The time she devoted to earning her degree had produced some tension in her marriage, Gordon not quite understanding her quest and sometimes finding the demands of her schedule inconvenient. He was not a temperamental artist, as some of his colleagues tended to be, but he did work in great sweeps, ideas and solutions coming to him in a giant, profuse draft. He objected to anything that interfered with him giving himself over to this force, uninterrupted, hour upon hour, believing that if he missed the creative moment that offered a brilliant path forward, he was not guaranteed that it would return in just the same way. Beryl found this notion a bit silly, as if the muse of architectural creativity stamped her foot and left the room if one weren’t paying sufficient attention. Gordon loved his new son, but sometimes found himself at a loss when the baby screeched and yammered when Gordon attempted to work. More than once in those early years, he had looked at Beryl, beseeching her to quiet him; more than once, she had suggested he scoop up the baby and take him out for a stroll so she could complete preparations for an upcoming clinical. Colin’s paternal grandparents were of no help, in part because Gordon’s father suffered frail health but more significantly, because they came from an older, more formal world that left them innately uncomfortable with the unpredictability of young children.

  “But, Beryl, I have a deadline,” Gordon pleaded one morning, when Colin was just beginning to toddle around the flat, happily yanking newspapers and ashtrays and cups of tea off table tops, his parents ill-prepared for his sudden mobility. “My client must see these drawings very soon and I cannot concentrate with Colin bashing about.”

  “My darling,” she responded, hands on hips, approaching him at his table. “Shall I say it another time? I have deadlines as well that I complete in and around caring for the baby. You have an office to flee to during the week—hours of blissful quiet that I seldom enjoy. When you are home, you can hardly expect me to manufacture the quiet of a library.”

  “Why, though, are you devoting this much of your time and energy to this? Do you truly plan to work as a nurse one day? I can’t see it—and I do not mean that unkindly, Beryl, because I know you are capable. But now that we’ve a child…”

  She looked at Gordon and heaved an indulgent sigh. Her beautiful, imaginative, mildly self-involved husband.

  “Whether or not I eventually work out in the world, I love every bit of this learning—the depth of it and all it requires of me. It assures me that I measure up to you. I don’t want to become my mother—sociable and complaisant, yes, that’s the good part, but a lady of leisure who can’t even hold a conversation over dinner about what’s happening in Europe. You have work that stretches and challenges you; this challenges me and I hope keeps you from growing weary of me.”

  “Now that’s an impossibility, love,” he said, placing his hands on either side of her familiar, cherished face—the deep green eyes, the swirl of dark hair. From the start, he had liked how she stood up for herself, how funny she could be and quite naughty, too, spiking the punchbowl at parties, marrying him despite family misgivings, letting the nanny go. And now here she was doing it again. He deserved exactly this. “You’ve got me. Forever. Yes, I do love your smart brain. It attracts me, gets me juices going, all that sensuous grey matter swirling around in there, winking at me. And I love what’s right beneath it,” he said, placing a kiss on each eyelid, then her freckled nose, then her full, smiling lips.

  Gordon became more comfortable as the years passed and Colin grew conversant, thoughtfully reflective, and curious about how the world around him functioned—how it all fit together. Now it was the father, when they gathered at night for dinner, who rambled on and on about the marvels of this child—about their conversation just that afternoon that revealed insight advanced for a child his age, supported by an expansive vocabulary Gordon suspected was quite, quite unusual.

  “Yes, love, Colin’s a real boy now!” Beryl had chided, and they’d laughed at this change of roles, Gordon utterly besotted as Beryl had been when Colin was tiny, both now enthralled with this little family they formed.

  Gordon’s work had been well received, and he progressed through the firm, taking on projects that challenged and satisfied his considered talent. But then this. He was conscripted soon after war was declared and deployed with the British Expeditionary Force to France, quickly promoted to lieutenant thanks in part to an education that included a working knowledge of German. But his service was short-lived; his battalion was surrounded by German troops at Calais. He was declared missing, the War Office at first only able to tell her he’d not been among those evacuated out of Dunkirk. And then, months later, a letter arrived from the Red Cross, affirming his registration at a POW camp in Germany. She’d received one other letter since, a note in Gordon’s own hand.

  I think of you in the garden in the warm evenings and know you’ll be glad of my comfort when you do so. We are busy within and without, with industrious schedules meant to secure our ongoing health and wellbeing in this novel acreage of the German Reich.

  It sounded translated from some ancient language. No concern expressed for Colin, no inquiries about her work, their friends, her parents. Nothing specifically about Gordon himself. But in these few words, the stilted syntax, she recognized he was advising her to stay in the Anderson shelter—it would comfort him, he was saying, to think of her protecting herself this way. The next tortured sentence could mean various things—that the prisoners travelled outside their camp to jobs somewhere, or that they were working on something significant within the confines of the camp. By “health,” Beryl feared he meant that doing precisely as the schedule dictated was his best hedge against being shot dead. It was clear he was housed in newly acquired territories outside the former boundaries of Germany.

  The Germans work relentlessly with keen commitment and without fatigue in the rolling hills and the beautifully constructed industrial factories, overseeing the trains that bring new residents to homes of necessary work.

  “Homes of necessary work?” How had that slipped past the German censors? Work camps, he must mean. But what other point was he trying to make? What else had he hidden in his apparent compliment of the German work ethic? Reading and re-reading, she concluded he was saying the Nazis were primed and prepared for this war and would not give up easily. He was in the countryside but aware of churning factories nearby. They were building new structures across the conquered countries, probably. Trains transporting “new residents”—did he mean more POWs? French troops, probably, captured in the fall of Paris. Most disheartening of all, he did not sign his notes with any profession of love, which is what she needed from him most of all. He closed with a simple “Yours, Gordon.” She worried he was suffering—either psychologically or physically or both and this odd prose was a way to convey this to her, that he was alive, but not well.

  Running late now, she returned the marmalade to the larder, gathered her things, saluted her cat, and headed out the door. As she pulled her key from the lock, the air raid siren sounded. Should she head back through the flat to the garden? No, she decided. Better to walk to the Tube station and wait there until the all-clear.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Comparison is the thief of joy.

  –Theodore Roosevelt

  Inside the Reich

  When Gordon recalled their naïve, shared hope at the moment of defeat at Calais, hope for a quick repatriation and resolution to the European conflict, he felt both foolish and ashamed: foolish for misjudging Germany’s vast ambitions so completely and somewhat embarrassed that his country—wholly triumphant in The Great War—had been so ill-prepared to take on this one, facts both dependent and related. England and America, too, had done their best to ignore Hitler’s bellicosity and the dwindling freedom within his borders, as if not discussing it diminished the threat. Gordon was privately ashamed of himself too—and he was not alone in this—for not acquitting himself better in France or at least escaping after capture. Again and again, the Calais survivors replayed with one another the pivotal sequence that led to their internment two and half years ago: how the Nazis had pushed them to the coast, bombed them mercilessly, and cut them off. Which British military genius had made the call that allowed their lethal isolation? The saving grace for the captives was learning much later that their capitulation, the delay it had caused in the progress of the Panzers, had led to the evacuation at Dunkirk that saved countless Allied lives.

  Gordon and those who survived the trip from France were housed first at a camp at Sandbostel, where daily they were tantalized by the sounds of townspeople outside the gates, greeting one another as they went about their business, the happy shouts of children pedaling bicycles to school, living ordinary lives, as if there weren’t prisoners of war housed in the barracks plainly visible through the barbed wire. And perhaps that explained why Gordon and his fellow prisoners were transported after a year to a more remote outpost. They were now encamped in Sagan, once a Polish town but now firmly in German control, residents of Stalag-Luft III.

  If an Allied POW, a guest of the Reich, didn’t die of malnourishment accelerated by dysentery that suddenly, spasmodically emptied his bowels, depleting him of the minerals needed to keep a heart beating—or if he did not contract TB or typhus—the next mortal threat was the overwhelming boredom that could cause a man to lose his mind and try to make a break for freedom. It had happened twice in Sagan that Gordon had witnessed, the failed escapees mown down by machine gun fire from the guard tower when they tried to get up and over the small section of fence that could not electrocute them. There was a deadening sameness to these days; standing in formation at Appell morning, noon, and night as each name was called and camp rules reiterated; daily rations of barley water the Germans had the nerve to call soup and the hard, black, rocks they called bread; the unremitting stench that overspread the camp thanks to latrines that spilled their contents with every hard rain. Was combat worse than this suspended animation? Gordon wondered. At least in battle, he’d been on the move, headed somewhere, even if it was headlong into enemy fire.

  The most sanguine and respected among the prisoners were those who did not constantly yearn for the world outside the barbed wire even as they expended considerable mental energy devising ways to rejoin it. It was their sworn duty as soldiers to try to escape. Gordon coped by organizing his day in much the same way he had before the war, as a span of time in which he had assignments to accomplish, appointments to keep. His ability to compartmentalize, to identify then accomplish small objectives, kept him from despairing at the big picture—endless captivity and no control over his life. Gordon rose before dawn and stood for roll call, his only goal to cooperate and get on to breakfast. He ate his rations without acknowledging the foul taste and the lack of calories and nutrients that had caused his body to soften and shrink. With fellow prisoners, he peeled potatoes, swept the barracks, and cleaned latrines as ordered. He took his exercise around the perimeter of the camp, although his jog had become a walk, and now that walk was slowing. Once in a while, he joined in the soccer games in the main yard, a useful interval for exchanging information unnoticed but still perilous, given the rocky, uneven yard that challenged even the best athletes. A deep gash in a shin or a broken ankle could bring fatal complications.

  Only briefly, before he fell asleep at night, did Gordon permit himself to contemplate his family. He read and re-read the handful of letters he’d received via the Red Cross, then pictured Beryl’s smiling green eyes, mirrored in their son’s, both of their noses surely covered with a spate of freckles by this time of year, both with dark curls atop their heads, Beryl’s more unruly and untamed—an ongoing frustration to her—and Colin’s clipped shorter as a young boy’s should be. Young boy. He was 13 now. Three years since they had said their goodbyes. Gordon closed his eyes and prayed, begging God to protect them from harm and beseeching the Almighty to end this war before his son had to join the fight.

  Then, with effort, he pivoted from these dangerous thoughts, away from the black whirlpool of loss and loneliness, the Charybdis that could pull him under. It would not serve him to grow despondent here. It would lead to death. So, in the stinking darkness, his prayers concluded and snores filling the barracks, he applied his concentration instead to all he had observed that day—new and recurring patterns in the movement of the guards throughout the camp, in the operation of the electrified fence, in the times of day when the gate swung wide. He drew conclusions and made mental notes of those things he would share with his superiors.

  The prisoners were mostly segregated by nationality and rank and spent the bulk of their hours in the company of the two dozen men housed in their barracks. The regular Heer officers showed begrudging respect for the senior Allied prisoners; they communicated news and revised policies through the top British flag officer, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Leonard, observing their enemy’s military chain of command. When a POW was to be punished for a perceived infraction—late for Appell, failure to properly clean latrine spillage from a walkway, or simple intransigence—their commanding officer was notified before the offender served his sentence, usually a span of days in a locked cell on even more limited rations. But while the regular military observed the broad outlines of the Hague Conventions, the Waffen-SS, Gordon observed, were uniformed thugs; wild-eyed, fervent believers who lived to demonstrate their singular dedication to the Party even if that meant ignoring universal military protocol and policy. The Waffen-SS came regularly to review camp operations and invariably found grievous issues they insisted be addressed immediately. Whether they expressed their displeasure to the camp commandant was unclear. Their preferred moment to notify the captives was at the final Appell, of the day, when the POWs were the most tired, the most irritated, when their fuses were shortest and they tended toward despair. Properly baited, any one of them could have a fatal overreaction as an SS-Standartenführer stood in front of them, toe to toe, barking incomprehensible orders in their percussive German, spittle landing on the prisoner’s cheek or in his eye. More than one POW had moved to strike his interlocutor, earning jail time or worse, depending on the mood of the visiting officer. Gordon took satisfaction knowing the SS’s lack of soldierly discipline and impulsive decisions would quickly thin their ranks and cost additional German lives. At least he hoped so. It heartened him to think of the lot of them continuing on in this war, officers promoted not because of their astute minds but party purity. As they preened in their ribbon-covered uniforms, the lightning bolt emblems on their hats and lapels signifying their vaunted positions, Gordon prayed each one would make spectacularly stupid decisions that would accelerate their undoing.

  On one late-spring day, the prisoners were ordered to gather in the wide yard at the back of the camp, an occurrence that often coincided with the arrival of new POWs. A Nazi garden party, the long-timers had taken to calling it. The first time they were invited to such a soiree, the men had been reticent to leave their bunks, concerned they were furnishing their captors an efficient opportunity to machine-gun them all at once. No, the camp commandant assured, it’s simply to allow for some housekeeping. The gathering meant the guards could make a thorough search of the POW quarters—all at once, no Kriegie interference. The camp guards were older, many slow-moving, too old to fight at the front but eager to be part of the war. Some limped noticeably or suffered other infirmities, but their hearts were true; they served the Fatherland with serious purpose. That is, except for the Poles conscripted into this service. Having survived the Blitzkrieg, now adapting to the occupation, Gordon observed the Poles’ loyalties shifted as opportunities presented themselves. They obeyed the Germans to keep their families safe. But in exchange for cigarettes and chocolate—which they consumed away from the camp so the Germans did not see—they furnished certain essentials for the prisoners’ wellbeing. There was the bucket in which the prisoners cooked their Kriegie hooch, fermenting raisins that arrived in the Australians’ Red Cross packages to make a horrible-looking cocktail with a gratifying alcoholic kick. The Poles had smuggled the two-gallon bucket in for them, hiding it underneath the barracks’ floorboards. But that was just the beginning. For the right price, they secured thread and buttons and bits of fabric to help transform military uniforms into civilian clothes, blank paper of just the right sheen and weight that forgers could transform into documents for escapees, and odds and ends like coiled wire for the current project: constructing a radio receiver. The newest POWs would likely have something to contribute; fliers were trained, as they bailed from their aircraft, to grab a tiny piece of something useful and shove it up a nasal passage or elsewhere, so deep that it would remain undiscovered even in a strip-search. When the German guards planned a camp-wide sweep, the Poles, from all appearances, supported the search in helpful and efficient ways: in actuality, they stayed ahead of their German colleagues, removing contraband before the guards arrived, and relocating it to barracks that had already been searched.

  For the prisoners, the garden party was a spirit-lifting reunion that let them remember themselves, let them recall and reclaim their identities as husbands and fathers and brothers—as men. Hope was renewed and contained within each healthy, unfamiliar face—most of them airmen shot down over Germany or France, a few captured in the African hostilities—not yet dead-eyed and thinned out, men still vigorous and relieved to be among the living, flesh and blood proof that the Allies were still fighting this war. Americans were now filtering into the camps, young bomber pilots and gunners forced to unceremoniously exit their burning aircraft under withering German fire, leaving compatriots dead in blood-spattered turrets. The long-timers—ranking officers first—encircled the new arrivals to absorb the latest news of the war. The Americans, they learned, were taking over RAF bases in East Anglia, but their early bombing runs had been near-disasters with unsustainable losses of aircraft and men. But at least America was in the fight now. That would surely turn the tide, Gordon and the others believed, or slow the Germans, anyway. What was Churchill’s plan, now that the Americans were in it? They sought news about their former air bases and questioned the new arrivals if they knew how this town or that village was getting on in the war. After the initial, consequential questions, they inevitably probed for that dearest bit of information—whether the new captive might know someone they knew. If, on the off-chance, they held a person in common, an authentic link to the world before the war.