The Stars We Share Page 11
There are rumors about German camps, and for the most part the inmates of Campo 78 agree that their camp is probably a sight better. They have a small library, a newspaper, sometimes a band. They have football and ready access to their Red Cross parcels, which make for unexpected luxuries; men who have been in the German camps say the deliveries are inconsistent there at best. And the guards, most of them anxious to avoid the front, are greedy for cigarettes. Alec keeps a handful of the cigarettes that come from the Red Cross so he can smell them; lighting them is almost beyond him with his hands gnarled into these scarred objects to which he feels almost no connection. They remind him of the branches of the olive trees that arc across the walls. But he welcomes the scent of the tobacco, and now only a few cigarettes last him a long time. The rest he trades to the guards for wine.
He is glad to have missed the winter. The camp is near the highest point of the Apennines, and he hears stories of the way the wind screamed through the barracks. Now, in the tail end of spring, the trees that crest the hillsides outside the camp have begun to blossom, and when the wind is right the flowers drift over the camp like particularly wistful snowflakes. In the depths of winter, the snow would have been less charming, and the ice lacing up the road to the annex at Campo 78/1 potentially lethal.
Some of the ANZAC officers have batmen among the NCOs and enlisted at Campo 78/1, doing hard labor in the quarry between the camps. Alec wants to feel bad for the enlisted men who have it so much worse than he does, but his main feeling these days is a sort of bitter finality. Sometimes he’s ashamed of his anger—once the war is over, he will be reunited with June. A lot of the other men aren’t going to have that—the camp is full of men who have had letters from home turning them loose and breaking their hearts. He looks at his hands, experimentally flexing his fingers, or trying to.
His hands are not completely useless, even tangled and flamed with pain as they are. The fingers and bones of his right hand took the brunt of the damage and have only the barest fine motor ability. But on his weaker hand he has reasonable function in his thumb and the first two fingers, and he is learning to use them more effectively. Matches are quite beyond him, and holding a pen, but he can shave and button his trousers, however slowly. Perhaps by the time the war ends he’ll feel less like some kind of clawed, scar-ridden creature. Perhaps by then he will have learned how to use his new hands, such as they are.
* * *
• • •
At Campo 78, the prisoners have cleared a field bordered by ragged oak trees for exercise. Sometimes there’s cricket. Alec misses the feel of a cricket bat in his hands, but he can’t grip the handle. Instead he sits on the sidelines, listening to the crack of the bat against the ball. If he closes his eyes he can pretend he’s about to hit a century. At Cambridge he had batted for Clare College, and then for the university Firsts; had the war not come, he would have taken a blue for it. As long ago as India he had lain in bed at night, his cricket bat just within reach, dreaming of glory on the pitch. His father had played every summer with his regiment, and Alec had loved to sit with his mother in the shade of the striped pavilions and watch the matches unfold for hours. He and Sanjay had sat talking about those days, about matches they’d seen in India, and the particular sound of the bat and ball in the amphitheater of foothills. How is it possible that his days with the bat are over? That he likely will never again lay that splendid slab of willow across his shoulder after a great whacking hit, the world smelling of linseed and grass, and look up to see June watching him?
He’s lying in the sun and listening to a match one day at the end of July, his head badly cradled by the pillow of his jacket on the ragged grass, dragonflies shimmering through the afternoon, when a man stops in front of him. An American, unless his flight jacket is stolen. Alec sits up. Behind the stranger, the sun has laced itself along the mountainside. Alec looks at the golden gossamer of fig trees and rocks, and waits.
* * *
• • •
The American has come to Campo 78 from North Africa, a chaplain en route from one base to another, separated from the rest of the men in his transport. He talks like a man who has almost forgotten the sound of his own voice, information lurching out of him in an order Alec doesn’t understand. He wants to know how to play cricket, and if it’s true that sometimes a test match can go for days, but mostly he wants to know if Alec is going to be okay.
Alec regards him carefully. The other man is older, perhaps as much as ten years Alec’s senior—he pauses, his mind almost emptying as he realizes it’s almost his birthday; he’s going to be twenty-four in a week? Time is confusing, and he doesn’t track it the way some of the men do. Everything is measured in chunks—when I was with June, when I was at Clare College, when I was not here, when my hands worked. But sometimes thinking of when he wasn’t at Campo 78 makes it worse—if he dares believe that he will eventually go home, what if he’s wrong? Or what if he’s right, but home is gone? Although, the truth is, June, not Fenbourne, is home.
The American sits beside him. “Did they do that to your hands?”
Alec flinches. The British in the camp have noted his hands and gone on without questions. There was an American pilot in Algeria, and he too had had questions about everything. Perhaps it’s an American problem.
“No,” Alec says, unsure who he means by they.
The chaplain waits a long time, but Alec has nothing else to say.
* * *
• • •
They get into the habit of taking their meals together. The chaplain’s name is Bart Smialowicz, and the handful of men who talk to him call him Padre until the day he finally steps out onto the ragged, not quite green of the athletic field, hefts a cricket bat experimentally, and slams the first ball bowled to him into the mountainside. After, they call him Smasher. Smasher talks incessantly. At first Alec thinks Smasher believes that the endless anecdotes and details will somehow shield him from the war. Later he understands that Smasher is filling him with stories to distract him from his hands, and from the war. The chaplain feels guilty about the rest of the men in his convoy, and about his mother in Minnesota. About his parish, also waiting, and their fears that he might not return. He feels guilty about the cousins in Poland he’s never met, whose fates he doesn’t know.
Alec listens. Sometimes he tries to say something he thinks will help, but most of the time he feels as though Smasher is just trying to get out all the words before it’s too late. As if either of them knows what too late means. But it’s something he can do, easy enough to sit quietly beside Smasher while they eat the scant bowls of pasta with watered-down tomato paste and cheese, or the fresh figs and fruit harvested by the enlisted men at Campo 78/1 throughout the summer.
Most nights Alec dreams of Charlie’s plane. He continues to hope that Sanjay escaped, that he survived and made it back to base. Now and again he dreams of the sea, of sinking into the Mediterranean with the tangle of his parachute, but as a boy, slipping from the deck of the RMS Jaipur and sliding silently beneath the waves in a wash of canvas and cord. He wakes missing the shipboard stars, disconsolate that he will never fly again.
* * *
• • •
It’s the end of August before he tells Smasher about June. He hasn’t talked to anyone about her until now, except Charlie and Sanjay. But Smasher has started to be talked out, at last, and his ramblings have begun to sound more like questions. And he is a priest, a chaplain as well as a friend; he is required to keep Alec’s secrets. At first the story comes out haltingly, Alec trying to decide where their tale begins. When he was eight and arrived in Fenbourne? Earlier, even, before he’d ever heard of June Attwell, when his lungs were still raw with the smoke of Bombay? Later, the first time he took her hand, the first time he kissed her? When he understood how well his palm fit in the small of her back?
When Alec closes his eyes, he remembers the yellow blouse June wore that
day in London when he proposed. He remembers the light in June’s eyes when he took his mother’s ring from his pocket, the lion like hope behind her, and the quiet, clear yes that he felt all the way through him. When he looks at his hands, he’s almost glad he hasn’t seen her in so long. But it’s impossible to ignore the ache in him that only her touch has ever been able to soothe. And impossible as well to describe the ache to Smasher.
Smasher helps him write postcards to Roger and Constance, a step up from the Red Cross notice they would have received when his captivity became official. Then they tackle the much harder task: writing to June. The last letter he had from her may as well have been a hundred years ago. And a letter is not nearly what he wants or needs. He had hoped they might have a leave together while he was still in England, but the war, or Floss Corbett, had thwarted him. A day would be nowhere near enough time to bury his face in her hair and feel her hands cool and strong against the curve of his elbow, anchoring him against the war and the loneliness, but it would have been better than no days. But now there have been months of not wanting to share his heart with the guards, too proud to ask another British officer for help, and not being able to write a letter himself. But now he has Smasher to help him.
It’s a short letter, more empty than full, he thinks. Even with Smasher he doesn’t say everything he needs to say, and so the letter is too short, a sparrow when he would have liked to send a goshawk. A dinghy lost on the ocean of missing her. If she gets it—when, he reminds himself, always when, never if—she will know where he is.
1944, HMS Anderson
There is always something in the roof, moving through the palm leaves. Sometimes it’s the rain, pounding so violently against the thatching that it brings to mind the thud of the ack-ack guns at home. Even when it’s not raining, the rattle of the leaves never stops. Tonight, during a break in the showers, it’s no different. A snake, then, or one of the spiders June keeps seeing, bigger than her hand and bristling with hair. If it’s a spider, she can ignore it, almost, as she does the enormous mantises that sit on the wireless tables and watch them work. But the snakes . . .
It’s worse when she’s on the wireless, taking a shift for a Wren. Those eight-hour shifts are usually an exercise in solitude, broken up by navy men on hourly patrols, the inconsistent arrival of other girls to offer a break for the loo or just a chance to stand and move around for a bit. And being unable to get away from the sound of slithering, or the chitter of various creatures on the floor or walls, can be hard. Nights like this, when she’s breaking codes, she can look up or shift around now and again, although she spends most of the time hunched over a table with her pencils and stacks of paper, turning the columns of numbers into something usable to send via teleprinter to Melbourne or Kilindini.
They’ve had a boon lately—a captured steel chest of Japanese code books that let them translate some of the codes nearly instantly. One of them is obsolete already, so frequently do the Japanese change their practices, but June has made a point of translating the information it contains into English so she can develop an even stronger familiarity with the shape of the messages, and where to expect which kind of information. It helps, on a practical level, but the expansion of her knowledge is exciting, too.
She turns, stretching her arms until her shoulders creak, and glances over her shoulder to see if their mongoose is around. Not theirs, really, but all the girls talk about him that way. In town, the Sinhalese tell her that the mongoose is a pest, like the minks at home in England, but in the wireless hut nobody cares what their mongoose does when he’s not with them. They call him Box, and give him the run of the station, the mess, even the loo. June loves his bristling swagger, not to mention the way he reminds her of Kipling and Alec. When not knowing how Alec is faring feels darkest and most terrifying, she clings to the idea that Box in some way stands in for him. It’s ridiculous, she knows, superstitious claptrap. And yet.
The rustling comes again, and she looks up. It’s not in the roof—and it’s not Box. Now that she’s paying more attention, she recognizes the sound as the rattle of cards being shuffled in the corridor outside. June smiles. One of the facts of this life is the seemingly random nature of assignments, and the way a person you liked is often someone you might never see again. In this case, it is happily the opposite—the powers that be have sent Wendy Fairchild to Colombo. Wendy is a Wren now, one of the wireless operators, and she carries a deck of cards with her everywhere she goes. She says the shuffling helps her focus, which June can’t argue with. They all have their tricks in those inevitable moments when the clicks and buzzes of the wireless run together into a hypnotic murmur.
June looks at her watch—shift change, so Wendy and her cards must be coming off her watch, relieved by one of the other Wrens. It’s no time at all before Wendy bursts into the room. Becoming a Wren has not made her any more decorous.
“Good evening,” June says.
“Hallo, Attwell,” Wendy says, grinning at her. “Sink any ships tonight?”
June smiles, although she wishes Wendy would not bring up the past. Even acknowledging that they were stationed together at Scarborough feels as though it skirts the parameters of the Official Secrets Act, despite her own gladness at their reunion.
“No,” she says. She glances down at her papers. So far tonight they have divulged only vague notions of troop movements, information that June has already passed along.
Wendy sits on the edge of the desk and leans closer with a conspiratorial whisper. “Truffit put her mug down on the table just now without looking and it moved.” She shudders cheerfully. “She’d put it on something’s back, can you believe it? Whole ruddy thing would have walked right off the table if she hadn’t stopped it.”
“She trapped a mantis in a cup the other day,” June says. Merrill Truffit minds the insects less than most of them, which is good, as she seems to attract them.
“As long as they’re creeping to her and not me, that’s all very well.” Wendy laughs, shuffling her cards against her thigh. “Seen Box around?”
June eyes her warily. After two years, she is somewhat accustomed to most of the more alarming fauna that inhabit the station and her barracks in Colombo, but sometimes one of the girls will report an insect so large or grotesque that June can hardly stand to hear about it. And Wendy, as much as June likes her, has a predilection for spreading word of these egregious creatures.
“He was here a little while ago,” June says.
“Wish that mongoose would go after the crawlies more often,” Wendy grumbles. She gets to her feet. “Are you coming along to the beach tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she says. She gestures at the papers before her. “I’ll clear this tonight.” Thinking of the beach at Mount Lavinia, where she’s gone to swim as often as she can since arriving in Ceylon, is distracting, but it feels good to hold a reward out for herself on her days off. She wants to sit in the sand and watch the warm, clear waves cresting in off the green and blue water, and the cormorants and, most of all, the fishermen, who remind her somehow of the old men at home in the Fens, weaving their wicker basket nets for eels.
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Wendy says.
“Yes,” June says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
The beach makes a grand respite from the war, but does nothing for her endless fears about Alec. They gnaw at her, cheating her of sleep, which she can’t afford, but it’s been like this since the end of November, when a months-old letter had come from her parents. Those letters are always a mixed blessing, as June can read between the lines and see that they would rather know where she is, that vague statements about the Foreign Office are not enough information for them. June understands—if she were in their shoes, she would struggle, too. For the most part, their letters are roll calls of the village, comments here and there about christenings in families she knows, the comi
ngs and goings of men on leave, holidays at the vicarage. But in that one there had been something new—a message relayed from Constance Fane, who had had a series of telegrams. Alec had been shot down over the Mediterranean, picked up by the Italians before a British ship could reach him.
June has never quite steadied herself from Alec’s first time shot down, and during the little time she’d been able to spend with him when they were both still in England he had not much wanted to talk about it. She knows almost nothing about what happened, or if there were other incidents about which she hasn’t any idea. If she thinks about it too closely, it sends a shuddering, echoing fear through her. She loves him; she does not want to lose him. And there are times when the juxtaposition of her affection for him and her desire to have a future built on career and a life of the mind is too chaotic a collision. There is no right answer, no way to solve it without breaking someone’s heart. So to hear that he had been shot down again and taken prisoner . . .
But an Italian camp is better than dead or missing, better than most of the alternatives, and so she clings to that. One of the effects of being on this side of the world has been the breaking of time. The narrative of the people she loves happens out of order with her own story, because it takes a long time for her letters to reach home, routed through the Foreign Office couriers back to London for the subterfuge of postmarking and the censor’s stringent gaze, and longer still for anything from Fenbourne to reach Colombo. This is magnified by Alec’s captivity—two months ago she received a letter from him, routed for almost a year through innumerable channels, stamped and prodded by the censors on both sides. But that letter had come from Italy, and she knows from her sources in the Admiralty that Campo 78 closed when Italy surrendered in September, its prisoners escaped into the mountainsides or loaded into trains for German POW camps. Alec did not escape; as far as she can gather, he followed the order to stay in place and await the Allies. And now, like most of the other men who obeyed, he is in one of those German camps.