Eventually it’s our turn to go in, and the school hut turns out to be a cabinet of wonders. I relax a little as everyone stares intently at the exhibits and nobody looks at me. The craft section comes first and includes a detailed model of a steam engine made from old food tins.
Bill smacks his lips appreciatively. “I’d like to meet the bloke that made this,” he says to nobody in particular.
There’s a model of a farm, and I bend down to study it carefully. The house is quite separate from the barn and stables, which I think is a stupid idea. I want to tell them how much more sensible it is to have them arranged around a courtyard.
There’s a model of industrial Glasgow and the harbor of Tel Aviv, and the greatest wonder of all—over a foot high and carved, so the notice says, out of soap—is a model of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. I marvel at their choices as well as their skill: Glasgow, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. These men are citizens of the world, while my life’s been so small and confined. But here we all are, together, all equally powerless.
We move on into a section for drawings and paintings. Many of these are comic cartoons, with jokes about camp life. Then we reach the back of a big crowd where the prisoners have halted, creating a bottleneck. A British soldier keeps saying, “Come on, you wankers. Move on now. Other blokes deserve a op of ’em.”
I crane my head to see past the shoulders of the men in front, and eventually we shuffle forward till I can see two large charcoal drawings of nude women with long, flowing hair curling around their shoulders. The drawings show large breasts and luxuriant pubic hair, and I can’t help blushing as I look at them. Someone behind me groans and says, “That’ll keep your pecker up. If I had half an hour alone with her—” and someone else cuts in, “Half an hour? Three minutes, more like.” There’s loud laughter.
I glance at my companions. Ralph is gazing mistily, but he might be looking slightly to one side of the pictures. Max’s face is full of bitterness and anguish; these naked women are not bringing him joy. Bill’s eyes are almost popping out like in a cartoon. I am completely forgotten as he ogles the pictures, and I’m furiously jealous of these imaginary women with their cascading hair and balloon breasts. I want to shout to him, “Me, look at me!” Then I realize that Gee-gee Cousins would be gawping at them too, so I shove my hands deep into my pockets, digging my nails into my palms, trying to master my anger, forcing myself to make a close study of the dots that make the nipples and the squiggles forming the pubic hair.
“Move on, son,” says the soldier-curator kindly. “Let the others have a turn. You can toss yourself off later.”
Bill taps my arm, and we turn and push our way through the crowd around the nudes. I want to ask him if pictures like that make his “pecker” stand up, and if he likes my small breasts as much as those large ones.
Out in the air again, I try to walk like a boy whose pecker has just been lifted, and wonder what that must feel like. How peculiar it would be to have a part of your body you can’t control, that jumps up of its own accord, and you can’t tell to lie down. I wouldn’t like that at all.
Max is silent on the way back to the hut, but Bill and Ralph discuss the things they’ve seen and laugh about the funny cartoons. Bill sighs over the nude drawings, and I want to smack him for thinking about them. Ralph sighs too, but I can’t help feeling he’s pretending as much as I am.
Close to our hut, Tucker falls in beside me and Bill, chatting about the drawings of the girls and rolling his cow eyes at me. He’s sauntering slowly, and by the time we reach the hut, the others are ahead of us, just out of hearing.
“And another thing,” Tucker says casually, as though he were still talking about the pictures. “I think it would be worth you giving me a little something from time to time, just to keep me mouth shut.”
Bill stops dead and looks around nervously. “What d’you mean?”
“Well, it’s hard to keep quiet when I’m so hungry, isn’t it? And a word in the ear of a goon might get me an extra parcel.”
We have stopped walking, and I look from Tucker to Bill, expecting Bill to say something, do something, but all he can manage is “You heard what Max said: They’d shoot her if they knew.”
Tucker smirks. “That’d be a pity, of course. Her so pretty an’ all. I don’t mean her any harm. Just need a bit more nosh. And some fags. Got some debts to pay. You could leave me a tin of grub and some fags at the end of your bunk, just under your blanket. I’ll come for them after lights out.”
Bill is looking at the ground. “We haven’t got any fags. We got a Canadian parcel.”
Tucker thinks. “Well, make it two tins, then.”
Fury rises in me, almost blinding me.
Bill growls, “You bastard!” He has his fists clenched by his sides, but Tucker hasn’t finished.
“And of course, if you tell Ralph Maddox or your other new mates, I’ll be straight to the goons with your little bit of news.”
Fourteen
Bill and Izzy’s first days at Lamsdorf begin to unfold in a mixture of terror, boredom and hunger. The search, the roll call and the latrines are the worst, and Bill’s heart thumps in his chest every time Izzy is close to a Nazi, though he’s full of admiration at the way she stares coldly at the guards. Almost every day the men from hut seventeen who know her secret are forced to stage some kind of diversion to draw the guards’ eyes from her to them. During one routine search, the lazy-eyed guard, banging his hands down her body, rests them for a second longer than necessary on her waist, but Bill, ever vigilant, pushes Max so that he trips forward in line into her, knocking the guard aside, and the moment passes. Bill is exhausted from feeling that he has to be alert to danger every second, that he can never take his eyes off her.
Each night they leave a small amount of food at the end of Bill’s bed for Tucker, and it’s always gone by morning. Bill and Izzy’s rations are now cut beyond endurance, and their stomachs twist and turn with hunger. Tucker seems to take pleasure in reminding them how easy it would be for him to betray them, standing close to the tall guard in the washroom and indicating him with a flick of his head or hanging about near the guard with eczema at the wire, opening his mouth as if to speak and then deciding against it. Bill loathes him more than he’s ever hated anyone in his life. Every day he thinks he’ll tackle him directly, but can’t decide how to do that in a way that won’t send him whining to the guards. Every day he makes up his mind to tell Ralph, because he’d know what to do, but then he wonders, How could Ralph stop Tucker going to the guards? There would always be an opportunity for him to spill their secret. Bill finds himself trying to dream up ways he could kill Tucker without being discovered and then is appalled at himself. Killing in battle is one thing, but he doesn’t know whether he could plunge a knife into a body. The thoughts buzz round and round his head, wasps trapped in a jar.
Each morning opens into a long, yawning day filled with the sweating closeness of men pressing in on every side, and he can only imagine how oppressive Izzy, who is used to open spaces and solitude, must find this. Even those who are protecting Izzy spend too much time scouring her with their eyes, then quickly looking away when Bill catches them. He can imagine how she must suffer from the unbearableness of never being alone or quiet, not for one single moment, not even in bed or on the toilet. How she must long for the fields and the sky. He knows he does, and he didn’t grow up with nature all around him.
The days seem interminable, as if time runs on a different kind of clock in the camp. When they were here before, Bill and Harry would fill the hours by reading or finding a football match to take part in or a cricket match to watch, or Bill would go to play the piano in the hut they used for a church. Now he and Izzy do their latrine duty and take a daily walk round the perimeter with Ralph and sometimes with Max or Scotty. And after that, the long, long hours till bedtime. He takes Izzy to the camp library and chooses Great Expectations, which
he begins to read to her, very quietly, tucked in his bunk, running his finger under the words so she can see them, and Izzy writes down all the words that are new to her. But he can only read for so many hours a day, and Bill misses the constant chats about anything and everything he had with Harry. He marvels at Izzy’s determination not to speak, but he longs for conversation to pass the time.
He wonders how Max can stand spending most of each day on his bunk, reading or scribbling rapidly in his notebook with tiny writing, or just lying with one leg always restlessly jiggling, staring at the slats above his head. Bill can’t understand why Max doesn’t go out and join a club or play a sport or teach something in the camp school. Anyone choosing to stay trapped in the hut all day is a mystery to him. He thinks about the marriage service—for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. It didn’t mention being stuck in a stifling hut all day.
He’s ridiculously grateful when Ralph falls in beside him and Izzy on the way back from roll call and says, “I saw you had a harmonica. Do you play anything else?”
“Just piano,” says Bill. “Not well or anything.”
“What composers do you like?” asks Ralph.
“Oh, I never had lessons. Me mum and dad run a pub, and we always had a piano in the bar. I started messing about on it when I was a tiddler, and just sort of picked it up. Mum always said I should have lessons, learn to read music and all that. But Dad couldn’t see the point. He said I could play well enough for the pub, and it wasn’t as if I was going to be a concert pianist.”
“Pity,” said Ralph. “You might have been.”
Izzy is nodding beside him, but Bill pulls a wry face. “Too late now. But it’s handy for a singsong. I had a sax at home too, but need to be taught properly.”
“Maybe the bandleader could teach you. He’s a good sort. I can ask if you like?”
“Not planning to be here that long.”
Ralph smiles. “Fair play.” And he opens the door to the hut.
Bill’s heart sinks as they step back into the hut, and he says, “When I was here before, I used to go and play the piano in the church hut when it wasn’t being used.”
“Well, go again,” Ralph urges him. “Go now! Me and Max will stay with Cousins. You need to get out.”
Izzy is nodding vigorously, and Bill is overwhelmed. He feels like running out of the door this very second. He shakes Ralph by the hand and wonders what he can do to repay him. “Do you think the men would like me to play my harmonica one evening, for a bit of a singsong?” He did that many times before in the camps where he and Harry were imprisoned.
“We’ll ask them,” says Ralph. “I should think they’d welcome it. Singing raises the spirits.”
So that night Bill plays, for almost an hour, and most of the men join in, singing familiar songs. Max doesn’t sing, but lies on his bunk with his eyes closed, and Izzy hunkers back on her bed, watching Bill.
As he drifts to sleep, Bill thinks how unfathomable it is that a species that can invent music and feel love can also kill, maim, starve and blackmail one another.
* * *
With every day that passes, Bill thinks how right he was to put his faith in Ralph. He knows now that Ralph is one of the Nazis’ “men of confidence,” in charge of their hut, relied on by the guards to keep control and able to speak German well enough to convey orders. But he also knows that he’s trusted by the men in the hut to treat everyone fairly and represent their needs to the commandant. That makes him a rare character. He’s all right for a northerner, thinks Bill. The north is all one undifferentiated place to Bill, who’s never been farther north than the top end of the Piccadilly line.
Bill is more wary of sad-eyed Max. He’s a curiosity with his occasional nasal Brooklyn twang, as though another Max is hiding inside this one, and perhaps another inside that, like Flora’s stacking Russian dolls. Bill isn’t sure he’ll like the one in the center, if he ever gets there. Max is obviously dead clever, but seems like a time bomb, set to self-destruct, and Bill doesn’t want to be close by when that happens.
Scotty is more straightforward, with no side to him. What you see is what you get. A diamond in the rough, Bill thinks.
He wonders if Izzy can hear the differences between their accents: his London, Ralph’s northern and the faint echoes of Yankee in Max. Perhaps all English sounds the same to her. Apart from Scotty’s, of course.
He thinks about the way in peacetime you stick mainly to your own sort, gravitating to friends with similar education and background, with parallel interests and views of the world. He’d never have made friends with a university student, an agitator, a riveter and a farm girl.
As the days pass, Bill is chuffed to discover he’s trusted in turn by Ralph. One evening when most of the men are out at the camp theater, Ralph tells Bill he’d like them not to go. Bill would have liked to take Izzy to the theater, but he feels proud to have been asked to stay behind. When the main group leaves the hut, only six prisoners are left. Bill is relieved that Tucker has gone out. A small degree of the constant tension drains from him when Tucker’s out of sight. Bill toys with the idea of taking this opportunity to tell Ralph they’re being blackmailed, but what could Ralph do?
A sentry is posted, and from a number of dried milk Klim tins come the parts of a crystal radio, which Scotty expertly assembles. He has a folding knife, which he uses to strip the wires. When he’s finished with the knife, he tucks it away, in a niche under a picture of his sister and her two children above his bed. Bill watches and thinks perhaps one day he’ll use the knife on Tucker.
Bill’s fascinated by the construction of the radio, and Scotty is delighted to show him the tube wound around with copper wire, and two more tubes covered in silver paper that fit inside each other. More wires run from one part to another, to a long string of copper. The whole thing is fixed to a block of wood no bigger than a book. Bill nods his appreciation to Scotty and whispers, “I could make one of those,” to Izzy.
Scotty climbs up to join the wire to another length of copper, which is pinned above the rafters, down the full extent of the hut. This is the aerial, a fine thread of shimmering copper that will connect them to the world.
When the radio is set up, Scotty hands one earpiece to Ralph, and Ralph indicates that Bill should have the other. Bill knows this is a treat and a mark of Ralph’s confidence in him. They listen as Scotty moves the silver tubes in and out to pick up a station. A voice comes loudly through the crackle. Bill says, “It’s German,” and hands his earpiece to Izzy. Ralph begins to write what he hears in shorthand, and Izzy motions for a pencil and paper to make her own notes. Max finds paper and a pencil for her. Bill watches her intent expression and rapidly moving hand, and is filled with pride.
As the broadcast unfolds, Ralph glances up at Izzy, and neither of them can hide their horror at what they’re hearing. As the news item ends and they stop writing, the others look at them expectantly.
“May I?” asks Ralph, pulling Izzy’s paper toward him, as if to confirm his own fears. The crease between his eyebrows deepens as he reads, and he adjusts his glasses, looking up at them. “It might be Nazi propaganda.” he begins slowly, “but they say the Polish Home Army has been completely routed and arrested. And, please God this isn’t true—the entire civilian population of Warsaw rounded up and sent to transit camps.”
They all sit in silence for a moment to allow this idea to sink in. Bill wonders if it can be true. Every single man, woman and child from Warsaw in Nazi camps like Lamsdorf? Is that even possible?
Max bursts out, “And where was Stalin? Where’s the Red Army?”
Ralph shakes his head. “Camped outside the city, the broadcast said.”
“Fuck,” says Bill.
Ralph hands the earpiece to Scotty to retune, and he finally finds what they’ve all been hoping for, a distant crackly voice from London. To Bill it’s like heari
ng the voice of God when you have almost ceased to believe in heaven. London is a real place, and it’s still standing, and somehow the clipped words are here with them in hut seventeen. They excitedly repeat what they’re hearing. The English news is so different from the German. It talks about Stalin and Churchill meeting to discuss the future of the Balkan states. They all agree it’s a sign the war must be nearly over.
“Why didn’t they mention Warsaw?” asks Bill.
Ralph shrugs. “Maybe the Nazi one was propaganda.” But Bill can tell he doesn’t believe that.
As the radio is dismantled and packed away, Ralph turns to Izzy. “It’s good that you can understand German,” he says, and he looks at her notes. “Your handwriting doesn’t look very English. Would you like me to teach you shorthand?”
Izzy nods eagerly, and Bill is delighted that Ralph is offering her something to pass the time, something to use her brain. He wonders how many people in Warsaw have loved their wives as much as he loves Izzy, and now they may never see them again.
The other men return from the theater, singing loudly and clowning around. Tucker leaps about, doing a silly dance, and Bill realizes with a sick lurch that he’s hardly thought of him for the last two hours.
Then someone steps on another man’s foot and is pushed roughly and retaliates, and the singing is undercut by the shouts of two men. One throws a punch, and the other clutches him in a wrestling hold.
Ralph and Bill jump between the fighting men, and others pull them apart.
“Stop it now,” shouts Ralph. “You’ll end up in the cooler!”
The bushy-eyebrowed guard throws open the door, drawn by the rumpus, and Izzy sits back on Bill’s bunk. Silence is thrown over the room like a blanket.
Ralph’s grip on one of the fighters slackens to a comradely embrace, and the only voice is Max’s, shouting from his bunk, for all the world as if he hasn’t seen the guard. “I tell you it was LBW!”
The Prisoner's Wife Page 16
