The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  Twenty-nine

  I feel sick to my stomach as I watch the wagon begin to trundle off, and I run to climb aboard myself, but the postern won’t let me. “Wounded only,” he says, pushing me with the butt end of his rifle.

  “I promise I’ll find you as soon as I can,” calls Bill weakly, and I can only stand and watch him, half-slumped on the wagon floor, trying to smile, his broken nose and black eyes still visible against the white of his face, carried away from me. What have I done? How can I let him go? I need him to see a doctor as soon as possible. But how could he leave me? Perhaps it’s only because he knows how badly he’s wounded and doesn’t want me to watch him die.

  As the wagon turns a bend in the road, Bill raises his hand in salute, just as he did when he first came to the farm, and I suddenly know, with the chill of absolute certainty, that I’ll never see him again. I pray, with fierce intensity, “Bring him back, please. I’ll do anything, give up anything, if you let him come back to me.” But I don’t know if God is listening. I think of the lifeblood pulsing from Bill’s wound, and I wish they’d let me go with him. It all happened too quickly. We didn’t say good-bye.

  As Bill’s wagon disappears, I try to hear Cousins stemming my panic, telling me it will be all right. “Steady now,” he says. “There’s work to do.”

  I join Max and help to lay body parts and whole dead men into the ditch, and I carefully collect their identity tags so their families will know, so the world will know. We have no tools to dig the frozen soil to cover them. Again I go to the older postern and demand, in German, “The dead must be buried.”

  He wafts me away like I’m a bluebottle. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll get the townspeople to do that. It will all be done properly.” Then he looks hard at me. “Your accent?” he asks. The younger guard, with an almost shaved head and many angry pimples, lifts his head and looks at me too, and I realize it might all be over. Somehow I’m too tired to care, because without Bill nothing matters anymore, but as the young guard picks up his rifle, my brain leaps to a plausible answer.

  I cough my voice down low and try to iron out my Czech vowels, to speak my mother’s perfect High German. “My teacher was from”—I search my memory for the German name for Jeseník—“from Freiwaldau. I think it’s in Silesia.”

  He still looks suspicious, and the young guard steps forward, but then the postern shrugs. “Ah, yes, a Silesian accent,” he says. “Country bumpkin.” And he turns aside from me. The young guard looks at me for a moment longer, and I meet his eyes, defiantly, as Cousins would, before he also turns away.

  I stumble back to where Max is sitting and briefly lean my head on his arm. Bill, Bill, where is Bill? Every cell in my body wants him. Every few minutes I find myself looking in the direction in which he disappeared, willing him to come back. I make a bargain with God. “If one of us has to die, let it be me, not him. Kill me and let him live.”

  The strafing has killed a horse as well as so many men, and that night we have soup with meat, brought around in buckets. But there is no joy in the meal. It’s almost as if we are eating the flesh of our dead comrades.

  Perhaps it’s from the richness of the meal, or from drinking dirty water before I brought clean water from the stream, but by the next morning, Max has developed dysentery. Bill isn’t back, and I want to wait where we last saw him, but the posterns force us to walk on without him. Sometimes they let Max crouch by the road, and I stand beside him, my feet planted apart like Cousins’, and guard my friend, but sometimes they make him keep walking, and the thin feces trickle down his legs. He keeps turning to me. “Sorry. I’m so sorry,” he groans before the pain doubles him up. By the afternoon he’s so weak that he sits down by the side of the road and refuses to get up. If I leave him, I know he will die in hours, from dehydration, or the cold at night, or a gun-happy Hitler Youth will use him for rifle practice.

  I lean in, close to his ear. “I am not go on without you. You have to get up. You cannot leave me alone,” but he doesn’t budge. I lean in and order him furiously, “You must live. Tell people what we see. Make sure this never happen again. You have work to do.”

  After a long minute, he lifts his eyes to mine and nods imperceptibly. I drag him to his feet and pull one of his arms over my shoulder. We shuffle on together, one foot in front of the other. When the others aren’t looking, the older postern offers Max some charcoal to chew to ease the pain.

  * * *

  Coming out of Tharandt, we drag ourselves slowly up a long climb to the summit of hill and a flat plateau. I think over and over that the two of us won’t make it to the top of the hill, and this is where it will all end. But somehow we do, and at the top, we’re allowed to sit for fifteen minutes to look down on small picturesque villages dotted about the frosty countryside. And then we’re on the move again, heading into a massive forest that stretches to the horizon. I remember my promise to Ralph that I’ll look after Max. I will keep going as long as he’s alive. It may not be long.

  Every mile or so, we shuffle past huge piles of logs waiting to be picked up by forestry trucks. There’s a lake, still frozen round the edges, with ducks standing on the ice or swimming in the center. We pass a house with a millpond.

  Overnight we stop in a school building. We are sleeping in the main school hall, which has a large blackboard on which someone has written Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy, which I remember learning at school.

  A soldier I don’t know asks, “Do you think someone knew we were coming?”

  I don’t think so, because I can see the difficult words underlined and imagine the teacher who was trying to explain this speech to a class of bored children who’d never experienced despair. Max sits in front of the board, staring at the words for a very long time. He’s sitting there when the lights go out, but he doesn’t say anything. I think he is choosing not to be, and I have failed in my promise to Ralph.

  * * *

  I wake in the morning to the loss of Bill. It kicks me in the stomach so that I curl myself around the pain. And as if the universe is laughing at me, I’ve also developed a severe head cold. My nose runs, my eyes water and my head aches and feels full of fog. I have hot sweats and cold shivers. I have no choice but to walk, using a rag to wipe my nose, wringing it out to reuse.

  After the forest, we begin to descend again on a road the guards call the Silberstrasse. We pass big riding stables and a fast-flowing unfrozen river. Why couldn’t this river have been near us when the RAF attacked? Maybe then everyone would have had clean water, and Max wouldn’t have dysentery.

  Every time we shuffle down a hill, it’s in the knowledge that in a few hours we’ll have to drag our bodies up another. Sometimes Max can stagger on his own; sometimes he walks with an arm linked to mine. Traveling up the hills, the two of us support each other, and I feel a strange sensation of water trickling down my face and my spine as we reach the top of one. I think it’s the fever from my cold.

  I look at Max, and his hair is wet with sweat as well. A man behind us says, “I’m sweating buckets,” and I realize the day is getting warmer, as if we have leaped from winter to summer in a couple of hours.

  Along the route we start to see discarded greatcoats and blankets. First one or two, then more and more. I know it can still get cold again after a false spring, and I’m determined to keep my coat and one blanket, but I discard the second blanket, the scratchiest one. I’ll try to change out of my long winter underwear if there’s somewhere private enough at our stopping place tonight. I can feel it becoming damp and heavy with perspiration.

  Max insists on dropping his coat and one blanket. “I can’t carry the weight of them any longer. I’m too weak,” he whispers.

  I certainly don’t have the strength to carry them for him, so he leaves them by the side of the road.

  We pass under double railway bridges, a big rail yard and a wasserwerk tower with a chimney tiled all
the way up with roof tiles. In the open country there are groves of trees, plowed fields, crops starting to come up in the uncaring cycle of the seasons, the gradual greening of the land. We eat a handful of grass and some rye shoots. I find a kostival plant and pull off its hairy leaves, stuffing them into my rucksack. Someone asks, “Can you eat those?” and I shake my head. I could explain they are just for wounds and could even be poisonous if eaten, but he doesn’t pick any.

  More and more, on and on, come the same agonizing, long, slow hills, up onto a plateau and down into the next valley. My nose stops running, but it’s now blocked, so I have to breathe through my mouth. I’m always thirsty, and I begin to cough, a chesty persistence that shakes my frame. I daren’t raise my eyes to look ahead, knowing there will be another hill that we have to climb.

  I don’t know what enables everyone else to keep going, but I think now I’m powered only by a steady flame of rage, fed at every step: rage at myself for not going with Bill or preventing him from leaving; rage at human beings who can treat one another worse than animals; rage against the ordinary people who failed to stand up against fascism until it was too late. I understand those who simply sit down and say they can’t go any farther. I’d do the same if not for my promise to take care of Max.

  The felt has now worn off the inside of my brother’s boots, and they are too big. At a stopping point, I inspect my blisters, which I know are becoming infected, and I wrap the kostival leaf around them to draw out the badness. I find some newspaper and wrap that around my feet. Somehow the pain each time I put my foot to the ground tells me that I’m still alive.

  We pass clumps of snowdrops and a lone crocus under a tree. I register these without the usual leap of my heart. It means spring will come again, but what sort of spring will it be? At night now, if we are in a low-lying village, comes the familiar whine of mosquitoes, joining the lice to suck the last of our blood. I sleep fitfully, coughing, itching, hungry, thirsty, grieving for Bill. Some strong instinct tells me he’s dead. The wound was worse than we thought, and he bled to death, or it went septic. He’s dead, I think. Dead. And I don’t want to be alive without him.

  We trudge on. Heads down. I’m almost carrying Max on some days and simply supporting him on others. I learn to walk in a lolloping way that puts the least pressure on the sore points of my feet. I cough with my head turned away from Max, fearful of infecting him if it’s TB.

  We pass some retreating SS men sitting beside the road, carefully cutting the insignia off their uniforms. For the first time, the posterns look really worried. They talk among themselves in low voices, but they follow their orders, forcing us on.

  One day a farm vehicle comes the other way, and as it passes, the back of it is emptied of milk and chickens. I drink some milk, and it tastes fatty and rich. Somewhere I can smell a chicken cooking, and my mouth waters at the thought of the crispy skin and soft flesh, but we don’t get any. We live mostly on turnips from the fields, fish heads from dustbins, grass. There’s a fight between two men over some swede peelings.

  At the top of yet another hill, we lie on the ground. I cough my lungs clear, spitting green phlegm into the grass.

  “Look there, some big town,” says Max, pointing.

  My eyes focus on the rising smoke from many industrial chimneys, making clouds that hang over the factories.

  “That’s Chemnitz,” says the older postern. “It means we’re nearly there. Nearly at Hartmannsdorf.”

  My heart is like lead in my chest at the thought I’ll get there without Bill. There’s no meaning to anything without him.

  The men pass the word back and forward in the column. “Nearly there!” “Nearly there.” And singing starts up. Not the patriotic songs of before, but show tunes, popular songs. “Happy days are here again. . . .”

  Our feet continue to walk, and finally, in the middle of the afternoon, we see the huts of a great POW camp spread out across the top of the hill: Stalag IVF. I never thought I would be so glad to see a Nazi prison and so ready to wish myself inside it. A man behind us says my thought aloud, and someone else laughs. “I was just thinking the same.” Perhaps every man in the column is sharing the same thought at the same moment. Max says nothing, but his head hangs from his neck as if it’s too heavy to support. I cough and cough, spitting gobbets of green slime.

  Then we wait, patiently, like cows waiting to be brought in from the fields, and after a while, when nothing seems to be happening, we sit down on our packs. It starts to rain, that light rain that soaks insidiously through every fiber, wetting to the skin.

  Every ten minutes or so, the line moves forward, and we all struggle to our feet, or crawl forward on all fours, and move another few yards.

  As we get nearer I realize we are being counted in, and the old fear licks up in me, clean as a flame, and the fog that has been swirling round my head is blown away. The guards are collecting us into groups of ten and sending us through the gate. What if I get separated from Max?

  Someone runs back to us. “There’s a hot meal and a bath when you get inside. The goons have promised it,” he shouts.

  A meal and a bath are the two things everyone longs for most in the world. Everyone except me. Max lifts his head, sees the panic in my face and fleetingly touches my hand.

  “I expect both are a mirage,” he says.

  Thirty

  We shuffle through the prison camp gate in our group of ten, and Max leans on my shoulders. He seems very heavy for such a skinny man, or maybe I’ve just become very weak. Someone asks the date and the Nazi guard tells us it’s the tenth of March 1945.

  It’s been four days since I last saw Bill. Has he died of his wound, or is he still trying to catch up with me? For the hundredth time today, I taste my instinct, and it has the flavor of death.

  “Shower,” the guard says, pointing to yet another queue.

  I indicate Max, leaning on me with his head bowed.

  “Sick bay,” I croak in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. My cold and cough have deepened it to gravel.

  The guard glances at Max’s flopping body, soiled trousers and boots, and the stench of him tells its own story. “That way.”

  We leave the line for the showers and join another where many men are holding up their sick friends or standing beside their prone bodies and helping them forward. All around us are crowds of starving tramps, moving this way and that. Some are fresh from the showers and have clean faces and hair above their filthy rags of clothing. I find myself watching the feet as they move past us, some bare and muddy or wrapped in bloodied sacking, some in clogs and fuss-lag, some in boots on which the uppers have come apart from the soles and threaten to trip their owners with every step, a few—very few—in worn boots and socks. The legs go past us and past us, in hundreds or thousands. None of them are Bill’s.

  Our queue slowly shifts alongside rows of coffins. We don’t know if they’re full of those who’ve died in the hospital wing, or empty, taunting the sick and dying.

  * * *

  It must be an hour before we reach the medic at the front of the queue. He’s brusque.

  “Problem?”

  “Dysentery,” says Max.

  “That all?” He looks at Max’s hollow face. “Dehydration.”

  He’s already lost interest and repeats a prescription he’s obviously given many times. “Clean water. Bland diet. Rest.”

  “Not sick bay?” I ask, forced to speak.

  The medic sighs. “Look. Eighty percent of you have got dysentery. All of you have got malnutrition and dehydration. I’ve got TB and typhus to deal with. Find him a bed in a hut. Get him plenty of clean water to drink. Let him sleep. Next.”

  I quickly sit down on the ground and unlace my boots.

  Max lifts his head. “Will I live?” he asks.

  The medic looks him in the eye. “If you want to,” he replies.

&nb
sp; I peel off the kostival leaves and hold my feet toward the medic. Max sucks in breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrug. What would have been the point?

  “I thought you were all supposed to have showers?” the medic says crossly, and I realize that I must smell bad. I feel humiliated and would draw my feet away, but the medic prods my infected blisters. One is on my right heel, and the other runs over the top of my left foot where the sock has worn through and the tongue of my boot has lapped daily at my foot. They weep pus, and the skin around is red and angry.

  “He’ll dress them,” the medic says, and points to another man, who also has a queue waiting.

  A coughing fit overtakes me, and the medic watches as I cough into my rag. He takes it from me and inspects the muck I’ve coughed up.

  “Bronchitis,” he says with new kindness. “No medicine, I’m afraid, but you’re young. Just rest and you’ll get better.”

  I nod. Rest, rest is all my body craves. Rest and the sight of Bill. The medic puts a hand on my sleeve. “Come back if you cough up blood.”

  I join the queue for the foot treatment, which turns out to be a clean rag, a small bottle of iodine, some salt in a twist of newspaper and instructions to clean the wounds each day with salt water and then apply the iodine.

  “If you see red streaks up your thighs or in your groin, come back quick—that’s septicemia.”

  I wish there was honey for my cough.

  We shuffle away and Max grunts, “Just let me sit down for a minute.”

  I pull him over to the wall of the sick bay hut and bend to whisper, “You wait here. I come back.”

  He sinks into the mud, and I join the milling crowds, pushing my way into one hut after another, seeking spare beds, looking for Bill. Sometimes I see a blond head, or someone with his build, and hope leaps in me for a second until I realize it’s yet another stranger.