“Name, rank, serial number,” said the sergeant, in English.
This had been no more real than a game of make-believe when Bill and I practiced it. Now it was actually happening, and it made my head spin.
Bill gave his details, and they were written down. The sergeant looked at me. I made a mime of my left hand as a notebook and my right hand as a pen.
“He don’t say nothing,” Bill told them. “Stumm. Mute.” He covered his mouth with one hand, turned to me and nodded. His blue eyes were dark with anxiety.
I started to move my left hand, as slowly as I could, and the young private trained his rifle on me. My heart was thumping as I reached inside the lining of my pocket to pull out the rolled-up cigarette paper Bill had given me, and I unsteadily unfolded it.
The sergeant sighed exaggeratedly and beckoned me to give him the paper as the guard stood at ease. I handed him the paper on which Bill had written “Private Algernon Cousins” and my fictitious rank and serial number in his English writing. I’d also practiced writing this, careful to form my letters in the English way and not to cross the number seven. The cross of a seven could be the end of everything. Panic swooped and dived in me.
The sergeant smoothed out the paper and read the details aloud. Then he beckoned again for me to bend toward him. I thought for certain he’d see I was a girl and not Private Cousins, that I’d be dragged away from Bill and never see him again. The sergeant stared so hard at me, it made me dizzy with terror. He checked again what Bill had written on the paper and then sighed and waved me back against the wall.
Our names and serial numbers were meticulously copied into a book, and the sergeant motioned us to sit on two chairs against the wall. I almost fell onto the chair, so grateful to sit, aware again of the uncontrollable shaking in my legs and the dull throbbing in the back of my hand.
With a sigh, the sergeant stood, walked around the desk and tipped our kit bags onto the floor to sift through the contents. Bill’s harmonica, in the felt pouch I made for him, went spinning across the tiles, and the sergeant approached it carefully, as if it might be a hand grenade. When he realized what it was, he laughed in relief and passed it to the young soldier, who sucked and blew inexpertly, making them both roar with laughter. The noise of the harmonica and their laughter echoed in the high-ceilinged space, and they both suddenly looked like ordinary young men having what Bill would have called “a lark,” until another soldier appeared and barked at them for silence. They had woken the captain. The sergeant blamed the private, who furiously shoved the harmonica back in its bag. The sergeant returned to the contents of our kit bags, scrutinizing Bill’s photographs, seeking cigarettes, weapons, food—who knew what? He handled with the tips of his fingers the muddy “spuds” we’d pulled up from a field. He didn’t find the hidden compartment at the bottom of my bag with the sanitary belt and rags I’d find so hard to explain. Of course, Bill didn’t know they were there either. How could I tell such a thing to a man? Blood thumped in my throat.
Finding nothing of interest, the sergeant ordered the private to stuff everything back in the bags and lay them at our feet. Some of Bill’s things ended up in my bag and vice versa.
Sitting here under the gaze of the soldiers, unable to move, to touch Bill, to escape, I was overwhelmed by the selfishness of my decision to run away with him. My desire to fight for my country, to be with Bill and to see my dad and Jan again had led us both to this. What a fool I’d been to hold on so long to the childish illusion that my father would find us and carry us to safety. I looked at the date on the wall calendar above the desk—October 1944, fifteen months since Dad and Jan left to join the resistance and refused to take me with them. Perhaps it was even true that they were dead. I tried to count the red and yellow tiles on the floor in an effort to calm the panic sweeping over and over me.
Time inched slowly forward—minutes that might be our last together—and as it passed, the shaking in my legs and the throbbing of my bruised hand subsided. Nazi soldiers marched in and out, but none of them took any notice of us. They weren’t even curious, let alone concerned. We were less than pieces of furniture in their eyes. I looked up at the fake-medieval coffered ceiling and the fancy staircase. I became aware that I was terribly thirsty.
Bill leaned forward, with his fair head in his long delicate fingers. I wanted to reach out, to wash the sweat and mud from his face and neck with a cool flannel, but I dared not touch him. His bowed head looked so fragile, so easily broken or lost. What had I done? What had I done?
A cramp began to repeatedly grip my guts. I pressed my hands on my stomach, and then, as the spasm passed, I stood. The sergeant at the desk glimpsed the movement, and his head jerked up. I wrapped my stomach with both arms and bent over in a pantomime of diarrhea.
“Take him to the crapper before he shits himself,” he barked at the private. I shrugged off the blanket I’d had strung across my body, and felt Bill’s worried eyes on my back as I followed the private back down the stairs and out through more palatial doors to a walled yard. We walked through a normal-sized door to the toilets.
The guard left one foot in the door as I fumbled under my coat with the unfamiliar trousers and underwear, but he turned away from the noise and stink I made. I was pleased Bill wasn’t there to hear me. When my stomach was truly empty and the griping pain had ceased, I smiled wryly to find carefully cut-up squares of German newspaper at hand to wipe myself with. It felt good to smear excrement on the propaganda, and as I flushed the toilet and came out of the cubicle, there was even water and soap to wash my hands. How quickly those things had come to seem like luxuries.
Back upstairs, Bill was still half-watching the door through which I’d left, and there was a tension and exhaustion in his face I’d never seen before, which made him look so much older than twenty-three. His eyes asked me, “Are you all right?” and I nodded and gave a ghost of a smile. He’d begged a glass of water, and we shared it, carefully sipping, not knowing when food or drink would come our way again. My stomach was empty now, and I was hungrier than I’d ever been in my life.
It became warm in our seats, and I unbuttoned my coat but didn’t take it off. Sweat trickled down my spine into the crack of my bottom. The heat made me drowsy, and I dozed for perhaps an hour before we were shaken roughly and hurried to the stairs leading down into the yard. A truck drew up, our details were given to the driver and we were shoved into the back. I wanted to tell them that pushing us till we stumbled actually made us slower rather than faster, but dropped my eyes and held my tongue. In the back of the truck were piles of crates and, on wooden benches, a guard and four other recaptured prisoners wearing a strange assortment of coats and hats.
We all nodded at one another, and one man said in an American accent, “Here we are again.”
“Happy as can be,” replied Bill, like a secret mantra.
Another American replied, in a phony German accent, as if it were a very old joke, “The war is over for you, Tommy.” Bill laughed so loudly, it made me jump. The two Americans introduced themselves, and Bill told them I was British, but mute from shell shock. They looked at me with interest and pity. One of the other recaptured prisoners was French, and Bill said, “Bonjour,” pronouncing it very badly.
“He’s Russian,” said one of the Americans, indicating the fourth prisoner. Nobody spoke any Russian.
The truck started up, and we jolted out of the cobbled yard. The clock in the tower now showed eight a.m., and it was light enough to see that the town hall’s ornate domes were green. Bill checked his watch. “Running slow again,” he said, fiddling with the winder.
Bill and I sat side by side, as the truck rattled and swerved back through the town. Our thighs pressed hard into each other, both of us knowing it might be our last touch. I could hear bells from a number of different churches, reminding me it was Sunday. I thought of my mother and Marek, hurrying, late as usual, into the f
amiliar comfort of our parish church. I pictured them there, my mother’s eyes red-rimmed and her mouth held in a tight line, as they were for so long after my father and brother left.
“Never marry a foolish idealist or a daredevil,” she’d told me bitterly. Now I thought that I must have been both, my father’s traits running through me like a fault line through marble.
I focused on what I could see from the back of the truck: Prostějov drawing away from us, more churches, a fancy theater, the grander buildings of the center giving way slowly to three-story, two-story houses, and then the low terraces of the outskirts before we were back out in the open country.
The Russian man sat and stared straight ahead as if none of us were there. I watched him curiously out of the corner of my eye. He was the first of this terrifying breed I’d ever laid eyes on. He looked like just a man.
“Do we know where we’re going?” Bill asked the Americans.
“Lamsdorf,” said one, and the Russian prisoner made a choked sound that might have been a groan. Bill shook his head in sympathy.
“Dropping off groceries en route,” said the other American, indicating the piles of crates. “Might take some time.” He smiled at me encouragingly. “Enjoy the trip!” He must have seen how terrified I was and thought I was very young. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a cowardly boy but a reckless twenty-year-old girl who had leaped from the comfort and security of home into the arms of an almost stranger, putting both our lives into appalling danger. Instead, I stretched my face into a smile.
* * *
As the truck followed the twists and turns of the road, we were thrown about, and it made me feel nauseous. I held my body away from the American on my left, and let myself lean into Bill on my right.
The shape of the houses began to change. The roofs got steeper, and one of the Americans pointed out a woodpile up one wall of a house, right to the roof.
“It must get pretty cold hereabouts?” he said.
Bill nodded. “A bit chilly. Like Canada.”
“I’m from Florida,” said the soldier.
“Blimey, you’re gonna feel it. Brass monkeys,” said Bill.
I didn’t know what it had to do with monkeys, but I thought the American would soon feel very, very cold as the Polish winter drew on. I wondered if I would live to see the first snow.
From time to time I allowed myself to glance at Bill, rationing the frequency so it wouldn’t be obvious. I took in his slightly ski-jump nose, the patchy blond-red stubble beginning to push through his chin, the tightness of his earlobe to his face, his blond eyelashes, and I loved all these things, wanted to hold them in my mind forever. More often I let myself look down at his hands resting on his thighs, the dirt under the nails, the long white fingers, a turquoise vein running down the back of the left hand. I wanted to cover them in kisses, knowing each kiss might be the last. Sometimes I felt his eyes on me, and looked up to exchange the briefest of glances. This close, his eyes were the gray-blue of a lake on a thundery day.
About midmorning the truck stopped at Mährisch Schönberg, and we were allowed out so they could unload some of the crates. The prisoners were permitted to pee up against a tree. I did my diarrhea mime again and was given a sheet of newspaper and allowed to go a little farther from the road. The guard kept his rifle trained on me, in case I was trying to escape. He didn’t know that wherever Bill was was where I must be, now and forever.
On the road again, the countryside stretched out below us as we climbed higher. Out of the back of the truck, we could see only where we’d been, not where we were going, but as the road bent, we glimpsed the mountains that lay ahead, hills behind hills, bluer and bluer as they faded into the distance.
“C’est comme les Alpes,” said the Frenchman.
“It’s a long way from Piccadilly,” replied Bill.
The farmhouses we passed now were tall and square, with storage in undercrofts and living spaces above. None of them were the familiar shape of farms I knew, with four buildings around a courtyard. There were stony fields where it wouldn’t be possible to grow anything, and fast-flowing shallow rivers. We’d covered such a short distance, but it was all so foreign already.
We had one more stop, at Frývaldov, and we stood to the side of the truck while the rest of the crates were unloaded. By now it was lunchtime, and the Nazi driver and guard sat on a wall and chewed on sausage and bread. We watched them like starving dogs, and I thought I might faint from hunger.
There was a short discussion, and then the guard gave a small nugget of bread each to me, Bill, the Americans and the Frenchman, but not to the Russian. I nibbled at my bread like a mouse, trying to make it last, and balled up a small amount, which I meant to give to the Russian once nobody was looking. But then hunger overcame me, and I ate it. I reminded myself of the stories of what Russian soldiers had done to women, but I didn’t feel good about my behavior. It wasn’t Christian. The guards passed around a canteen of water, and we each took a swig, wiping the top of it with a sleeve. I handed it to the Russian, but the guard snatched it away.
We passed through a checkpoint, and I realized I’d left my homeland for the first time in my life. It was a shock to know that here, if I spoke, I wouldn’t be understood; in fact, people would laugh at me because Poles found Czech speech funny. I thought I wouldn’t want to be laughed at; then immediately I wondered that in such danger I could be concerned about being ridiculed. I was still such a child.
And then we were descending the other side of the Jeseník Mountains into flat farmland again. Fog was closing in and the trees were charcoal smudges on the horizon. Tall avenues of trees spread out behind our truck on the long, straight roads. The road stretched out behind, taking me farther and farther from my mother, my brother, everything I knew, leaving them in fog.
It was midafternoon before the truck trundled through the gates of an enormous POW camp, with watchtowers and barbed wire fences. Dread clutched my stomach, sending waves of sickness through me. I pressed my leg into Bill’s, from hip to knee, like one last lingering kiss. My imagination galloped ahead, to my being discovered as a girl, dragged, screaming, from Bill, never to see him again. I saw Nazi soldiers lining up to rape me, forcing Bill to watch, until one did me the favor of a bullet through the brain. I hoped he wasn’t thinking the same.
We were unloaded just inside the gates, and prisoners watched us from beyond more barbed wire fences. Perhaps they were interested because we were the only things that lifted the monotony of the hours, though every day must have brought new prisoners through the gates. Perhaps they were hoping to see old friends. They checked out our clothes and faces, and I wondered what movement or expression would betray me as a girl.
“British?” someone shouted.
Bill looked in the direction of the voice and nodded.
“Welcome to the holiday camp,” called the voice.
Bill smiled grimly and shouted, “What time’s the knobbly-knees contest?”
Laughter erupted around us, and the guard looked over. I’d never understood the British need to make jokes out of everything, but now I began to recognize that it was an aspect of courage.
Bill was scanning the faces to see if there was anyone he recognized. He’d told me it wasn’t likely, because men moved through here so quickly into the Arbeitskommando work camps. Perhaps he was thinking about Harry and wishing he hadn’t left him behind. Or just looking for a familiar face in this ocean of strangers.
We were prodded forward through another set of gates into the compound. The two rows of wire fencing looked flimsy until I raised my eyes to the tower and saw the guns, and pictured the guards, wounded or too old for the Russian front, itching to pull triggers to prove themselves still men.
During our long nights walking, Bill had warned me about what might lie in store if we were captured. First, we’d be entered in their endless books. Names, ranks an
d serial numbers again. Then they might delouse us, and here the greatest danger lay. In some camps prisoners were taken to the delousing station, stripped naked, showered or hosed down and then painted on the underarm and genital area with louse killer. If I was taken to one of those camps, I’d be finished. We’d be finished. Everything would be finished.
He’d also told me that escaped prisoners were normally put in the “cooler” for thirty days. I could barely imagine half an hour in a damp, cold cell on my own, let alone thirty days away from Bill, away from any other people, so far from my mother.
I bit my tongue, hoped a Hail Mary would contain the fear, prevent it bubbling, like a hot spring from my lips. Hail Mary, I said over and over in my head.
Ahead, I could see block upon block of long single-story buildings that must have been the “huts.” The ground below our feet was mud, which had been stamped hard as a road by so many feet. We were prodded into the third building, where an overweight Nazi sergeant asked Bill for his name and serial number. Bill replied smartly, looking straight forward. I practiced in my head the details we’d agreed for me.
“Which working party did you escape from?” the sergeant asked.
“I can’t remember,” said Bill. “Went for a stroll and got a bit lost.”
I feared they would strike him for his insolence, but the guards seemed to be used to this British humor.
The sergeant motioned me forward and asked my name. I placed two fingers on my lips and mimed writing on a paper.
“Permission to speak,” said Bill.
The sergeant raised his eyebrows and turned to a young soldier with a lazy eye. “Call Sergeant Maddox,” he ordered in German, and as the soldier left, the telephone rang. Perhaps this would be someone reporting a Czech girl on the run.
“Wait,” he said to us, picking up the receiver. “No, the turnips have not arrived,” he said. A conversation about supplies of vegetables! The normality of it slowed the crazy beating of my heart. I focused on translating it into English.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 11
