I can barely find the strength to haul myself up to my bunk, where I lie, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal, waiting for the pain in my back and limbs to subside, waiting for enough energy to go to wash and eat. Ralph and Max are lying down too, but Scotty and Bill sit on the lower bunks, unwinding the bloody rags from their hands and showing each other their blisters. I can hear my mother’s voice. “Surgical spirit hardens the skin against blisters,” and I hear Bill, almost as if he is repeating her, “Surgical spirit hardens skin,” and Scotty replying, “Aye, mebe, but where’ll we get some o’ that?”
I drift to sleep, and Bill has to wake me to wash and eat and use the toilet before lockdown. I wash my face, but ignore the dust in my hair. It will only be back tomorrow.
Max is writing in his journal. “It’s November the first,” he says. “We missed Halloween.”
“Every day is Halloween here,” says Scotty grimly.
“All Saints’ Day today,” says Bill, and Max asks what that means.
“All the saints are remembered today, and tomorrow it’s All Souls’ Day, when we pray for the departed.”
Everyone is quiet, remembering their own loved ones who’ve died. I wonder if I should be saying special prayers for my father or Jan. I have no way of knowing if they’re dead or alive, though I think I would somehow know if they’d been killed. Some fabric of the universe would have shuddered, and I would have known.
Exhaustion overcomes me, and I sleep as deep as a baby.
• • •
At lunch the next day, Berta notices my blisters, and in the evening, a bottle of surgical spirit and a clean rag have appeared in our bedroom.
In the quarry, over the next few days, and always under Kurt’s gaze, my friends take turns to work alongside me, and as we work, they talk more to me, and I begin to fill in the jigsaw puzzle of each life. Although it’s hard for them to work and talk, it’s as if my silence draws the words out of them.
Ralph tells me more about starting university as a medical student. “The sight of blood made me physically sick,” he laughs wryly. “I was such a disappointment to my family, and they were all working so hard to help me become a doctor.” He hefts his pickax a few times as I sweep around him, and then resumes, in bursts between his blows. “When I switched to classics, I was in heaven. To have a whole library full of books. And for the first time, friends who really understood me. To walk all day with them, just talking, with no one to say which way or when to stop.”
Some days he passes the time by telling me stories from the ancient Greeks, from The Odyssey and The Iliad. I think it comforts him to remember this world of books and stories hasn’t entirely deserted him. He doesn’t simplify his vocabulary or patronize me, but sometimes when a word is particularly obscure, he’ll explain it as he goes. I think he would make a marvelous schoolteacher, if that’s what he decides to do. He tells me about his sisters and his mother and the guilt he feels that there wasn’t enough money for all of them to go to the grammar school.
His eldest sister Jean is a Red Cross nurse stationed in Malta. I would have liked to do that, to be off on a great adventure, nursing the wounded men. The middle one, Grace, was apprenticed to a bookbinder, but has gone as a Land Girl, the very job I’ve struggled to escape. The youngest, Hilda, has been working in a department store selling men’s ties since she was fourteen.
“Imagine that,” Ralph says, “a world where men walk into a shop and spend hours choosing a tie. It’s easier for me to imagine Ithaca!”
He describes his sisters so vividly that I almost feel I’d recognize them on the street. I hope I’ll meet them one day and be able to tell them how wonderful their brother is. Over the weeks he seems to tell me everything about himself, until I realize he has never mentioned a girlfriend.
In the evenings, if we aren’t too exhausted, he continues to teach me shorthand, and I correct his German grammar. In our room, with the door shut, I sometimes feel brave enough to whisper a word or two, but mostly silence has fallen down over my shoulders like a nun’s habit, and I can no longer remember what I used to chatter about all day. I’ve become the quiet man Cousins, and conversation now happens in my head.
As the weather becomes colder, and the initial aches in our backs and arms have become second nature, Ralph’s limp is worse, and his face often contorts in pain. Eventually he admits that his foot is becoming more and more unbearable. He developed frostbite soon after he was captured. He shows us his foot, and the toes are so red and swollen that they must be pressing against his boot every moment. Bill insists that he tells Herr Rauchbach, who immediately takes him down to see the local doctor. The doctor says it must be bathed in warm water two or three times a day and then some cream must be applied. Herr Rauchbach says he will allow Ralph and me to be a little late to work in the quarry each day, and that if it gets worse, he will find him work to do in the office, where his excellent German will be useful. Each morning, as the other men leave for the quarry, Ralph sits at the kitchen table, and I bring him a bowl of warm water to bathe his foot. Afterward, I dry it for him and apply the cream. “You’d be a good nurse,” he says, “like my Jeanie. Or maybe a doctor. A better doctor than me.”
And I think, yes, maybe after the war, instead of being a translator, I could become a nurse or a doctor. I long to ask how much it would cost, and if it could be done on a railway clerk’s wages. And if they would take a woman. Perhaps I’d need to continue to be Cousins during the day, just returning to being Izzy at night with Bill.
• • •
After a few days in the quarry, Herr Rauchbach takes me and Bill with him to set the dynamite, and he tells us why the marble has to be so perfect. “It’s used for the graves of Nazi officers, killed in battle, and brought home to be buried with full honors.” There is irony in his voice as he adds, “The glorious dead.”
Suddenly the work doesn’t seem so arduous, if every slab we sweat and struggle to hew from the rock face is going to cover a dead Nazi.
• • •
Day by day Bill and the others are more and more aware of the way Kurt follows me around with his eyes. I hear them talking about it when they think I’m asleep, and it fills me with foreboding. How ironic it would be to be attacked by one of my own countrymen, when I’d fooled all those Nazi soldiers in Lamsdorf. I don’t tell Bill how Kurt clutches my bottom when he’s searching us, and there’s no way I can avoid the searches, although most nights my friends manage to create some kind of diversion to move Kurt quickly from me to the next prisoner.
Whenever I go to the latrine in the quarry, Kurt finds some urgent work he has to do close by. Only once does he actually follow me inside, but Scotty is close behind him, letting out a loud fart, which makes Kurt turn and leave rapidly. I laugh into the grimy sleeve of my jacket. It’s the most I’ve laughed in weeks, and so hard to keep it silent.
Some days I work alongside Scotty. I find his accent lacerates the words, as he talks to me of life in tenement slums and the jobs he did before the war, but I connect with enough words to make sense of what he’s saying.
“I was on the ships at fourteen, apprentice riveter, but it’s no a life. They lay you off and take you on, and the metal is sae cold in your hands, and riveting makes you stone-deaf in the end. All the old fellas lip-read, you know. Nobody taught them how to do it; they just picked it up because their hearing was gone.”