My eyes focus on the rising smoke from many industrial chimneys, making clouds that hang over the factories.
“That’s Chemnitz,” says the older postern, “It means we’re nearly there. Nearly at Hartmannsdorf.”
My heart is like lead in my chest at the thought I’ll get there without Bill. There’s no meaning to anything without him.
The men pass the word back and forward in the column “Nearly there!” “Nearly there.” And singing starts up. Not the patriotic songs of before, but show tunes, popular songs. “Happy days are here again.…”
Our feet continue to walk, and finally, in the middle of the afternoon, we see the huts of a great POW camp spread out across the top of the hill: Stalag IVF. I never thought I would be so glad to see a Nazi prison and so ready to wish myself inside it. A man behind us says my thought aloud, and someone else laughs. “I was just thinking the same.” Perhaps every man in the column is sharing the same thought at the same moment. Max says nothing, but his head hangs from his neck as if it’s too heavy to support. I cough and cough, spitting gobbets of green slime.
Then we wait, patiently, like cows waiting to be brought in from the fields, and after a while, when nothing seems to be happening, we sit down on our packs. It starts to rain, that light rain that soaks insidiously through every fiber, wetting to the skin.
Every ten minutes or so, the line moves forward, and we all struggle to our feet, or crawl forward on all fours, and move another few yards.
As we get nearer I realize we are being counted in, and the old fear licks up in me, clean as a flame, and the fog that has been swirling round my head is blown away. The guards are collecting us into groups of ten and sending us through the gate. What if I get separated from Max?
Someone runs back to us. “There’s a hot meal and a bath when you get inside. The goons have promised it,” he shouts.
A meal and a bath are the two things everyone longs for most in the world. Everyone except me. Max lifts his head, sees the panic in my face and fleetingly touches my hand.
“I expect both are a mirage,” he says.
Thirty
We shuffle through the prison camp gate in our group of ten, and Max leans on my shoulders. He seems very heavy for such a skinny man, or maybe I’ve just become very weak. Someone asks the date and the Nazi guard tells us it’s the tenth of March 1945.
It’s been four days since I last saw Bill. Has he died of his wound, or is he still trying to catch up with me? For the hundredth time today, I taste my instinct, and it has the flavor of death.
“Shower,” the guard says, pointing to yet another queue.
I indicate Max, leaning on me with his head bowed.
“Sick bay.” I croak in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. My cold and cough have deepened it to gravel.
The guard glances at Max’s flopping body, soiled trousers and boots, and the stench of him tells its own story. “That way.”
We leave the line for the showers and join another where many men are holding up their sick friends or standing beside their prone bodies and helping them forward. All around us are crowds of starving tramps, moving this way and that. Some are fresh from the showers and have clean faces and hair above their filthy rags of clothing. I find myself watching the feet as they move past us, some bare and muddy or wrapped in bloodied sacking, some in clogs and fuss-lag, some in boots on which the uppers have come apart from the soles and threaten to trip their owners with every step, a few—very few—in worn boots and socks. The legs go past us and past us, in hundreds or thousands. None of them are Bill’s.
Our queue slowly shifts alongside rows of coffins. We don’t know if they’re full from those who’ve died in the hospital wing, or empty, taunting the sick and dying.
• • •
It must be an hour before we reach the medic at the front of the queue. He’s brusque.
“Problem?”
“Dysentery,” says Max.
“That all?” He looks at Max’s hollow face. “Dehydration.”
He’s already lost interest and repeats a prescription he’s obviously given many times. “Clean water. Bland diet. Rest.”
“Not sick bay?” I ask, forced to speak.
The medic sighs. “Look. Eighty percent of you have got dysentery. All of you have got malnutrition and dehydration. I’ve got TB and typhus to deal with. Find him a bed in a hut. Get him plenty of clean water to drink. Let him sleep. Next.”
I quickly sit down on the ground and unlace my boots.
Max lifts his head. “Will I live?” he asks.
The medic looks him in the eye. “If you want to,” he replies.
I peel off the kostival leaves and hold my feet toward the medic. Max sucks in breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug. What would have been the point?
“I thought you were all supposed to have showers?” the medic says crossly, and I realize that I must smell bad. I feel humiliated and would draw my feet away, but the medic prods my infected blisters. One is behind my right heel, and the other runs over the top of my left foot where the sock has worn through and the tongue of my boot has lapped daily at my foot. They weep pus, and the skin around is red and angry.
“He’ll dress them,” the medic says, and points to another man who also has a queue waiting.
A coughing fit overtakes me, and the medic watches as I cough into my rag. He takes it from me and inspects the muck I’ve coughed up.
“Bronchitis,” he says with new kindness. “No medicine I’m afraid, but you’re young. Just rest and you’ll get better.”
I nod. Rest, rest is all my body craves. Rest and the sight of Bill. The medic puts a hand on my sleeve. “Come back if you cough up blood.”
I join the queue for the foot treatment, which turns out to be a clean rag, a small bottle of iodine, some salt in a twist of newspaper and instructions to clean the wounds each day with salt water and then apply the iodine.
“If you see red streaks up your thighs or in your groin, come back quick—that’s septicemia.”
I wish there was honey for my cough.
We shuffle away and Max grunts, “Just let me sit down for a minute.”
I pull him over to the wall of the sick bay hut and bend to whisper, “You wait here. I come back.”
He sinks into the mud, and I join the milling crowds, pushing my way into one hut after another, seeking spare beds, looking for Bill. Sometimes I see a blond head, or someone with his build, and hope leaps in me for a second until I realize it’s yet another stranger.
All the huts are full, and I’m beginning to despair of finding somewhere for Max and me to rest, when finally, way across the compound, I find a hut with two empty top bunks close to each other. I shrug off my blanket and ease my shoulders out of my kit bag. All it contains now is my mess tin and cup, my brother’s pajamas and summer underwear and my small, grubby towel. I throw my blanket onto one bunk and my kit bag onto the other, but bring my mess tin and cup in the hope of finding some food or drink to put in them. I pray I won’t find other men sleeping on our bunks when I get back with Max or discover my blanket and kit bag stolen. They are the last things I have from home. And it strikes me now that I have nothing to prove who I am or even where home is. Nothing to show I am married to an Englishman. Was married. Might now be the widow of an Englishman. Only Max could speak for me now.