The Welsh Girl (19 page)

"Played."

The ball comes to rest against the fence, and the men stare at it--the players and those gathered to watch the game.

There's a single strand of wire, a foot off the ground, that runs inside the fence, set back ten feet. They've been warned not to cross it.

"Let someone else," Schiller says softly. Karsten hasn't even been aware of the thought, but as soon as Schiller says

it he can't
not
run forward, stand at the wire, squinting up at the

guard towers, a hand to his brow. They see him, he's sure (the guards have been hanging out of the towers watching the game), but they make no move, and he's damned if he's going to ask their permission. Instead, he takes a deep breath and steps over the wire.

"Oi," someone shouts, "stop right there." But Karsten strides forward, pretending he doesn't know English--"Halt! Bollocks, what's German for 'Halt'?"--his head down, intent on the ball. When he bends for it, he can smell the damp grass in the ditch on the other side of the wire, and as he rises again-- "Halt!"

"Yeah, what's the German for it?"

"
Halt!
"-- he looks up at last at the land beyond the fence, the trees and then the bright steep slope of pasture. He's been here for more than a day, he realises, but he's barely dared look beyond the camp, over the tar-paper roofs of the barracks, through the scribble of barbed wire topping the fences, and then only in glances, as if the outside world were too glaring to look at for long.

"No, idiot. The German for 'halt'
is
'halt'."

"Fuck it is!"

Above and behind him there's the dry snap of a rifle bolt, and he stands very still, staring at the view.

A shiftless, slovenly lot the guards seem to him, more jailers than soldiers. Karsten knows the kinds of men who

draw such duty--shirkers and backsliders, the dregs of an army. There'd been one in his squad in basic training, Voller, the broad arse of the platoon, always bringing up the rear.

He'd eventually been transferred to some sort of cushy guard duty. There'd been grumbling among the men, but Karsten had told them, "It's for the best. You wouldn't put a fellow like that in the front rank of a parade any more than you'd put him in the front lines. You wouldn't want us judged by the likes of him.

Stick him in the rear where he'll be invisible." He'd been relieved, in truth, to see the back of him, as if Voller were some shameful secret.

And what does that make me
, he thinks,
to be guarded by the likes?

He takes one more look through the fence, glances back over his shoulder at the guard tower and the other prisoners lined up silently. And then there's Schiller, clapping impatiently. "Come on, it's not half-time. Let's get on with it."

This is the form his gratitude takes, Karsten finally understands as he heads back. Looking out for him, vouching for him with the other men. All the little jokes to show that Karsten can be a good sport. All the little warnings.

He's distracted during the rest of the game, letting the ball slip under his foot and then lunging into tackles. One clattering collision ends with the other player springing up, shoving Karsten--"
Now
you want to fight, eh?"--the foul escalating into a dusty, panting tussle until the other man's teammates pull him off. Karsten looks up from under his brows, hands on knees, and sees his own side standing back, watching. None of them have come to his aid. Even Schiller is silent.

The next time the ball flies out of play, Karsten jogs to the sidelines and tells Schiller to take his place. He doesn't wait for the other's reply, just turns away from the game, back towards the fence.

The camp is at the high end of a valley, he sees, spread out

across a deep shelf. There are the remains of a slate mine to the north, the hillside scraped back to the purple stone, a pile of waste slate like a burial mound beside it. The slope to the east, craggy cliffs interspersed with steep spills of scree, isn't much less barren. But to the south, separated from the longest side of the parade ground, by a narrow lane and a stand of hawthorn trees, a grassy hillside rises to an angled ridge. It's here the locals gathered, and it's here that Karsten finds himself drawn. What's over that ridge? he wonders as he drifts back and forth along the wire.

He's there, one evening later that week, when he spots the local boys, hiding in the trees, spying on them. Something about their furtive scrutiny enrages him, almost as much as the oblivious-ness of the other men. They've been prisoners for less than a month, and already they've relaxed their guard to the point of being ambushed by children.

He glares into the trees as if to say, I can see you! And when that elicits nothing more than a shivering of leaves, a shifting of shadows, he cries out, "Show yourselves. Little cowards!" Cries out in German, as though speaking to himself, not them.

In the mess he complains to the others, but they shake their heads. "They're just boys," Schiller says with a note of impatience. "What do you care about boys?"

"It's like you're on duty," he adds when Karsten goes back to the fence, what Schiller teasingly calls 'the front'.

Schiller himself has joined the evening drill organised by the 150-percenters. It's proudly rumoured that they've even impressed the commandant with their smart precision. The 150-percenters have gone so far as to offer him the Heil Hitler; the gesture is officially banned, but the major has overlooked the audacity.
Makes him feel like a general
, the men say. The joke is that he's returning the salute with his

phantom limb. At any rate, he seems content to turn a blind eye to the 150-percenters' excesses--one fellow, rumoured to

be homosexual, has had both hands smashed in a door frame so he can't even fuck himself--in return for an orderly, disciplined camp.

"You'll join us if you know what's good for you," Schiller tells him darkly.

Karsten knows he's right, yet he can't tear himself away from the fence, even when he feels the ground beneath him tremble with stamping feet. On the march from the Dover docks they'd run a gauntlet of schoolboys perched on a railway bridge who spat down on them, heads jerking back and forth, as the column passed below, until the men's shoulders and hair shone with saliva. "Filthy British weather," the fellow beside Karsten had muttered. At the time Karsten had been too shocked to feel much more than despair, but in memory the moment makes his scalp crawl. These boys aren't spitting, of course, but he feels their eyes on him. And he thought he'd bested them by throwing back the cigarettes!

The first letters from home start to arrive at the end of their second week in the camp.

A bowlegged sergeant conducts the mail call, appearing from the guardhouse one afternoon, a sack over his shoulder and a wooden crate in his other hand. After all the weeks of waiting, the last few moments are the worst. The sergeant, perched on his crate, seems to have no grasp of the concept of alphabetical order, delving into his sack and pulling out letters at random, as if he's Saint Nicholas himself, or drawing names for a raffle.

But perhaps that isn't such a bad idea, Karsten thinks, pressing close; a letter is a prize. And besides, the sergeant's method gives them all hope until the very last, straining to make out their names in his terrible accent, and even then

they make him turn the sack inside out and shake it before the tight circle hemming him in loosens.

There's nothing for Karsten that first day, but he's buoyed nonetheless.
Not long now
. Besides, a letter to a barracks mate is almost as good as one to yourself, since you share everything in camp. Karsten listens to the lucky ones reading their letters that night and the next. But on the third night, the third day of mail with nothing to show for all his letter writing,

he wraps his arms around his head in the darkness, distraught with jealousy.

At least he's not alone in that. Astoundingly, one of the letter readers has received a sausage in the first shipment, and later that night, when the men find him gnawing at it under his blanket--the smell gives him away--they make him sit at the table and saw at it with a blunt penknife so they can all have some. In the candlelight, it looks to Karsten as if the men are lined up to take the host. And indeed the shavings peel off, thin as paper, and dissolve on the tongue like communion wafers, a sacred taste of home.

The fourth day, and no mail. The fifth, nothing.

Karsten has written more letters than anyone--has begged for the stationery ration of men who don't want to write--and yet day after day he turns away from mail call empty handed. He keeps it up, though, writing almost daily now, as if it's his duty.

He can tell from the replies that several of the men have taken his advice about not complaining in their own letters.
I'm glad they're treating you fairly
, one wife writes. And yet gradually, hearing the letters they get back--
we're coping well, spirits are high, everyone has faith in our army
-- it becomes impossible for Karsten to quell the suspicion that these loved ones might be lying to them in return. What is it really like at home? How are they truly managing? The camp commandant

has posted a newspaper--a two-day-old copy of
The Times
, ironed flat by one of the guards--on the side of the mess to keep them apprised of the course of the war, but the camp leaders have denounced it as propaganda and forbidden the men, especially those few with a little English, to read it. And now love seems to be further obscuring the truth from home. Even the others begin to doubt it, and resent Karsten for inadvertently putting the thought in their heads.

"I know, I know," Schiller says one evening. "We're 'protecting' them. But do you ever think perhaps we shouldn't have told them we're prisoners at all? Said we're still on the front lines, or better, told them we're silting in a cafe in Paris. Wish you were here!"

Karsten ignores him, but listening to the letters, he realises he can't say for sure any more who is protecting whom.

Another couple of days without mail and he hardly cares. Now the men read their letters softly, not looking in his direction, while he scribbles another.

"What have you got left to tell her?" Schiller asks once, though not unkindly.

He still can't sleep, his thoughts turning to his mother over and over. He's grateful, as if for mercy, when there's finally something else to distract him. One evening shortly after lights out, he becomes aware of a stillness spreading over the barracks. Something other than the slow transition to steady breathing. It's almost as though they've been waiting for something, Karsten thinks. He can't make anything out himself yet. And then there it is, at the very edge of hearing, carried on the breeze, drifting in and out as on the tide, the distant drone of engines overhead.

"Heinkels," someone breathes, and Karsten wonders how the fellow knows--they're all navy here. But he doesn't ask, no one does; they want to believe it. "Heading up the Irish Sea,"

another voice adds. A third: "Turning for Liverpool or Manchester." They listen, rapt, as if to a radio, Karsten thinks, picturing his mother's boxy Volksradio, her first set, the two of them kneeling before it.

The windows of their barracks are shuttered and bolted from outside, but the sound sifts down to them through slatted vents under the roof. The throb of the engines might as well be a serenade, and long after the tune has faded, they lie still, hoping for the distant fanfare of bombing. There's a long pause and then a scrape of bunks being pushed together, the soft grunts of men clambering up, one on the shoulders of two others. They can't quite reach, so they call on Karsten, the climber. He pulls himself up, yanks at the louvre until it comes loose, lowers it, pushes his head into the dark space. He can hear no more, but he hangs there for a moment smelling the air--he can just catch a tang of the ocean--taking deep huffs of it until someone else demands a turn. Men balance there all night, though they hear nothing else, craning for a glimpse of light at the horizon, of fires. When they do catch sight of something, it's only the dawn, and they have to scramble to replace the louvre before reveille.

It's all they can talk about the next day, the planes overhead.

Every barracks has heard it. The camp leaders are smiling, strutting a little. The men, for once, can't wait for nightfall, as if the sooner they go to bed, the sooner the planes will come again. Except this time they don't, not the next night nor the one after that, and when, on the third, they do return, the men catching the pulse of the engines for a few moments, like a snatch of some favourite tune, Karsten finds himself thinking not of the bombs the planes carry but of the men inside, of how they're only a few hundred feet above, and of how by morning, if they survive, they'll be miles away.

When he finally drowses, he dreams of pulling himself through the louvre, climbing out on to the barracks roof, of

reaching his arms up into the sky and catching hold of the undercarriage as a plane sweeps overhead. His uniform snaps like a flag in the wind. He imagines the sensation in his stomach as the plane unloads its cargo and bobs up, lightened. He watches the stick of bombs fall away beneath him, a curving line of fence posts, and as they drop behind, he watches the landscape dip and rise in waves until the plane crosses the white line of cliffs at Dover, like a halo around Britain, and there's the sea itself glimmering between his feet. In his dream, dawn breaks, a flock of gulls scuds beneath him, and there are the beaches of France, flashing golden with shell casings. His arms should be tired, but they're firm, not even shaking with effort, as if, rather than holding on, he is gripped in the talons of a huge bird. He pulls himself up, doing chin-ups for the sheer joy of it. Any minute now, he thinks, they'll land, but no, the plane keeps speeding along over Alsace, the corduroy patches of vineyards, and then north- east until he knows where they're headed by the mountains rising before him. Then they're banking, dropping lower and lower until he can make out rivers, roads, Bergen-strasse, on the outskirts of town. He starts to windmill his legs, and then his feet touch in a puff of dust and he's sprinting down the