We return to our corner and hang our washing to drip onto the warm floor.
Bill and Max go to wash, while I light one of Max’s remaining cigarettes to burn lice from the seams of my trousers. While they’re away one of the posterns swaggers over, eyes alert with excitement.
“What’ve you got in those bags you’re guarding?” he asks, and I realize he must have been watching us, waiting for the boys to leave me alone.
I shake my head as if I don’t understand. My heart’s beating loudly in my ears as he bends to Max’s kit bag, tipping a shriveled turnip and his notebooks out onto the floor. He flicks through the notebooks, but obviously doesn’t speak English, and drops them carelessly, kicking one out of the way.
Some prisoners I don’t know can see what’s happening and start to come toward me.
“Hey, leave that stuff alone,” one says, and I scramble to my feet, arms crossed over my front, as much to hold myself together under this assault as to protect my unbound breasts. But the postern continues, now emptying my bag onto the floor. I have a blower, plus a potato, a box of matches, my brother’s summer undershorts and pajama top, my filthy towel, the stained foot rags and the last square of chocolate. He dives on the chocolate and shoves it in his mouth. Then he shakes the bag again, feeling something moving in it. He turns it inside out and, at the bottom, finds the hidden section.
“I knew you were hiding something!” he says triumphantly. A small crowd is gathering, but he waves his gun threateningly at them, and they stay back, wary but curious.
From the hidden compartment, he yanks Marek’s small vest, which he throws to the floor, and the sanitary belt and a small heap of stained rags.
My vision goes black and red. I begin to quake. Bill will come back, and I’ll simply be gone, dragged away to the fate of so many women before me.
“What’s this?” he asks, waving my sanitary belt about.
My head is spinning as if I’m going to faint, but the part of me that is Cousins steps forward and takes it from his hand, shoving the potato into the waxed gusset and yanking the elastic back like a slingshot, aiming at his head.
“A catapult!” shouts one of the prisoners. “It’s a bloody catapult. Go on, let him have it.”
“David and Goliath,” shouts someone else, and for a fraction of a second, I’m tempted.
The postern looks at the device, and I nod furiously and relax the elastic. There’s a murmur of disappointment from the crowd. I hold the “catapult” out to him, keeping the potato. He stuffs it into his pocket, with the elastic trailing out, turns to Bill’s bag and tips out a carrot, the other blower, his photographs and one of his harmonicas.
“Ha!” he cries, and swoops down on it. “Mundharmonika.”
He brings it to his lips and begins to suck and blow, making a cacophony like a donkey braying, a world away from the heartbreaking melodies Bill can draw from the instrument. This is the moment Bill and Max return, pushing through the crowd to get to me. Bill hurls himself at the postern, who knocks him away with the butt of his pistol. There’s a sickening crack as it connects with Bill’s face, and he falls back, blood pouring from his nose.
“You’ve broken his nose!” shouts Max, and there’s a surge forward all around us. For a second I think the crowd will close in and tear the postern to pieces, but he shoots into the air above their heads, and the circle expands again.
The postern shoves Bill’s harmonica into his pocket with my “catapult” and shoulders his way through the prisoners.
I’m down on my knees beside Bill as bright blood drips from his nose. Terror for myself now transmutes to fear for him and cold fury against the postern.
“Give us some air here,” says Max, and the circle steps back again. “Are there any medics?” Nobody moves, and I take Bill’s newly washed shorts and ball them against his nose to stanch the bleeding. He flinches as the nose is touched, and tears spring to his eyes, but he keeps his lips clenched together. He takes the shorts from me, and I can see he’s pressing harder than I would dare.
“Tip your head back,” says someone, and he does.
The shorts become redder and redder, and I begin to despair, thinking, He’s never going to stop bleeding. He’s going to die here, in front of me, and there’s nothing I can do.
An age passes, and some men drift away, and Bill pulls the bloody pants from his nose.
“I think it’s stopping,” he says. “But it don’t ’alf-’urt.”
“Must be broken,” says Max anxiously. “Pity Ralph isn’t here. Though he wouldn’t have liked the blood.”
Woebegone, Bill looks up to me. “I’ll look like a boxer.” He grimaces. “Sorry.”
But all I can see is my beautiful boy, my beautiful Bill, with his face bloodstained by that beast. My hand flutters in a signal that’s supposed to tell him I don’t care about the shape of his nose. I don’t care about anything as long as I have him with me.
Black bruising starts to spread like an eye mask across Bill’s face.
“Thought I’d get through this caper unwounded,” he says ruefully.
“Could have been worse,” says Max, nodding at me, and Bill agrees.
“Could have been a lot worse.”
We look at our few remaining possessions scattered around us, and I collect Bill’s photographs. Max carefully puts his notebooks back in his bag, then stops.
“Where’s the other harmonica?” he asks, and Bill taps the breast pocket of his battle dress.
“Safe and sound.” He winks with his swelling eye.
* * *
Later I go back to the washroom with Bill to wash his bloodied pants and, hopefully, my filthy body and my corset. The queue has gone as men settle down to pull straw together for mattresses and eat what very little they have. I rinse the blood from his shorts, and he splashes it from his face. When we turn around, we are alone in the washroom.
“Quick,” says Bill. “Wash yourself. I’ll watch the door.”
I don’t need prompting to thrust his wet shorts up inside my battle dress, under my arms, around my scrawny body and down the front of my pajamas as far as I can reach. Then I roll up my trousers and wipe my legs. I’m damp all over under the clothes, and even though I know it won’t have got rid of the lice, I feel clean for the first time in weeks. I unroll the corset and quickly scrub it.
We return to Max just as the lights are put out all over the factory, without any warning. In the dark we fumble for the raw vegetables—our only meal of the day. I prop my corset around the base of a column, close to the wall, to dry.
“Maybe there’ll be bread in the morning,” says Bill.
In the dark I pull on Marek’s vest and Jan’s pajama top. The vest is now only a little tight; I am the size of an eight-year-old boy. I stretch out on the straw, in my clean clothes, feeling the glorious warmth easing its way up from the brick floor.
In the morning Bill’s almost unrecognizable with his two half-closed black eyes and his swollen nose. I want to kiss each eye and the poor, shattered nose. But I don’t. I check that all the washing is dry, and then I pull my brother’s long underwear and a tatty shirt on and sit on the warm floor, flicking lice from the seams of my battle dress and grinding them underfoot. Later in the morning, there’s bread—a loaf among four—and soup and a potato each. Almost a feast. All day we doze, and I listen to Max and Bill talk, and I miss Scotty and Ralph, and my mother and father, and Marek and Jan, until a dark hole aches in my entire chest.
From time to time Bill gingerly fingers his nose or checks the breast pocket of his battle dress for the other harmonica.
When the lights go out, I relace the corset under my clothes. At least it’s another layer of clothing.
Twenty-eight
When they set out the next day, Bill’s eyes are half-closed, and his broken nose throbs with each step he takes, though at l
east his clothes feel clean and his coat and blanket are dry. He hopes that Izzy feels stronger for the rest and the meager food, and marvels at her resilience. Who’d have thought a girl could survive this? Perhaps they’ll make it, he thinks.
It isn’t just him—he can see that everyone is more hopeful, lifting their heads to take in the view as they reach the top of another hill rather than simply shuffling forward. He realizes that even a little food and warmth and rest can bring hope. But it’s as if the Nazis are playing a cruel trick on them, because after the brick factory there are no further food rations for three days, and now they are truly starving. To make matters even worse, many men have now developed dysentery. Sometimes they are allowed to crouch down at the side of the road to empty their bowels, but often the posterns refuse to let them stop, and the watery, bloody bowel movements run down their legs as they struggle onward. At rest stops Bill sees sets of filthy bloodstained underwear left by the side of the road.
They come across a boy sitting on a gate, watching the ragged column walk past. He pulls a big carrot out of his pocket and opens his mouth to bite into it. Bill stops and tries to beg it from him. The boy is unmoved, looking the three of them up and down to gauge what he could ask for in return. He obviously isn’t impressed by anything he sees. Bill’s hand slowly goes to the breast pocket of his battle dress and brings out his precious remaining harmonica.
The boy’s eyes light up, and he stretches out his hand for the harmonica. Bill indicates, “Carrot first,” and they hand them over simultaneously, each holding on to their own offering until they’re sure the swap has been made.
The boy runs off, leaping into the air with joy, and Bill offers Izzy the first bite of the carrot. She nibbles at it and hands it back. Bill takes a bite and hands it to Max, who refuses for a moment.
“All for one,” says Bill, and Max digs his teeth into the hard flesh. As they trudge on, they each take a small bite. When the carrot is finished, they feel just as hungry, and Bill, who for a few minutes felt proud of his sacrifice, now wants to weep for the loss of the harmonica Flora sent him.
In the next village, a civilian man is standing in a shadowy doorway. He makes eye contact with Izzy and motions her toward him. She pulls on Bill’s sleeve, and the three of them drop out of line for a moment. The man thrusts a bag of hot potatoes into her hand and disappears into the shadows before they can even thank him. They hide the potatoes under their blankets and eat them slowly without being seen. Bill thinks surely the men around them will smell their delicious scent, but perhaps they will think it’s a hallucination, like the bread and dripping he thought he saw. When the last scrap of the chewy skin is swallowed, and the warm food is moving down into his stomach, Bill thinks, If this man had come along sooner, I’d still have my harmonica.
And then thinking slowly ceases again, and his body puts one foot out in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. . . .
* * *
They haven’t been walking long the next morning when five RAF planes fly low over the column of shuffling prisoners. Everyone cheers and waves, and Bill throws up his arms. Joy surges in his chest. Perhaps this is the end! He thinks, They’ve found us and come to save us! But the planes circle back, and as they come in closer, there’s a deafening sound and the flash of gunfire as they begin to strafe the line.
“Get down, get down!” shouts everyone, and Bill, Max and Izzy throw themselves to the ground and crawl into the ditch.
Max grunts. “They think we’re Nazi soldiers.”
An RAF man stands up from the ditch, waving his distinctive blue airman’s greatcoat. For a second Bill holds his breath and thinks the fighter pilots have understood and recognized a comrade, but then they open fire again, and the RAF man’s body jumps and twitches, spraying blood. Bill throws himself over Izzy so any bullets will get him first. Her life is more important than his own.
The RAF planes circle back three times, and the bullets bounce on the track all around them. The noise is like that of a deafening hailstorm, a great machine of death, and it pounds in Bill’s temples, taking him back to the last terrible battle at Tobruk. He can smell the stink of the hot interior of the tank, hear Harry’s voice making jokes through it all, subduing their terror. He hopes Harry is safe.
They continue to lie in the ditch with their hearts beating loudly for minutes after the planes fly off. Bill and Max and Izzy struggle to their feet, but many prisoners have been badly wounded or killed outright. There are men screaming like animals; men calling out for their mothers; hands and feet and a head blown off that disgorge bright blood into rivulets on the road; a torso hangs from the branches of a tree. Izzy’s face is rigid with horror, and Bill thinks, Yes, this is what a battle looks like. This is why we keep it from you women and children. If he could cover her eyes and ears and protect her from it, he would. It’s another hell he’s led her into.
But Izzy looks around decisively and moves to help an injured soldier. Max turns over the body nearest him and finds he’s already dead. Without knowing he’s going to, Bill begins to take control, calmly directing those who can move to help those who are injured. He’s proud to see Izzy pulling the rags from her kit bag and using the strips as tourniquets for one man’s arm and another’s leg. There’s so much blood that he doubts the men will survive, but he doesn’t tell her that. The smell of blood all around them is metallic and hot. Some survivors sit with their heads in their hands; their bodies are in the shape of despair. Some men weep bitterly that their friends have come so far, through so many years of war, and survived battles and imprisonment and starvation only to be mowed down now by so-called friendly fire.
Izzy watches one man wiping blood from his open wounds with muddy water from the ditch, while another drinks the same water without boiling it. She marches straight up to one of the older posterns with their three mess tins and speaks in German, waving her arm toward the wounded and over to the field beside them. Bill freezes with fear for a moment at the risk she’s taking, and then sees the postern indicate to her that she can go to look for clean water.
Bill turns back to his job of organizing the wounded to gather together in a “muster station,” and he watches Izzy out of the corner of one eye as she strides down the hill toward a line of trees. The postern is watching her too, hand on rifle in case this is an attempt to escape. The trees must line a frozen brook, and Bill can see her breaking the icy surface with the heel of her boot, to dip in the tins. The postern relaxes as Izzy carefully carries back the filled mess tins. She takes a sip from one to demonstrate to him that it’s clean water, and he sends a younger guard to fill bigger water containers.
Izzy returns to the stream time and time again, with as much water as she can carry—and gives it to men to drink and cleanse wounds.
Bill is busy separating those who can still walk from those who can’t go any farther. A man with his foot blown off leans on Max and hops to the mustering place. On Bill’s orders, the bodies of the dead are lifted and carried to the ditch at the side of the road. The posterns stand in groups smoking, watching as the prisoners clear the road of their comrades and bind up the wounded as best they can.
Eventually, someone from a local village comes with a horse-drawn wagon, and those too injured to walk any farther are loaded onto it. As Bill helps one of them to the cart, Izzy notices a dark stain on the back of his coat, near the shoulder.
She turns him round. There’s a small tear in the center of the stain.
“You are bleeding,” she whispers accusingly. She presses the place gently and he winces.
“I didn’t notice,” he says.
“Take off coat.”
Bill pulls off his coat, straining to look over his shoulder, and now that she’s pointed out the wound, the pain begins. As he removes the coat, Izzy sees his battle dress and the jumper below are still bloodier. Bill can’t tell if he is badly wounded, or whether the bleeding ha
s stopped, but the pain is spreading and throbbing insistently. He runs his hand up through his hair, looking at the semiconscious men laid out on the wagon. Izzy presses a wad of rags to his bloody jumper and he wrenches away from the pain. He’s got more important things to think about than a little flesh wound.
“Someone ought to go with the wounded,” he says, “to speak up for them, make sure they’re treated well.” He yanks away from Izzy and tries to put his battle dress back on, but his left arm won’t work anymore, and he can’t push it through the sleeve. Izzy drapes the bloodstained battle dress and coat over his shoulder.
Bill looks around for someone who can go with the wounded, and a wave of nausea overtakes him as the pain grows stronger. All about him the survivors are busy helping to carry the dead into the ditch, or are lying, exhausted, or sitting with their heads bowed. There’s nobody he can send.
“You,” whispers Izzy. “You are best man. You go.”
“But . . .” The wagon lurches forward. Bill looks from it to Izzy, and is torn by indecision. He can’t leave her. But he can come straight back once he’s seen that the men are being looked after. He can easily catch up. “Will you be . . . ?”
“Go. Make doctor look at your shoulder. And your nose.”
He looks again at the bodies on the wagon, men hardly moving, unable to demand the care they deserve, and he decides. “I’ll catch up and find you as soon as I can.”
Izzy gives him a half push, her eyes dark with worry.
Bill runs a few steps to catch the moving wagon, and with difficulty, now unable to use his left arm, he climbs up, and turns to Izzy, trying to hide from her the pain of his wound, forcing his face into a smile as the wagon pulls away.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 32
