Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Karsten put a hand on the wire. “You know, I only said your friend might be a prisoner.”

“But it’s the only explanation,” the boy said. “The only hope.”

The way he said it — like a general — Karsten knew he believed it. Maybe there had been moments of doubt. Maybe others had tried to change his mind. But fighting for it, being beaten for it, had convinced him somehow, proved it.

On the other side of the wire, the boy was looking around, past Karsten, to the men on the football field, the barracks behind.

“What’s it like being a prisoner?”

“Dull!”

“What do you do?”

“As you see. Play sports, write letters, walk.” Karsten shrugged.

“Aren’t you planning an escape?”

He laughed. “Escape? I don’t think so. Where would we go? Who would help us?” But the boy, he saw, wasn’t laughing. If anything he seemed disappointed, and it moved Karsten to add, “Besides, what makes you think I’d tell you about it?”

“So you do think about escaping?”

“Are you trying to trick me?”

“ Tell me! ”

Karsten leaned down and whispered, “All the time.”

He wasn’t sure what to expect. Perhaps that the boy would be frightened, but instead he beamed. They were silent for a minute, not looking at each other.

“Are you,” Jim asked shyly, “a coward?”

Karsten hunched his shoulders, as if for a blow that had already fallen.

“What?”

“You heard.”

He was serious, Karsten saw, the answer deeply important to him. For just a moment, he wanted to cry yes! and have done with it. For just a moment, he could feel the cool relief of admitting it, even to this child. He was almost certain the boy would rather have his friend alive and a coward than brave and dead. All he had to do was say it. Yet something inside him recoiled. Some pride, some recollection of those dreadful steps down the passage out of the bunker. He recalled Schiller, of all people, back in training when he was still their sergeant, saying once that the thing cowards were most afraid of was being found out: “Which makes them act like fucking heroes.”

The boy was still waiting, an almost pleading look on his face, and finally Karsten told him, “I hope not.”

Jim nodded.

“I’m glad.”

And Karsten felt a lightening inside himself, though he knew the sentiment was more for the other man, the boy’s friend. “Cowards don’t get taken prisoner, do they?” he added. “It stands to reason. A real coward just runs away.” And for a second he actually believed it.

OF COURSE, he can’t write any of this to his mother, he thinks, glumly. Funny how he could say such things to a boy, a stranger, the enemy, and not to his own mother. She’s as much as told him she doesn’t want the truth, but having not told it to her, he doesn’t know what else to write. One thing you could say for your enemy: there was no danger of betraying him. The paper in his hands is wilting in the heat, still blank, but looking as if it could hardly support words any longer.

Behind him some fellows have started a football game; others to bet on it. In short, it’s desultory business as usual. He’s asked to play, but shakes his head. Twice the ball bounces through the crowd where he’s sitting. To his right, a group of men talk about the upcoming film. They’ve been promised The Invisible Man this week, and anticipation is high after seeing a clip of it in the coming attractions — that bewitching image of a man, head swathed in bandages, slowly unwinding the white gauze, gloved hands passing around and around his head to reveal nothing, no hair, no features, just those glasses hanging in space above a bandaged jaw line.

What an image for prisoners, Karsten thinks. What they wouldn’t give to be invisible, to just walk out of the gates.

The fellows beside him are speculating about whether such a thing is possible, and he can’t help eavesdropping. The 150-percenters have put about rumors — secret weapons, armies in reserve — to keep their spirits up. Were such things so much more unlikely than the astounding flying bombs raining down on London? What if the Führer’s scientists had discovered how to make a man disappear? someone asks. Mightn’t there be secret armies of invisible men waiting in special camps to be unleashed, hundreds, thousands of men made to disappear by the science of the fatherland?

Childish hopes, Karsten thinks, turning away, though he wishes he could share them. Those pictures of the bandaged man only made him wonder what kind of terrible wound the fellow had suffered. What kind of hideous disfigurement could only be healed by making it’s victim invisible? It makes him think of the flamethrower casualties, the bandaged wounded they’d seen carried past them on the beach at Normandy. That could have been him, or Schiller or Heino, if he hadn’t surrendered. He’s wondered what lay beneath those dressings — melted, scorched flesh — but he’s never imagined emptiness, nothingness. It’s an odd kind of healing, he thinks, that makes both wound and man vanish.

The ball bounces into their midst again and Karsten sets the letter aside. He folds the paper into his pocket, relieved, and goes after the ball. But when he turns to kick it back to the players, he sees they’re looking the other way, towards the guardhouse, where a crowd is forming. Somewhere he hears a radio playing, a tune he recognizes. Slowly it comes to him: La Marseillaise. It was banned in France, but more than once, on patrol, they’d heard it faintly in the village, clattering through the streets after it’s fugitive strains, trying to determine which house it was coming from, never finding it’s source.

Still holding the ball, he starts to follow the other men, hurrying towards the guardhouse, the radio playing inside it. Something has happened, he thinks, his heart racing. But before he gets there, the news spreads towards him, called from men on the fringe of the crowd. Paris has fallen, and as he hears it, he slows to a walk, a stop. Paris has fallen. He pats the pocket of his tunic, feels the paper there, crinkling. At last, he thinks, news. Something to write to his mother. But then, by the time it reaches her, she’ll already know, of course.

IT’S JUST MORE propaganda, the camp leaders insist the next morning. Paris? Impossible! But if it is a lie, a fiction, the men see that their guards believe it. The Tommies, who themselves have seemed stunned by the drudgery of camp life, are cheerful for a few days, giddy even, suddenly generous with their cigarettes and chocolate. The men accept them hesitantly, as if they might be tainted, but eat and smoke them anyway, scowling.

Karsten can barely believe the news himself. All his dreams of escape have been of France, of getting to France, and now it’s not enough. He tries to imagine the fall of Paris, but all he can think of are the images of German forces taking the white city. He thinks of his mother, her words as she watched the newsreels of the conquest in ’40. The end of the war. They thought they’d won. So now what does it mean? He remembers the Arc de Triomphe, standing beneath it, the marble bright but cool, almost chilly on a warm spring day. Our triumph. Their triumph. As if the stone itself were fickle. When he pictures the arch, only the direction of the marching men is different, as if the newsreels he remembers have been run backwards through the projector. He hopes it’ll be as easy to reverse again.

And then there it is, at the end of the week, on the Pathé News. The raucous, cheering crowds in the familiar, flickering streets. Smiling, waving Tommies astride their tanks, and the girls throwing garlands, kisses. He feels a pang of jealousy, but what haunts him afterwards, what he sees most vividly in his memory, are those other images, not of celebration but revenge, the pictures of the French women shorn in the streets. The women who slept with Germans. Les collaborateurs horizontale. He thinks of Françoise, of the dinner he pleaded with her to join him for. The meal, he hoped, would make their relationship normal, like a courtship. Proper. And for the first time he sees that she had taken pity on him when she agreed. Pity on him, the conqueror, the occupier! He’d insisted on the finest food, the best wine. Called for music, left a generous tip.