Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

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 realizes, 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.”

“At school they said I joined the wrong air force.”

“They’re any planes you want them to be.”

“No! You made them. What did you mean them to be? It doesn’t matter what I think; it’s what you meant them to be. You were thinking of German planes, I bet.”

Karsten begins to deny it, and stops. Of course he’d been thinking of German planes. But what he really wants to say is that he’d been thinking of freedom. The freedom he’d heard in the planes overhead, the freedom he’d felt thinking of the toy planes, something from the camp, something he made there, existing outside of it, outside of his reach, his sight.

“Anyhow, they’re gone now,” the boy says with a sigh. “I chopped them up with the hatchet and stuck them in the fire.”

Karsten pictures the brass propellers twisting in the heat, blackening, falling through a sooty grate.

“They called me a traitor,” the boy chokes out.

“I’m sorry,” Karsten says softly, overwhelmed by a wave of grief. He begins to say he’ll make him something else, but he can’t think what.

HE LIES IN HIS sagging bunk that night, long after the barracks grows still, staring up at the coarse timber joists of the roof, impatient for sleep to ambush him, yet constantly vigilant. He was never this alert on guard duty. The hut stinks of men, of sweat and feet and damp wool and arseholes, and he rolls over to catch the sporadic scent of the sea. He can make out the smell of the damp trees on wet days, or of dry heather on fine ones. Nights are the worst, he thinks. He dreads nine o’clock, when they’re ordered off the parade ground and herded back to their barracks. The evenings, once it gets too gloomy to play football, once the dusk deepens and the white dots of sheep on the hillside vanish, are a slow, anxious prelude to this confinement. It makes him feel like a punished child, no older than the boy, sent to bed early, and he dreads the winter when the days will get shorter and they’ll be locked in even earlier.

He wonders if his mother is punishing him by not writing. She considered it unladylike to strike a child — that was a father’s place. Not that she didn’t hit him on occasion, but more commonly she would give him the silent treatment if he disappointed her.

Recalling his childhood and her punishments, he’s reminded that he did once see her turn away a suspicious couple from the pension. He’d have been just seven or eight. This was before he understood the nature of trysts. He remembers it because he overheard her telling them there was no room, and when they mentioned the Vacancy card in the window, she said her son must have forgotten to take it down. He’d thought it was a mistake and hurried out to tell her that no, there were vacancies, but when she persisted, he grew indignant, as if he were being blamed unfairly. The man, he remembers, became impatient. “Are there rooms or not, madam?” And his mother shook her head adamantly. “The boy is mistaken.”

“But Mutti, ” he’d cried, and she snapped at him to shut up, and he burst into tears, the injustice of it too much to bear. “It’s not fair,” he sobbed, and the young woman had crouched down beside him, taken his hands in her soft ones. “There, there, little man.” Her head of brown hair was as glossy as a fresh chestnut, and he’d reached out for it. But then he felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him to her. “Don’t you touch him!”

The woman had stood stiffly and told the man they should leave. “Otto, please.” She put a hand on his arm, and as Karsten watched from his mother’s skirts, the woman stroked the man’s sleeve lightly. “Don’t make a scene,” she said softly, as if it were just the two of them, and the man turned to her then, and without another word they’d left.