Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

It might have been the recollection of Dover or the question about surrender, but all at once Karsten realized he knew the fellow. He reached for the name. Steiner.

Karsten drew a cigarette from the pack as gingerly as if it were the pin of a grenade. He hadn’t had a smoke for a couple of days — he’d lost Esther’s pack when he’d been swept into the sea — and the bitter taste of the tobacco on his tongue thrilled him. He watched Rotheram/Steiner light a match, extend it across the table, and he bent stiffly to the flame. It took him a heady moment to master the darting rush of nicotine, to stop himself from drawing too hungrily on the cigarette.

When he steadied himself, he said, “Can I ask you a question first? Is that permitted?”

“Not normally, no,” the captain said, smiling thinly. “But I’ll allow it.”

“Well, then, are you a Jew? A German Jew?”

Rotheram sat very still, the smile retreating from his lips. He looked at his hands on the table for so long that Karsten thought he was counting the hairs on them. Finally he said, “Can’t you tell?” And in truth Karsten couldn’t. He’d recognized Rotheram as Steiner as soon as he’d offered a smoke, but that seemed less important than whether he should have recognized him at Dover, known he was a Jew. That’s why he’d asked. He stared at the captain as if he might divine the other’s secrets, and eventually Rotheram asked, “What if I am?”

“Then I’d ask what it was like for you to leave,” Karsten said evenly. “To run? I’d imagine that must have been hard, too.”

“Touché,” Rotheram told him. He looked up then. “I’ll tell you, if you tell me?” And Karsten, after a moment, nodded once.

“Then, yes, I am. I used to be a German, but now I’m just a Jew. Is that what you want to hear?”

It shocked Karsten to find that he believed the man. Stare at him as he might, however, Karsten couldn’t see anything different about him, any more than he had with the couple his mother had turned away from the pension all those years ago.

“And leaving,” Rotheram went on steadily, “running, if you will, was the most shameful thing I’ve ever done in my life. The most cowardly. Sometimes I think saving my life was the worst thing I ever did in it.” He leaned towards Karsten then, gave a gaping smile. “But we both know that, I think. What we’d give for a second chance, eh, Corporal?”

Karsten watched the ash on his cigarette grow longer and longer, until it seemed that if he moved it would tumble, that he was sitting still in order to save it. Then Rotheram pushed his empty teacup forward. Karsten tapped the ash into the saucer, took a long last pull on his cigarette, and slowly shook his head.

“I’d do it again,” he said quietly, and when Rotheram opened his mouth, Karsten whispered, “And you would too. It’s all right.”

Rotheram had bent across the table, frowning. “Do I know you? I mean from before, from home?”

And then there’d come a hammering at the door.

“Yes!” he’d cried in annoyance, and a guard hurried in, bent down to him, and muttered something.

“The major sent you?” Rotheram demanded angrily. “The major?” He seemed about to say more, but then glanced at Karsten, composed himself. “Well, it seems there’s going to be a brief interruption to our conversation.”

THEY’D CONGRATULATED HIM at first, the camp leaders, called him a hero, an inspiration. Schiller was with them; he’d probably begged to come along. He’s my friend, Karsten could imagine him crowing. He’d actually winked at Karsten at one point, and he’d seen it then: The slate wiped clean. A way back into the fold. Welcome home.

But then they’d wanted to know what he’d seen, as if he’d been out on reconnaissance. He couldn’t see how to tell them without talking about the girl, and if he mentioned her, even in passing, he knew it would spread, embroidered with rumors, beyond this little room, beyond these men, to the rest of the camp, and eventually to the guards. So he’d hesitated, and they’d seen it and become suspicious. How had he managed to elude capture so long? Luck, he suggested, but they shrugged it off. He wasn’t the lucky kind, was he? It made them wonder, they said, wonder what he’d really been up to. Talking to the British, maybe?

“I’m no traitor,” he said, and they sneered at him.

“Did you really not learn anything out there?” Schiller pleaded, and Karsten nodded.

“Well?”

What did he learn out there? Nothing new, exactly, nothing the rest of the men didn’t know. He’d realized it in the empty bunker, but it had come to him not as something new but something old, something recognized. He’d known it in France, on the beach, only he’d not been able to face it then.

What had so amazed him there was that the invasion, so vast in scale, could have been kept a secret. He’d heard, and discounted, the rumors of invasion all spring, just like the rest of them, yet still he couldn’t fathom it. How had that time, that place, been kept so close? How had those thousands of men been kept secret, training at bases, massing in camps, produced now, as if by magic? He suddenly imagined the whole of Britain — not just the leaders, the soldiers, but the civilians, the families with sons and husbands and fathers in uniform — knowing, or at least suspecting, but somehow not breathing a word. A million people keeping a secret. It was almost more astounding than the sheer force of arms, that force of will. He had wanted to ask someone about it, but around him the men in the stockade hadn’t breathed a word about the invasion to each other, just stared out through the wire as if they couldn’t believe their eyes, as if it were all invisible. And yet there was nothing else to talk about. It was as if, he thinks now, we were keeping the secret ourselves.

He remembers, amid the long line of men moving past him, focusing on the small white cross on a chaplain’s helmet as it bobbed along in the column, coming closer and closer, and then as it passed he saw the man’s pale face, the fear on it, and something about a priest’s fear moved him. He wished he could comfort him somehow. He wanted to offer tips — tell him about the baker in the next village who sold passable wine from the back of his shop. He wanted to tell him not to worry, Father, that he’d make it, that he’d live. You’re going to win, Karsten wanted to cry, and recoiled at once from the thought.

So he’d known it then.

The war was lost. Not quite over, but lost. That was the secret. The deserted shore defenses he’d slept in had only confirmed it. But no, that wasn’t quite right either. Really, it had been the girl who’d convinced him, or helped him accept it, rather. He’d felt such astonishment slipping inside her, as if he’d never quite believed it possible. It had seemed, even to him, the amateur conjurer, like true magic. He thought of a shining coin palmed snugly in the fleshy fold beneath his thumb; a stillwarm pocket watch ticking in his hand beneath a silk handkerchief. Gone, disappeared. Just like that.

For a moment, he had thought the whole war had been waged for that purpose only; he had felt such peace, he was sure it must be over, that they’d separate and rise to the bright news of armistice. An end to the war that was neither victory nor defeat, just peace.

“What do you want to know?” he’d asked the camp leaders.

“Anything. Everything!”

“We’re going to go home,” Karsten said. “The war’s almost over.”

“How do you know?” Schiller asked hopefully, and then another voice, sterner, daring him, “Who’s winning?”

He looked into Sulzer’s face. “They are.”