The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  All the huts are full, and I’m beginning to despair of finding somewhere for Max and me to rest, when finally, way across the compound, I find a hut with two empty top bunks close to each other. I shrug off my blanket and ease my shoulders out of my kit bag. All it contains now is my mess tin and cup, my brother’s pajamas and summer underwear and my small, grubby towel. I throw my blanket onto one bunk and my kit bag onto the other, but bring my mess tin and cup in the hope of finding some food or drink to put in them. I pray that when I get back with Max I won’t find other men sleeping on our bunks or discover my blanket and kit bag stolen. They are the last things I have from home. And it strikes me now that I have nothing to prove who I am or even where home is. Nothing to show I am married to an Englishman. Was married. Might now be the widow of an Englishman. Only Max can speak for me now.

  * * *

  As I work my way back to where I left Max, through the meandering rivers of men, I’m carefully memorizing my route and constantly scanning the crowds for Bill’s face. The pain in my feet is so bad, I consider going barefoot in the mud.

  When I find him, Max has fallen asleep, slumped sideways against the wall of the sick bay, and for a second I think he’s dead. I have to shake him hard to wake him.

  Taking his arm, I half-support, half-drag him through this mass of shuffling strangers. If we fall they will just continue to walk forward over us, I think. No one would care if we were dead or alive.

  I locate the hut again, and we step inside to the familiar noise and stink of men. Most of the bunks we pass are occupied, with prisoners lying motionless. I lead Max toward the bunks I’ve found, in the murky interior of the hut. Deep in the gloom of the back row of bunks are the two empty places along the top level. Nobody has taken them.

  Max looks up at the bunk rearing above his head. He shakes his head, gripping the post of the bed for support. And then, for the first time, he starts to cry. The tears roll down his face and splash on the bunk below.

  The man on the bottom bunk is lying on his back, staring up at the slats above his head. He seems to be barely breathing.

  I touch his sleeve. “Can you help, please?” I ask in my hoarse voice. “I need to get him up to the top.”

  The man turns slowly onto his side and looks at Max. “Shouldn’t he be in hospital?”

  “We should all be in hospital,” says someone else.

  The man heaves himself to a sitting position. “He can have my bed, if you get those shitty clothes off him first.”

  It seems to take the last ounce of the stranger’s strength to ease himself to the edge of the bed and stand, and then to climb to the top level. I pass up his blanket and kit bag.

  “Thanks,” Max says with a groan.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Phew,” says the man in the next bunk, holding his nose. “Can’t you leave his cakky clothes outside?”

  I remove Max’s boots and help him pull down his trousers and long johns. His scrawny bottom and thighs are caked with dried blood and excrement. I rub his body with a clean part of a trouser leg, but have nothing to wash him with.

  Max rolls away onto the bed, and I cover him with my damp blanket and shove the towel from his kit bag under his bottom, then weave between the bunks and men with my stinking bundle of clothing. I throw Max’s trousers under the hut. This feels like a daring act of rebellion.

  When I return, Max is hunched on the bed in a half-sitting position. “I can’t lie down. It makes the cramps unbearable.”

  I’m so tired that the only thing I want in the world is to rest and close my eyes, but I bend down, rearrange the towel under him and whisper, “I am going to find water.”

  I take my own towel, my brother’s pajama bottoms and our mess tins and cups. At the latrine block I fill my cup and swig it in three gulps. It tastes metallic. I drink two more mugfuls, which makes me feel sick, and then I visit the “forty holer,” sitting with my coat bunched in front of me, too exhausted even to be afraid. Under my coat, in the dimness of the latrine, I strip off my trousers, peel off my long woolen underwear and hope the lice will go with them, and pull on Jan’s old pajamas to wear under my army trousers. I drop the crawling underwear down the hole of the latrine. And then I go to wash.

  The water’s so cold, it makes me gasp, but there’s carbolic soap, and I push up my sleeves to scrub my arms as well as my hands and then my face and head. I strip off my boots and wash one of my battered feet after the other, and dissolve a little of the salt in water. When my feet are dry, I dab my blisters with salt water and then iodine, which makes them sting so much that I have to bite my lip not to cry out. It’s purgatory to shove my feet back into my boots. I dip my head under the tap to wash my hair, and the shock of the cold sets off a coughing fit that racks my body, so I have to sit down to recover.

  An older man touches my shoulder. “You all right, son?” And I nod, waving him away.

  Finally I fill the tins and cups to take back to Max. He’s barely able to lift his head, but sip by sip I get water into him.

  Someone comes round with a bucket of potato mush. I’m amazed at the way the starving prisoners queue politely for it, until I remember that the guards are still there in their watchtowers, with their rifles trained down on us. I’m given half a cup of potato each for me and Max, steaming hot, and retreat back to the end of Max’s bunk with it, scooping tiny mouse portions into my mouth. I’ve seen what happens when starving people gorge themselves, and I don’t want to vomit it straight back up. In between my own small mouthfuls, I try to persuade Max to eat, and he manages to swill a little around his mouth before his eyes close.

  Then at last, I allow myself to climb to my bunk with its dirty straw palliasse, lie down and close my eyes. I wonder if I should have said good-bye to Max, in case he’s dead in the morning. But I don’t have the strength in my limbs to climb down again. Sleep drags at me, and I sink unresistingly into its bog, though in my dreams I’m still walking, as if I will never stop, and coughing, coughing, coughing.

  In the morning I’m still in a deep sleep when the familiar “Raus, raus” is shouted into the hut. For a few moments I don’t know where I am, and the man lying an arm’s length from me in the next bunk is a complete stranger, with a hand down his trousers, scratching the lice in his groin. I panic and whip over to my other side. The man who moved up and let Max have his bed grimaces. “I could eat a horse.”

  It’s just the sort of thing Bill would say. But Bill is gone. Gone. Gone. And I have no one. No husband. No family. No papers. Nobody but Max.

  A voice comes up from below. “You’ll be lucky, mate!”

  It isn’t Max’s voice. I lean over the edge to try to see him, and he’s still half-sitting, just as I left him last night, with his knees up and his head lolling on them. A cold hand grips my stomach, and I think he might be dead. My only friend in this dangerous, murderous world.

  A coughing fit takes me, and when it subsides, I force myself to swing down and poke his shoulder. There’s no response, but he doesn’t fall sideways. I grasp his shoulder and shake him properly. I almost jump back when he stirs and raises his head, recognition in his brown eyes.

  Thank you, thank you, I think, though I don’t know who or what I’m thanking. Carefully, I feed him some sips of water and a small amount of cold potato. Then I help him out of the hut, barefoot and naked from the waist down, with his blanket wrapped around him.

  “There is soap in the latrine,” I quietly tell Max, and help him stumble there, often stopping and waiting until a spasm passes. He’s too weak to stand and wash himself, but he leans on the basin, while I scrub away at the dried blood and diarrhea on his legs and bottom, with a bar of soap and a corner of his towel. Once he’s clean I treat my feet again and take him back to bed, then hobble to the cookhouse to collect some mint tea for both of us.

  * * *

  For the first days in the
camp, perhaps for a whole week, we lie all day on our bunks, sleeping, waking, sleeping, only rousing ourselves to struggle out to the latrine, or take the half cup of soup or potatoes on offer. Ten days have passed since I saw Bill, and with each day, the small hope of seeing him again diminishes further. I hardly know why I’m bothering to eat, but my body craves food. The loss of Bill fills my chest like a heavy metallic lump inside my rib cage.

  Max’s dysentery slowly ceases, until he’s able to lie down and even to eat the miserly rations. My cough begins to subside, and I treat my feet diligently, watching the new pink skin starting to form. I wonder if pink skin ever forms again on a broken heart or if it’s always scarred. As soon as I’m able to walk again, I prowl the camp, scanning the faces of men playing football, standing around in groups talking, queuing at the cookhouse, cleaning their teeth in the washhouse, waiting on the parade ground. After a few days I start to recognize the same people, but none of them is Bill. They could vanish in a puff of smoke for all I care. How terrifying it is that our own happiness hangs on the well-being of so few others.

  The other prisoners are showered and deloused, and clean clothes are issued. I hide from the showers and delousing, slipping back between the crowds, but I do manage to get issued clean underwear and a Belgian uniform. Max brings me back some of the delousing powder in a twist of paper, and I rub it over my head, under my arms and down into my pubic hair, though it doesn’t seem to do much good.

  As the days open over one another, I start to spend the hours when I’m not obsessively hunting for Bill sitting in the sun outside the hut. I watch the crowds endlessly shuffling to and fro, but Bill is not among them. What shall I do without him? I think. What shall I do?

  Some days it rains and the sky hangs low over the camp. Then I can hardly drag myself from my bunk. I make my rounds in search of Bill until I’m too wet and miserable to walk any farther, but few men are out and about in the rain, so I give up, hang my wet things on the end of the bunk and return to bed. I try to sleep as much as possible.

  Days roll into one week and then the next, in the careless rhythm of the camp, its hours of yawning boredom, the heavy weight of sorrow over Bill. Max watches me descending into emptiness and persuades me to come with him to the camp library. He chooses for me a book called Jane Eyre, and I begin to read, discovering I can take myself to other places and even distract myself a little from thinking about Bill, though each time I lay the book down, I know I have lost my Mr. Rochester and the world is empty. I have sunk back into silence. There is no one I want to speak to and nothing I want to say.

  Max moves in the opposite direction. He joins a debating society and begins to campaign for the election of the Labor Party when the war is over. It seems he’s decided to live, and despite myself, my body too works on bringing me back from the brink of starvation: My feet heal slowly; my cough gradually vanishes. Beyond the wire I hear birds singing, and I think what joy it would be to be alive if Bill were here with me, even in this filthy place. Max tells me of miraculous places called bluebell woods and Kew Gardens, but I know I’ll never see them now. As soon as we are liberated, I’ll have to return to the farm, to the life I detested, to the rule of the Russians. I picture my future self staying at home forever, nursing my mother in her old age, all my life empty from the loss of Bill.

  One day a Swiss lorry enters the camp with Red Cross parcels, and for the first time in weeks, we have protein and sugar. Some men eat too much too fast, and the hut stinks of vomit and diarrhea. Max and I know better, and we eat gingerly, pecking at the food like sparrows.

  We begin to hear artillery fire in the distance, and it comes closer day by day, hour by hour. Suddenly there’s food, as if the Nazis know they mustn’t be found with spare food and starving prisoners when we are liberated. Sacks of beans, peas and carrots are quietly “made available.” Parcels are mysteriously located and handed out. One of them contains fudge, and I bite off tiny portions and let them dissolve in my mouth, wanting the sensation to go on forever.

  Late one afternoon, Max hurries back to the hut from his political group and finds me in my usual spot, sitting in the sun with a book.

  “D’you know what day it is?” he blurts out. I’ve no idea.

  “March twenty-sixth,” he says. “Isn’t that your birthday?”

  I nod slowly. I am twenty-one, but my mum and dad aren’t here to wish me “Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám,” and now I will never hear Bill say, “Happy birthday, Izzy.” I remember he said he’d take me dancing. I haven’t seen him for twenty days. The start of a lifetime of nothingness without him.

  Max says, “I haven’t got anything to give you.”

  I shrug. What does it matter? What does anything matter?

  He crouches down beside me. “Look,” he says, “I’ve been thinking. If Bill doesn’t show up, we could pretend you’re married to me, and I could get you back to England and we could look for him there.”

  I think, Bill’s dead and nothing matters anymore. The heaviness sits hard on me today, and it seems too much effort to speak, but I struggle to listen to Max, who is still talking. “And later, if we can’t find him, and if you wanted, we might really get married. We’ve both lost the person we love, and I’ll never marry anyone else, and God knows you’ve seen me at the very worst. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.”

  I look up at him with incredulity. To be married to Max?

  He misunderstands my look and babbles on. “Oh, not for sex. We wouldn’t have to do that, but you’ve saved my life twice now, and I want to do everything I can for you. Maybe we could both go to Ruskin College. I think we’d rub along all right.”

  The idea swims around my brain like a black cloud. To be married to anyone other than Bill is unthinkable. And yet it would save me having to go back to the farm and the Russians. I think, I’d be better marrying Ralph, if he’s still alive. He’ll never have a wife.

  I pat his hand and whisper, “Maybe. Thank you.”

  But as I watch him walk away, and my mind settles, I know that the impulsive, self-centered girl who expected her daddy to rescue her and her husband to protect her has died somewhere on the road. If I am never to see Bill again, I’ll have to find the strength to make it on my own in the world to come. I won’t be dependent on anyone else, but I’ll forge my own path, just as Cousins would. I think of England, where I know no one. Will I really be brave enough to go there?

  Later, Max comes to me with a birthday present of a tin of coffee and two more squares of the exquisite fudge, swapped for all his cigarettes.

  * * *

  Everything is changing in the camp. I overhear guards trying to reassure each other, “Befehle sind befehle”—orders are orders—and I know this means they’re really scared. We notice that more and more of the guards have taken the insignia off their uniforms, and one tells a prisoner that he’s never been a Nazi, and Hitler is a schweinhund.

  To our astonishment, the postern who broke Bill’s nose at the brick factory seeks me out and holds out a hand in which my “catapult” and Bill’s harmonica are clutched.

  “I am returning confiscated belongings,” he says without looking me in the face.

  There’s jeering from all the men around us. “Bloody thief,” they catcall.

  I slip the harmonica into the breast pocket of my battle dress, near to my heart. The postern elbows his way through the jostling prisoners and back out of the hut.

  * * *

  Every day now, the whole sky seems full of aircraft, with flares of every color going up. The noise is incessant. We watch a plane falling from the sky, on fire from wingtip to wingtip, with sheets of flames billowing from it. All day we hear dull booming and see vivid flashes. One afternoon the whole camp is engulfed in an enormous smoke cloud. On the horizon we can see the red glow of towns burning.

  That night we lie awake in the darkness and listen to the sound of a
violin being played for an hour. The music seems to voice all the unspeakable sorrow in me: for Warsaw, for the starving people we passed, for my home, for my family, for Scotty, for Ralph, but most of all for Bill and for love that is lost to me forever.

  * * *

  One bright afternoon in late March, I’m sitting in my usual spot, deep in a book about a village called Middlemarch, when a sound makes me lift my head. It’s a whistle, someone whistling. A long way off. I lay my book down, not even noting the page number, and tell myself, “Lots of men whistle . . .” but the tune begins afresh, moving away from me, and I recognize the song about the nightingale in the square that Bill always played for me. My heart leaps, and I jump to my feet, weaving between the huts and around the groups of men to follow the sound. It stops and I panic. Maybe it’s him, but we’ll forever miss each other in this great maze of humanity. Then it starts again, and the words come back to me: angels dining at the Ritz. It’s closer now, and I begin to run, rounding the edge of the cookhouse and slap-bang into the whistler.

  “Oy!” he yells, and pushes me away. I stumble back, half losing my footing, and catch a momentary glimpse of a dark-haired, lanky stranger.

  “Watch it!” he snarls.

  I back away, muttering, “Sorry, sorry.”

  I round the edge of the nearest hut, with his voice following me. “You wanna mind where you’re going!”

  I crouch down against the wall, curling into myself, into a tight ball of pain. It’s not Bill. It will never be Bill. All my life I’ll hear snatches of song, or catch sight of a blond head in a crowd, and think it’s him. And it never will be. I pull my knees into my chest, hugging the pain, holding my breath, willing myself out of a world that no longer has Bill in it.