The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  Once the watchmen have given the “all clear,” Ralph raises his hand for silence. The twenty or so men are quiet immediately. Bill can see they obviously respect Ralph, but he has no idea if he’ll be able to control them once they’ve heard about Izzy. He is racked with misery and guilt.

  Ralph’s voice is low, but everyone can hear. “This is Bill, joining us from the Eighth Army and a work camp in Czechoslovakia.”

  A murmur begins, and Ralph raises his hand again. “And this . . . Steady now, men—” He pulls Izzy forward to stand beside him, keeping one hand on her shoulder.

  She looks hard at her boots and chews the inside of her cheek. Bill forms fists and parts his feet for balance, in case he needs to defend her.

  “This is his wife.”

  A riot of noise erupts around them. One man bangs his tin cup on the table. Others cheer. Close by someone says, “A woman in the camp!”

  Men call out, “Will she do us all?”

  “I’m first.”

  “Put her in a different bed each night!”

  Bill steps in front of Izzy, raises his fists and wishes Harry were here beside him.

  Ralph keeps his hand on Izzy’s shoulder and yells, “Quiet!” but this time it takes several seconds for the excited murmuring to die away. All around them men are pressing closer, where they can get a good view of Izzy.

  Slowly she raises her head, and one by one she looks them in the eyes. Bill watches their faces, alert for any rush toward her. He sees exhilaration and thrill in their eyes, but nobody moves to grab her.

  Ralph barks, “That’s the last time I hear anything like that, or God help you! She’s the wife of a British soldier, and we’ll all have to work together night and day to keep her safe. I don’t know if we can do it.” He pauses and looks around him. “But I know we can’t do it unless we all pull together.”

  An electric charge of excitement runs through the hut.

  Ralph pauses and calls, “Max?” and the other prisoners turn to a man who is still lying on his bunk, curled away from them. Slowly Max turns over and gazes blankly at them. And then, as if they slowly come into focus, he sighs and climbs down from his bunk, his dark hair standing up on end. Everyone’s watching him. He’s a stick of a man, with a long, mournful face and deep black circles under his eyes, as if he hasn’t slept for weeks. His cheeks are hollow, and Bill can see his skull beneath the flesh. The crowd parts to let him stand beside Ralph.

  “I’m in,” he says. He speaks with the faintest trace of an American accent. He clears his throat, and everyone listens carefully. “We have to remember she isn’t military. Not covered by the Geneva Convention. If they find her now, they’ll say she’s a spy.” He nods to Izzy and Bill, and his eyes are deep brown pools of sadness. “Sorry to say this, guys, but they shoot spies.”

  Bill and Izzy glance at each other, aghast. How could she be a spy? Bill thinks. What would she tell? Who would she tell? This is a new horror, something he’s never considered. He looks around at the other prisoners’ faces and wonders what the Nazis do to men who harbor spies.

  Over to Izzy’s right, a short, square man with sandy hair and piercing blue eyes pushes through the crowd. His Scots accent rips and jars the words, so Bill can hardly understand him. “I’m with ye.” He looks around the hut. “And by the by, I’ll kill the man who messes with the lassie.” Bill suspects from the silent way they receive this casual threat that the men know he means it.

  Another steps forward, a man with a thin mustache. “I’m with you,” he says. But there’s something in the way his calculating scrutiny rests on Izzy too long that Bill doesn’t like. His eyes are fringed with long black eyelashes, like a cow’s, but he has none of the softness of a bovine gaze.

  “OK. I’m in,” says one man, and then another and another.

  “Don’t worry, love,” says someone. “They’ll have to take us down first.”

  There’s murmured assent and a buzz of excitement from all the prisoners. Bill slowly lowers his fists.

  Ralph nods. “OK, lads. This must be our secret. Our deadly secret. He’ll be known by everyone as Cousins. He’s listed here as Private Algernon Cousins.” He chuckles. “You may remember that Algernon was Biggles’ cousin.”

  A laugh explodes around the hut and seems to release the pressure in the room. “The story is that he’s got shell shock and doesn’t speak.”

  Bill looks around with a hopeful grimace. “If we can do this . . .”

  Someone says, “You’ll have a lot of godfathers for your first,” and the tension breaks again into laughter.

  “Tell us the story,” says someone else. There’s a mix of amusement and admiration on every face, and Bill can’t help rising to it.

  “I was on a work detail based at a sawmill in Mankendorf. Five of us was sent to her mother’s farm to help bring in the crops. I suppose you’d say it was love at first sight.” There’s a mix of groans and cheers from the men. “We was married about ten days ago”—Bill pauses for effect, lifting his eyebrows suggestively, and there are more cheers and groans—“and we’ve been movin’ at night. Her dad and brother are in the resistance, so we thought we might get lucky and make a home run. . . .”

  Five clear raps come at the far door of the hut and instantly everyone moves back to their previous places. A buzz of innocent chatter begins. The door opens and the lookout comes in, with a gust of fresh air. “Goon on the block,” he says. “And the working parties returning.”

  The day’s turning darker outside the windows. Ralph nods, and the men return to their bunks, to their card games, dissolving in the gloom.

  Ralph taps his lip with his forefinger and addresses Izzy. “I think we’ll hide you in plain sight, Cousins,” he says, indicating the first bunk by the door. “I’ll shift over, and you’ll come here by the window, in the middle bunk, with Bill below you. It’s warmest on top, but insects drop out of the ceiling. I’ll move to the next bunk.”

  Bill feels Izzy shiver and remembers her fear of spiders. How trifling that seems now.

  Ralph continues. “We’ll keep the bunk above you free as long as we can.”

  “Thank you,” says Bill. “Sorry to be so much trouble.”

  As the removal of Ralph’s belongings is being managed, the door closest to them opens again, and a line of filthy and exhausted-looking men files in. They don’t speak much, but seek out their own beds, pull off their work boots and lie down. Izzy shrinks back into the shadows of the bunk, but Bill can see they are too tired to pay any attention to the newcomers.

  The lookout calls, “Goon up!” and three Nazi guards enter by the door at the other end of the gangway.

  “Hut inspection,” says the fat sergeant who signed in Bill and Izzy.

  Ralph motions to Izzy and Bill to stay where they are, and hurries down to meet the guards, calling, “Look lively, men. Stand by your beds.”

  From the shadows to the right, someone shouts, “Oh, no, I was just dreaming of giving a fat English sausage to the commandant’s lovely missus.”

  There’s laughter, but the guard ignores it. Bill thinks perhaps he doesn’t speak English.

  The prisoners stand at the ends of their bunks as the two guards march forward, turning over a game of chess in progress on the table, deliberately knocking over tin mugs from which the men have been drinking tea, poking into the precious parcels open on some of the beds.

  Bloody bullies, Bill thinks, staring at the opposite bunks as they approach.

  The young lazy-eyed guard slings their kit bags, blankets and a straw mattress each onto their bunks. The sergeant glances at them and addresses Ralph in English. “They should be in the cooler. Will be when we finish with those RAF Terrorflieger bastards. For now, latrine duty.”

  Ralph protests, “But the Russians do that.”

  “Well, now they do it too. It’s their punishm
ent. The ostler can hold the horse.”

  Ralph begins to speak and thinks better of it. He hands the Nazi his trousers. “Confiscated civilian clothes.”

  The sergeant looks them up and down and then passes on to the next bunk. He doesn’t pay any particular attention to Izzy, and the relief is so great, it makes Bill feel unsteady. He looks up, and the man with the thin mustache is studying Izzy with an expression Bill can’t read.

  Twelve

  Twilight is falling on the camp. We line up to be searched as we leave the hut. Ahead of me the prison guard is patting down prisoners, and wild terror pulses through me as the line moves and I get nearer and nearer to my turn. Now he’s searching Bill, his hunger-skinny arms and chest, and then the horrible Nazi hands go up my legs, my hips.

  From the dusk ahead of us, someone calls, “Fat-arsed squarehead. Going to lose the war. Like you did before.”

  The guard searching me freezes momentarily. I can smell the cigarettes on his breath and can’t tell if he’s looking at me or past me. A joyful, derisive chorus starts up out in the twilight.

  “Going to lose the war, like you did before!”

  The guard motions me forward and starts to search the man behind me, and I stumble out into the air, shaking all over, taking deep breaths. I force myself to march like a man, left, right, repeating it over and over to myself in English.

  On the parade ground, thousands of men line up. Guards move up and down the rows, count each man and return to the commandant with their tally. Our guard has great bushy white eyebrows and white hair sprouting from his ears. His eyes scan my face, and I expect him to notice at once that I’m a girl. I look out beyond the wire, at the top of a fir tree, as he passes. I force myself to concentrate as the cold wind riffles the tree’s uppermost branches. I try to imagine I’m a bird sitting up there observing us, my feathers lifted by the breeze, ready to take off at any moment and fly to freedom. Fly home. The guard passes on, and my heartbeat slows. One group has to be counted twice, and the early-autumn chill starts to penetrate my clothes.

  At last “the count” is completed, and the prisoners all move toward the latrines and washhouses. I choose a dark corner hole in the stinking latrine, while Bill, the sandy-haired man, the thin-mustache man and the mournful man stand with their backs to me, introducing themselves to one another. I hear the sad-faced man say his name is Max, and the sandy-haired man calls himself Scotty. The man with the thin mustache is Tucker. He’s the only one who flicks a glance over his shoulder at me sitting on the latrine. They’re blocking me from the view of the tall guard who passes the washroom door from time to time and looks in. I guess the guards don’t want to be in this stinking place any more than we do.

  The twenty men from “B company” contrive not to use the holes near to me, but allow me a respectful distance. A man who doesn’t know my secret plonks himself beside me, farting loudly.

  As we come into the washroom, someone hands me a sliver of soap, someone else a well-used toothbrush and another a small, grubby towel. I have to blink back tears at their kindness and pin my tongue to the roof of my mouth not to thank them. I hope they can see my gratitude.

  The soap is poor quality, but it feels good to wash my hands. I use a small corner of the towel as a cloth to wash my face. I wonder when I’ll be able to wash my body again. The cold water on my face tingles, and I’ve never felt more terrified, but oddly too, I’ve never felt more alive. Everything is brighter and louder and more acute than I’ve ever seen it. The men’s banter ricochets around me. The guard pauses at the door, watching two men who are fooling about. He isn’t interested in me. They start up a rollicking song, and others join in. “Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over, lay me down and do it again.”

  I wonder if those who know my secret are thinking of me and Bill as they sing. Tucker is singing heartily, with his cow eyes on me, and his thin mustache hopping up and down on his lip, and I’m the first to look away. My scalp prickles with uneasiness.

  By the time we leave the washroom, it is almost dark and the searchlight from each tower around the compound plays backward and forward along the double lines of perimeter fencing, over the thousands of prisoners.

  Back in our hut, the window shutters have been closed from the outside. It’s terrifying to be locked in, but at least I’m shut away from the Nazi guards. Some men sit on their bunks to remove their boots and tie them together in pairs. I notice how few of them have socks. Most seem to have their feet wrapped in strips of linen.

  “Fuss-lag. Foot rags,” says one of them wryly, noticing my stare. “Not as good as woolly socks.”

  The men begin preparing their meager evening meal. Terror has prevented me from feeling hungry, but now I realize it must be many hours since Bill and I sat on the railway embankment and ate our morsels of bread.

  I think of the dumplings my mother must be serving now, and the memory of the smell of cooking in our kitchen is almost overwhelming. I must be careful what I allow myself to think about.

  Ralph Maddox tells Bill that we two will be a “combine” to share food and Red Cross parcels when they come. Tonight we get a third of a black loaf to share between us.

  The sad man called Max says, “The Geneva Convention says they’re supposed to give us the same rations as they give their military. I pity the poor schmucks if this is all they get.” I wonder if he’s a lawyer. He has that kind of serious look about him.

  A few men can fit around the tables at the center of the hut, but most retreat to their own bunks to eat or sit on a mate’s bottom bunk. We sit on Bill’s bed with Ralph and Max facing us. Scotty has disappeared back to a group of his own friends, but sometimes I catch his eye and he winks at me. His eyes aren’t the gray-blue of Bill’s, but bright and clear as a lake under ice. It comforts me a little to know he’s watching, alert for trouble. Tucker is also playing cards, sitting where he has a clear view of me. I try to inch myself as much as possible into the shadow of the bunk above, draw myself back, like a snail into a shell. If I could, I’d make myself disappear.

  Most of the men around us are using the edges of their metal POW ID tags as rulers and knives to get an exact division of the bread, but Bill just tears ours roughly in half and gives me the bigger share. I don’t protest, but when he isn’t looking, I swap them over. The men bring out yesterday’s parcels, and in their “combines” of two or three, they earnestly debate whether they will have margarine on the bread, or jam to make it a “pudding.” Some have pink tinned meat, which they call Spam, and that too is divided into carefully ruled portions. I can see already that the parcels mean the difference between slow starvation and survival.

  Ralph and Max each give us a sliver of their pink meat, and I understand without being told that this is quite a sacrifice.

  “I’ll try to get you a parcel tomorrow,” says Ralph. “It’s usually Tuesday or Friday, but you never know.”

  Up to now I’ve been too frightened to be hungry, but as the bread and meat go down, they remind my stomach how much it wants to eat. I’m hungrier when it’s finished than when I began.

  Many of the men bring out strange devices made from old tins. One vertical tin and one lying horizontally are joined together by a belt made from a shoelace, all fixed to a board.

  Bill explains, “Blowers. They’re called blowers. See here. You can light your wood or whatever in the bottom of this tin and then turn the handle, and that winds the pulley and cranks a fan to get the fire really hot with a tiny amount of fuel. You can make a brew whenever you like. Bloody genius invented the blower. I’ll make us one as soon as we’ve got empty cans.”

  I watch as Ralph conjures a small flame, enough to heat water for a cup of tea. They take the tea making very seriously, and I nod my thanks when a hot tin mug is pressed into my hands, even though I don’t like the taste of the powdered milk.

  Scotty approaches the end of my bunk. He doesn’t
speak, but reaches up to the end of my bunk and balances something on the wooden frame. He winks reassuringly as he turns away, and even in this half-light, his eyes are astonishingly blue. Other men who are “in the know” watch him, and before they pack away their parcels, a few of them select something and walk to our end of the hut to leave an offering on the end of my bunk. Some bend down and smile shyly at me as they do so, and I’m filled with a childish desire to jump up and see what they have left. But I’m trying to make myself invisible as well as silent, and so I hunch back in the shadows. I’m glad Tucker doesn’t come any closer. Tentatively, I poke the bruise on my hand. The fact that it hurts proves this is all horribly real.

  Bill’s deep in conversation with Ralph Maddox and sad-eyed Max. Their English is too fast for me to be able to follow everything, and they all have slightly different ways of speaking. I gather that there’s been an influx of American prisoners and RAF fliers from a battle to the west of here. They keep looking at me seriously, anxiously, and with a sudden lurch, I fully understand that it’s not only me in danger, but that I’ve put every man in the hut at risk too.

  Bill smiles encouragingly at me from time to time, but doesn’t draw me into the conversation. I sit and watch the three of them, who now control my fate. Mournful Max is always moving, one leg or the other jigging rapidly up and down, and he motions with his hands as he speaks. He keeps his voice down, but his face is dramatic. I see emotion scudding across it, but there’s a darkness in him, and he has deep shadows under his eyes, like a man who doesn’t sleep well. I think he might be good to have as a friend, but not as an enemy.

  Ralph Maddox is slower and more considered in his movements, like a man double his age, though none of them can be much older than me and Bill. Only Scotty might be as old as thirty. I focus on listening to the way they speak, to give my mind something to hang on to, to stop myself from howling in fear.