A Feather on the Water(36)

Five minutes passed. Then ten. When there was still no sign of anyone emerging, Martha opened the door and peered inside. There was no one to be seen. The doors of the two cubicles were still shut. They must both be ill, she thought, to still be in there after all this time. She made her way past the urinals and the water pump and knocked softly on one of the doors.

“?le si? czujesz?” Are you unwell? It was one of the phrases she’d picked up from Delphine.

There was no reply. No sound at all from either of the cubicles. Martha racked her brains for more words. “Potrzebujesz pomocy?” Do you need help?

Still nothing. Could Corporal Brody have been mistaken, she wondered? Had he imagined seeing the two old ladies? Gingerly, she pushed open the door. She gasped at the sight of a hunched seated figure with a shawl pulled over the head.

“Oh my God!” Martha’s first thought was that the poor woman had died of shock when Brody’s boot had forced the door. Instinctively she reached out, pulling back the shawl. But what she revealed was not a woman’s face. What she was staring at was the whiskery snout of a pig.



“That’s unbelievable!” Delphine listened, open-mouthed, as Martha related the story.

“Quite brilliant, really,” Martha said. “Honestly, they were so lifelike. Whoever did it had put long skirts on the carcasses to cover the trotters, then swathed them in shawls so the heads were in shadow. You should have seen Corporal Brody’s face—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man blush like that.”

“What did he say when he found out it was the pigs in disguise?”

“I haven’t told him. I’m going to keep it quiet for now. The fewer people that know, the better. It’s such a battle getting the food quota from the local farmers—if word got around that our DPs were stealing . . .”

“I see what you mean.” Delphine nodded. “In some ways, you can’t blame them for it; the meat we’ve been getting is all bone and gristle. But what about the farmer who made the complaint? What will you say to him?”

“I’m going to send Corporal Brody around to tell him we searched the place but found nothing. That’s not a lie, as far as Brody’s concerned. He’ll take a couple of hundred cigarettes from the warehouse as a peace offering. Hopefully, that’ll calm things down.”

“And the pigs?”

“They’re in the kitchens, being cooked as we speak. It would be wicked to waste that meat—but only the women and children will get to eat it. You see, I don’t know for sure who stole the animals. It was the only retribution I could think of, apart from cutting the cigarette ration to blockhouse five to allow for what we’re giving the farmer.”

“How will you stop it from happening again?”

“I don’t know. That pork would have been worth a lot on the black market. I just hope the fact that the carcasses have been confiscated will put off whoever was responsible. They took a big risk, sneaking onto the farm. If the farmer had spotted them, they could have been shot.”

“It’s like the war’s still going on,” Delphine said. “Germans versus Poles, but now it’s food they’re fighting for. And we’re stuck in the middle.”

“It’s so hard, trying to be fair to everybody.” Martha shook her head. “I guess we’re just making it up as we go along, and it isn’t easy to know if you’re getting it right.”

Making it up as we go along. Her words echoed in her head as she made her way to the clothing storeroom. She had to start sorting through the piles of coats, trousers, skirts, and sweaters the army had dumped there, work out if there was enough of everything to clothe the influx of new DPs who would be arriving any day.

The smell of stale sweat greeted her as she pushed open the door. Everything was going to need washing, and what couldn’t be washed was going to have to be hung out to air. It was going to be a mammoth task. The women in the laundry had enough to do, trying to keep up with the washing created by the people already in the camp. She was going to have to work out some way of getting hundreds of garments clean and dry before they ran out of time.

She leaned back against the wall, suddenly defeated. It wasn’t just the clothes. How were they going to stretch their meat supplies, which were already so pathetically inadequate, to feed yet more hungry DPs? What had she been thinking, coming here? Believing that she could help these people?

She’d come to Germany because she wanted to run away from home—from a life she could no longer tolerate. What would the families in the camp make of that? This was their reality: the cast-off clothes, the lack of decent food, the overcrowded blockhouses. It had been one thing to read about the war in the papers, quite another to find herself face-to-face with the men, women, and children who had suffered unimaginable horrors and had no home to return to.

She felt a powerful urge to cut and run: to pack her bags and leave. Now she understood why the spearhead team had deserted the place. It was too much. An impossible task. The realization made her legs crumple under her. She slid down the wall and slumped onto the cold concrete floor. She felt paralyzed. Tears blurred her vision. She tried to blink them away. A sea of brown met her eyes. She saw that it wasn’t clothes, but boots. Dozens and dozens of pairs of army boots, stacked beneath the tables. Most were caked in desiccated mud. And some were smeared and spattered with something else. As she stared, she realized the dark stains were dried blood.