“I wish…beer,” I said in my halting English, and he beamed even wider.
“I’ll pretend it is.” He grinned, smacking his lips appreciatively. I could see him trying to think of something to say to extend the conversation. “Do you make beer here?” he asked.
I nodded. “We grow…” I didn’t know the word for “barley.”
“You grow beer?” He playacted amazement. “I’ve died and gone to ’eaven.”
A laugh escaped me, and the guard strode over to poke Bill hard in the ribs with the barrel of the rifle in a way I knew would bruise, and he shouted at him in English, “Get back to work. Lazy swine.”
I learned quickly that I mustn’t laugh out loud or draw the guard’s attention to the prisoners.
• • •
The guard stood at the edge of the field in the thin shade of a straggly tree and watched us all work, fiddling with his rifle and his tight collar. Sweat poured down his face. He kept batting away a persistent horsefly or mosquito, and I willed it to bite him. He was a postern rather than regular army—perhaps happy to have work guarding POWs rather than being on the front lines again. I’m sure he knew how easily this bunch of young men could overcome him, if they chose. All that lay between them was his rifle and his sense of self-importance. And the fact that if they ever tried to escape, they were deep in the heart of Nazi Europe, more than a thousand kilometers from the neutral countries of Switzerland or Sweden. I felt Bill watching me watching the guard, but I didn’t look at him.
The prisoners were allowed to stop at noon for lunch, and pulled tiny squares of bread from their packs. Mother took one look at their rations and signaled to me to go back to the farmhouse for the loaf she’d baked yesterday, for farm butter and cheese. I brought beer too, for the guard, to keep him sweet and make sure he would continue to bring the men back to us. I was careful to take him lunch his first, and swallowed my dismay at how much of the cheese he took. I wished I’d hidden the total amount and just brought his separately.
I carried what remained to the prisoners, who were lying in the shade of a big oak tree. Some were asleep. Only Bill was sitting, with his back against the tree trunk, watching me as I went around to the others. They each looked as if I were giving them the best meal they’d ever tasted. I saved Bill’s till last.
He grinned at me as I leaned down to him with the tiny portion of food, and I smiled back. As he squinted up at me, his eyes were bluer than they’d seemed in the yard. His mouth was wide, as if it liked to smile. The other men were only interested in the food I gave them, but he held my gaze.
“Do you make the bread and cheese here too?” he said slowly and clearly.
I struggled to retrieve my poor English and wished I’d worked harder at it in school.
“Yes, we make.”
“Best I’ve ’ad for years.”
He smiled at me until I dropped my eyes. I wasn’t often lost for words, but I couldn’t think of the English vocabulary.
“I…hope…like,” I said slowly.
His eyes twinkled mischievously. “Oh, I like very much.”
My stomach tightened, knowing he didn’t mean the cheese, but I retorted in Czech, “You haven’t got many girls to compare me with,” kicking myself for not being able to say it in English.
I felt his gaze on me as I walked back to my mother.
• • •
By the end of the afternoon, the biggest field was cut, and the sheaves were being forked onto our horse-drawn wagon. It was my job to look after the mare, holding her head and leading her forward, though she was so used to the work that she didn’t really need me. I petted her nose and brought her the sweetest grass.
I knew where Bill was working without even looking, because of his habit of whistling or humming as he worked. He vibrated with music.
It was hot, sweaty work, and I returned twice to the house to get cold water for the prisoners to drink. Each time I carried water to them, I saved Bill till last and tried to snatch a word or two with him under the watchful eye of the guard.
“I’m Bill,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Izabela,” I told him.
He repeated it seriously twice. “Isabella, Isabella,” as if it mattered to him to say it right. “Does it mean something?” he asked, but I didn’t know how to say it in English.
I shrugged and shook my head.
“I think there was a Queen Isabella. Of Spain,” he said, and I shook my head in wonder.
“Bill,” I said. “What mean?”
“I dunno. It’s a king’s name. William the Conqueror.”
Ruefully, he indicated his shabby clothes. “Queer sort of conqueror.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, nor why he started to laugh silently so the guard wouldn’t hear, but his delight was infectious, and I started to giggle quietly too. I had a sudden overwhelming sense that in all this hardship and mess, it might be possible to feel joy. The same feeling was written all over Bill’s face.
• • •
At the end of the day, we were all covered in the dust of the hay, which stuck in our hair and on our sweaty skin.
The guard stood over the men as they took turns to pump the handle for one another to wash in the yard. One by one they stripped to the waist and leaned their heads and bodies under the freezing water, gasping and laughing at the shock of it, pushing and flicking one another with water like children. I stood in the entrance to the barn, trying to appear unconcerned, busy with something just out of sight, as if I wasn’t watching, wasn’t waiting for Bill’s turn.
But out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he stripped the vest from his china white torso. I took in his terrible thinness and the tight muscles on his sinewy arms, and something flipped over inside me, like a newly landed fish. He rubbed his hair with his fingers under the running water and then stood back and threw his head up, laughing, as if he was not a half-starved prisoner in a land far from home, but just a boy, knowing that a girl was slyly watching him and liking what she saw. He pulled his clothes back on. His hair was darker when it was wet, and it gradually lightened as it dried.
I took off my clogs and crept up to the window on the landing over the wagon doors so my mother couldn’t see me watching the truck drive them away, but Bill somehow knew where I was and threw me a tiny salute as they turned the corner in the road.
When I entered the kitchen, my mother was pounding a double-sized portion of bread dough on the table. Marek was on the floor playing with his toy cars.
Mother was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen since my father and Jan went away, but as she saw me, her smile turned to a frown.
“Be more careful,” she said.
I blushed again and wondered if I would ever be able to hide anything from her.
“The guard can see everything I see,” she continued.
I doubted it.
“I know it’s hard when all the boys are gone, but this isn’t possible.”
“What boys?” asked Marek. We both ignored him.
I always hated to be told something was impossible, immediately deciding I must prove it wasn’t. I inherited it from my mother; she was just the same. If someone had told her she couldn’t join the partisans, she would have tried, just like me.