A SMALL VILLAGE, 1945

Joseph Lewis

We go along the field to the brook with jam-jars to catch sticklebacks and see the prisoners. It’s summer and we’re allowed to wander where we please. My sister wouldn’t come. She says they’re the enemy. She’s stopped playing with the Parian dolls because they have Made in Germany sewn across the back of their necks. They look normal to me.
            The men are in brown uniforms, two of them dragging a log from the brook, others kneeling and hauling up handfuls of vegetation. A guard with a rifle watches them work.
            I walk to the water’s edge, perching carefully on a mossy rock and looking for tell-tale flashes of movement. I unscrew my jar, hitch up my skirt, and crouch down. The water slops around the stone, and all I can see at first are pebbles and silt.
            'There!’
            The others bound over to where I’m pointing, and I splash my jar into the water, letting the currents bring the brown fish to it, then scoop it up and hold the jar for everyone to see. The stickleback flaps its fins, swimming backwards and forwards in the green water.
            'Gut gemacht.’
            I glance over and see one of the older men looking back.
            'That means, Good job,’ he says. 
            We tell them we’re catching fish for our nature studies. The older man laughs. He fished in the Cochem with his daughter, he tells us, and takes something out of his breast-pocket and throws it over on the grass. We all gather round to look. It’s a creased photograph. There is a young girl with blond plaits, standing next to the older man.
            'You look very like her,’ he says.
            I throw the photograph back. He picks it up and mutters something. He must miss her. My father used to come with us to the brook. He flies planes now. My sister says he’s doing God’s work.
            The man starts to walk towards us, but the guard grunts. The man stops, taking something else from his pocket and throwing it over.
            It’s a wooden carving of a carp.
            'It was hers. You can have it.’
            'Won’t she want it back?’
            'No.’
            'Why?’
            'Don’t worry. Have it.’
            Then we leave. On the way home, we pass more men, brown shapes bent over in the fields. We collect armfuls of cowslips. I keep one to give to the man tomorrow.