The Evening Chorus (3 page)

The Kommandant rises from behind his desk when the prisoner is ushered into his office. He extends his hand and James shakes it solemnly, as though they were being introduced at a cocktail party.

“Please sit down,” the Kommandant says. His English is very good, carries no trace of an accent.

James sits on the rickety wooden chair that faces the desk. He wonders if the Germans also have to periodically saw pieces off their furniture to feed the stove during the winter months.

The Kommandant is older than James by more than ten years; he’s also plumper, with a receding hairline and pale-grey eyes. His brow is furrowed with lines, worry that has existed since before this war.

“You have been seen loitering by the river,” he says. “Are you perhaps thinking of escaping?”

James is impressed with the word “loitering.” This man has not learned English on the job, making simple translations from ordinary German words into ordinary English ones. The Kommandant has clearly come to this job already equipped with English.

“I’m not escaping,” says James. “I’m watching the birds.”

“
Der Vogel?
” The Kommandant seems surprised. Whatever lie he was expecting, this is not it.

“Redstarts.” James produces his notebook from a jacket pocket. He hands it across the desk. “There is a breeding pair down by the river.”

The Kommandant carefully turns the pages of the notebook, peering at James’s cramped handwriting and his tiny pencil sketches.

“You are very thorough.”

“I mean to make a proper study.”

The Kommandant hands the notebook back across the desk to his prisoner.

“I will allow it, then,” he says. “But only because you are making a proper study.” He smiles, and James can’t tell if he is mocking him or not.

“Thank you,” he says, tucking the notebook back inside his jacket.

The guard opens the office door for him, and James steps out onto the wooden porch and then down onto the earth of the yard, still puzzling over the tone of the Kommandant’s remark.

T
HERE’S A
tunnel underway this spring, a big one, started in bunkhouse 14, which is near the centre of the camp, farther from the wire than the bunkhouses where other tunnels have been started. The tunnellers are hoping that this will throw the Germans off the scent, that it won’t occur to them to be suspicious of one of the middle bunkhouses. The extra fifty feet they have to dig seems worth it if they are successful in fooling the guards.

One of the tunnellers is in James Hunter’s room in bunkhouse 11. His name is Davis and he is known as the Modeller because he is making a scale model of the village where he used to live out of bits of wood, tin, and cardboard. Sometimes he solicits the Artist to help him decorate the facades of the tiny buildings. He keeps the finished pieces in a box under his bunk, but occasionally he’ll display the village on the table in the middle of an afternoon, when most of the men are outside playing football or bashing the circuit.

“He moves the models around a lot,” Harry said to James once. “As if he can’t quite remember where the buildings actually go, even though he remembers what they look like.”

All their activity is about not forgetting, thinks James, listening to the Modeller hum as he waits for the tinpot teakettle to boil. No one knows how long the war will last, and none of the men want to lose themselves in the process. By constructing the house they used to live in or lecturing on the subjects they once taught, they are able to hold on to the memory of the men they used to be. The unspoken hope for all of them is that when the war does end, they will be able to step back into those lives and continue on as though they’d never had to leave, and as though nothing of any consequence had happened to them in the war.

James leans over the edge of his bunk. The Modeller has his back to James, is sitting at the table working on assembling one of his miniature buildings. From his perspective, James can’t tell what the building is going to be, but he can see from the hunch of Davis’s body over his work how much attention he is paying to what he is doing.

When James had asked the Modeller why he was involved in digging the tunnel, Davis had just said, “I want to go home.”

The effort that Ian Davis is taking in reconstructing, from memory, each stone of his childhood is touching, but James wonders if casting all one’s attentions towards home is really the right approach to being a prisoner.

“It’s coming along,” he says. But Davis, intent on his task, doesn’t reply, or doesn’t hear him.

The roofs of the miniature buildings make James think that’s how they would look to a bird flying over the real village.

Or an aeroplane.

He had joined the air force because James wanted the height and distance of the plane in relation to the ground. “So I don’t have to see the people I’m killing,” he had said to his sister, Enid, when she asked him why he’d chosen the RAF. “So I don’t have to know that I’ve killed them.”

A
FTER THE
nest is built, the clutch of eggs is laid. James can’t tell how many eggs there are, but he can see that the base of the nest is covered in a light-blue colour, so there are probably as many as half a dozen.

When the chicks are born, their gullets are a bright orange. If the nest was dark or in the hollow of a tree, the adult redstarts would be able to see the bright throats of their babies and know where to place the food they have brought back to them.

The arrival of the chicks cheers James. He likes listening to their tiny cries, seeing the splash of orange in their open mouths. It excites him to think that he’ll be there when they fledge. He doesn’t mind counting the number of times the adult birds return to the nest with food, or watching them catch insects in the air above the river. He is attached to the progress of the redstart family and is eager for it to be successful. Most baby birds don’t survive into adulthood. There are countless predators waiting to snatch them from the nest or grab them from the ground after their first wobbly flight.

A few days after the chicks are born, James leaves his post at the river to attend the evening roll call. As is his habit now, he first returns to his bunkhouse room to put the notebook and pencil away on the shelf by his pillow. He’s a bit late coming back from the river; most of the men are out in the yard already, and even Stevens is gone from his bunk. James hurriedly climbs the ladder, placing his notebook and pencil on the shelf, and just as he’s about to climb back down, he sees an object on his pillow. It’s a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper. James pulls off the paper and sees a guidebook to the birds of Germany. The page with the entry on the redstart has a piece of paper placed there as a bookmark. Written on the paper, in neat script, are the words “To help you with your proper study of the birds.”

“Y
ORKSHIRE PUDDING
,” says Harry, “dripping with gravy. Fresh green beans from my father’s allotment. Apple Charlotte to finish.”

“Omelette,” says James. “Mushroom and cheese, with a stack of toast and butter.”

“Remember how good butter used to taste?” says Harry. “A little cool from being in the larder. Pale and creamy. Just the right amount of salt.”

“A pint of ale,” says James.

“Two pints of ale.”

“A ham sandwich, with mustard and butter.”

“We’re back to butter again.” Harry flicks his cigarette onto the earth at his feet. “Let’s switch to people. Who do you miss the most?”

They’re walking the circuit just before evening roll call. It’s a warm spring evening. James is convinced he can smell apple blossoms on the breeze that wafts over the camp. As they pass the office, the door opens and the Kommandant steps out onto his wooden porch. He looks right at James and smiles.

“Who is it?” says Harry.

“What?”

“Who do you miss?”

James breaks eye contact with the Kommandant as he and Harry walk past the porch.

“My wife,” he says.

“What’s her name?”

“Rose.”

“And is she?”

“Is she what?”

“As lovely as a rose?”

“I suppose so.” James looks over his shoulder. The Kommandant is still standing on the wooden porch. In exactly fourteen minutes they will pass in front of him again. Will he smile a second time, or will he be gone?

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

“It’s private. How I feel about my wife is private.”

Harry snorts with laughter, slaps James on the shoulder. “Have you not noticed where you are?” he says. “There’s nothing here that’s private, old chum.”

The prisoners obsess about their women back home. They talk about them endlessly, carry their letters around—sniffing at them to inhale the fading perfume that might still linger on the page. The Artist is kept busy drawing life-size portraits of wives and girlfriends from photographs. The portraits are tacked up on the walls beside the men’s bunks.

The men who don’t have wives or girlfriends talk about missing their dogs or the countryside where they grew up. All of them have something back home to fixate on while they are locked away in the camp.

James thinks about his wife as often as any man, but where the others are public with their feelings, he prefers to keep his to himself. His marriage is his business, he thinks. By keeping his feelings private, he keeps them active. The men who talk and talk about their wives are spending those feelings here, and when they get back to England, they might find that nothing of that emotion is left and their wives are now strangers to them.

H
E’S NERVOUS
knocking on the office door the next day. When the guard opens it, he doesn’t know what to say about his reason for being there.

“Tell him that James Hunter is here,” he says. And then, fearing that the Kommandant won’t know who this is, he adds, “The Birdman.”

The office is the same as it was the last time he was there. The Kommandant rises from behind his desk and shakes James’s hand again. He says something in German to the two guards in the room and they both leave, closing the door quietly behind them.

“How can I assist you?” asks the Kommandant, sounding like a London shop clerk.

James takes the bird guide from his pocket and puts it on the desk.

“Thank you for your gift,” he says. “But I don’t read German.”

“No, of course not.” The Kommandant picks up the guide, opening it to the page with the bookmark. “Would you like me to read it to you? It is the redstart you are watching, correct?”

“Yes, it is. Yes, well, I suppose that might be helpful.”

The Kommandant lays the book flat on the desktop and clears his throat.

“It will help me to practise my English,” he says. “To read to you.”

“Your English is already very good,” says James. He wants to ask why this is but feels that he’d be overstepping a boundary—although he guesses that boundary has already been overstepped by the Kommandant in choosing to read a German book aloud to a British prisoner.

The Kommandant reads slowly, carefully, never stumbling over words, but making sure he has enunciated each one before moving on to the next. His voice is deep and calming. James suddenly feels crashingly weary. He would like to topple off his chair and sleep for months on the stone floor of the office.

“The heart of the redstart beats at fourteen times the rate of a human heart,” reads the Kommandant. “This is approximately 980 beats a minute.” He looks over the top of the book. “So fast,” he says, “it wouldn’t beat so much as vibrate.”

James says nothing, but he thinks that the fast heartbeat is likely the primary reason for the brief life of the bird. It simply uses itself up.

When the Kommandant finishes reading the redstart entry, he closes the book and pushes it towards James.

“You keep it,” he says. “It will assist you with your German.”

“But I don’t need to learn German,” says James.

“Yes, you do. It is going to be a long war, I think. You will be a guest in my country for a few years at least. Take the book.”

James recognizes a command when he hears one, so he picks up the guidebook and stands up to leave. He hesitates before walking towards the door.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You are welcome.” The Kommandant also stands, and James notices how his uniform strains over his chest and stomach, as though it is one size too small or the Kommandant has increased one size while in charge of the camp. All the prisoners are losing weight, James thinks as he walks out of the dark office and into the sunny morning.

If it weren’t for the Red Cross parcels, the prisoners in the Oflag would be starving. Twice a day the Germans provide a meal of black bread and a thin soup that is often just water with a couple of potatoes thrown into it. The Red Cross packages, which arrive every fortnight or so, contain jam, chocolate, tea, biscuits, sardines, meat rolls, and dried milk. Each parcel is also bound up with ten feet of string, and the string is employed to make brushes, hammocks, football nets, even wigs for the theatricals. Cigarettes come by separate post, each man receiving an allotment of fifty per week. The few prisoners who don’t smoke, James among them, use their cigarettes to barter for foodstuffs.

Everything is made use of. Every scrap of material is put towards practical purpose. Even the tins that the food comes in are fashioned into mugs and pots after they have been emptied.

Food preoccupies the prisoners. They talk about it constantly. Lately, Harry and James have taken to playing the game where they each describe a perfect meal.

When James returns from the Kommandant’s office, Harry is lying on his bunk, reading. He looks up when James enters the room.

“I’ve been thinking about chocolate cake,” he says. “A really rich one, made with about a dozen eggs and a filling of cream and butter.”

“It would make you sick if you had chocolate cake now,” says James, sitting down at the table in the centre of the room. “You’re not used to rich food anymore.”

“What’s got into you?” Harry says.

“Nothing.”

James drums his fingers on the table. The German bird guide in his jacket pocket feels heavy as a brick.