She shrugged. “Is history. War.” She drew a line on the grass with her finger and said, “One nine one four.” Then rubbed it out and drew another line farther away. “One nine one eight.”
Bill repeated the numbers, running his hand up through his hair, then: “I get it—nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen. The borders got moved after the Great War?”
Izzy nodded and rubbed out the line again. “And now”—she opened her arms wide—“Lebensraum.”
This was one of the few German words that Bill knew well.
“Hitler has taken it all,” he said.
“All,” she agreed.
They both sat in silence for a moment until he said, “You. Tell me about you. What do you want when all this is over?”
“I want go university, but too late now. Too old,” Izzy said, pulling a wry face.
“It’s too late. I’m too old,” Bill corrected her. “No, you aren’t. Anyway, how old are you?”
“Twenty. You?”
“Twenty-three. Eighteen when I joined up.”
She made an irritated sound with her teeth. “My father say I not go join partisans when I nineteen.”
Bill wondered if he’d misunderstood. Her accent was very thick. “You tried to join the resistance?”
“For sure. My big brother, Jan, he go. I want too. Kill Hitler soldiers. Fight for country. Leave farm. Big adventure. But my father say not girls.”
Bill agreed absolutely with her father, but she looked so angry that he thought he’d better not say so. “I wanted adventure too,” he said ruefully. “And look where it’s got me.”
She was still frowning. “But you have see world.”
“That’s true. We sailed all round the cape of Africa. Camped under the pyramids. Then captured at Tobruk, worse luck.”
The images and noise of that last battle threatened to crowd in on him, and he forced himself to concentrate on Izzy.
“Where Tobruk?” she asked.
“Libya.” As he said the word, the stink of the camp flooded back to him, and he clenched his fists.
“So how you here?” she demanded.
He shook his head to rid himself of the sounds and sights. “The Jerries want us as far as possible from home. Stops us running away. Now you. Tell me about you.”
Haltingly, she told him about her mother, a German-speaking farm girl from Vražné, and her father, a music teacher from Prague, the Czech socialist who’d won her mother’s heart. As she spoke, Bill gently corrected her or supplied a word, and she scribbled the new vocabulary in her notebook. He thought perhaps his meeting her was somehow meant to be: another musician meeting a farm girl, as if history was repeating on a loop. Izzy told him how her parents had gone to live in the capital and about the excitement of their life there. The sun was beginning to set as she described her mother’s father becoming ill, and their coming to Vražné together to take over the family farm. Her father had given up his career as a musician to be close to her mother. Bill wondered if he could have done that.
“She teach Dad everything for farm,” Izzy said.
“Like me,” said Bill. “You’ve taught me about scything and hoeing.”
“And taking—hnuj—from horse and cow, to field.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed and wrinkled his nose. “Muck spreading the dung. Yes. I know all about that.”
He watched as she wrote down “muck spreading” and “dung.”
Before coming to Vražné, he’d never thought about where his food came from or the work that went into producing it. His aunt had a small garden where she grew raspberries and rhubarb, but in his mind, those things simply grew, without any human effort. They didn’t have a garden at the pub, just a yard full of barrels. Now he was wondering if he could ever go back to that closed-in brick-and-concrete life.
“Could you live in a town, do you think?” he asked.
“For sure. I want leave here. See world. Like you. See Table Mountain and pyramid. I want adventure, see life.”
He rubbed his face. “And I’ve had enough adventure for a lifetime.”
They looked through the wire at each other for a long time, and Bill realized it was beginning to get dark. He looked up at the sky, at the evening star, and she followed his gaze and jumped to her feet.
“If not home by night . . . ,” she began.
He stood too. “Your mother won’t let you come again. Go, go quickly. But take care.”
He reached a hand forward to the wire again, and she touched his fingertips.
“See you soon,” he said.
He stood watching her cycle away until she disappeared around the bend in the road.
* * *
The next day Bill was working in the yard at Izzy’s farm when she ran in shouting that the pigs had escaped and she needed help. As if at random, she grabbed Bill’s sleeve and pulled him with her toward the empty sty. He ran behind her, bemused and not sure what was coming next. He was beginning to understand that life with Izzy would never be dull. They stopped near the pigsty where two sows were loose. He’d never been so close to a pig before, and they were bigger than he’d expected. Izzy began shooing them back to the sty, instructing him to block their escape. He stood well back and waved his arms, not knowing if pigs might bite or charge and trample him. The smell made his eyes water, but Izzy didn’t seem to notice. He suspected she had let them out on purpose.
Once the pigs were back in the sty, she looked around, checking that nobody was about. Her eyes were bright with merriment, and she held out a hand to him, in the shadow of the sty. He drew close, and then they were kissing, and he never wanted it to stop. One of the pigs sneezed, and Bill jumped. Izzy could afford to be reckless, but he was a soldier, alert to danger. If they were caught, she would remain here on the farm, free to come and go, with good food and fresh air, and she’d probably find another prisoner to kiss. But he’d be sent back to the closed-in, stifling hell of Lamsdorf.
Regretfully, he kissed her on the nose and turned back to the yard.
* * *
During the light July evenings, Bill waited by the wire for Izzy. Sometimes she didn’t come, and he climbed into his bunk full of the despair of long imprisonment. He was always tired after his long day’s work with too little food, but the sight of her bicycle whizzing down the road made adrenaline surge through his body, filling him with energy. On her second visit he brought out his harmonica and shyly asked if she’d like him to play something. He tried to put everything he couldn’t find the words for into his music: how strange and wonderful it was that fate had brought them together.
Every time she came after that, she would ask him to play something on the harmonica, and sometimes the other prisoners would begin to sing along with him, like a male choir. Bill chose romantic tunes, allowing his fellow prisoners to speak for him: There were angels dining at the Ritz, and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. He hoped she could understand the words.
Most often though they talked about themselves: the things they liked and loathed, their families, their friends. Bill told Izzy how much he hated being an only child and that his cousins who lived on the same street were his closest friends, especially his cousin Flora. He told her about the journey he and Harry had taken through various prison camps. He didn’t say how they’d been beaten by sadistic guards, but did tell her Harry had become like a brother to him.
“Different than brother, I think,” she said cheerfully. “I want kill my brothers sometimes.”
They talked about the things they liked to eat. He was astonished that her favorite was goose. He thought all girls liked chocolate.
“Mine’s jam roly-poly. Or spotted dick. Or Christmas pud—” His mouth watered, and for a moment, he could taste each of the long-lost delicacies on his tongue.
They talked about things they were good a
t and things they were terrible at. She made him laugh by telling him how her father despaired at her inability to learn to play the piano, how he called her “sausage fingers.” Bill looked at the elegant hands holding her pen and book and wanted to kiss each “sausage” finger.
“Perhaps I could teach you to play? I’d like to teach people, one day, when I’ve learned to read music.”
“I can teach read,” she said, “but nobody teach me play!”
He asked her what she was afraid of, and she said she didn’t like spiders.
“What you afraid?” she asked.
“Getting sent back to Lamsdorf,” he said.
“I afraid that too.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. For Bill, Izzy was some kind of miracle, a bright flower growing out of concrete, unexpected and unimagined. He couldn’t believe that he meant the same to her, who must have had so many men to choose from. To her he couldn’t be any more than a passing diversion, a novelty to be played with. It was too soon to tell her the truth: that the thing he most feared was never seeing her again. So instead he said, “And being put in front of a firing squad again.”
She was horrified. “When that?”
The terror of it swept through him once more, but he tried to make light of it. “Down in Italy, on our way here. Me and Harry thought we’d try to escape, and we got caught within a day. The Ities handed us to the Jerries, who put us up against a wall.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth, but he continued. “I’d always wondered what people thought about when they were in front of a firing squad, and now I know.”
“What think?”
“I thought, I wish they’d bloody well hurry up. I don’t think I can stand here much longer.” He shivered at the memory, and she reached out to touch his fingers on the wire.
“I am glad they not shoot,” she said.
“I’m glad too. Very glad.”
* * *
On the days when Bill and the other prisoners were taken to work on a different farm, or on the road, his body seemed to become heavy and old beyond its years, and the work was hard, hard, hard. But on the days their truck turned in the morning toward Vražné, he began to whistle, wondering when he would see her and how she would contrive to find them time to be alone for a few minutes.
By late July he was sometimes left to work by himself, fixing the tractor or one of the other farm machines, and that helped them to grasp a few minutes out of sight of her mother and Herr Weber. Izzy had been surprised that Bill knew how to mend engines, but he explained that gunners like him were trained in how to take things apart and put them back together.
“I’ve always been good with my hands,” he said. “Piano playing, mending cars, you name it.”
He was too delicate to name the kind of soft touching he’d almost forgotten, as erotic to the toucher as to the touched, reminding him what desire felt like, licking through him, strong as a flame.
As the weeks of summer passed and July became August, she’d let him slide a hand inside her dress as they kissed, cupping her breast, and later she didn’t stop him from lifting her skirt, running his fingers up the inside of her thigh and up the wide leg of her knickers into the silky wetness. Then he bent down and tongued her hard nipple through the fabric of her cotton dress until he felt her shudder of release.
Each time it became more and more difficult to pull himself back to the task in hand, to remember that at any minute they might be discovered and it would all be over.
At the sawmill one evening, Izzy looked along the fencing to where Matylda and Dagmar were posing provocatively in their tight clothes, with a gang of admirers, including Harry, inside the wire. As Bill watched her, Izzy blushed deep red.
“You aren’t like them,” he reassured her. “What we do isn’t like them. This is something different.”
* * *
Sometimes they talked about the progress of the war. Izzy brought snippets of information about the rapid advance of the Soviet front, which he was able to pass on to his friends. By late August, he learned that the Russians were in the Carpathian Mountains in Czechoslovakia, and close to Warsaw in Poland. He had only the haziest idea of the geography, but realized that as the Red Army drew nearer, he and the rest of the prisoners would be moved back to Lamsdorf. His time with Izzy was coming to an end as surely as the summer passed.
A few days later, Bill was at the farm, working on an old string-binding reaping machine that he’d pulled out of the barn to fix, when he recognized Izzy’s footsteps behind him. She had brought his dinnertime bread and cheese, and he turned to her with a rush of anticipation. They looked all around to make sure her mother wasn’t coming, and ducked into the cool darkness of the barn, kissing and clinging to each other.
Bill pulled back, gasping for air. “You are too beautiful.” He breathed in the smell of her hair and lifted her curls in one hand, feeling their weight. “I love your hair.”
Izzy laughed. “My mother say must cut hair. She want make me into boy. She is put boy clothes, my brother clothes, for me to wear when Russian soldiers come.”
The thought was like a cold slap in the face. Bill’s whole body froze, and he tried to see her expression in the dim light as he thought through the implications of her mother’s plan and the need for it.
“They’re getting closer, then,” he said at last. “The Jerries ain’t holding them.” He began to pace away from her and then back. “If they come, you must do what your mother says. You’re too beautiful. They would . . .”
She nodded, miserably. The village gossip was alive with what happened to the women in every village and town the Soviets took. Slowly, she told Bill one of the stories she’d heard. “A mother with two daughters—my age. Mother know soldiers come, hide girls in”—she searched for the word—“room at top of house.”
“Loft. Attic,” supplied Bill, motioning for her to continue.
“Hide them in loftattic room, pull cupboard to hide door. Two soldiers come and ask for molodaya zhenshchina, any fräulein. The mother she say no, but then one girl . . . atishoo!”
Bill said, “Sneezed.” He already knew where this was going, but Izzy couldn’t be stopped. The words were tumbling out of her.
“Soldiers hear sneeze. One punch the mother, and she fall to floor. Other man kick her. Then they pull the girls downstairs. Girls scream and cry help. Pull girls into mother and father bedroom and lock door. Mother bang on door with hands. . . .”
Izzy wouldn’t meet Bill’s eyes as she told him the story. Her terror filled the barn, and he paced up and down, swishing helplessly at the straw with a stick. He could hardly bear to listen, seeing Izzy’s face on one of the girls, her body about to be violated, not knowing how he could put himself between her and the might of the Red Army.
Taking a deep breath, Izzy went on, telling him how the girls resisted, scratched and spat and twisted away, until one of the soldiers pulled out his revolver and shot them both.
“One girl shot in leg and one in stomach. Then men do . . . that thing . . . to both girls, bleeding and crying and maybe die. After, soldiers hold down mother and do it to her too. They go off, laughing.”
Bill punched the door of the barn, enraged by his own powerlessness. “If you stay here and they find you . . . I can’t save you. My God, I can’t bear to think of it. Promise me, you’ll do what she says, dress like a boy. Promise.”
And Izzy promised, though he didn’t believe it would be enough to protect her. If only she could escape to the partisans, he thought. If only he could help her escape.
They moved back outside, and he began to work again in furious silence while Izzy trudged back to the field. Despite the glorious sunshine, he was overtaken with despair. Soon everything would change. He and the others would be taken back behind the wires and watchtowers of Lamsdorf, and Izzy, darling Izzy, would be left here at
the mercy of the bestial Russian army.
Six
We harvested the potatoes and sugar beets in September, my mother working without rest. To my joy, the Oily Captain brought the working party almost every day. Bill and I met for snatched moments in the buildings where the crops were being laid up for the winter. I told Bill that some farmers buried their potatoes surrounded by straw, to ensure they didn’t get damp. My mother and I would probably find a place to do the same, to keep some the local inspector wouldn’t know about.
Harry was careful to go outside for a smoke from time to time, and then in the earthy-smelling dark of the barn, Bill and I whispered and kissed, kissed and whispered.
One day Harry said, “I’m just off to stretch my legs for a bit,” and sauntered, wreathed in smoke, back toward the potato field.
I took hold of Bill’s head and pulled it to me, hungrily. I let him touch me wherever he liked, knowing now that it was where I liked too, pushing against his fingers.
“You know I’ll come back for you, when it’s all over,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I studied his face, the three thin lines etched across his brow when he was deeply earnest.
I picked my words carefully. “But everything is different then.”
He was almost angry. “I won’t be different. I won’t feel any different. I love you. I love you.”
The words were small and clear but also like a great wind rushing in my ears. I couldn’t stop myself grinning as I said the words I had been practicing in front of my mirror for weeks. “I love you also.”
“Then you must know I’ll come back?” He was urgent.
“I will be wait for you. Even if long, long time.”
He pulled me tight into him again and kissed my eyelids.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 5
