Dear Captain Meier,
I have had a telegram to go to my aunt’s in Český Těšín. I hope you can take care of the farm until my mother and I return.
Izabela
I hoped that would buy us a few days.
Then we pulled on our coats and hats, shouldered our bags and blankets and headed out into the darkness.
Nine
Bill and Izzy had agreed to move by night and sleep during the day, but Bill wasn’t used to nighttime without streetlamps and found he had to walk quite slowly. Night in the countryside was darker than he’d ever imagined.
Izzy knew the area well enough to have planned where they’d hide for the first two days, and she led Bill from the road across an uneven field and onto the railway tracks, which would lead through Hranice and Lipník to Přerov. She was bubbling over with the thrill of it, but Bill thought they wouldn’t get far before the guards started looking for him, even with the false trail Izzy had left in the notes. The best he could hope for was to get her out of the path of the oncoming Russian soldiers, and deliver her safely to her dad and her brother.
The stars were often obscured by clouds, and Izzy sometimes lost the rhythm of stepping over the railway sleepers and tripped. Bill’s stride was longer, and he seemed to find it easier to set up a slow, steady rhythm to whatever song was playing over and over in his head.
Each time the dark shape of a building reared up beside the track, he would fall silent, and his heart would thump louder in his chest as he listened for patrolling soldiers. This was worse than escaping with Harry. Now he was responsible for Izzy, and she was just like an excited child who wouldn’t stop talking. How hard she made it to keep her safe, he thought.
It was already becoming light when they left the railway tracks to find the farm Izzy was seeking. She’d told Bill there was only one woman on this farm now, and he thought it was true, judging by the disrepair of many of the outbuildings. Izzy pulled him into the disused stables and led the way up the rickety staircase to the old ostler’s quarters.
They pushed open the door, and a dust cloud rose to meet them. Bill was pleased. Nobody had set foot in here for years. The dust made them sneeze, but it was private and out of the wind, and there was even a bed. Bill wedged a chairback under the door handle, and Izzy was impressed because she’d never seen that before. He didn’t tell her how ineffective it would be against guards trying to break down the door. He had other things on his mind.
Slowly he stripped all the clothes from her, dropping them one by one to the floor. He unlaced her corset and lifted out each breast, then stood back to look at her in the light falling from a tiny dusty window. This time he was determined to make it last.
“Lie on the bed,” he said, pulling off his boots and socks, never taking his eyes from her. He turned to remove his shorts and fit the Johnny, then sat on the bed beside her.
“Now I’m going to show you what it’s all about,” he said.
* * *
During the course of the day, they made love five times, falling entangled in a deep, sticky sleep afterward, and waking to drink a sip of water or creep down to the stable to pee in a corner. When Bill woke for the third time, he was aware of every rustle in the old stable, but mostly he was listening to Izzy’s quiet breathing. He lay on his back with her head resting in the dip below his shoulder and thought, This is heaven . . . not dancing cheek to cheek.
When they woke up and discovered it was beginning to get dark, they started to gather their clothes from around the room where they’d been thrown down in the dust. Bill decided tomorrow he’d fold Izzy’s clothes properly.
“I want wash,” she said, and Bill did too, but he tried to be cheerful. “I know. Me too. I stink like a goat.”
Outside in the twilit yard, he found a water barrel and dipped a rag into it so they could wash as best they could.
Bill refilled their water bottles, and as soon as it was completely dark, they set out again along the railway tracks. Usually Izzy talked, but sometimes they simply held hands and listened to the sounds of the night. Then Bill’s mind wandered back and forth from the past to the present to the future, looping and curling on itself. Only when they reached a station did he remember to be afraid, to look for movement or light that might mean an end to everything; only then did he remember that all this happiness was fragile as an eggshell.
As day broke after their third night walking, they found an abandoned cottage, and barely even stopped to lock the door before peeling off each other’s clothes. Bill had used up his supply of Johnnies and forced himself to withdraw quickly.
“That not so good,” Izzy complained.
Bill laughed. “Don’t I know it. But I’m not going to make you pregnant.”
“I don’t care,” she said, running a hand down his chest and stomach. “I like have your baby.”
Bill gripped her hand. “But not here, and not now. Though, God knows, I can’t leave you alone.” He bent his head to lick her from throat to navel. And later he slept like a baby himself, though he’d promised himself he’d stay awake to protect her.
And so they continued for five days, walking through the nights and spending the days wrapped together in haylofts, barns and outbuildings. When their food ran out, they began to steal. Izzy suggested she should go to a farm and ask to buy food, but Bill didn’t want her to be seen, in case the guards were out questioning farmers. They tried to guess if her mother had now returned from Český Těšín and if the guards knew they’d run away together.
On their sixth day, they found an abandoned hunting shelter. It was a single room with a single bed in an alcove, plus a table, two chairs and a fur rug in front of a fireplace.
“Could have fire?” Izzy asked pleadingly. “To lie, no clothes.”
“You were such a good girl, and I’ve turned you into a harlot,” said Bill, thoroughly pleased with himself.
“What is har lot?” she pouted, and in answer, he pushed her up against the wall.
* * *
Later, Bill lit the fire, despite his fear of the smoke being seen from miles away in broad daylight. “Look at your green eyes, like some kind of witch,” he said, stroking her face. “I’ve always thought of myself as a sensible sort of bloke. How did you make me run away with you if it wasn’t by casting a spell? Why have I lit a fire which might bring Nazis from miles around? You’ve put an enchantment on me.”
“Spell is love,” she said, running a finger down his hairless chest. “I make you do anything.” She touched the tip of his penis. “I make you do this.”
He groaned. “Again?”
“Again,” she breathed in his ear.
* * *
Afterward, it was as if a new thought had struck her. “How you know all this? What to do?” Bill was sleepy and didn’t want to talk, but she jabbed him in the ribs. “How you know?”
“Know what? I need to sleep, Izzy. You wear me out.”
“Yes, sleep, but first tell. How know what girl like?”
Suddenly he was awake. “Ha! Just a natural, I suppose,” he joked.
“No. Not laugh. Tell. What other girl you do this with?”
“Oh, come on, not now, surely?”
“Husband tell wife everything,” she ordered.
“You knew I’d done it before,” he said.
“I know. But now must tell name of girl. Was Flora, yes?”
Bill was appalled. Whatever had made her think such a thing? “Good God, no. That’d be like doing it with my sister.”
“Name, then.”
Bill hesitated. His better judgment told him to laugh it off, to cajole her into a safer topic. But part of him thought they should have no secrets from each other. Everything should be clear as crystal between them.
“London’s not like Vražné,” he started. “And not all girls are good girls like you.” He
sat up and could see the lovely curve of her body in the light from the coals and penetrating the thin curtains.
“I must know,” she insisted.
“OK. If you ‘must know,’ in the pub, my parents’ pub, there’s a couple of working girls. Not so young anymore.” He saw she didn’t understand and he was beginning to think this was a really terrible idea, but couldn’t see how to backtrack now. “On the game. Not bad girls, but they ain’t got husbands and have to make a living.”
“Do sex for money?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“You pay money?” She was outraged, and he was equally indignant.
“No. I’ve never paid. Not even in Egypt. One of the girls—name was Kath—when I was eighteen said she’d give me a birthday present I’d never forget.”
“Děvka!” Izzy spat.
Bill protested, “It wasn’t just that. We went to her place.”
Izzy was listening now in silence.
“She said she was going to give me a lesson more useful than anything I’d been taught in school. She was going to show me how to make my wife happy.” He chuckled smugly. “And she bloody did!”
Izzy smacked his back, hard, and he jumped, taken completely by surprise at the stinging blow.
She hissed, “You think it funny to put that thing in filthy děvka and then put in me?”
She’s jealous, Bill thought, a little pleased.
“You are disgusting,” she spat. “I not same as filthy děvka.” And she tried to hit him again.
He grabbed her wrists to keep off the blows. She was almost as strong as he was, and they struggled together, hampered by the blankets round their legs. He fell back and took her with him. Her mouth made contact with his shoulder, and she bit down, hard.
He shouted out in pain and surprise, and pushed her away from him. She fell back, and he jumped to his feet, one hand holding the place she’d bitten. He backed away from her, behind the table.
“Get yourself under control,” he ordered.
They circled the table, both naked, and he was aware of blood coming from below his fingers. Izzy covered herself with one arm across her breasts and a hand over her groin.
“Not look!” she ordered.
Bill lifted his wet hand toward his face. “You drew blood.” He looked down at the circle of teeth marks. “I didn’t know you had such a temper.” He thought, She’s a bloody wildcat. I don’t know her at all. “Aren’t you going to say sorry?” he asked, pressing a dirty rag against the wound.
“I not speak,” she said.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” he said. “I only told you the truth, like you wanted.” He paused. “And anyway, Kath was right, and you did like it. You loved it.”
Izzy wrapped a blanket around her and went to lie on the cold single bed in the alcove, turning her back to him while he returned to the makeshift bed by the fire. He lifted the rag from the wound, and when it had stopped bleeding, he dressed himself slowly.
“It’s warmer to sleep here,” he suggested, but she didn’t move.
He lay, missing her warmth, wondering what other things they would discover about each other, wondering how much time they had left.
When darkness had fallen and it was time to get on the move again, he had trouble waking her. She still seemed determined not to speak, so he kept up a barrage of light chatter. He talked about different kinds of fireplaces and how they burned coal in London, not wood, and he didn’t remark on her failure to reply. They packed up their things and set out, both feeling like something was broken between them that could never be mended.
She stumbled on the railway tracks, and he caught hold of her elbow. She shrugged him off.
“Look, Izzy,” he said, almost in a whisper. “We might be captured any minute. We might never see each other again. I’m sorry you weren’t my first. But I can’t change what happened before I met you. You are the love of my life.”
As soon as he started to speak, tears began to roll from her eyes, and she tripped. This time when he steadied her, she let him. Then she stopped walking as sobs came in great gulps. He took her in his arms, and she howled into his shoulder, tears and snot running down the oilskin cape. He held her, stroking her short curls, until she was cried out; then he pulled a rag from his pocket for her to blow her nose. It was crisp with dried blood from when she’d bitten him.
“Sorry,” she sobbed. “Sorry for bite, for smack, for shout. You can hit me.”
He shook his head. “I’d never hit a woman. Seen too much of that. Never. Never.”
She kissed him on the lips. “You right. We alive. We never fight. And I never do not speak. Too hard.”
* * *
But though they were lovers again, something subtle had changed, and the reality of their situation finally began to dawn on them. Bill knew they were moving too slowly and finally acknowledged the truth—the partisans weren’t out looking for Izzy; they had more important things to do, like blowing up bridges and fighting battles. He and Izzy were tiny and alone in the center of a huge continent teeming with Nazi soldiers who would crush them like beetles under their boots.
They walked for two more nights, more sober, more realistic, more hungry. They burrowed themselves down in cold barns and outbuildings during the day, and held on to each other with a new desperation.
As they walked, they began to talk about what would happen if they were caught. Bill knew what they’d do to him—send him back to Lamsdorf for thirty days’ solitary confinement in the cooler—but he didn’t know what the punishment might be for Izzy, for helping a prisoner escape. He feared they might shoot her. Impossible though it sounded, it might be safer for her to pretend she was another escaped prisoner of war.
“You wouldn’t be able to speak,” he warned, and Izzy nodded dismally.
“We’d have to come up with a name for you, and you’d have to learn a serial number and how to write them like an English person would.”
He told her that her British next of kin would be informed, and said that would have to be Flora, if only they could think of a way of letting Flora know that this fictitious prisoner was connected with him.
“I know! His name will be Cousins, because me and Flora are cousins.”
Bill tried out various possible first names as they walked through the dark, and eventually decided Cousins’ first name should be Algernon because he and Flora used to play at being Biggles and Algernon.
“Characters from books,” Bill explained. “She’d know right away. We used to play it all the time when we was kids. So you’d be Algernon Cousins. He’d be young, to explain the fact that you don’t shave. Maybe he lied about his age and joined up when he was only fifteen or sixteen.”
Izzy nodded. “I am small for a boy.”
“He’d have been bullied at school, for being so small, for having a stupid name like Algernon, but that would have made him tough.”
“And what work he do? Farm boy?”
“No, because he’ll have a London address—Flora’s address. He could be a stable lad who looks after the horses which pull the coal wagon, but who dreams of being a jockey. That’s it—an ostler who looks after the gee-gees. Like Al-gee. That’d be his nickname for sure, Gee-gee Cousins.” He explained to Izzy that young English children called horses “gee-gees,” but he couldn’t tell her why.
When they rested that day, he showed her how to write her new name and address, and she memorized an invented serial number, Harry’s with two numbers changed.
“Will this work?” asked Izzy doubtfully.
Though Bill couldn’t see how it would, he tried to sound confident. “Of course. It has to work.”
As afternoon slipped into evening on the eighth day, they were sleeping in the hayloft of a barn when they were woken by voices from the yard outside. They gripped hold of each other, and Bill raise
d himself to a sitting position. It sounded like two people.
“Fuck,” whispered Bill as he recognized Captain Meier’s and Herr Weber’s voices. “Quick, hide.”
They scrambled to their feet. Bill grabbed their boots, and Izzy rolled up the blankets. Above their heads the thick rafters crisscrossed, supporting the roof.
“Up there,” Bill ordered, quietly.
Izzy passed Bill the kit bags and blankets, and he stretched on tiptoe to lay them on top of the beam nearest to him.
The great door of the barn swung open below them, and a shaft of evening light streamed in. Bill kicked the straw about where they’d been lying.
The captain and Herr Weber entered the barn beneath them, speaking in German. Bill wished he knew what they were saying. He led Izzy on tiptoe to the darkest corner of the hayloft, and he wrapped his arms around her knees and lifted her so she could reach the beam. With a massive pull, she heaved her body up onto the rafter and lay along it.
“Bombardier King,” Herr Weber called in English, “are you in here? If so, I arrest you. Give yourself up now, and it will not go so badly for you.”
Izzy reached her hand down to help Bill, but he moved silently across the hayloft, as far from her as possible. If they found him first, he’d say they’d quarreled and split up days ago. Anything not to turn her in.
There was another discussion in German below, presumably Captain Meier telling Herr Weber what to say, and he called out in English again.
“Are you here? Is Izabela with you? The SS will shoot her for helping a prisoner escape. Her mother is back on the farm, and she is beside herself with anxiety. You must hand yourself over to us now. This is your last chance.”
Although Bill had been able to reach the beam to hide their belongings, it was harder for him to get enough of a grip to pull himself up. Halfway up his hand slipped, and he fell back onto his feet.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 9
