He asked her what she was afraid of, and she said she didn’t like spiders.
“What you afraid?” she asked.
“Getting sent back to Lamsdorf,” he said.
“I afraid that too.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. For Bill, Izzy was some kind of miracle, a bright flower growing out of concrete, unexpected and unimagined. He couldn’t believe that he meant the same to her, who must have had so many men to choose from. To her he couldn’t be any more than a passing diversion, a novelty to be played with. It was too soon to tell her the truth: that the thing he most feared was never seeing her again. So instead he said, “And being put in front of a firing squad again.”
She was horrified. “When that?”
The terror of it swept through him once more, but he tried to make light of it. “Down in Italy, on our way here. Me and Harry thought we’d try to escape, and we got caught within a day. The Ities handed us to the Jerries, who put us up against a wall.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth, but he continued. “I’d always wondered what people thought about when they were in front of a firing squad, and now I know.”
“What think?”
“I thought, I wish they’d bloody well hurry up. I don’t think I can stand here much longer.” He shivered at the memory, and she reached out to touch his fingers on the wire.
“I am glad they not shoot,” she said.
“I’m glad too. Very glad.”
• • •
On the days when Bill and the other prisoners were taken to work on a different farm, or on the road, his body seemed to become heavy and old beyond his years, and the work was hard, hard, hard. But on the days their truck turned in the morning toward Vražné, he began to whistle, wondering when he would see her and how she would contrive to find them time to be alone for a few minutes.
By late July he was sometimes left to work by himself, fixing the tractor or one of the other farm machines, and that helped them to grasp a few minutes out of sight of her mother or Herr Weber. Izzy had been surprised that Bill knew how to mend engines, but he explained that gunners like him were trained in how to take things apart and put them back together.
“I’ve always been good with my hands,” he said, “piano playing, mending cars, you name it.”
He was too delicate to name the kind of soft touching he’d almost forgotten, as erotic to the toucher as the touched, reminding him what desire felt like, licking through him, strong as a flame.
As the weeks of summer passed and July became August, she’d let him slide a hand inside her dress as they kissed, cupping her breast, and later she didn’t stop him from lifting her skirt, running his fingers up the inside of her thigh and up the wide leg of her knickers into the silky wetness. Then he bent down and tongued her hard nipple through the fabric of her cotton dress until he felt her shudder of release.
Each time it became more and more difficult to pull himself back to the task in hand, to remember that at any minute they might be discovered and it would all be over.
At the sawmill one evening, Izzy looked along the fencing to where Matylda and Dagmar were posing provocatively in their tight clothes, with a gang of admirers, including Harry, inside the wire. As Bill watched her, Izzy blushed deep red.
“You aren’t like them,” he reassured her. “What we do isn’t like them. This is something different.”
• • •
Sometimes they talked about the progress of the war. Izzy brought snippets of information about the rapid advance of the Soviet front, which he was able to pass on to his friends. By late August, he learned that the Russians were in the Carpathian Mountains in Czechoslovakia, and close to Warsaw in Poland. He had only the haziest idea of the geography, but realized that as the Red Army drew nearer, he and the rest of the prisoners would be moved back to Lamsdorf. His time with Izzy was coming to an end as surely as the summer passed.
A few days later, Bill was at the farm, working on an old string-binding reaping machine that he’d pulled out of the barn to fix, when he recognized Izzy’s footsteps behind him. She had brought his dinnertime bread and cheese, and he turned to her with a rush of anticipation. They looked all around to make sure her mother wasn’t coming, and ducked into the cool darkness of the barn, kissing and clinging to each other.
Bill pulled back, gasping for air. “You are too beautiful.” He breathed in the smell of her hair and lifted her curls in one hand, feeling their weight. “I love your hair.”
Izzy laughed. “My mother say must cut hair. She want make me into boy. She is put boy clothes, my brother clothes, for me to wear when Russian soldiers come.”
The thought was like a cold slap in the face. Bill’s whole body froze, and he tried to see her expression in the dim light, as he thought through the implications of her mother’s plan and the need for it.
“They’re getting closer then,” he said at last. “The Jerries ain’t holding them.” He began to pace away from her and then back. “If they come, you must do what your mother says. You’re too beautiful. They would…”
She nodded, miserably. The village gossip was alive with what happened to the women in every village and town the Soviets took. Slowly, she told Bill one of the stories she’d heard. “A mother with two daughters—my age. Mother know soldiers come, hide girls in”—she searched for the word—“room at top of house.”
“Loft. Attic,” supplied Bill, motioning for her to continue.
“Hide them in loftattic room, pull cupboard to hide door. Two soldiers come and ask for molodaya zhenshchina any fräulein. The mother she say no, but then one girl…atishoo!”
Bill said, “Sneezed.” He already knew where this is going, but Izzy couldn’t be stopped. The words were tumbling out of her.
“Soldiers hear sneeze. One punch the mother, and she fall to floor. Other man kick her. Then they pull the girls downstairs. Girls scream and cry help. Pull girls into mother and father bedroom and lock door. Mother bang on door with hands.…”
Izzy wouldn’t meet Bill’s eyes as she told him the story. Her terror filled the barn, and he paced up and down, swishing helplessly at the straw with a stick. He could hardly bear to listen, seeing Izzy’s face on one of the girls, her body about to be violated, not knowing how he could put himself between her and the might of the Red Army.
Taking a deep breath, Izzy went on, telling him how the girls resisted, scratched and spat and twisted away, until one of the soldiers pulled out his revolver and shot them both.
“One girl shot in leg and one in stomach. Then men do…that thing…to both girls, bleeding and crying and maybe die. After, soldiers hold down mother and do it to her too. They go off, laughing.”
Bill punched the door of the barn, enraged by his own powerlessness. “If you stay here and they find you…I can’t save you. My God, I can’t bear to think of it. Promise me, you’ll do what she says, dress like a boy. Promise.”
And Izzy promised, though he didn’t believe it would be enough to protect her. If only she could escape to the partisans, he thought. If only he could help her escape.
They moved back outside, and he began to work again in furious silence, while Izzy trudged back to the field. Despite the glorious sunshine, he was overtaken with despair. Soon everything would change. He and the others would be taken back behind the wires and watchtowers of Lamsdorf, and Izzy, darling Izzy, would be left here at the mercy of the bestial Russian army.