They’d been captured together during the Siege of Tobruk in 1941. Their tank took a hit, and they all scrambled out of the smoke-filled interior, straight into the barrels of waiting Nazi guns. There was nothing to do but raise their hands above their heads and walk toward their captors.
“My legs feel like jelly,” Bill told Harry.
Harry smiled grimly. “At least we won’t have to get inside a tank ever again.”
They’d all laughed when one of the Nazi soldiers announced, “The war is over for you Tommies.”
“Blimey,” said Bill, “I didn’t think they actually said that. I thought that was just in the pictures.”
* * *
They spent the next three months in a viciously guarded prison camp in Libya, where the tribesman who guarded them would hang a man by his wrists in the baking sun all day, just for amusement. They all got the runs and shivered without blankets in the subzero nights, then were taken by boat to Sicily. The hold was so full of prisoners that many couldn’t fit below, and they had to lie like sardines on the deck. But Bill and Harry were delighted to be up on deck, surrounded by the blueness of the sea, as dolphins played beside the boat. Bill felt he could breathe for the first time in months as the sky stretched away above him. But no sooner had he acknowledged the world’s expansion than it contracted down again into the cramped quarters of a dark cattle truck that jostled and shook them all the way up through southern Italy, to the closed quarters, watchtowers and barbed wire of a prisoner of war camp.
Mussolini’s guards were kinder than the Libyans, and the food was better, but there was nothing to occupy themselves with from morning to night every long, long day, and nothing to protect them from being eaten alive by mosquitoes as soon as the sun went down. Some men passed the time by laying bets on the speed at which a lizard would climb a wall. Others tried to teach a group to speak a language or learn algebra. Harry went gymnastics mad. Bill shut his eyes and played an imaginary piano or sometimes made real music on the harmonica he’d had in his pocket when their tank was hit. Once, he and Harry tried to escape, climbing into the dirty laundry as it was being driven out of the gates. To their horror, they found themselves facing a firing squad, but their sentence was commuted to imprisonment. After that they agreed they’d never try again.
“Let’s just concentrate on getting through this thing alive,” said Bill, and Harry agreed.
* * *
As the news of Allied advances up the leg of Italy reached their camp, there was an undercurrent of buzzing excitement, and then the news that Mussolini had capitulated. For a few days they talked about nothing but freedom and release.
“D’you reckon they’ll let us go home for a bit, or just put us back on the front line?” asked Harry. Bill was pretty sure they wouldn’t be sent home.
One morning the guards were gone, and just as Bill and Harry were certain they’d be liberated, trucks covered with swastikas pulled up, and new guards took over, speaking German now, not Italian. Hope of freedom vanished as they were rounded up and taken by cattle-truck trains, on the move day after day, night after night, up through the Alps, and right across Austria and Czechoslovakia into Poland, to the giant camp at Lamsdorf.
Within the camp, the regime was similar to the one in Italy, with twice-daily roll calls, cramped conditions, insufficient food and guards patrolling the fences with rifles. But Bill soon discovered that Lamsdorf was really an enormous processing center to provide labor for the factories, mines, quarries and forests of the Third Reich. It wasn’t just the Romans who needed slaves to run their empire. The Geneva Convention said captured officers weren’t allowed to be put to work, so they remained imprisoned for the duration of the war, but the NCOs and enlisted men like Bill and Harry could be sent out to Arbeitskommando labor camps, across miles of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and even into Germany itself.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Bill, scanning the watchtowers and barbed wire fences. “I can’t stand this no longer.”
He and Harry agreed they didn’t want to actively assist the Nazi war machine, so they wouldn’t make armaments or build tanks, or mine for the coal that drove the operation, but they thought they could live with themselves helping out with forestry and agriculture, so they signed up for a work detail at the Mankendorf sawmill deep in the Nazi-run countryside of Czechoslovakia. They were both city boys, and neither of them had ever cut down a tree or even seen a cow close-up.
It was freedom compared with the string of prison camps Bill had been in for three long years, ever since he was twenty. Here they were hardly under guard at all, just a rota of old soldiers and wire netting no more frightening than a tennis court, but nobody tried to escape because there was nowhere they could run away to. As Harry reminded Bill, they were more than six hundred miles from Switzerland, and all the way they would be surrounded by ardent and trigger-happy supporters of the Third Reich.
No wonder Bill was intrigued when their old guard and the captain both accompanied them to the farm for the first time. He couldn’t understand why they needed guarding here and nowhere else. Until he saw the girl and her mother. He glanced at Harry and thought the girl would be bound to fall for Harry’s charms, like they always did. But Harry was yawning, and the girl hardly gave him a second look.
Instead she met Bill’s eyes and held his gaze. He felt the horizon draw back all around him, and the sky lifted into blue.
Three
My job the next day was to lead the mare and hold her head while the hay wagon was loaded and unloaded. Bill and Harry were in the fields with the rakes and pitchforks, heaping the sheaves onto the back of the wagon to be taken to the farmyard, where other prisoners were obeying my mother’s instructions for stacking the hay inside the barn.
The weather grew more and more humid until we were all slick with sweat. Even Bill’s whistling stopped, so I knew he must be tiring. I wanted to tell my mother that we were working the prisoners too hard, but her mouth was fixed in a line, and I knew there wouldn’t be any point. A dark cloud was building on the horizon. The time for lunch came, but she wouldn’t let us stop.
“We have to get the hay in before the rain,” she said in German to the guard.
I went around the men as they worked, giving them water and bread, but they only stood still for a few moments. Bill was out of breath, and his eyes were dark blue like wet slate. I thought it was strange that they changed color all the time, but perhaps I’d never paid so much attention to anyone’s eyes before.
Through the afternoon we continued, clearing up and down the rows, until more hay was in the barn than in the field.
Bill and I crisscrossed in the field, secretly smiling at each other whenever we passed. We all worked faster and faster, driven in an old battle of man against weather. The dark cloud covered the sun, dimming the light like evening, and the wind turned over the leaves on the oak.
* * *
Bill and Harry were pitchforking the last of the cut hay onto the wagon when the first flash of lightning lit the whole sky. The horse shied, and we all jerked our heads up. I comforted the mare and counted aloud, “Jedna, dvě, tři,” as thunder shook the hills.
“Three miles,” shouted Bill.
Kilometers, I thought.
“Just like Far from the Madding Crowd,” he yelled.
I smiled my incomprehension, holding tight to the bridle.
“It’s a book. There’s a terrible storm”—he hurled the last forkful of hay into the wagon—“and a beautiful girl.”
That part I understood. I promised myself I would learn to read English well enough to find a copy and know the whole story. Harry looked at him and at me, and said, “I’m off,” running back toward the house and barn. I clicked to the horse, and she began to walk quickly toward the house. Bill fell in step beside me.
“I’ll read it to you one day,” he said as the first fat raindrop fell on my no
se.
Before I could stop him, he leaped up onto the moving wagon and pulled a tarpaulin over the hay he’d worked so hard to cut. Lightning flashed again, and he was illuminated against the sky. I struggled to hold the mare’s head, with no time to count before deafening thunder shook our whole village. I glanced round quickly to check if lightning had struck a tree, but no flames shot into the sky. Bill jumped down again beside me, and the rain came on, sudden and heavy, as if we’d stepped under a fireman’s hose.
The rain was soaking us, running down our faces and into the neck of my dress. Half walking and half running beside the horse, I held my hand out to him. He grasped it very firmly and lolloped alongside me, gazing at me through the rain. In that look was a question, a recognition, a hunger. I pulled him toward me, and we were kissing, stumbling, out of step, teeth bruising our lips. I wanted to let go of the horse and kiss him properly, but Bill pulled away.
“You have to go. It’s too dangerous,” he said.
He dropped back and ran around the wagon and into the main barn. My mother rushed out into the rain to make sure the hay on the wagon was covered.
“Bill did it,” I told her. We unbuckled the mare from the shafts, and I led her into the stable adjoining the barn.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bill bent with his hands on his knees, puffing at the exertion of the day and the run, laughing and saying something to Harry. I hoped he wasn’t telling him that he’d kissed me. The rain thundered down on the roof of the barn.
The guard caught me looking at Bill, and I turned to Mother. “We did it!”
She took the horse’s bridle from me. “You’re soaking! Go into the house and get dry and then get some food for everyone.”
I forced myself not to glance at Bill and pelted from the barn to the house, splashing water up my legs from the muddy puddles forming among the cobbles.
I tore up the stairs and yanked off my wet clothes, dropping them where they fell on my bedroom floor. In my looking glass, I could see I looked flushed and pretty, despite my straggly wet hair. My pupils were so enormous that my eyes looked no longer green but as dark as Mother’s. I couldn’t take the grin off my face as I rubbed my hair, quickly pulled on dry clothes, loaded a basket with food and swung my mother’s waxed cloak over my head and the basket to run back to the barn.
The Oily Captain arrived as I was handing out the food, and my mother greeted him as if he was an old friend, holding her hand out to shake his. “We did it! Thank you so much.”
He clicked his heels and saluted, with his fingers to his cap rather than a full-armed Nazi salute. “I’m very glad.” He looked like Marek when he licks cake mix from the bowl. “Is it all covered?” he asked.
She was flushed with eagerness. “Yes, the wagon has a tarpaulin, and the hay barn’s full. I couldn’t have done it without the work party. Would you like to see the barn?”
He looked even more pleased and pulled his coat around his shoulders. My mother took the oilskin I’d hung on a nail to dry and they half ran across the muddy yard. She could have run faster, but I thought she was hanging back in deference to his bad leg.
I didn’t like to see her being nice to him and I wished my father were hiding somewhere to take a shot at him. From where I stood, I could have got him clean between the shoulders. The guard was watching me again when I turned round, and I reminded myself I had to be much, much more careful. I took him a piece of cake and tried to arrange my face into a semblance of kindness.
“They did good work,” I said in German. He seemed pleased I’d spoken to him. He was old, with gray skin blending into gray hair, and lips so thin below his gray mustache that they added no color to his face. When he spoke, his teeth were stained yellow.
“Yes, good enough workers when they want to be. Though not as good as German workers.”
“No, of course not,” I said, slipping away to take bread to the prisoners, who were flopped around the barn. They were much more tired than my father and brother would have been and far more tired than I felt. I was zinging with adrenaline and could have gone out and done the whole day’s labor again. For a moment I was scornful of their weakness, and then I realized how hard it must be to exert yourself after months or even years of relative inactivity and poor food. It made me feel like a stupid little girl.
I went to Bill last. I could feel the guard’s gaze on my back, and I signaled to Bill with my eyes. He understood immediately and yawned a big fake yawn as I came close to him. He didn’t look me in the face or speak, but our hands brushed as he took the food from me, and it felt as if lightning sparked between us in the dark of the barn.
I turned as carelessly as I could and sauntered back to the barn entrance, swinging my hips slightly, feeling Bill’s eyes on my back, to see the rain easing and my mother and the Oily Captain returning, deep in conversation about the repairs our outbuildings needed.
Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes, find him work and keep them coming here forever.
* * *
The Oily Captain was as good as his word, letting us know every few days when the prisoners would next be coming and what the jobs would be. We would hear his knock at the kitchen door, and he would politely inquire what needed to be done. My mother would invite him in and offer him mint tea or coffee. Sometimes she would leave her hair uncovered, loose to her shoulders, as curly as mine, though shot through with silvery streaks since my father and Jan left. She talked to the Oily Captain about the farm and the weather and the town where he came from, and he showed her photographs of his children. I hated to see them chatting easily together and made sure never to leave them alone in case he tried something with her. I never trusted him, but I needed him to keep bringing the working party.
Some days he said the prisoners couldn’t be spared from some other task, on another farm or on the road they were improving, and I was first furious and then plunged into a pit of gloom. I was sharp with my mother on those days and refused to play with Marek. I turned to my English primer with furious determination, learning ten or twenty words a day, repeating the difficult irregular verbs over and over to myself as I walked or sewed or washed up. “I am, you are, he is; I am, you are, he is . . .”
Four
Two long, slow weeks inched past after the day of the thunderstorm before there was any chance for me and Bill to steal a moment on our own, though we’d exchanged frequent smiles and glances across the potato field. I listened for his whistling tunes to know exactly where he was working. Only when he was tired toward evening did he stop whistling, and then I worried about him and kept looking to check if he was all right.
We were always under the watchful eyes of the guard, the other prisoners and, most vigilant of all, my mother. Our hands touched as I passed him water or bread, and the same sparks flew between us. The desire to be alone with him, to kiss him properly, became an ache in my stomach.
I worked at ingratiating myself with the guard, bringing him tidbits from our larder, discovering he had a sweet tooth and taking him cake whenever I could.
“Do you mind if I speak to you from time to time?” I asked him.
“Why’s that?” he asked. “So you can take secrets to your traitor brother and father, I suppose.”
I looked shocked and hurt. “No. Not at all. Quite the opposite.”
He glanced up at me, his mustache coated with strawberry jam. I continued, hesitantly. “I think I could be more useful to the Reich as an interpreter than as a farm girl. I speak German and Czech, of course, and I would like to interpret in English too, but I only have my schoolbooks and no chance to practice. I heard you speaking perfect English.”
He licked his lips, though some jam remained on his mustache. He studied me carefully, and I tried to look as hopeful and guileless as possible.
“I used to be a schoolteacher,” he said.
I prayed my father would forgive my disloyalty.
“If my father and brother hadn’t gone off with the . . . traitors, I might have been able to go to university instead of being stuck on this farm with my mother, hoeing turnips for the rest of my life.”
I put on my sulkiest expression and hoped he would be taken in. It was partly true, of course. I had hoped to go to university, and my father had been preparing me for the entrance exams when he left. I’d been taught at home by him ever since the school had asked me to leave when I was fifteen for refusing to obey the head teacher.
I’d repeated a silly joke about President Hácha’s bushy eyebrows trying to mate with Hitler’s mustache. It wasn’t even very funny, but I was wiggling my eyebrows and my top lip, and my friends were giggling so hard, they were almost crying. Then they started to wave at me, still helpless with laughter. I thought they wanted more, but they were trying to signal a warning that the school principal had come up behind me.
He dragged me to his office, with a huge portrait of Hitler behind his desk, and ordered me to apologize to him. I pressed my lips together, and though words were buzzing in my mouth like wasps, I wouldn’t let them out. They certainly weren’t the words he wanted to hear. He wasn’t used to being disobeyed and told me to go home and not come back to school until I was ready to say I was sorry. My mother was furious and said I had to return at once.
Dad said, “At least the child has principles.”
My mother retorted, “Principles won’t milk the cow. And won’t get her to university.”
“You can teach her German literature,” said Dad. “I can teach her everything else.”
The Prisoner's Wife Page 3
