Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

It had seemed like fate to find the girl again, the coincidence, more than anything else, making him trust her that first morning. But afterwards, gone to ground again, he couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t get away from the sense that talking to her was the closest thing to freedom he’d tasted since his escape.

But now she has told him to go.

Talking to her about his father has reminded him that his father never wanted him to go to sea. Karsten had been aggrieved by that; all his friends, sons of other fishermen, were expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But when he’d pushed his father, all he’d say was “Have you ever seen a drowned man?” It had made Karsten think his father afraid, though later, after he was lost but his body never recovered, it occurred to him that his father was trying to spare him something, protecting him even in death.

He’s not sure why he hasn’t tried for Ireland, but once she says it, he wonders if he is afraid of drowning. If he returns to her, perhaps she’ll think him a coward, and he can’t bear that.

He leaves the mountains and climbs down to the coast, one foot pulled after the other, not using the lanes but crossing the fields, pushing through clumps of sheep or cattle, once outrunning a bull, squeezing himself into hedges to sleep. In the darkness he feels the slope flattening, and an hour later he’s on sand again. He hates the feel of it underfoot, the yielding. He retraces his steps to the wrack line, following the dirty path of seaweed and jetsam in the starlight, until up ahead in the watery predawn gloom he sees the jumbled lines of tipped masts.

The boats are beached in the sucking mud, waiting for the tide to lift them, but he knows that with the tide will come their owners. He can’t move any of the larger vessels, but he manages to haul a dinghy through the mud, alternately pushing and pulling it to the water, his ankles sinking in the muck.

He shoves it through the surf, and when he feels his feet being lifted from the bottom, he scrambles over the stern and collapses in the bilgy bottom, breathing hard, letting the current pull him down the shore until the boat scrapes bottom again — a sandbar — and he unships the oars, begins to pull for the distant dawn. After what seems an hour, he looks over his shoulder and sees a streaky brightening. He’s heading east, at least, though before him, where he’s come from, is still pitch. And when the sun comes up, he can’t see the shore, the beach, just the mountains behind it, rising up smokily into the clouds.

He thinks he’s rowed the whole day when the sky darkens again, but looking up he sees storm clouds pressing down, feels the wind begin to pluck at him. He’s drenched with rain first, and then the inky black waves start to slap the boat, break over it, the water so dark he thinks he must be stained by it. There’s nothing to bail with, and in the gloom he feels his feet, then his ankles, then his calves grow cold.

Finally, in one slow, rising toss, the boat bucking beneath him like a live thing waking, he’s in the water, the little vessel snatched out from under him like some joke. He’s going to drown like his father and for a fleeting moment he is at peace. Died escaping, he thinks. Died trying. Died at sea. Honor restored. He thinks of his mother receiving the news, wonders if his body will ever be found. A splintered oar flies end over end above him, impales the surface with a great gulp not a yard from his head. It might have killed him on the spot — and in that second, gazing at it bobbing before him, he realizes he doesn’t want to die, clutches for the oar. He clings to it through the afternoon, and then the night, alone and yet feeling his father close to him, watching him, and sometime in the darkness it comes to him: it wasn’t drowning that his father was afraid of, but seeing men drown. How many must he have watched over through his periscope. In the morning the misty curtain of dawn lifts over a line of grey peaks and he kicks for them, lets the tide shove him in.

The Wicklow Hills, he thinks, licking the salt off his lips. Relief breaks over him like a wave.

He lies on the beach, where water meets sand, for a long time, letting the surf lift and lower him. He drifts off to sleep like that, and when he awakens he’s high and dry, the sand beneath his hands warm from the sun. The last time he went in the water was in France, before the invasion. It tastes the same, he thinks.

From his prone position he seems to see a pair of wide, dark eyes hanging over him, watching him, and then he focuses, sees that they’re the firing slits of a bunker cemented into the cliffside. He lies very still, feels the morning sun warm as blood on his neck. Behind him, then. To the east.

So, not Ireland after all.

He squints up at the bunker, staggers to his feet. No point in running. He walks towards the emplacement, hands up, waiting for the cry, waiting for the flash. It reminds him of the walk out of his own bunker, the wait for death, and it comes to him suddenly that it was the bravest thing he’s ever done, surrendering. Only when he’s staring point-blank into the slit does he see that the bunker is empty, unmanned, disused, and he sinks down against the concrete and wraps his head in his hands.

Later, shivering in the wind, he lowers himself through the gun slit. Where better to hide while he recovers his strength? No one will think to look for him here. The bunker smells so familiar, it feels like coming home.

SHE’S FEEDING THE HENS two mornings later, swinging her arm in long arcs to scatter the grain, skipping slightly to avoid their pecking, when he walks out of the barn. Her fist tightens reflexively on the handful of feed in her grasp. He’s smiling through his beard but stumbling a little, staggering — it takes her a moment to realize he’s swaying, dancing, imitating her steps with the hens. “Did you miss me?” he asks, reaching for her closed hand, raising it as if to twirl her, before she jerks away.

“Get off!”

He tries again, smiling, as if she’s just a clumsy partner, and she flings the grain at his feet.

“What are you still doing here?”

She sees his smile waver, sees how forced it is, how fixed. He looks like he might laugh, but hysterically.

The hens dart between them, and he nudges them aside.

“I’ve nothing else for you,” she tells him, though more than once since he’s left, she’s wished she’d cleared out the pantry for him. “No food,” she repeats, enunciating the words slowly as if the problem is only one of language. It comes to her that she’s somehow keeping him here, as if her helping him to escape has only bound him more. “I’ll scream,” she tells him, even takes a deep breath, but he just watches her, shaking his head.

“Who will hear?” She’d think it a threat but for the way his shoulders slump, as if at the futility.

“Don’t you want to get away?”

He gestures to the mountains, the sky. “Where should I go? With no food, no clothes.” He plucks at his fraying, torn uniform.

“Then why escape at all?”

“I saw a chance. That’s all.”

“A chance of what?”

He looks around as if for an answer. “I don’t know. Nothing more than this view, perhaps. Something else to look at other than wire and fence posts.”

“So now what?”

He shrugs. “They catch me. I give myself up.” He sees her face. “I’m sorry.”

“No wonder you trusted me,” she says bitterly. “It didn’t matter if I turned you in. I thought you wanted to get away. To… to—”

“To where?”

“To redeem your honor!” she cries. “No wonder you surrendered.”

“ Ruhe! ”