“Take him to the crapper before he shits himself,” he barked at the private. I shrugged off the blanket I’d had strung across my body, and felt Bill’s worried eyes on my back as I followed the private back down the stairs and out through more palatial doors to a walled yard. We entered a normal-sized door to the toilets.
The guard left one foot in the door as I fumbled under my coat with the unfamiliar trousers and underwear, but he turned away from the noise and stink I made. I was pleased Bill wasn’t there to hear me. When my stomach was truly empty and the griping pain had ceased, I smiled wryly to find carefully cut-up squares of German newspaper at hand to wipe myself with. It felt good to smear excrement on the propaganda words, and as I flushed the toilet and came out of the cubicle, there was even water and soap to wash my hands. How soon those things had come to seem like luxuries.
Back upstairs, Bill was still half-watching the door through which I’d left, and there was a tension and exhaustion in his face I’d never seen before, which made him look so much older than twenty-three. His eyes asked me, “Are you all right?” and I nodded and gave a ghost of a smile. He’d begged a glass of water, and we shared it, carefully sipping, not knowing when food or drink would come our way again. My stomach was empty now, and I was hungrier than I’d ever been in my life.
It became warm in our seats, and I unbuttoned my coat but didn’t take it off. Sweat trickled down my spine into the crack of my bottom. The heat made me drowsy, and I dozed for perhaps an hour before we were shaken roughly and hurried to the stairs leading down into the yard. A truck drew up, our details were given to the driver and we were shoved into the back. I wanted to tell them that pushing us till we stumbled actually made us slower rather than faster, but dropped my eyes and held my tongue. In the back of the truck were piles of crates and, on wooden benches, a guard and four other recaptured prisoners wearing a strange assortment of coats and hats.
We all nodded at one another, and one man said in an American accent, “Here we are again.”
“Happy as can be,” replied Bill, like a secret mantra.
Another American replied, in a phony German accent, as if it were a very old joke, “The war is over for you, Tommy.” Bill laughed so loudly, it made me jump. The two Americans introduced themselves, and Bill told them I was British, but mute from shell shock. They looked at me with interest and pity. One of the other recaptured prisoners was French, and Bill said, “Bonjour,” pronouncing it very badly.
“He’s Russian,” said one of the Americans, indicating the fourth prisoner. Nobody spoke any Russian.
The truck started up, and we jolted out of the cobbled yard. The clock in the tower now showed eight a.m., and it was light enough to see that the town hall’s ornate domes were green. Bill checked his watch. “Running slow again,” he said, fiddling with the winder.
Bill and I sat side by side, as the truck rattled and swerved back through the town. Our thighs pressed hard into each other, both knowing it might be our last touch. I could hear bells from a number of different churches, reminding me it was Sunday. I thought of my mother and Marek, hurrying, late as usual, into the familiar comfort of our parish church. I pictured them there, my mother’s eyes red-rimmed and her mouth held in a tight line, as they were for so long after my father and brother left.
“Never marry a foolish idealist or a daredevil,” she’d told me bitterly. Now I thought that I must have been both, my father’s traits running through me like a fault line through marble.
I focused on what I could see from the back of the truck: Prostějov drawing away from us, more churches, a fancy theater, the grander buildings of the center giving way slowly to three-story, two-story houses, and then the low terraces of the outskirts before we were back out in the open country.
The Russian man sat and stared straight ahead as if none of us were there. I watched him curiously out of the corner of my eye. He was the first of this terrifying breed I’d ever laid eyes on. He looked just like a man.
“Do we know where we’re going?” Bill asked the Americans.
“Lamsdorf,” said one, and the Russian prisoner made a choked sound that might have been a groan. Bill shook his head in sympathy.
“Dropping off groceries en route,” said the other American, indicating the piles of crates. “Might take some time.” He smiled at me encouragingly. “Enjoy the trip!” He must have seen how terrified I was and thought I was very young. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a cowardly boy but a reckless twenty-year-old girl who had leaped from the comfort and security of home into the arms of an almost stranger, putting both our lives into appalling danger. Instead, I stretched my face into a smile.
• • •
As the truck followed the twists and turns of the road, we were thrown about, and it made me feel nauseous. I held my body away from the American on my left, and let myself lean into Bill on my right.
The shape of the houses began to change. The roofs got steeper, and one of the Americans pointed out a woodpile up one wall of a house, right to the roof.
“It must get pretty cold hereabouts?” he said.
Bill nodded. “A bit chilly. Like Canada.”
“I’m from Florida,” said the soldier.
“Blimey, you’re gonna feel it. Brass monkeys,” said Bill.
I didn’t know what it had to do with monkeys, but I thought the American would soon feel very, very cold as the Polish winter drew on. I wondered if I would live to see the first snow.
From time to time I allowed myself to glance at Bill, rationing the frequency so it wouldn’t be obvious. I took in his slightly ski-jump nose, the patchy blond-red stubble beginning to push through his chin, the tightness of his earlobe to his face, his blond eyelashes, and I loved all these things, wanted to hold them in my mind forever. More often I let myself look down at his hands resting on his thighs, the dirt under the nails, the long white fingers, a turquoise vein running down the back of the left hand. I wanted to cover them in kisses, knowing each kiss might be the last. Sometimes I felt his eyes on me, and looked up to exchange the briefest of glances. This close, his eyes were the gray-blue of a lake on a thundery day.
About midmorning the truck stopped at Mährisch Schönberg, and we were allowed out of the truck so they could unload some of the crates. The prisoners were permitted to pee up against a tree. I did my diarrhea mime again and was given a sheet of newspaper and allowed to go a little farther from the road. The guard kept his rifle trained on me, in case I was trying to escape. He didn’t know that wherever Bill was was where I must be, now and forever.
On the road again, the countryside stretched out below us as we climbed higher. Out of the back of the truck, we could see only where we’d been, not where we were going, but as the road bent, we glimpsed the mountains that lay ahead, hills behind hills, bluer and bluer as they faded into the distance.
“Il est comme les Alpes,” said the Frenchman.
“It’s a long way from Piccadilly,” replied Bill.
The farmhouses we passed now were tall and square, with storage in an undercroft and living space above. None of them were the familiar shape of farms I know, with four buildings around a courtyard. There were stony fields where it wouldn’t be possible to grow anything, and-fast flowing shallow rivers. We’d covered such a short distance, but it was all so foreign already.