Max’s dysentery slowly ceases, until he’s able to lie down and even to eat the miserly rations. My cough begins to subside, and I treat my feet diligently, watching the new pink skin starting to form. I wonder if pink skin ever forms again on a broken heart or if it’s always scarred. As soon as I’m able to walk again, I prowl the camp, scanning the faces of men playing football, standing around in groups talking, queuing at the cookhouse, cleaning their teeth in the washhouse, waiting on the parade ground. After a few days I start to recognize the same people, but none of them are Bill. They could vanish in a puff of smoke for all I care. How terrifying it is that our own happiness hangs on the well-being of so few others.
The other prisoners are showered and deloused, and clean clothes are issued. I hide from the showers and delousing, slipping back between the crowds, but I do manage to get issued with clean underwear and a Belgian uniform. Max brings me back some of the delousing powder in a twist of paper, and I rub it over my head, under my arms and down into my pubic hair, though it doesn’t seem to do much good.
As the days open over one another, I start to spend the hours when I’m not obsessively hunting for Bill sitting in the sun outside the hut. I watch the crowds endlessly shuffling to and fro, but Bill is not among them. What shall I do without him? I think. What shall I do?
Some days it rains and the sky hangs low over the camp. Then I can hardly drag myself from my bunk. I make my rounds in search of Bill until I’m too wet and miserable to walk any farther, but few men are out and about in the rain, so I give up, hang my wet things on the end of the bunk and return to bed. I try to sleep as much as possible.
Days roll into one week and then the next, in the careless rhythm of the camp, its hours of yawning boredom, the heavy weight of sorrow over Bill. Max watches me descending into emptiness and persuades me to come with him to the camp library. He chooses me a book called Jane Eyre, and I begin to read, discovering I can take myself to other places and even distract myself a little from thinking about Bill, though each time I lay the book down, I know I have lost my Mr. Rochester and the world is empty. I have sunk back into silence. There is no one I want to speak to and nothing I want to say.
Max moves in the opposite direction. He joins a debating society and begins to campaign for the election of the Labor Party when the war is over. It seems he’s decided to live, and despite myself, my body too works on bringing me back from the brink of starvation: My feet heal slowly; my cough gradually vanishes. Beyond the wire I hear birds singing, and I think what joy it would be to be alive if Bill were here with me, even in this filthy place. Max tells me of miraculous places called bluebell woods and Kew Gardens, but I know I’ll never see them now. As soon as we are liberated, I’ll have to return to the farm, to the life I detested, to the rule of the Russians. I picture my future self staying at home forever, nursing my mother in her old age, all my life empty from the loss of Bill.
One day a Swiss lorry enters the camp with Red Cross parcels, and for the first time in weeks, we have protein and sugar. Some men eat too much too fast, and the hut stinks of vomit and diarrhea. Max and I know better, and we eat gingerly, pecking at the food like sparrows.
We begin to hear artillery fire in the distance, and it comes closer day by day, hour by hour. Suddenly there’s food, as if the Nazis know they mustn’t be found with spare food and starving prisoners when we are liberated. Sacks of beans, peas and carrots are quietly “made available.” Parcels are mysteriously located and handed out. One of them contains fudge, and I bite off tiny portions and let them dissolve in my mouth, wanting the sensation to go on forever.
Late one afternoon, Max hurries back to the hut from his political group and finds me in my usual spot, sitting in the sun with a book.
“D’you know what day it is?” he blurts out. I’ve no idea.
“March twenty-sixth,” he says. “Isn’t that your birthday?”
I nod slowly. I am twenty-one, but my mum and dad aren’t here to wish me “Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám,” and now I will never hear Bill say, “Happy birthday, Izzy.” I remember he said he’d take me dancing. I haven’t seen him for twenty days. The start of a lifetime of nothingness without him.
Max says, “I haven’t got anything to give you.”
I shrug. What does it matter? What does anything matter?
He crouches down beside me. “Look,” he says, “I’ve been thinking. If Bill doesn’t show up, we could pretend you’re married to me, and I could get you back to England and we could look for him there.”
I think, Bill’s dead and nothing matters anymore. The heaviness sits hard on me today, and it seems too much effort to speak, but I struggle to listen to Max, who is still talking. “And later, if we can’t find him, and if you wanted, we might really get married. We’ve both lost the person we love, and I’ll never marry anyone else, and God knows you’ve seen me at the very worst. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.”
I look up at him with incredulity. To be married to Max?
He misunderstands my look and babbles on. “Oh, not for sex. We wouldn’t have to do that, but you’ve saved my life twice now, and I want to do everything I can for you. Maybe we could both go to Ruskin College. I think we’d rub along all right.”
The idea swims around my brain like a black cloud. To be married to anyone other than Bill is unthinkable. And yet it would save me having to go back to the farm and the Russians. I think, I’d be better marrying Ralph, if he’s still alive. He’ll never have a wife.
I pat his hand and whisper, “Maybe. Thank you.”
But as I watch him walk away, and my mind settles, I know that the impulsive, self-centered girl who expected her daddy to rescue her and her husband to protect her has died somewhere on the road. If I am never to see Bill again, I’ll have to find the strength to make it on my own in the world to come. I won’t be dependent on anyone else, but I’ll forge my own path, just as Cousins would. I think of England, where I know no one. Will I really be brave enough to go there?
Later, Max comes to me with a birthday present of a tin of coffee and two more squares of the exquisite fudge, swapped for all his newly acquired cigarettes.
• • •
Everything is changing in the camp. I overhear guards trying to reassure each other, “Befehle sing befehle,” orders are orders, and I know this means they’re really scared. We notice that more and more of the guards have taken the insignia off their uniforms, and one tells a prisoner that he’s never been a Nazi, and Hitler is a schwein hund.
To our astonishment, the postern who broke Bill’s nose at the brick factory seeks me out and holds out a hand in which my “catapult” and Bill’s harmonica are clutched.
“I am returning confiscated belongings,” he says without looking us in the face.
There’s jeering from all the men around us. “Bloody thief,” they catcall.
I slip the harmonica into the breast pocket of my battle dress, near to my heart. The postern elbows his way through the jostling prisoners and back out of the hut.
• • •
Every day now, the whole sky seems full of aircraft, with flares of every color going up. The noise is incessant. We watch a plane falling from the sky, on fire from wingtip to wingtip, with sheets of flames billowing from it. All day we hear dull booming and see vivid flashes. One afternoon the whole camp is engulfed in an enormous smoke cloud. On the horizon we can see the red glow of towns burning.