Bill is more wary of sad-eyed Max. He’s a curiosity with his occasional nasal Brooklyn twang, as though another Max is hiding inside this one, and perhaps another inside that, like Flora’s stacking Russian dolls. Bill isn’t sure he’ll like the one in the center, if he ever gets there. Max is obviously dead clever, but seems like a time bomb, set to self-destruct, and Bill doesn’t want to be close by when that happens.
Scotty is more straightforward, with no side to him. What you see is what you get. A diamond in the rough, Bill thinks.
He wonders if Izzy can hear the differences between their accents: his London, Ralph’s northern and the faint echoes of Yankee in Max. Perhaps all English sounds the same to her. Apart from Scotty of course.
He thinks about the way that in peacetime you stick mainly to your own sort, gravitating to friends with a similar education and background, with parallel interests and views of the world. He’d never have made friends with a university student, an agitator, a riveter and a farm girl.
As the days pass, Bill is chuffed to discover he’s trusted in turn by Ralph. One evening when most of the men are out at the camp theater, Ralph tells Bill he’d like them not to go. Bill would have liked to take Izzy to the theater, but he feels proud to have been asked to stay behind. When the main group leaves the hut, only six prisoners are left. Bill is relieved that Tucker has gone out. A small degree of the constant tension drains from him when Tucker’s out of sight. Bill toys with the idea of taking this opportunity to tell Ralph they’re being blackmailed, but what could Ralph do?
A sentry is posted, and from a number of dried milk Klim tins come the parts of a crystal radio, which Scotty expertly assembles. He has a folding knife, which he uses to strip the wires. When he’s finished with the knife, he tucks it away, in a niche under a picture of his sister and her two children above his bed. Bill watches and thinks perhaps one day he’ll use the knife on Tucker.
Bill’s fascinated by the construction of the radio, and Scotty is delighted to show him the tube wound around with copper wire, and two more tubes covered in silver paper that fit inside each other. More wires run from one part to another, to a long string of copper. They whole thing is fixed to a block of wood no bigger than a book. Bill nods his appreciation to Scotty and whispers, “I could make one of those,” to Izzy.
Scotty climbs up to join the wire to another length of copper, which is pinned above the rafters, down the full extent of the hut. This is the aerial, a fine thread of shimmering copper that will connect them to the world.
When the radio is set up, Scotty hands one earpiece to Ralph, and Ralph indicates that Bill should have the other. Bill knows this is a treat and a mark of Ralph’s confidence in him. They listen as Scotty moves the silver tubes in and out to pick up a station. A voice comes loudly through the crackle. Bill says, “It’s German,” and hands his earpiece to Izzy. Ralph begins to write what he hears in shorthand, and Izzy motions for a pencil and paper to make her own notes. Max finds paper and a pencil for her. Bill watches her intent expression and rapidly moving hand, and is filled with pride.
As the broadcast unfolds, Ralph glances up at Izzy, and neither of them can hide their horror at what they’re hearing. As the news item ends and they stop writing, the others look at them expectantly.
“May I?” asks Ralph, pulling Izzy’s paper toward him, as if to confirm his own fears. The crease between his eyebrows deepens as he reads, and he adjusts his glasses, looking up at them. “It might be Nazi propaganda.” he begins slowly, “but they say the Polish Home Army has been completely routed and arrested. And, please God this isn’t true—the entire civilian population of Warsaw rounded up and sent to transit camps.”
They all sit in silence for a moment to allow this idea to sink in. Bill wonders if it can be true. Every single man, woman and child from Warsaw in Nazi camps like Lamsdorf? Is that even possible?
Max bursts out, “And where was Stalin? Where’s the Red Army?”
Ralph shakes his head. “Camped outside the city, the broadcast said.”
“Fuck,” says Bill.
Ralph hands the earpiece to Scotty to retune, and he finally he finds what they’ve all been hoping for, a distant crackly voice from London. To Bill it’s like hearing the voice of God when you have almost ceased to believe in heaven. London is a real place, and it’s still standing, and somehow the clipped words are here with them in hut seventeen. They excitedly repeat what they’re hearing. The English news is so different from the German. It talks about Stalin and Churchill meeting to discuss the future of the Balkan states. They all agree it’s a sign the war must be nearly over.
“Why didn’t they mention Warsaw?” asks Bill.
Ralph shrugs. “Maybe the Nazi one was propaganda.” But Bill can tell he doesn’t believe that.
As the radio is dismantled and packed away, Ralph turns to Bill. “It’s good that ‘Cousins’ can understand German,” he says, and he looks at her notes. “Your handwriting doesn’t look very English. Would you like me to teach you shorthand?”
Izzy nods eagerly, and Bill is delighted that Ralph is offering her something to pass the time, something to use her brain. He wonders how many people in Warsaw have loved their wives as much as he loves Izzy and now may never see them again.
The other men return from the theater, singing loudly and clowning around. Tucker leaps about, doing a silly dance, and Bill realizes with a sick lurch that he’s hardly thought of him for the last two hours.
Then someone steps on another man’s foot and is pushed roughly and retaliates, and the singing is undercut by the shouts of two men. One throws a punch, and the other clutches him in a wrestling hold.
Ralph and Bill jump between the fighting men, and others pull them apart.
“Stop it now,” shouts Ralph. “You’ll end up in the cooler!”
The bushy-eyebrowed guard throws open the door, drawn by the rumpus, and Izzy sits back on Bill’s bunk. Silence is thrown over the room like a blanket.
Ralph’s grip on one of the fighters slackens to a comradely embrace, and the only voice is Max’s, shouting from his bunk, for all the world as if he hasn’t seen the guard. “I tell you it was LBW!”
Bill takes the hint and yells back instantly, “That umpire wants his eyes tested,” and others join in, arguing volubly about cricket.
The guard watches suspiciously and then retreats.
“Quick thinking, Max and Bill.” Ralph nods. “Now, you two, shake.”
The two men who were fighting shake hands reluctantly and go to their separate bunks, each complaining quietly to his own group of friends.
Bill turns to Izzy. “Sorry. Fights break out all the time in camps. Everyone’s nerves are shot.”
Izzy nods miserably, and he knows she feels it too. The boredom and tension, and so many people all around them, buffeting and jostling all the time, even make them irritable with each other. He looks away from her, and Tucker catches his eye, eating their food in his bunk, raising his tin mug to Bill and Izzy. Bill thinks again of Scotty’s knife.
It’s no surprise to Bill that talk in the hut is mostly about food. It’s been the same ever since he was picked up. Before he was captured, he might have expected a group of men to talk about girls or sport, but instead it’s a constant litany of fish and chips, steak-and-kidney pies and roasted potatoes. In the absence of sex, food has become an obsession, similar to the early days of falling in love. All the prisoners are in love now with the memory of food, and hunger’s there all the time, under the surface of everyone’s minds. As soon as they finish one of their meager meals, they begin to plan the next, to worry about the parcels not arriving on time, to wonder what will be in them. Bill’s thoughts of food are magnified by the conviction that he should be providing for Izzy, keeping her fed.