Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

She thinks of the first time she gave him anything, after burning his clothes. She’d dressed him in an assortment of her father’s things — the trousers rolled up until the cuffs were fat as sausages. He looked so forlorn, she’d run back to her room and returned with a jumper. “This was Eric’s,” she said — they’d used it as a blanket once to sit on the hillside, and she still liked to press it to her face sometimes — and he asked, “Who’s Eric?” and she told him. “And he was an evacuee and we loved him,” she said, trying to win his trust. But something in Jim’s eyes, a slight recoil, had told her he didn’t want to be loved, or more importantly, not by her, and something in her had answered his flinch. And now she knows: she picked Jim because he wasn’t Eric; she picked him because he was as different as a boy could be. She picked him because she could be sure she’d never love him.

She glances back at the camp furtively for a last sight of Colin. She’s sure now it wasn’t he who hit Jim — the boy would never have gone so close to him otherwise — and she tries to decide if she hates him any less. But she can’t make him out down there in the crowd of men, finds herself focusing instead on a couple of the Germans. They’re standing, hands on hips, looking up at her, and all at once she feels very exposed on the hillside. She turns and pulls her cardy around her, hurries to join her father.

“Well,” Arthur says with a grim smile, jerking his head back to where Jim has disappeared over the ridge, “at least he didn’t get caught by them this time.” He gestures to where a lorry is pulling into the lane, and she realizes it’s the sappers, leaving.

She takes a deep breath. So it’s her secret, she thinks. As if it never happened.

IT MUST BE the new bunk, Karsten thinks, his first few nights in the new camp, the cloying scent of freshly sawn timber, and the thin mattress, through which he can count the slats beneath his back, buttocks, thighs, and calves.

He can’t sleep.

It’s not fear, at least. This new camp has come as a relief to the men. Karsten feels it himself, this slackening. It shames him, but he understands it.

The journey by truck from the transit camp at Dover had seemed interminable. Twelve hours? Fifteen? He’d lost track sometime in the night, the dread growing with each mile. The worst moment had been just after dusk, when the column had pulled over in a dark culvert and they’d been ordered out. Not a man had moved. Karsten had listened to the latches on the tailgates being snapped open, so like the sound of a rifle bolt being drawn back, and seen the fear in the faces around him. He’d finally slapped his own thighs and climbed down, pushing the tarpaulin aside like a curtain. Others, though not all, had followed, and they’d been herded to one side, lined up facing a low stone wall… and ordered to piss. Back in the truck, Schiller had leaned over and whispered, “Haven’t you had enough of leading?” but then Schiller hadn’t gone when given the chance, and within an hour, his bladder aching like a wound, he’d had to beg the guard at the back of the truck to let him go over the side, clinging to a rib of the roof with one hand, his dick with the other, his piss a jumping silver stream in the headlights of the truck behind.

Karsten might not have been worried about being machine-gunned in some field — at least it’d be quick — but he wasn’t without his own fears as the men jounced along. The watery dawn light seeping through the truck’s tail flaps revealed, when the wind lifted them, fiercely rugged mountains, jagged peaks cutting across the sky like a piece of paper torn in two. He stared at the boulder-strewn hillsides, the cascades of grey scree tumbling into lakes like mirrors, and thought, A thousand years’ hard labor. Though when someone gave out a low whistle at the view, he called out staunchly, “It’s nothing compared with the Harz.”

“At least you’re loyal to landscape,” someone else had yelled from the other end of the truck, and before Karsten could reply, Schiller had hissed, “Shut it,” though whether to him or the other man, Karsten wasn’t sure. He’d spent the rest of the trip in grim silence, though even he couldn’t resist the general air of giddiness when they’d disembarked at the new camp.

The barracks certainly looked more comfortable than the moldering tent town at Dover, and even the distant audience of locals on the hillside, so disquieting in their stillness, were easily driven off, like so many sheep. Karsten had exulted in throwing back their filthy cigarettes, though he’d gotten dirty looks from the rest, and Schiller had pulled him aside in the mess line and demanded, “What are you trying to prove?”

They’d set out to explore the camp as soon as they’d eaten, mapping it minutely, discovering which showers had the best flow, which bunks were in a draft, which latrine seats were the least splintery. And like explorers (like conquerors, indeed, Karsten thought bleakly) they’d named everything they found: the barracks after the grand hotels of Europe — Savoy, Adlon, Ritz; the guard towers — Eiffel, Pisa, London, Babel. The barracks were palatial compared with the tents they’d come from, yet the men fretted over them, bouncing on the thin striped mattresses, opening and closing doors and shutters, tut-tutting about the rough finish. “I hope everything’s to your liking?” Karsten, no stranger to picky guests, asked sarcastically, looking down at Schiller, perched on the lower bunk, and the older man grinned and told him, “I’ll take it!” Schiller even persuaded the others to name their barracks after Karsten’s mother’s place, the Pension Simmering — a joking kindness, Karsten supposed, though the reference made him more, not less, homesick, and he had to force himself to smile.

He’d written of it to his mother that evening — they’d all fallen to letter writing as soon as they’d been issued stationery after dinner — telling her that he was still in the family business and pointing out at least that every bed was filled with a long-term guest. And then he’d crossed that out, sucked on his pencil. Around him men were scribbling away, the barracks as silent and concentrated as an exam hall at the gymnasium. “What are you writing?” he’d asked Schiller, and the other had said, “Just about the shitty weather, the lousy food.” The weather had turned, a persistent drizzle settling over the camp like a mountain mist, and the offerings in the mess had been poor — better than Dover, but much worse than their own mess in France — but Karsten told him, “You can’t write that.”

“Why not?”

He’d searched for an answer, aware that men in the nearby bunks were waiting too.

“Who’s that to, your wife? What’s she going to think, reading that? It’s going to worry her, make her cry. Is that what you want?”

In truth, it occurred to Karsten, it probably was what Schiller wanted — sympathy, pity — but not even he would admit that.

“So what should I write?” he asked, half impatient, half humoring.

“I don’t know. Tell her they feed you decently, that the camp’s humane.”

“Propagandist! Is that what you write? You should be ashamed, lying to your own mother.”

“What else?” Karsten told him sharply. “It’s all we can do, isn’t it? The only way left to protect them.”

Schiller stared at him for a long moment, and Karsten realized that he’d crossed a line. The men around them were watching carefully. And then he added, “As if you never lied to your wife,” and Schiller’s tight face broke into a crooked grin.

He listens for Schiller’s breathing now, tries to decide if he’s asleep, but he doubts it. Judging by the sounds from the other bunks, they’re not alone. He imagines them all lying awake, waiting for the last light of the summer evening to fade from the cracks around the windows. The heavy silence is punctuated by the men’s frustrated sighs, or the sighs of their farts. Here and there too, as Karsten listens through the night there is, amid the sporadic thumping of pillows and rustle of blankets, the quietly insistent rhythms, the short smothered breaths and creaking bunks, of masturbation. Karsten’s heard it before, back in basic training or in the barracks in France. Yet it shocks him now. Once, he hears someone hiss gruffly, “Come, if you’re going to!” and there’s a snort of laughter. But he’s silent when he feels his own bunk tremble, thinks he’s giving Schiller his dignity, what little he has left. It’s the inevitable male remedy for sleeplessness, he thinks, and he feels a sullen envy when Schiller stills.