Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“Do you?”

“I think so. Yes.”

She feels upbraided somehow, defensive, and then she recalls what Mrs. R said on the hillside the day the Germans arrived: Fatherland! How did the women ever let the men get away with that one?

“And if it were called motherland-love?” she asks.

He stares at her as if she’s asked something else, then slowly nods. More in thought than in agreement, she thinks, but what he says eventually is “I do trust you.”

He still sounds like he’s trying to convince himself, but she nods in turn.

“It’s just safer for you not to know,” he adds. “In case of questions.”

“But you do have a plan?”

“Of course.”

She feels a flutter in her stomach. “It’s Ireland, right? That’d be best, I think.” She can’t look at his face as she says it. She turns and stalks to the barn door.

“Is that what you’d do?” he asks softly, following her.

She raises an arm without looking at him, points downhill to the lacy fringe of surf along the coast. “On a clear day you can see the Wicklow Hills from here.” She nods. “That’s where I’d go.”

There’s a long silence, and it occurs to her that he might ask her to go with him, the two of them swimming to Ireland, Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams, matching each other stroke for stroke. Could he pass as Irish? she wonders. Could she? The thought is somehow seductive. And from there, where? Germany? Could she learn German, act German? She doubts it. America, then — yes! Who knows, in America he might even pass as Welsh, with her help. What did they know of Welshness there? She’d be free to invent it. They’d travel as far as it took, find some place where the people had never heard of Wales. And not to escape Wales, she thought, but to be Welsh, him too, because no one else would know otherwise.

She gazes at him, waiting, but the question he asks at last is “Do you want me to go?” and she breathes, “Yes.” It’s the only answer, though for a second, such is the earnestness with which he asks, she imagines she’s replying to that other imagined question.

He stands there for a moment, swaying slightly on his heels as if in a breeze, and then he leaves her, stooping against the dusk as if the descending dark might crush him. She watches him go with a sense of release, as of a secret finally spoken.

That night, she tells herself she’ll be glad to be rid of him. Yet there’s some misgiving nagging at her, nibbling at the edges of her satisfaction. She tries to concentrate on it, isolate it in her heart, and then it comes to her. She’s jealous, of course. She wants him to escape, but most of all she wishes he could have taken her with him.

It makes her remember Rhys, her jealousy at his leaving. Is that why she didn’t stop him? she wonders. Did she want him to go, to go for her? And suddenly it seems as if the Rhys who left, the Rhys who went — why, she’d have married that Rhys.

Poor thing, she thinks, he couldn’t win.

But then it occurs to her that that Rhys, the Rhys who left, might not have wanted her anymore.

The next day, she doesn’t see the German, or the next, or the next, and by the fourth day — watching Arthur cutting the rams out of the flock and penning them for another season — she concludes he’s gone at last. But instead of filling her with the expected relief, the thought only makes her despair. She dreams of him that night, imagines him on a little boat out at sea. The boat’s oddly familiar, and it comes to her that it’s the ship in a bottle he gave to Jim, and then she’s on board herself, looking up at the frayed grey sail overhead, which reminds her of the hole in his shirt, and she wonders where it is. And then her hands are moving over his chest, his arms, looking for that little hole. He’s stretched out before her on the sand now, waves lapping at their feet, and she’s kneeling over him, lifting his limp arm, hunting for the hole in the folds and creases of his wet shirt, thinking, I can mend that for you, I can mend it, if I can only find it.

ESCAPE, IT HAS COME to Karsten, is as complicated as surrender. Not one act, one moment, so much as a process. Escape followed by escape followed by escape, just as one surrender succeeds another and another. It’s exhausting to think of.

From within the wire, he recalls, freedom always seemed so limitless, so infinite in it’s possibilities. The men in the barracks would while away the sleepless nights talking of what they’d do after their release — the beers they’d drink, the schnitzel they’d eat, the baths they’d take. Freedom in their minds was silk sheets, pressed shirts, obliging women. Karsten loved to listen to them, imagining them as guests at the grand hotel he’d manage one day. But of course, like his fantasy of a hotel, their dreams weren’t of any life they’d lead, but of a life they promised to themselves after release. They were dreams of escape from the camp, to be sure, but also from their old lives. More than that, he thinks, lying in a ditch by a deserted lane, they were the dreams of conquerors, of the spoils of war. None of them had come close to such things at home — only briefly in France, for forty-eight hours at a time.

In fact, escape, the here and now of it, is poverty, not luxury. It’s being cold and wet and hungry. Oh, there’d been a brief moment of elation: the breeze in his hair at the top of the fence, the lurch in his stomach as he’d dropped to the ground, the look of naked astonishment on the faces pressed to the wire. And then Karsten had bolted into the night, dodging the guards and following the boys, bumping against them, laughing with them, unrecognized in the night. Around the bend they’d scattered in the darkness and he’d gone his own way. He’d climbed at first, with some idea of getting to higher ground, some faith in his ability to move faster in mountainous terrain than anyone he knew.

There’d been no sign of pursuit, the guards charging after the boys if they could be bothered to go after anyone, and he thought that if the other prisoners kept quiet, he might not be missed until the next morning. But he’d been idle for so long, his muscles felt stiff and tight as he strode up the dark slope, and dropping down the far side, he began to realize that he had no food, no shelter, no idea what he was doing. He might have broken his ankle, even his neck, that first night, sliding down a long slope of scree in the dark, but he’d been lucky, had stumbled upon what he thought was a cave mouth, and pulled himself inside. He’d lain there that night, and only then had it come to him, what Jim had whispered at the wire, a name, her name. Esther.

Why of course! he’d thought, laughing at the perfect dreamlike inevitability of it. And then, miraculously, he’d slept, his deepest night of sleep in months, and on a bed of stone at that, only to be woken by the baying of dogs on the breeze, wondering if he’d merely dreamed her name. He’d drawn back into his lair and discovered that the cave he’d imagined was no cave at all, but a tunnel, a mine shaft. Praying the dogs couldn’t track his scent over rock, he’d retreated underground, only to get lost in a series of galleries. He’d stumbled around in them for hours, maybe a day or more, until he’d made out a dim light, hurried towards it, to find an old man snoring at the foot of a tall ladder, a bottle beside him.

Karsten had waited, starving, terrified his rumbling stomach would give him away, until the old fellow roused himself, and then Karsten had followed him, trusting him to know the way out. Karsten should have left him then, of course, struck out in the opposite direction as soon as he emerged, blinking, into the grey dawn, but his stomach was now his compass, and instead he followed the fellow to his farmhouse.