Famished Lover (6 page)

“My work is here! I don't want to be travelling every day and night and never see you and the baby. Frame is a decent man, he'll push me more salary. I've been with him eight years. That's settled. All right?”

She looked ready to say more, but I didn't want to argue, not on a Sunday, not this day in particular.

But the murk in the water had been stirred, stirred.

“What are you doing?”

As soon as I speak the needle drives far into my wound and my spine whiplashes, though my legs are being held firm. I have a vague sense of the darkness of the room, how shadows stretch along the ceiling like mounds of earth waiting to cover me up.

He unleashes a torrent of German, and for a moment I see his dark, heavy hair, the cowlike eyes, too big even for such a large head, the hands that look meant to steer lumber down a fast-flowing river.

“Jesus!”

The pain settles like fish hooks inside. His whisper is the gentle sliding of a knife being withdrawn from its scabbard. I close my eyes, lie as still as possible, as if such stillness might fool him. But someone shrieks in another room, followed by other wails of distress and the cursing of ill men too pained or hungry or bored or scared to sleep.

She's in the room somewhere. I can't see her but I know she's here.

Later I hear a voice whisper in the gloom beside me. “He said you're lucky to still have your feet.”I look over at a bandaged wreck, one arm suspended from above by a wire stretching towards the ceiling. “I understand a little German. They were going to amputate when they first brought you in, but Schreider wanted to try you out on something.”

“Try me out?”

I don't remember arriving here at all. The last I know I was stumbling along the roadside, bleeding into the dirt.

“He has things he wants to test. That's what I heard, anyway,” the man says.

He sounds British, but not from London, perhaps. Somewhere else. I introduce myself and he replies, “Bill Chesterman.” He blinks hard — the small section of face around his eyes is nearly his only unbandaged bit of flesh. “Caught a taste of the new gas,” he says. “How about you?”

I tell him I'm all right, practically ready to be up and at it. “Who told you this doctor wanted to cut me up?”

“The last guy in your cot. They took him out yesterday dead as a post. Nice chap, too. Australian.”

And he starts to laugh, a wheezing, slightly crazy gurgle.

She's in the room but I can't see her, can't turn my head enough for the bloody straps.

“He came in with a broken jaw. Some fight or other.
Herr Doktor
Schreider mucked about with his mouth. We could all hear the screaming. Crushed a bunch of teeth with a pair of fancy pliers, then rooted around with a nail to get out all the scraps. Blighter died of fright.”

Towards morning
Herr Doktor
comes back and pumps my other leg full of something equally excruciating. He rubs the feet up and down, digs his fingernails into the wounds. “Ya? Ya?” he says. I scream to blow the glass out of the windows.

“Ya? Ya?” he says.

If I had a saw or knife or a stretch of sharp wire I'd hack off my own feet to stop the pain.

I don't tell him about my arm. I don't tell anyone.

Some days later the poison subsides, and gradually my feet begin to heal to some semblance of working order. Schreider brings in a phalanx of white coats to surround my cot and examine the miracle of my limbs. They're stern, quiet, respectful men, all but one younger than Schreider. Some have bloodstains on their coats. All have eyes that look as if war is teaching them more than they want to learn. They prod and sniff and turn my feet from left to right and back again while Schreider talks at them in his way, a machine-clanking sputter. Some of the words are directed at me. Schreider waits for a time, sneering, evidently expecting a reply.

I don't say a word. But Schreider and his colleagues leave finally, and Chesterman translates for me afterwards. “You're lucky to be alive. But now your feet are healed, and
Herr Doktor
said it's time for you to work for the Fatherland.”

Sometime later a British sergeant arrives, trailing a scowling German guard. “Crome, is it?” the Brit says, and shakes my hand. He is carrying a bundle of clothes for me but turns to chat with Chesterman first. “How are they treating you then, Bill? Rotten as always?”

“And always rotten,” Chesterman sings back. “How about you, Collins?”

“Hardly keeping my head above the shit,” Collins says
cheerfully. He's a small man, even shorter than me, though less wiry. Perhaps in his forties. The crescent of his hairline sweeps to the rear of his head.

“Collins has been in camp since Second Ypres,” Chesterman says. “Practically runs the place.”

“Oh yes,” Collins shoots back. “And you've been delusional ever since they wheeled you in. When was it?”

“The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

I swing myself out of bed and totter on shaky legs.

“I was told you were fit for duty,” Collins says.

“I'm fine,”I mutter. “Are those for me?” Collins has brought a faded dark tunic and black trousers painted with a red stripe down the leg, and wooden clogs to replace my ruined boots. I hold onto his shoulder and lift one leg at a time, doubtfully, while he helps me. Fortunately the trousers come with rope for a belt. The clogs have no splinters — that's perhaps the only good thing about them.

“Can you walk, Crome?” Collins asks. “Or should I try to make the case for you to stay here?” He nods ever so slightly in the direction of the guard who's taking it all in with malevolent silence.

“I'd sooner roast in hell.”

“Let's not rush ahead of ourselves,” Collins says.

Chesterman laughs painfully. “You two get out of here,” he gasps. “Before I bust a seam.”

I take a few tentative steps, which brings upon me a flood of verbal abuse from the guard. But Collins bolsters my arm. “Just keep walking,” he whispers. “I'll fill you in.” We march beside the guard along the grey corridors, out of this damn hospital. While the guard sputters Collins says, “You're going to
Arbeit
, see,
raus raus
, like a good
englischer Schweinehund
,
and some more things that he's talking about, or there will be
Strafe
, understand, punishment for all the
Kriegsgefangene
. Not just you, but all of us. Nod your head, yes, that's it, since England
kaputt
! And keep your nose clean or it's the hoose-gow for you.
Verboten
! Precisely. Now we all understand.”

Down the stairs and out into the blinding sunlight, and along more passageways between high fences of barbed wire. Across an infinite distance to an open section near what must be barracks — squat, sorry-looking cabins with black-topped, shallow-sloped roofs. Towards about thirty ragged men at attention in the dirt compound, watching us approach. Even from a distance I can see Witherspoon towering above the rest. I hope they've not been standing long on my account. I hurry, try to keep up with Collins and the guard. I spot a machine gun trained on us from an overlooking tower, as if we might bolt en masse and fling ourselves at the barbed wire.

“So you will salute the lamppost beside Sergeant Agony here. Yes, not at him but at the lamppost, good, and march over by Cuddihey in the rear of the second row. And if we're all good children we won't have to stand here for hours listening to more of his prattle. Now
raus!
Yes, make a show of hurrying, but not too quick.”

Collins winks at me and nods slightly, his face a strange mixture of restrained fury and kind humour. I fall into line beside Cuddihey and try to stand somewhat straight. But I'm exhausted from just that short walk out of purgatory.

And into something else.

Agony marches in front of us, his face flushed, spouting more harsh words while Collins provides the appearance of translation. “No sick days, either —
nicht Kranke besuchen!
Because of the wonderful food. Steady, men, humour him.
And more things that he's saying,
nein, nein
, no to this and to that or we're going to have to answer to
Herr Kommandant
Farmer Bob. Don't laugh at my jokes! Stay British or it's
Strafe, Strafe, Strafe!
” Peering between the shoulders of the men ahead of me I see in the distance a ghoulish gang of prisoners forming on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Ragged as we may be, they are in tatters, the skin shrunken around their skulls, eyes dull as caves, shoulder blades propping up the worn fabric of their uniforms.

“Who are they?”I whisper to Cuddihey beside me.

“The Russians,” he whispers back. “They've been here the longest. They only have what the Germans give them.”

What the Germans give them is the same as what the Germans give us. At dinner I line up with the others for another round of anemic soup and half-slice of petrified bread. The water comes from a pump in the compound and smells of sewage.

“Easy on the champagne, there, fannigan,” Collins says to me. We are sitting with our backs to the hut, faces in sunshine, as if the heat of the afternoon might make up for the paltry and disgusting food.

“You can call me Fannigan if you want, but I'm not Irish.”

“Everyone's fannigan here,” he says, smiling. “
Kriegsgefangene!
Prisoners of war.” He dips his bread in his soup then rolls it around in his mouth to soften it. “Don't eat too much of this swill — not that you'll ever get a chance — but never skip a meal, either. If it's horrific just have a little. You have to keep something in your stomach.” He has brought some forms for me to fill out. “They want to know what you are in real life. Be careful what you answer. They're looking for
miners, machinists, farmers — anyone who might be useful to their war effort.”

“I'm a lion tamer,” Witherspoon says. “And Milne is a magician, and Findlay —” he searches among the group of lounging men till he catches Findlay's eye. “What are you, Findlay?”

“A dance instructor!”

Others begin calling out their professions.

“Butler!”

“Bullfighter!”

“Bellhop!”

“Sausage fitter!”

“A what, McGuire?” Collins calls back.

“I fit the sausage into the skin,” McGuire answers. “And if you don't believe me, give me a whopping big helping of sausage and I'll fit it into my skin before you know what's happened.”

Good-natured laughter. Great God, I think, we are almost men again. A band of fannigans.

“So what are you, Crome?” Collins asks.

“I'm an artist,”I say with pride, and write in the word, then look at it in the hard sun of this dismal place.

Justin Frame kept his offices in a tired little building off Dorchester, about a forty-minute walk from our cold and crummy flat. In the slush and ice of that winter, in an old pair of shoes with rubber galoshes, my hat pulled down, coat collar scarfed and buttoned, I made the trip a perfectly round twelve times per week. I could have taken the trolley car, but I was saving to move us up in the world. When I was single I used to buy lunch quite often with the other fellows from the office — with Gil Jenkins and Howard Lineman and old Bruce Bannerman, who'd been working for Frame for twenty-two years. Bannerman could sketch a woman's face, hat, dress and gloves for a quarter-page advert in the
Gazette
in eight minutes while carrying on a loud conversation about last night's boxing matches. Almost all Bannerman's women had the same face — those imperial eyebrows, the hard lines of their cheeks and lips — so they became known as “Bannerman girls.” Clients asked for them specifically.

Yet he was the first one old Frame let go. In the winter of 1930 all kinds of businesses were throwing out the engine coal to keep from sinking further. Bannerman had a soft,
pillowy face red from drink, a nose that looked punched-in ages ago. Everything for his retirement had been in northern Ontario gold stocks that had evaporated the season before. But his daughter had married a banker, still employed, and they were going to take him in. The day old Frame told us the news we stood around Bannerman's cluttered desk and drank Scotch, and I thought about other winters I'd endured in other years.

“These times are not so bad,” I said to them, and we all grunted and agreed. Even old Frame stood with us and drank. We might have been a herd of bison gathered around the water hole, shuddering out of the wind. I'd told old Frame about the pregnancy months before, and he'd shaken my hand and said how much he'd like to help. He would look at the books and see. If I'd just be patient . . .

Jenkins went next, towards the end of March. He'd been the last one in the door, hired in the spring of '28 when Frame was turning away contracts, we were so busy. Frame gave him the news at the end of the day — and mid-week at that — and there was no Scotch, we did not stand together like bison. “Oh no,” Gil said simply, in a scared little voice, and his face grew pale the way I'd seen men's faces blanch in other circumstances. “Oh no,” he said again and again.