The Welsh Girl (23 page)

The men watch her go.

"You could use some work on your technique, lover-boy!" someone drawls, and Karsten shrugs, grins lopsidedly. He can still feel the wiry warmth of her fleece, the trembling tick of her heart. He can't remember when he last touched another live thing.

It makes him ache for escape. But when he asks Schiller if

he's heard any more rumours about a tunnel, the other rolls his eyes. "Only tunnelling around here," he says, making a pumping gesture, "is fellows into their fists."

By the end of the week, the girl seems an apparition, too improbable to believe in. Karsten must have imagined her. Still, he lies in his bed and thinks of her stepping out of the trees like a spirit, touches himself, guessing many of the others are doing the same. But at least in
his
dreams, he can speak to her.

He wonders what his mother would think of his talking to the girl. He has not written to her since her letter, nor she to him.

Fraternisation, she'd probably call it. Of course, he hadn't told her of Francoise either, but then they'd never talked about girls, his mother and he. He supposes that fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, have such awkward conversations, but mothers and sons? What could they say to each other?

Perhaps she thought he'd simply absorb what he needed to know. It was hard to be an innocent in a guesthouse, especially a cheap one, not with all those bedrooms

overhead. His mother never turned away business, not even those couples who, the next morning, when addressed by name, "Herr Schmidt, Frau Schmidt," blinked at her in bafflement across the breakfast table. They used to make him burn with anger, these people lying to his mother. Sometimes he would try to catch them out, addressing them by other names, just to see if, confused, they would answer. Other times he would use their false names to their faces over and over, drilling them sarcastically. He wanted them to know he knew they were lying. Once, though, when the couple in question had hurried to check out, his mother had slapped

him a ringing blow, slapped the smile of triumph right off his face. "It's not your business," she told him. "Learn to look the other way." He'd stood there dumbfounded.
Why, she'd known

all along
. "But they're lying," he'd begun, and she'd raised her hand again. "If I can put up with it, so can you!"

He learned after that to recognise a slight change in her tone when she talked to these couples. He could be sitting in their cramped kitchen and hear her welcoming guests in the hall, and even without seeing them--their stiff faces with the twitchy smiles they gave each other when they thought they were unwatched--he'd know, just from the way his mother said "
Wilkommen, Herr und Frau
." There was a hollowness to it, a kind of resignation--not a welcome, truly, just a weary acknowledgement. Every time such a couple checked in, more so even than the married couples, the families with children, he thought of his father. He missed him for himself, of course, though he could hardly remember him, thought of his father more as a role, an empty place at the head of the table, than as a person. But those were the moments when he felt

his mother's loss most keenly.

Perhaps that, he thinks, is why they never talked about love. Why, even when there had been girls--respectable girls, local girls, German girls (and he'd had his share of crushes)--he hadn't spoken of them to her. On his last night before the army took him, he'd made a plan to meet a girl--Eva. She was a

little older than he, twenty maybe, a rosy, round-faced thing with plump little hands. He'd watched her from afar for years, it seemed, always on the arm of some fellow in uniform, but he'd only had the nerve to ask her out, to the cinema, after he'd joined up. It was the bravest thing he'd ever done, he thought at the time. He stared into her dark pupils while she thought about her answer, and then he'd told her, "I'm shipping out tomorrow," and she'd pursed her lips and said, "Well, then." She called him a patriot. She said that there was no higher love than the love of one's country, and he nodded mutely. Her own patriotism was well known among the local boys, who called her the Recruiter.

Karsten had laughed along with the rest, thought her a gullible romantic at best, at worst a slut for the swastika, but now he saw what she felt most was pity. Knowing it, he still planned to use it against her, pitiless himself. But as he'd gone downstairs that evening, he'd found his mother alone in their cramped kitchen and he knew she'd been crying, and so he'd stayed with her. Perhaps, he'd thought, squeezing her hand, there was no distinction between pity and love. That's when she'd told him his father would be proud of him. She squeezed Karsten's hand. "Don't disgrace us," she said, and he'd nodded and sworn.

He wonders now if his mother still thinks him a virgin--the very worst thing a soldier can be, other than a coward, he thinks bleakly. And yet he finds himself, despite himself, hoping she does.

As for Eva, he'd written to her to apologise, but of course she'd never written back.

Karsten consoles himself that the Welsh girl's fleeting appearance at the wire at least scared the boys away, but before long they're back, and to his surprise he's actually pleased to see them. He recognises the one she grabbed, asks his name, but the boy ignores him. Ignores him yet lingers, as if fascinated by Karsten's English, as if the language issuing from him were as improbable as a talking sheep or dog. The boy is slightly built, with a watchful look about him, and seems always on the fringe of the crowd. A follower, Karsten intuits, a tagger-along, tolerated by the others, perhaps bullied by them.

"Where's your sister?" Karsten tries again the next night, but the boy bristles.

"She's not my sister! I'm an evacuee. My dad's in the navy!"

He sticks his chest out as if for a medal. There's a challenge in his voice, but Karsten doesn't want a fight.

"You must miss him," he says kindly, but it's a mistake. The boy's face clouds, and Karsten sees too late how he's trapped him. The boy can't admit he misses his father in front of the others, can't say he doesn't for fear of seeming disloyal.

"Shut up!" is all he can cry, and his shrill belligerence only makes the older boys laugh.

The gang as a whole is losing interest in the camp. Fewer boys come each night, and when they do, they chat among themselves, bored by the prisoners. No
longer afraid of us
, Karsten thinks.

He's reduced to entertaining them to maintain their interest. When he sees one of the older toughs, an albino by the look of him, lighting a cigarette, he brings two fingers to his own mouth, raises his eyebrows.

"You must be joking, sunshine."

"Not to smoke." Karsten struggles for the word. "For a...trick, you know. Magic." He cuts his eyes towards the slight boy, the one he's really doing this for.

The tough frowns, but Karsten can see he's intrigued, and in his own good time he strolls over, offers a cigarette jutting from his pack. "You're really not going to smoke it?"

"No matches," Karsten tells him, pulling his pockets inside out.

"Fair enough. I'll go along."

The albino waves the others over like an impresario, and they stand before Karsten as he twirls the cigarette in his fingers. He has a modest repertoire of sleight of hand, with which he used to entertain his mother's guests as a boy, but he's rusty, his knuckles stiff, and on his first attempt the cigarette slips through his grasp. He has to fumble to catch it.

"Oooohh!" The older boy rolls his eyes. "You're good, you are. Know any others?"

Karsten ignores him, trying to still the sudden panic he feels. He used to have a line of patter to distract his audience,

but he's so gripped with stage fright he can't think to translate it. He pushes his sleeves up, concentrates on his next pass, one hand slipping over the other, and to his own mild surprise the cigarette vanishes. He turns his hands back and forth before them, smiling in triumph.

Even the albino is impressed. As for the little lad, his eyes are huge. He's surely never seen anything like it before.

"Where is it?" he asks in hushed tones, looking at the albino as if he might know.

"Gone," Karsten says. He puts his two empty fingers to his lips in a suave smoking gesture. "Unvisible!"

"Invisible," the tough snorts, but the little one, enraptured by the trick, breathes, "Unvisible," as if it's the magic word.

Instinctively, Karsten reaches out to him with a twirl of the wrist. He means to produce the cigarette from behind the

boy's ear, but for once he's forgotten the wire and has to let his hand fall quickly to hide the cigarette.

"Come on," the tough says, suddenly suspicious, as if Karsten intends to keep the cigarette. "Where is it?"

Karsten mimes forgetfulness, rubs his face thoughtfully, and then draws the cigarette from his nostril, to the delight of the younger boys.

"Oi!" the albino cries. "That's disgusting." Karsten holds out the cigarette but the other shakes his head. "I ain't putting that in my mouth!"

"You can't always believe your eyes," Karsten says, smiling. He holds it out again, but the boy isn't having any of it.

Besides, the others are clamouring for him to do it again, and Karsten obliges, running through the routine twice more, three times, balancing the smoke on the back of his hand, making it vanish with a clap, then pulling it from thin air with a flourish as he gets his feel back.

He slips the cigarette between his lips as he saunters back to the barracks that night, wondering if the boy will tell her

about the trick, if she'll believe him. And abruptly he hopes not. That she'll want to see it for herself.

But the next night brings only the boys again, and by the end of the evening they've seen all his tricks a dozen times.

He'd feared the little one would vanish with the rest, when they lost interest, and yet there he is, one day all by himself, looking around as if for company. Perhaps the others haven't deigned to tell him of a new meeting place.

It's the chance Karsten's been hoping for.

He pulls a pair of toy planes from his tunic. He's been working on them all week, fashioning them from a couple of bed slats with a blunt penknife. They're crude things, not much more than crosses of wood lashed together with twine and painted with boot polish, but each has a golden propeller, cut from flattened shell casings he's begged from a guard.

They're not much, but he's proud of those propellers, has polished them to an oily shine, the first thing he's polished since his surrender. He's bent the soft metal blades at an angle, so when he swings the planes through the air before the boy, they swirl with a soft ticking sound, glittering in the sunset.

Karsten can see the desire in the boy's eyes. He can't take them off the planes, one in each of Karsten's rough palms now. He lifts them towards the boy, but the lad hops back like a bird.

"Would you like them?"

The boy nods emphatically.

"The girl," Karsten says cautiously. "The girl who fetched you. Tell me her name and you can have them."

The boy stares at the planes, their propellers winking. He's torn, Karsten sees, but finally he shakes his head.

"Come on."

The boy's shoulders drop and he turns away, and Karsten finally relents. She'll just have to remain the Welsh girl. Much

as he wants her name, there's something about the boy's loyalty that moves him.

"Here, then." He pushes the planes through the fence before he can change his mind, and the youngster snatches them out of his hands, darts off.

For a slow moment Karsten feels bereft, as if he's given up a treasure. The boy wanted them so much. Karsten's hands, which cradled the toys for days, feel abruptly empty. But when he sees the boy running uphill, the planes whipping over the long grass, banking around tree trunks, sailing towards the crest, it comes to Karsten that this is what he has wanted all along, for the planes to go where he can't. Into a home. He thinks of them crossing the threshold like the flights he'd watched in France racing across the coastline; he imagines them roaring around the kitchen, flashing past whitewashed walls; pictures them diving through the steam from a kettle as if it were a low cloud skimming over the lake of the sink, shooting across the long, flat field of a dining table, past bucolic scenes on the china ranked along a dresser. He thinks of them buzzing through the dimness of a hallway, banking sharply, gradually gliding in for a safe landing on the broad, smooth strip of a well-made bed. And he thinks of the girl finding them there, or among the plates--on the dinner table,

or on the boy's desk. Thinks of her reaching for them with surprise, wondering where they're from.

Perhaps she'll ask the boy; perhaps he'll tell.

And he realises,
They're for her
. Somehow, he's made them for her.

He dreams of her coming to the wire the next day, but he's still pleased to see the boy, even alone, hurries to meet him at the wire, smiling. But the lad is grim faced, empty handed.

Karsten feels a brief pang that the planes have already lost their appeal. Or perhaps he's simply lost them, or had them

taken from him by some bully at school, and the premonition fills Karsten with indignation.

The boy won't look at him at first, pacing back and forth before the wire, staring at his own scuffed boots.

"Those planes," he blurts out eventually. "Those planes you gave me."

"Yes." I'll make more, Karsten thinks. A whole squadron. Enough for the boy, for a whole village of boys, if need be. Anything to make him look less distraught.

"They were
German
planes, right?" He looks up sharply

into Karsten's face as he says--spits--the word.

Karsten searches for an answer, his smile curdling. A part of him has forgotten the war still going on somewhere.

"Not really," he says at last, guardedly. "They were just planes."

"But
you
made them," the boy insists.

"You didn't think they were German planes when I gave them to you."