Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“I’m in love with you,” he’d told her, and she’d nodded perfunctorily, not even looking up from her dinner.

“Do you think you could ever love me?” he’d asked.

She’d chewed and swallowed. “ Jamais! ”

“But why?”

She’d searched for the words. “We are enemies, hein? Anything other”—she rubbed her finger and thumb together—“would be surrender.”

He cringes at the thought, but makes himself imagine her, the hair tumbling around her ears, the locks bouncing off her narrow shoulders, wafting to the floor like feathers. He hears the women have been stripped in the streets, but it’s this nakedness, the nakedness of her head, a nakedness he never imagined, that appalls him. To be seen so! “Forgive me, but she’s just a French whore,” Schiller tells him. “She’s had worse done to her.” But the shame of it seems unbearable, intolerable to Karsten. He can’t imagine how she’ll possibly survive it. It makes him think of basic training, the way they’d all been shorn that first day, their heads looking so shrunken, so white, as if the skulls beneath them had been revealed already in all their thin fragility.

And he’d been worried about her in the arms of a Tommy! Such selfishness. He hopes now that she has a Tommy, a big, loving one, that she clings to him, drapes her tresses around him, sweeps them across his chest in the night. Someone who can save her hair.

Karsten had once begged her for a lock of it. They’d been in the corner of a bar, and she’d reached a hand beneath her skirt and pulled out a single pale loop, held it glistening before him, laughing at his stricken face.

It was the only thing she ever gave him for free.

In the night, when he can sleep, he dreams the smell of Françoise’s hair. It’s there, faintly, though he can’t quite inhale it, can’t quite capture it. He dreams of holding her, aches to protect her, cradling her head, feeling it’s hard ridges instead of curls, the scabs from the scissors, the raw, torn places. Her crown is hard under his chin.

He lies there then, rigid, feeling his erection subsiding in tiny staggering flinches.

Just a French whore, he tells himself. But that’s exactly what terrifies him. He can’t even protect her. The thought of a single hair on her head being harmed shakes him.

And then he finds it’s not Françoise he’s thinking of, but his mother. He’s never felt more imprisoned.

THE BOYS, who’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, appear again in the wake of the news from France, inspired no doubt by the newsreels. Karsten studies them with a kind of dull fury, Jim among the rest, but does his best to ignore them. He feels like a fool for trying to befriend the boy.

They’re not interested in him anyway. Since the fall of Paris, the camp leaders, the NCOs, have been trying to set an example, polishing their boots and buckles, brushing their uniforms, and resuming drill each evening, bullying as many of the others into joining as they can. It’s this spectacle the boys are transfixed by, watching the massed ranks file by on the parade ground, and then seeming to join, forming a column of their own that marches up and down the lane as if the fence were a mirror, in emulation, it seems at first, and then gradually in shambolic parody, bumping into each other, kicking each other up the backside. When the men give their Heil Hitler, the boys all offer another salute, putting a finger to their upper lips, a ragged line of dirty-kneed Führers.

It’s too much for the camp leaders. They’ve put up with the boys thus far, considered their presence beneath notice. But now they’ve gone too far. It’s a criminal offense in the fatherland, after all, to make fun of the Führer. They go to the major, demand that something be done.

The next evening when the boys appear, goose-stepping, the searchlights swing down on them like huge white clubs. They stand frozen as if stunned by the blow, almost two dozen of them, like actors stricken with stage fright. Karsten sees Jim’s white face among the rest. And then there’s the scrape of boots on the lane, and a party of guards appears, double-timing it towards them. The boys bolt like rabbits into the trees, the men behind the fence jeering their flight. The guards press after them, but they’re slowed by the heavy undergrowth, the low branches snatching at their caps. Karsten sees one man get caught by his epaulet, as if run through at the shoulder. By the time they emerge from the trees, the boys are far ahead up the slope. The guards watch them go, hands on hips, while from the camp below there’s a smattering of applause.

And yet the next night, too, the boys are back, mocking the prisoners, but now also the guards, waving up at the searchlights. The Tommies give chase again only to be outpaced once more, the boys careening away, but only until they know they’re out of reach, and then they slow, as if taunting the guards to come on. A couple of boys use the flock as a shield, and the guards seem reluctant to push through the sheep. “They don’t bite,” someone cries from the camp, but as the shout goes up, a guard is bowled over by one of the startled beasts, and there’s a burst of laughter from the prisoners. Now, Karsten notes, their jeers are for the guards, as they trudge downhill, making their clumsy, cursing way through the trees, mopping their brows.

The following day brings a change of tactics, the guards going out into the lane in the late afternoon, an hour or so before the boys usually appear. They hurry into the trees and take cover to left and right. There’s a murmur among the prisoners; nods and smiles are exchanged. After a long, dull day the air is heavy with anticipation. When the boys appear at dusk, the guards in the towers ignore them ostentatiously — one even spreads a newspaper over the wooden railing before him.

The boys straggle out of the trees and into the lane, calling abuse, coming closer and closer to the wire. Jim, among others, Karsten sees, has blackened his face with mud or shoe polish — like commandos, he supposes, though the effect is to make the boys seem more like urchins. He pushes himself towards the front of the crowd pressed against the wire, but when Jim sees him, he moves down the line, and after a moment Karsten doesn’t bother pursuing him. When the searchlights play down the lane, the boys don’t flinch, their shadows wheeling around them. A tiny lad plays a game of chasing the light, running along in it as it moves, until he stops, panting, not more than a yard from the fence, close enough that Karsten can see his little chest heaving.

The boy’s cheeks are glowing red, the fine damp hair plastered to his brow, but it’s the look of exhilaration on his face, of joy, as if he’s forgotten where he is, who they are, that Karsten can’t take his eyes off of. He crouches down. The youngster can’t be more than six or seven, and for a moment he actually beams at Karsten. It’s just a game to him. And suddenly Karsten is leaning close to the fence. “Run,” he breathes, but still the boy smiles. “Run!” Karsten says more loudly. “It’s a trap.” The boy frowns, as if puzzled that he can understand Karsten, and then his eyes widen.

There’s a shout from the trees, and the guards rise out of the underbrush. For just a second, the boys are stock-still, and then Karsten is bellowing at them, “Run! Run!” Jim appears beside the little boy, grabs his hand, and yanks him away, though not before leaning close to the wire to whisper something. “What?” Karsten calls after him, but by then his shout has been picked up by the other men — though whether in warning or in derision, Karsten can’t be sure — and the boys are off, pumping madly, arms and legs flailing, racing for the gap in the trees where they came from as the guards close in from either side, cutting off their escape. Half of them make it, surging uphill; the rest— is that Jim among them? — turn and scatter.