At midday we are allowed back to the house, and a fresh pot of soup stands on the range, being stirred by a large-boned Czech woman who clearly has enough to eat. There’s fresh bread too, proper bread, not like that sawdust muck at Lamsdorf. Herr Rauchbach gives out a loaf to each of the “combines” of men.
“How long does this have to last?” asks Bill, and Frank tells us the ration here is half a loaf a day for each man. Half a loaf of good bread seems so much better than a third of a rotten one, even if we are having to use so much energy. I’m thrilled to discover the soup is sour, like my mother’s. The Englishmen complain and pull amusing faces, but I love it. The soup’s full of vegetables, and there’s enough to have a second portion. I long to pass just one word with the Czech woman who’s cooked it, to talk to her about the ingredients, to speak my own language. She smiles at my obvious relish of her soup and offers me more. She has slightly hooded eyes and strong cheekbones. I refill my mess tin three times. When she reaches out toward me with the ladle, I notice her hands are large, and her wrists are twice the width of mine. I think she would make a better man than me. Ralph asks her name, and she says she’s called Berta. Her German is poor. The longing to speak Czech to her is so strong that I have to clamp my teeth together.
Scotty wanders over to the range and sniffs the pot appreciatively. “It’s got some herbs in it,” he says to Ralph. “Can you ask her what they are?”
Berta says majoránka and libeček, but she doesn’t know the German names. She tells Ralph she’ll ask Rosa, and she beams at Scotty.
“Didn’t know you were a cook,” says Ralph.
“Aye, in the canteen at the biscuit factory. No that we used any herbs there. Plain food for plain working men and lasses.” Scotty sighs. “We’d think nothing o’ geein’ leftovers to the pigs, which I’d merrily kill for now.”
After a twenty-minute break, Kurt hurries us back to the quarry, and on the way, Frank tells us that Rosa and Berta and the Czech women who do our washing will bring us black-market eggs and rabbit in exchange for soap and cigarettes. He says they’ve even smuggled in radio parts, and a crystal radio is assembled every few days to make sure we have news of the war. I wonder if the Czech women could be trusted to take a message to my mother.
The afternoon is never-ending noise and dust, pain in my hands and aches in my back and arms. I try not to show how hard I’m finding this. I remind myself this is all my choice, that Cousins can work this hard and harder.
By four o’clock the sun is setting, but we work on into the dusk, until Herr Rauchbach comes down to tell Kurt it’s time for us to stop.
“What are you thinking of?” he asks Kurt in Czech. “They can’t see what they are doing. The marble will be ruined. And this is a very special order.”
Kurt obviously doesn’t like being told off in front of us, even though he assumes nobody can speak Czech, and he protests, “But, Herr Rauchbach, we are already running behind, and these new men are too slow.”
He takes our tools from us as we file past, packing them away for the night.
Herr Rauchbach grimaces. “You don’t need to remind me. But they can only work while they can see. It’s too dangerous, and the slabs will be uneven and spoiled.”
Kurt slams the door of the toolshed.
Ahead of us on the track, at the entrance to our quarters, the men stand in line and wait for Kurt. He hurries past us all and stations himself at the door, where he pats down each man, searching, I suppose, for anything that could be used as a weapon or to aid escape. The old Lamsdorf terror surges through me as I get closer and closer. Then it’s my turn. I lift my arms to the side as the others have done, and Kurt leers into my face as his hands pat my waist and hips. “Breathe easy,” Cousins tells me. “Breathe easy.” Kurt bends to grope around my ankles, and I think I could kick him over and run. Then the moment’s past, and I stumble into the light of the house, my heart banging like the hammers and chisels I’ve been hearing all day.
I can barely find the strength to haul myself up to my bunk, where I lie, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal, waiting for the pain in my back and limbs to subside, waiting for enough energy to go to wash and eat. Ralph and Max are lying down too, but Scotty and Bill sit on the lower bunks, unwinding the bloody rags from their hands and showing each other their blisters. I can hear my mother’s voice. “Surgical spirit hardens the skin against blisters,” and I hear Bill saying, almost as if he is repeating her, “Surgical spirit hardens skin,” and Scotty replying, “Aye, mebe, but where’ll we get some o’ that?”
I drift to sleep, and Bill has to wake me to wash and eat and use the toilet before lockdown. I wash my face, but ignore the dust in my hair. It will only be back tomorrow.
Max is writing in his journal. “It’s November the first,” he says. “We missed Halloween.”
“Every day is Halloween here,” says Scotty grimly.
“All Saints’ Day today,” says Bill, and Max asks what that means.
“All the saints are remembered today, and tomorrow it’s All Souls’ Day, when we pray for the departed.”
Everyone is quiet, remembering their own loved ones who’ve died. I wonder if I should be saying special prayers for my father or Jan. I have no way of knowing if they’re dead or alive, though I think I would somehow know if they’d been killed. Some fabric of the universe would have shuddered, and I would have known.
Exhaustion overcomes me, and I sleep as deeply as a baby.
* * *
At lunch the next day, Berta notices my blisters, and in the evening, a bottle of surgical spirit and a clean rag have appeared in our bedroom.
In the quarry, over the next few days, and always under Kurt’s gaze, my friends take turns working alongside me, and as we work, they talk more to me, and I begin to fill in the jigsaw puzzle of each life. Although it’s hard for them to work and talk, it’s as if my silence draws the words out of them.
Ralph tells me more about starting university as a medical student. “The sight of blood made me physically sick,” he laughs wryly. “I was such a disappointment to my family, and they were all working so hard to help me become a doctor.” He hefts his pickax a few times as I sweep around him, and then resumes, in bursts between his blows. “When I switched to classics, I was in heaven. To have a whole library full of books. And for the first time, friends who really understood me. To walk all day with them, just talking, with no one to say which way or when to stop.”
Some days he passes the time by telling me stories from the ancient Greeks, from The Odyssey and The Iliad. I think it comforts him to remember this world of books and stories hasn’t entirely deserted him. He doesn’t simplify his vocabulary or patronize me, but sometimes when a word is particularly obscure, he’ll explain it as he goes. I think he would make a marvelous schoolteacher, if that’s what he decides to do. He tells me about his sisters and his mother and the guilt he feels that there wasn’t enough money for all of them to go to grammar school.
His eldest sister, Jean, is a Red Cross nurse stationed in Malta. I would have liked to do that, to be off on a great adventure, nursing wounded men. The middle one, Grace, was apprenticed to a bookbinder, but has gone as a Land Girl, the very job I’ve struggled to escape. The youngest, Hilda, has been working in a department store selling men’s ties since she was fourteen.
“Imagine that,” Ralph says, “a world where men walk into a shop and spend hours choosing a tie. It’s easier for me to imagine Ithaca!”
He describes his sisters so vividly that I feel I’d almost recognize them on the street. I hope I’ll meet them one day and be able to tell them how wonderful their brother is. He seems to tell me everything about himself, until I realize he has never mentioned a girlfriend.
In the evenings, if we aren’t too exhausted, he continues to teach me shorthand, and I correct his German grammar. In our room, with the door shut, I som
etimes feel brave enough to whisper a word or two, but mostly silence has fallen down over my shoulders like a nun’s habit, and I can no longer remember what I used to chatter about all day. I’ve become the quiet man Cousins, and conversation now happens in my head.
As the weather becomes colder, the aches in our backs and arms have become familiar. Ralph’s limp is worse, and his face often contorts in pain. Eventually he admits that his foot is becoming more and more unbearable. He developed frostbite soon after he was captured. He shows us his foot, and the toes are so red and swollen that they must press against his boot every moment wears it. Bill insists that he tell Herr Rauchbach, who immediately takes him down to see the local doctor. The doctor says the foot must be bathed in warm water two or three times a day and then some cream must be applied. Herr Rauchbach says he will allow Ralph and me to be a little late to work in the quarry each day, and that if it gets worse, he will find him work to do in the office, where his excellent German will be useful. Each morning, as the other men leave for the quarry, Ralph sits at the kitchen table, and I bring him a bowl of warm water to bathe his foot. Afterward, I dry it for him and apply the cream. “You’d be a good nurse,” he says, “like my Jeanie. Or maybe a doctor. A better doctor than me.”
And I think, yes, maybe after the war, instead of being a translator, I could become a nurse or a doctor. I long to ask how much it would cost, and if it could be done on a railway clerk’s wages. And if they would take a woman. Perhaps I’d need to continue to be Cousins during the day, just returning to being Izzy at night with Bill.
* * *
After a few days in the quarry, Herr Rauchbach takes me and Bill with him to set dynamite, and he tells us why the marble has to be so perfect. “It’s used for the graves of Nazi officers, killed in battle, and brought home to be buried with full honors.” There is irony in his voice as he adds, “The glorious dead.”
Suddenly the work doesn’t seem so arduous, if every slab we sweat and struggle to hew from the rock face is going to cover a dead Nazi.
* * *
Day by day Bill and the others are more and more aware of the way Kurt follows me around with his eyes. I hear them talking about it when they think I’m asleep, and it fills me with foreboding. How ironic it would be to be attacked by one of my own countrymen, when I’d fooled all those Nazi soldiers in Lamsdorf. I don’t tell Bill how Kurt clutches my bottom when he’s searching us, and there’s no way I can avoid the searches, although most nights my friends manage to create some kind of diversion to move Kurt quickly from me to the next prisoner.
Whenever I go to the latrine in the quarry, Kurt finds some urgent work he has to do close by. Only once does he actually follow me inside, but Scotty is close behind him, letting out a loud fart, which makes Kurt turn and leave rapidly. I laugh into the grimy sleeve of my jacket. It’s the most I’ve laughed in weeks, and it’s so hard to keep it silent.
Some days I work alongside Scotty. I find his accent lacerates the words as he talks to me of life in tenement slums and the jobs he did before the war, but I connect with enough words to make sense of what he’s saying.
“I was on the ships at fourteen, apprentice riveter, but it’s no a life. They lay you off and take you on, and the metal is sae cold in your hands, and riveting makes you stone-deaf in the end. All the old fellas lip-read, you know. Nobody taught them how to do it; they just picked it up because their hearing was gone.”
He tells me he left the shipyard after a year and then did a range of jobs, in the quarry he’d mentioned, as a hod carrier on a building site, a month in a milliner’s shop, and then in the canteen of the biscuit factory where his sister’s husband was foreman.
“He nae wanted me, but did it to stop my sister nagging. He was a bastard to us workers almost as much as he was to her.” He straightens his back for a moment and looks long into my eyes. When he turns back to his work, he begins, between hefts of the pickax, to slowly tell me something else. I’m sweeping next to him, and I concentrate hard on his words, knowing he is trying to tell me something important.
With a shock the meaning springs clear. “I’ve ne’er told anyone this. And mebe I shouldna tell you now, but it’s eating at me, bad as the hunger. I did for him, you see. Killed him mysen. I’m nae proud of it, but he beat her once too many times. And beat the bairns too. Even the wee one. Can you credit it? Och, that was a sight to turn your stomach, the wee mite with bruises on her pretty face. Next time he might have murdered her.”
I wonder how he killed him—a knife, a rope, a push beneath a train? Maybe poison? And does this mean he killed Tucker? But Scotty continues. “I ran right for the recruiting sergeant. I thought they’ll nae come looking for me in the army, and so I was right. And he had plenty enemies. I was more afeared o’ jail than the rope. Ha! And now in jail these last three years. I reckon I’ve done my time here, but the bailie would na see it like that.”
We work for a while, the only sounds the arrhythmic percussion of the quarry. “Mebe I’ll go to Australia when we get out. Mebe they wouldna catch me up there, d’you think? I’d like to see ma sister again and her bairns, but mebe in time she could come to Australia to join me. If I get a good life there. No sense going home to the tenement or the hangman.”
I look around to see if we are near anyone, and then I whisper, “I hope you see her again.” Scotty jumps, as if a dog has spoken.
As we finish for the day and he places himself between me and Kurt to hand back our tools, he says, “I know ye wouldna tell a soul.” And I think one day I would like to tell Bill, feeling sure he would understand, but I nod my promise to Scotty, and he’s satisfied.
Less often, Max takes a turn near me. He tells me about his work in the trade union movement, and things I don’t know, like F. D. Roosevelt having polio, but overcoming that to have three terms as president of the United States. I think one day Max might be a famous politician, perhaps even prime minister. He talks and talks, and when he talks, he shines with a kind of fierce passion, an icy fire. It’s hard to believe that before I came, Max had lain on his bed for days, getting up for roll call and then returning to his bunk, barely eating, willing himself to die.
I wish he’d talk to me about that, but he never does. Perhaps he’d said to his brother, “Take care of Rachel for me,” and his brother had taken care of her in every way. But Max never mentions her; he talks only about strikes and better deals for the working man and woman, and ridiculous dreams of free health care and pensions for the old, and money for women with children. Impossible ideas. He offers to lend me his books, and I nod gratefully. In the evenings he mostly writes in his journal, sometimes copying passages from a volume he’s reading. Once I glimpse something laid out like a poem. I wonder what he can find to write poetry about here.
On some evenings there are speaking contests, or debates, or hands of bridge, or darts, or Ralph’s “film nights.” Bill and I had to leave Great Expectations in Lamsdorf, unfinished, but now Max has lent me a novel called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and though it’s difficult, I read that to myself. My shorthand continues to improve, and I scribble almost as fast as Ralph when the radio is assembled for us to listen to news from outside our tiny goldfish bowl of a world. They don’t dare set up the radio too often in case it’s discovered.
In mid-November, we hear that General Patton’s troops and tanks have crossed the Moselle River. Our hopes rise for a quick end to the war. Roosevelt has won a fourth term as US president, and Max explains to us the difference between Democrats and Republicans. I think I am a Democrat.
But as November stretches on, everyone becomes glum and frustrated again. The Allies don’t seem to be making any advances in Italy, because of heavy rain, and there’s less news of the Soviet advance. I worry for my brother and father. I wonder how close the Red Army is to my family’s farm, and if my mother has already had to face the Russians.
The rain affects us
too, and the quarry is an even more dangerous place as the marble becomes slippery. Bill is working next to me; we are soaked to the bone, and trembling with cold, when he brings down his pickax, and it glances off the glassy rock and almost embeds itself in his foot.
That evening Herr Rauchbach orders us to stop work until the rain ceases, and we are filled with relief at the prospect of some rest. We peel off our wet clothes and are able to give them to Berta to take to the washerwomen in the village. We’ve spent the last few evenings burning the lice from the seams of our dry clothes, and Berta has given us paraffin to wash our hair with, which is supposed to kill the lice, so I’m hopeful that the itching might lessen for a few days. My body must be covered in weals.
That evening Frank tells us about a time back in 1941 when summer rains stopped the work and they were allowed to swim in an abandoned quarry.
“One of the blokes banged his head playing the fool and almost drowned. All the good swimmers were diving for him, but it was like swimming in milk, and they couldn’t see anything. They were just about to give him up for dead when one of them touched him and was able to dive down and haul him out.” Frank pauses. “They say he’s the man who Rosa was sweet on. And that’s why he got moved.”
Everyone falls silent.
“Do you think it’s possible?” asks Bill. “A prisoner and a local girl?” I keep my eyes on the grain of the wood in the table, and my heart beats fast.
“A prisoner and a local girl,” muses Frank. “There’s another story from here, of a local girl and a French prisoner. It’s said he got her pregnant.”
One of the other men in the room pipes up, “Trust a Frenchman! Can’t keep their cocks in their trousers!”
Bill glances at me at the word “cock,” and I realize it’s not a word he’d use in front of me. “Should’ve used a French letter,” he jokes, and everyone laughs. I have no idea what this means, but don’t have time to puzzle over it because Frank picks up the story.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 21
