Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“This’ll help you talk to the guards,” Pinkie is saying, but all the words offered for simple greetings are obscenities. “Alfweed-er-sane,” Pinkie enunciates, waving goodbye, “means ‘Bugger off!’” A man’s voice repeats the words slowly after him, to the accompaniment of giggles. “And when you meet someone, you say, ‘Pleased to fuck you!’” Pinkie says cheerily. Esther feels herself redden, with embarrassment then anger, and swats at the wasp, which has found her again. Another man, she sees, is urgently miming eating. “Oh,” Pinkie says. “What do we say when we’re hungry?” He grins at the others. “What you ask is, ‘May I have some cock, please?’ Go on, try it. ‘More cock, please!’” The German repeats it and the boys howl with laughter. It’s suddenly too much for Esther. She can’t bear to see it go on, and she finds herself pushing through the undergrowth, the brambles pulling at her legs.

“Stop it!” she shouts, stumbling into the midst of them, arms raised, and they scatter like sheep. For a moment she has Jim’s arm, and then he breaks free and she chases them into the trees, listens to them crashing through the brush.

“Hey,” she hears Pinkie call in the darkness. “Was that your mam, Bedwetter?” And Jim howling, “No!”

She stares after them, stung by their laughter, but when she turns, the men at the wire are watching her silently, their eyes wide. Somehow she imagined that they’d bolt too. They’re not laughing at least, but after a second this makes her more, not less, uncomfortable.

She looks from one to another, quickly turns.

“Don’t go,” someone blurts in accented English, and she stops for a second as if she can’t quite believe it, as if it’s some trick. She searches their faces in the gloom, then starts to back away once more.

“Thank you,” the voice calls, and this time she sees it’s the tall, sandy-haired one at the edge of the group who has spoken. She thinks she might have seen him playing football.

“You’re welcome,” she responds automatically.

There’s a hurried exchange in German, and she looks from man to man until the tall one raises a hand like a boy at school. She nods, curious about what he could want to ask her.

“What’s your name?”

She stares at him open-mouthed, finally shakes her head, staggers back into the trees, stands there for a long moment in the deep shade. She’s out of sight, but the men stay where they are, searching the shadows, and she keeps still, her breathing shallow.

“Come back,” the tall one calls, and she looks at his beseeching face, marveling at it. One of his comrades tries to pull him away, and as he turns something occurs to her, and she calls softly, “If you know so much English, why don’t you tell your friends they’re not learning what they think they’re learning!”

“I will,” he says quickly, nodding towards her voice. “I will. We were just playing with the boys. I’m sorry for any offense.”

And he is sorry, she sees, with a kind of wonder — he actually blushes — and what’s more, he’s afraid of her leaving. She sees the fear on his face, the disappointment as she stays silent, sees his hand on the wire, and she thinks, He can’t touch me. And the thought warms her through.

HIS CONVERSATION with the girl — his tête-à-tête, as the others start to call it in coarse French accents, his rendez-vous —brings Karsten a new notoriety in the camp. A better one, he supposes. At least the men are talking to him again. They all want to know what she said to him there at the fence, what he said to her, and when he hesitates — he knows the truth will disappoint them, and besides, he’s embarrassed, ashamed to admit he kept silent while the boys mocked them — they tease him, call her his “Welsh girl” and him her “lover-boy.”

Karsten denies it all, of course, knowing as he does so that this is part of the game, part of being a good sport. He recognizes this taunting — they’re the same ribald jokes he endured about Françoise — knows his role.

“You’re learning,” Schiller tells him with a little nod.

Karsten stands at the fence the next evening, hoping for a glimpse of her. Pure foolishness, he knows. It was hardly a romantic encounter, nor is the girl precisely a prize. She’d not even been wearing a dress, but rather breeches and a bulky sweater; the guards had probably mistaken her for one of the boys. A tomboy, and young, too, seventeen or eighteen. Françoise had been seventeen, or so she’d told him over dinner, but he’d never believed her. In her makeup and experience she seemed so much older. And yet there was something about this girl. The way she’d looked at him, with anger, contempt, pity even, but also as if she expected something better of him.

It’s the first time in almost two months that he hasn’t cursed his knowledge of English, wished in fact that it were better, quicker.

Still hoping forlornly for her to appear again, he hears a rustle in the trees on the last day of July, and as he watches, a stray sheep emerges from the undergrowth, daintily leaping across the ditch. She ambles across the lane and begins nosing in the sweet, lush grass on the other side of the fence. A crowd of men gradually gather beside Karsten to watch, drifting along with her as she crops her way back and forth. For the first time in a fortnight or more, they actually respect the warning wire, line up along it, not wanting to scare the animal, as if they are watching in a zoo.

Karsten ignores the whispered jokes about his “girlfriend.” Someone runs to the mess, comes back with a handful of furred carrots, a greenish potato.

“It’s not a goat,” Karsten hisses. But he creeps towards the fence, proffering the vegetables as if they are a peace offering. The ewe wisely ignores him and the food, nibbling at the grass. The tearing sound of her teeth is so loud it makes Karsten flinch. He reaches out a slow hand, touches the wire, and then stretches through to stroke her back, and for a moment she submits to it. The wool is tightly sprung and, as he pushes his fingers into it, greasy with lanolin. But what astonishes him is how warm it is. He looks back at the others with a smile of wonder, but that sets the men hopping over the wire, and the sudden movement makes the ewe shrug him off and jump away, breaking into a loping trot.

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 rumors about a tunnel, the other rolls his eyes. “Only tunneling 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. Fraternization, she’d probably call it. Of course, he hadn’t told her of Françoise 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!”