careful to take him his lunch first, and swallowed my dismay at how much of the cheese he took. I wished I’d hidden the total amount and brought his separately.
I carried what remained to the prisoners, who were lying in the shade of a big oak tree. Some were asleep. Only Bill was sitting, with his back against the tree trunk, watching me as I went around to the others. They each looked as if I were giving them the best meal they’d ever tasted. I saved Bill’s till last.
He grinned at me as I leaned down to him with the tiny portion of food, and I smiled back. As he squinted up at me, his eyes were bluer than they’d seemed in the yard. His mouth was wide, as if it liked to smile. The other men were only interested in the food I gave them, but he held my gaze.
“Do you make the bread and cheese here too?” he said slowly and clearly.
I struggled to retrieve my poor English and wished I’d worked harder at it in school.
“Yes, we make.”
“Best I’ve ’ad for years.”
He smiled at me until I dropped my eyes. I wasn’t often lost for words, but I couldn’t think of the English vocabulary.
“I . . . hope . . . like,” I said slowly.
His eyes twinkled mischievously. “Oh, I like very much.”
My stomach tightened, knowing he didn’t mean the cheese, but I retorted in Czech, “You haven’t got many girls to compare me with,” kicking myself for not being able to say it in English.
I felt his gaze on me as I walked back to my mother.
* * *
By the end of the afternoon, the biggest field was cut, and the sheaves were being forked onto our horse-drawn wagon. It was my job to look after the mare, to hold her head and lead her forward, though she was so used to the work that she didn’t really need me. I petted her nose and brought her the sweetest grass.
Without even looking I knew where Bill was working, because of his habit of whistling or humming as he worked. He vibrated with music.
It was hot, sweaty work, and I returned twice to the house to get cold water for the prisoners to drink. Each time I carried water to them, I saved Bill till last and tried to snatch a word or two with him under the watchful eye of the guard.
“I’m Bill,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Izabela,” I told him.
He repeated it seriously twice. “Isabella, Isabella,” as if it mattered to him to say it right. “Does it mean something?” he asked, but I didn’t know how to say it in English.
I shrugged and shook my head.
“I think there was a Queen Isabella. Of Spain,” he said, and I shook my head in wonder.
“Bill,” I said. “What mean?”
“I dunno. It’s a king’s name. William the Conqueror.”
Ruefully, he indicated his shabby clothes. “Queer sort of conqueror.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, or why he started to laugh silently so the guard wouldn’t hear, but his delight was infectious, and I started to giggle quietly too. I had a sudden overwhelming sense that in all this hardship and mess, it might be possible to feel joy. The same feeling was written all over
Bill’s face.
* * *
At the end of the day, we were all covered in the dust of the hay, which stuck in our hair and on our sweaty skin.
The guard stood over the men as they took turns pumping the handle for one another to wash in the yard. One by one they stripped to the waist and leaned their heads and bodies under the freezing water, gasping and laughing at the shock of it, pushing and flicking one another with water like children. I stood in the entrance to the barn, trying to appear unconcerned, busy with something just out of sight, as if I wasn’t watching, wasn’t waiting for Bill’s turn.
But out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he stripped the vest from his china white torso. I took in his terrible thinness and the tight muscles on his sinewy arms, and something flipped over inside me, like a newly landed fish. He rubbed his hair with his fingers under the running water and then stood back and threw his head up, laughing, as if he were not a half-starved prisoner in a land far from home but just a boy, knowing that a girl was slyly watching him and liking what she saw. He pulled his clothes back on. His hair was darker when it was wet, and it gradually lightened as it dried.
I took off my clogs and crept up to the window on the landing over the wagon doors so my mother couldn’t see me watching the truck drive them away, but Bill somehow knew where I was and threw me a tiny salute as they turned the corner in the road.
When I entered the kitchen, my mother was pounding a double-sized portion of bread dough on the table. Marek was on the floor playing with his toy cars.
Mother was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen since my father and Jan went away, but as she saw me, her smile turned to a frown.
“Be more careful,” she said.
I blushed again and wondered if I would ever be able to hide anything from her.
“The guard can see everything I see,” she continued.
I doubted it.
“I know it’s hard when all the boys are gone, but this isn’t possible.”
“What boys?” asked Marek. We both ignored him.
I always hated to be told something was impossible, immediately deciding I must prove it wasn’t. I inherited it from my mother; she was just the same. If someone had told her she couldn’t join the partisans, she would have tried, just like me.
Her idea of parenting was to bend my will to hers, but I’d always been a match for her. When I was small, I decided I wouldn’t eat rabbit. I clamped my lips tight and refused the meal she’d cooked. So she brought out the same plate of stew for meal after meal and refused me any other food, saying, “You can’t be hungry if you won’t eat that.” I ate nothing for days, until I was light-headed with hunger. When she clattered the rabbit stew plate in front of me for breakfast on the third day, it had started to grow a fine furring of mold. Then my father stepped in, as I knew he would, giving the stew to the pig and telling my mother, “She’s just like you.” Later, she always gave me a plate of boiled turnips when the family had rabbit stew, even after I’d told her I liked it now.
But she was right about the lack of boys. There wasn’t one over the age of fourteen for miles around. The tiny handful of Czech speakers had run away to join the resistance like my dad and Jan, but the German-speaking majority had volunteered for the Nazi army or gone to work in factories across the Reich. Many of the girls I’d known at school had gone too, and of those who stayed, Matylda and Dagmar were rumored to give themselves freely to the soldiers who were billeted nearby. At least their lives were moving on, while mine was caught like a fly in amber, an unchanged daily routine since I was fifteen. Five long years when I should have been discovering so many new things, but instead my world had narrowed down to just this farm and house, punctuated only by occasional trips to market or to church. A life that chafed like outgrown shoes.
“You worked hard too,” she said, now trying to make it up to me.
I smiled grudgingly. “And you.”
When had a day ever passed that she didn’t work hard? What else was there in her life apart from work?
After our meal, I slipped to my room and took down the dusty English reader I’d had at school, opened it to page one and applied myself with absolute concentration. My mother’s life wasn’t going to be mine. I would make sure of that.
Two
When his work party was unloaded at the farm in Vražné that morning, Bill felt a tingle in the back of his head, as though something important was going to happen. For the past five years, he’d had the repeated sensation that his world was alternately expanding and shrinking, expanding and shrinking, as if he lived within the rib cage of some live, breathing creature. And this morning, it was about to expand.
He glanced at his mate Harry, but he was yawning and scratching, oblivious to anything special about the day. It had been an early start, and there was another day’s hard labor ahead of them. The only thing Bill could see that was different today was that they had the old guard with them, as well as a smartly dressed captain. Usually they were just dumped at the day’s workplace—a forest clearing, the roadworks, a farm—and left under the eye of some zealous, gun-waving, Nazi-supporting local man. Bill wondered what was so special about this farm that it required two soldiers.
The kitchen door opened, and he smiled. A shapely woman in her mid-forties stepped out, with clogs and dingy skirts and her hair in a scarf, but with an air of imperious elegance, as though she were attending a ball. Bill thought, Ah, that’s why they’re here. They ain’t watchin’ us at all.
A moment later, a girl half her age emerged, and leaned casually against the doorpost as if completely unaware of the effect she was having on these woman-starved young men. If the mother was attractive, the girl was an oasis in a desert. Bill felt Harry straighten up beside him, and he pulled his own shoulders back. The girl’s eyes ranged over them, assessing, sizing them up. She had black curls, eyes like a cat, and a body as lithe and slim as her mother’s was rounded and womanly. Bill held her stare, and the walls of the farmyard seemed to move back.
He’d felt this world expansion before. First of all, back in 1939, when he had been eighteen and his Sunday league football team had downed too many pints after a game and dared one another to join up for the army. He’d hardly been aware then that he was signing away any control over his own life for an indeterminate period, hardly realized that from then on somebody else would tell him where to be, what to wear, what to eat, when to go to sleep and when to wake up, who to kill. But marching to the training camp, he realized his life was no longer going to be confined to the Stoke Newington pub where he’d grown up, the familiar London commute to his job at Paddington Station and home to practice his saxophone or play the piano in the bar in the evening.
After basic training, his world expanded again as he mounted the gangplank of the ship at Portsmouth to an unknown wartime destination, stepping out into a life full of possibilities and dangers, including the new sensations of seasickness and homesickness. He longed to see his mother, his cousin Flora, even his boss in the ticket office. He missed the piano keys that had been like extensions of his fingers, part of his body, for as long as he could remember. He suffered the boredom of the high seas, where there was no entertainment but endless card games on the long voyage around South Africa and up the Suez Canal. On some days he played his harmonica for singsongs. He saw Table Mountain as they rounded the Cape, and eventually he felt the gritty sand of a desert under his boots.
His battalion pitched their tents in the freezing-cold dark, and in the morning, when Bill flicked back his tent flap, there was a bloody great pyramid.
“I think we’re in Egypt,” he said over his shoulder.
“They better have tea in the NAAFI,” replied Harry.
But Bill wasn’t interested in tea; he couldn’t wait to climb the pyramid, and stood at the top with his arms thrown wide, looking out over a world grown so much bigger than he could have imagined.
/>
That night Harry set off with some of the lads for the local brothels, but Bill refused to join them. “Don’t come crying to me when you’ve got the clap,” he warned. Instead he made do with memories of the girls back home and wandered the bazaars and streets, soaking up the strangeness, tingling with the excitement of it.
* * *
Bill’s world continued to expand and then contract, from the glittering wonders of Cairo to the sweaty, suffocating confined space inside a tank lumbering across the sands for days on end. The gunners took turns standing in the turret for some fresh air. They became irritable with each other, squeezed together in a metal box under the roasting sun, a metal box that might be their coffin. On Harry’s twenty-first birthday, they opened a tin of corned beef, and it was so hot in the tank that the meat ran out as liquid. They suffered mind-numbing boredom, roasted all day and shivered all night, until suddenly they were in the terror and earsplitting din of battle, with shells exploding all around them, exposed as a row of ducks at a fairground shooting gallery.
He and Harry had been through it all together, like a couple of bookends: blond Bill at one end of the shelf and Harry with his wavy brown hair at the other. Girls couldn’t resist Harry’s half-closed, sleepy eyes, while men of a certain kind were drawn to Bill’s prettiness, and more than once Harry had to put them straight. It was more than any peacetime friendship. Bill had seen the horrors Harry saw; Harry had felt Bill’s terror. They trusted each other implicitly, watched each other’s backs, shared each other’s food. They had their disagreements, of course, and often drove each other mad, but each knew the other would sling him over his back and carry him off a battlefield until he couldn’t walk a step farther. Brothers-in-arms.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 2
