I laid a finger on his lips and led him to the door. “You not go Lamsdorf,” I said firmly. “I stay you here.”
“By God, I think you will.” He shook his head with admiration.
As I opened the door and light flooded into the kitchen, he looked beyond the stairs into our dining room. “A piano!” he said. “You’ve got a piano!”
“Can play?”
“It’s my best thing—after kissing you! Can you play?”
I almost had to push him out of the door, he was so reluctant to leave the piano.
“I learn long time but play bad.”
“And I ain’t never had a lesson,” he said. “But I play good. Funny old world.”
We turned toward the fields, and Harry followed at a considerate distance. Bill glanced back at the house, as if knowing the location of the precious object would somehow enable him to play it.
“We could play duets.” He ran his hands up and down imaginary scales in the air.
I asked, “What music you like?”
“Jazz tunes, ragtime, dance music, anything that goes down well in a pub.” He paused. “I play by ear.”
“What ‘by ear’?”
“Without music. I don’t know how to read music. I can play the tunes if I hear them. Almost any tune off the radio.”
I had never met anyone who could do this.
“This gift from God,” I said in wonder, and a beaming smile lit up his face.
Five
In the wired-off compound outside the Mankendorf sawmill, Bill and Harry were playing shuttlecock over a rope. Bill was using a table tennis paddle and Harry had an old tennis racket, but that wasn’t why Bill was losing so badly. Every few seconds he glanced up at the road from Vražné, the road Izzy would cycle along if her mother allowed her to come. The jittery anticipation in his stomach overrode his ever-present hunger. The shuttlecock landed at his feet.
“Thirty-six to seven,” called Harry. “You ain’t even trying.”
Outside the wire, the tarty girls from the village were holding court with a group of prisoners inside the fence. At dinnertime today, Bill had told Izzy that other girls came down to the camp and asked if she could come too. She doubted her mother would allow it, but he couldn’t help hoping.
Bill flipped a shot over the washing line, just as bright movement caught his eye on the road from Vražné. The dress of a girl on a bicycle. It was. It was her. His stomach tightened, and he missed Harry’s return shot. Harry shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of Bill’s gaze. “Oh, now I get it,” he said. “Off you hop, then, chummy.”
Bill thrust the tennis table paddle at him and moved to an empty section of the wire fence, watching as Izzy dismounted and scanned the faces inside the compound. The tarty girls spoke to her, but she barely replied. Herr Weber sat smoking with the owner of the sawmill, halfheartedly watching the men, and he started up when he saw Izzy approach, but she waved her schoolbooks at him to show her serious intent.
Then she spotted Bill at the wire and smiled with obvious relief. Something jumped inside him as he grinned back.
Feeling nervous, as if this was his first date, Bill smoothed his hair down with one hand, then ran his fingers back up through it with the other. He watched as Izzy laid her bike down on the ground and walked toward him, clutching her books. He drank in the supple movement of her slim body, her skirt swinging, until she stood, perhaps a meter away, on the other side of the wire.
“Hello,” he said awkwardly. “I’m so glad you came.”
“My mother say is good,” she replied, hardly meeting his eyes.
“Did she really?”
Izzy pulled a wry face. “Not good, for sure, but OK.”
They both laughed, and the tension broke.
“I see you’ve brought your books,” he said, grasping for something to say. “That’s a pretty dress.”
But she was looking at the sawmill and the wire.
“Is bad here?” she asked anxiously.
“No, it’s not bad. Not compared with Lamsdorf and the other stalags. We get extra rations here because we’re doing what’s classified as heavy work.” He followed the direction of her gaze to the factory, and pointed at the second floor.
“We sleep upstairs there above the factory floor. Two big rooms with thirty men in each. On bunk beds. Harry sleeps below me. We’re locked in at night, of course. But we get a bath every Saturday and”—he swept his arm around at all the surroundings, at the countryside, which was so new to him and which he’d fallen in love with—“all this. Beautiful trees. Fantastic sunrises over the hills, and look over there. They let us grow tomatoes, lettuce and spring onions, and sometimes we’re allowed to swim in the river.” He paused. “And now you’re here.”
“Now I am here.” She smiled.
Bill put his hand up to the wire, and she checked to see if Herr Weber was watching before stepping forward and touching her hand to his. Her hand was warm, and heat seemed to pass into Bill’s from it. After a moment she stepped back again. He wanted so much to have something to give her, some flowers or chocolate. But he had nothing.
“I want to know everything about you,” he said.
She smiled. “Not much say. I am Czech farm girl.”
He shook his head. “You are beautiful and clever. You are learning English so fast.”
“I have good teacher.”
He grinned again. “I have a good teacher.”
“A good teacher,” she echoed. “A very good teacher.”
“So let’s sit down and tell me, tell me about you. Tell me everything.”
“You tell when I say thing wrong. I have bring dictionary.” She corrected herself. “I have bring a dictionary.”
Bill sat cross-legged in the dust on his side of the wire, and she sat down on the grass on the other side. He had so much he wanted to ask. He wanted to know everything about her and her family and this mysterious country he’d washed up in. “Tell me why most people speak German if this is Czechoslovakia,” he said at last.
She shrugged. “Is history. War.” She drew a line on the grass with her finger and said, “One nine one four.” Then rubbed it out and drew another line farther away. “One nine one eight.”
Bill repeated the numbers, running his hand up through his hair, then: “I get it—nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen. The borders got moved after the Great War?”
Izzy nodded and rubbed out the line again. “And now”—she opened her arms wide—“Lebensraum.”
This was one of the few German words that Bill knew well.
“Hitler has taken it all,” he said.
“All,” she agreed.
They both sat in silence for a moment until he said, “You. Tell me about you. What do you want when all this is over?”
“I want go university, but too late now. Too old,” Izzy said, pulling a wry face.
“It’s too late. I’m too old,” Bill corrected her. “No, you aren’t. Anyway, how old are you?”
“Twenty. You?”
“Twenty-three. Eighteen when I joined up.”