A Life Eternal

by Richard Ayre

  ‘Did you ever marry?’ I asked him and, as I feared, he shook his head.

  ‘No. After Jane I sort of stopped bothering, really. I thought, well, what’s the point? I was happy enough here so I just kept the old place going and, when they offered to buy it and let me stay on indefinitely, I jumped at the chance. It’s not bad, you know. I still have my old bedroom and I get to wake up every morning to this.’ He swept an arm across the view from the window.

  A staff member brought us a pot of tea

  ‘Shall I be mother?’ asked Greene, and busied himself making two cups. He sipped from his and looked at me over the rim.

  ‘Now then, Sergeant. I believe you have some explaining to do.’

  He stared at me, keenly. I offered him a cigarette and we smoked in silence for a while. Where the hell would I start? He gave me an option.

  ‘I followed your progress,’ he said. ‘In those days, I had a bit of influence, as you know. I received reports about you over the years. I heard about your exploits in New York, working for that awful Irishman. That must have been exciting; I’ve seen lots of gangster films.’

  He flashed his dentures in a smile at me and then continued. ‘I know you were searching for something or someone after that when you went to France and Germany. I supposed it was that doctor, Valin, was his name?’ I nodded, listening carefully.

  ‘I heard about him as I kept my eye on you. I used my influence in the American Embassy to follow your progress. I had an uncle who worked for the Yanks and he told me about your exploits. He sent someone to come and see me once in, oh, what was it, forty-three, forty-four? During World War Two, anyway. I took an instant dislike to the fellow. Awful man. Smiled like he was supping sewage. Said he was a professor of such and such. Seemed very interested in your history.’

  I closed my eyes, momentarily. So now I knew how Pfumpf had first found me.

  ‘Anyway, as I’ve said, I’d been following your exploits. You see, I felt terrible about how I treated you, Rob. Simply terrible. I turned away a good friend for a woman who tossed me aside as soon as the better option turned up. She never loved me, and I think you knew that from the moment you met her. You were right and I was wrong.’

  He suddenly looked like a very old man indeed and his liver-spotted hand scrabbled for mine.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rob,’ he said, his eyes glistening. ‘I’m sorry for how I treated you. It was her I should have got rid of. Not you. Not you. Can you forgive me?’

  I swallowed hard and licked my lips. This man had saved my life on numerous occasions in our time together in those God-damned trenches.

  ‘Sir, you have nothing to apologise for. Nothing at all.’

  He nodded his thanks, taking a handkerchief and wiping his eyes.

  ‘I’ve prayed every night since then that I would meet you again one day so I could tell you that,’ he said. ‘And God has answered those prayers at last. Thank you, Rob. Thank you.’

  We both stared out of the window for a while, two old men from an era long gone, unwilling to show their emotions to the world. But I smiled to myself for all that. If he hadn’t let me go I would never have started down the road that led me to Madeleine. How could I be angry about that?

  ‘So you kept an eye on me?’ I prompted him, eventually.

  He nodded. ‘I knew something strange was going on with you. I saw the odd photograph over the years, and I saw you were not changing at all. I remembered your tale about the medic in France.

  ‘It’s my belief he did something to you, Rob. God knows what, but he did something to make you like this. Look at you! You’re exactly the same as you were all those years ago! How is that possible? Is he the same as you? Are there others?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m the way I am. You’re right, though: I think the Medic did do something to me. I don’t know what it was, or how he did it. But he made me like this, I’m sure of it. That Professor, Pfumpf, the man who came to see you, he caught up with me a couple of times. He tried to find out why as well, but he never did. He said Valin was like me.’

  I didn’t tell Greene that his interest in my life had almost caused the death of the only woman I’d ever loved, or about the months of pain under Pfumpf’s knife. He had simply been interested in an old friend. If he thought he had caused me any suffering, I think it would have killed him then and there.

  ‘I saw a photograph of that man, the Medic,’ I said. ‘In France. It was taken in the thirties and said his name was Liebnicht and that he was an Austrian Jew. But he was older than he had been at the church where I first met him, so he isn’t like me.’ I sighed. ‘I thought for a while he may have been, but he’s not. Whatever the hell I am, I believe I’m the only one of my kind.’

  Greene stared at me in wonder. He shook his head. ‘How can it be?’ he asked me. ‘How can you be like this? What is it like?’

  I decided not to tell him the truth about this.

  He told me he’d followed Valin’s movements as well as mine, but found, like me, that the trail went cold in 1936 when Valin had apparently returned to Austria.

  So Pfumpf had lied about that too. He hadn’t known anything about the Medic. His promises to help me find another like me were based on nothing but lies and hearsay, a name picked up from his conversations with Greene. He had never known where Valin was. It didn’t really surprise me.

  I didn’t want to discuss the Medic anymore, so we spent the rest of the afternoon just talking about our time in the war and what we had done since. I didn’t tell him everything, and I certainly didn’t say anything about the encroaching cold darkness that I felt creeping through me like a shadow. A man as sunny and engaging as him would never have understood. I did tell him about Madeleine, however, and, strangely, saying her name didn’t hurt when I was discussing her with a friend.

  As the sun was lowering through the window, I finally stood to leave and, to my surprise, Greene hugged me as a father would hug his son.

  ‘I’m sorry for you, Rob,’ he said. ‘I hope you find yourself some peace. I believe you are the saddest man I have ever known.’

  I nodded slowly. I believed he was right. I smiled at him, shook his hand and left Longwood for the last time, walking back to the village.

  I was still alone, still no further forward. My future was still an open road with no ending yet in sight, and my feelings towards humanity were still as depressing and disinterested as usual.

  But Jonathon Greene, like Madeleine, had shown me that not all human life was a waste. Even though Jane had turned out as I knew she would, even though he’d spent his entire life in one place, he was still a good man. A good friend. Perhaps the only friend I had left in the world.

  When I closed my eyes that night, I dreamed, as I usually did, of Madeleine.

  And this time, the dreams comforted me.

  XXI

  I spent the rest of the seventies and all of the eighties alone again. I didn’t think I had any choice.

  Jonathon Greene, the last person to know my real identity, the last person to know me, died in May 1984 and I returned to Hampshire for his funeral, although I didn’t go back to Longwood. I stood at the back of the church, knowing my secret had died with him. Nobody else knew about me. Pfumpf, for all his talk of secret government agencies, had been nothing but a liar, a man out only for himself, and had obviously not disclosed his secret quest for me to anyone else. The thought that I wasn’t on any sort of “hit list” did nothing except make me feel even lonelier.

  When everyone had gone, I went and stood by Greene’s grave, remembering the short time we’d had together. Our friendship had been forged in battle and hardship, and we had relied on each other completely. I had fought another war after that, and I didn’t believe either of them had made one bit of difference. New wars continued to come and go.

  America had only pulled itself out of Vietnam nine years before, the UK had gone to the Falklands, and the Soviets were
now in Afghanistan where more men were killing and dying with a depressing regularity. Conflict seemed to be the norm for the shallow creatures I shared the planet with.

  But Greene had been someone to whom war had been abhorrent. He had fought because he believed it had to be done and, thankfully, he had survived the following conflicts. He had been blessed with the good death he deserved, tucked up in his bed in the house that had meant so much to him. Greene had been a true warrior. A true friend.

  A single tear trickled down my cheek as I pulled myself to attention and saluted his grave.

  I stayed in Britain but I kept moving around. I couldn’t remain in one place longer than a few years as my continual youth would always start to bring about questions. I worked at all sorts of jobs.

  I was a taxi driver in Coventry, I worked as a gardener in Manchester. I did anything that did not require too many background checks and I never stayed in each job long. I saved my money over the years and my old French bank account continued to add up the small amount of interest from the sale of the cottage back in the early seventies, as well as the money left over from Wall Street. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to get by, which was all I could ask for. I just existed: a part of, but apart from, humanity.

  I wandered eternally. I lived in cities and towns and villages. I watched the humans around me going about their ordinary, useless lives and my disdain of them grew by the day.

  I watched with a cold indifference as the eighties ended and the Cold War spluttered out of existence. Gorbachev was voted out and Yeltsin was voted in. Previous to this, I had seen the crowds cheering as the Berlin Wall came down. It seemed to mean a lot to the people cheering, but as usual it all meant nothing to me.

  But I should have taken more notice. Because the collapse of the USSR opened up an opportunity for me. Eventually, after decades of fruitless searching, it led me to the Medic.

  *

  I’ve said before that, when I was wandering around, I had to limit myself to Western Europe. This wasn’t strictly true, of course. One could travel across the so-called Iron Curtain back then, but you needed permits and visas, that sort of thing. There was no way I was going to try that: the identities I had created for myself would never have withstood the scrutiny. So I had contented myself with the West.

  However, now that the Curtain was no more, I felt the wanderlust fall upon me again. I had a passport, this time in the name of John Foster. His was the identity I had taken. He had never existed, but I had concocted a National Insurance number and, as well as a passport, I had acquired a driving licence and everything else I needed. It wasn’t all that difficult, even in the early nineties. So I could travel. And travel I intended to do.

  In the summer of 1992 I took a flight to Moscow, Russia. For half my life the Cold War had been a background noise heard on the radio, but I had never been to the capital of the now former USSR. I had never even met a Russian before, even during World War Two when we had been allies, and now that travel was easier I decided to visit the Russian capital and see what, if anything, it could offer my broken humanity.

  It was not, in hindsight, the best time to go.

  I took a taxi from the airport, passing the parliament buildings where, the year before, Yeltsin had stood on a tank and demanded the release of Gorbechev from a last-ditch coup attempt by the hardliners trying to preserve the former USSR. Outside my hotel, the homeless seemed legion, and the faces of the people on the streets were gaunt and blank. The populace seemed to be trying to come to terms with the collapse of the USSR, and Yeltsin’s government didn’t seem to know how to make it better for them.

  In attempting to “free” the economic market in the January of 1992, Yeltsin had made a huge mistake. The state-run system that had existed for so long under the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev was in no condition to be changed so quickly and so radically. Hyperinflation, matching even that of Germany in the 1920s, ravaged the country. Unemployment surged. The Russia I experienced seemed mortally wounded by things it didn’t really understand, and a malaise of unease and fear seemed to hang across the city of Moscow.

  Undaunted, I visited the cathedral of St Basil and gazed down at the brown and waxy visage of Lenin in Red Square. His embalmed corpse seemed to me to be a reflection of the city around him. He, like me, was a relic from the past, lost in a frightening and unknown future.

  I found that Russia did nothing to change the rising darkness of my soul. I tried to interest myself in its culture and history, but it was useless. Everything still bored me. Everything was still a waste of time. Moscow’s broken people seemed to reflect back at me my broken soul, and all my visit did was make me even colder towards the humanity around me. I was totally and utterly alone in this world, surrounded by a species I was truly beginning to hate. Going to Russia was a huge mistake and I left after less than a week.

  I headed for the sun. I flew to Greece and got myself a summer job on the quays of Piraeus, offloading fish and octopus for the restaurants of Athens. After a year or two I went to Turkey and once more made a meagre living making and selling my little wooden toys. I wandered and wandered, never settling, never happy. Every single person I encountered looked upon me with revulsion and fear. The blackness of my condition seemed to be emanating from me more and more, and the ordinary humans who came across me recognised that there was something very wrong with me. Something alien and repellent. I think I frightened every single person that I met.

  By the summer of 1996 I had exhausted any interest I had in anything. I was unmoved and uncaring. Nothing I saw elicited any kind of response within my blackened soul and the darkness swamped me. It was even worse than my time in Africa during the war. I was almost totally de-humanised, and even the realisation that this was so did nothing to make me want to change. I existed only in a world of simmering hatred towards humanity.

  However, one August morning I awoke in the hostel I was living in and realised that I hadn’t dreamed of Madeleine as I usually did. With a rising horror I realised I hadn’t even thought of her in months, and this in turn brought a shocking revelation within me. Was I becoming so cold that even Madeleine’s memory would be lost to me? Would the darkness just get bigger and bigger and drown her memory from my mind forever? I felt a huge wave of shame that her beauty and love and devotion, her very memory, was being thrown away by me. How could I do that to her?

  It was then and there, in a dirty, cockroach-infested hostel in Istanbul, where I swore to myself I would not let that happen. I would make sure that some form of humanity remained in me, even if it was just enough to keep the memory of my beloved Madeleine close.

  I looked at the date on my watch and an idea of how I might do this came to me. I nodded to myself. I had been thinking about it for a while and now the idea seemed apt. There was a big anniversary coming up in my life, and I now knew what I wanted to do with it. I would spend the day of my hundredth birthday at the sight of the worst atrocity mankind has ever seen. I would visit Auschwitz.

  This may seem a rather macabre birthday wish, and in a lot of ways it is. But I had fought in both of the wars of that century. I had seen death and destruction on a massive scale. I had fought against the Nazis and everything they had stood for.

  Like everyone after the war, Madeleine and I had watched in revulsion as the footage came back from places like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I had known what horrors man could inflict upon his fellow man; I’d seen it with my own eyes. But the images we saw then… There are some things that stay with you more than others and those bodies, those pathetic, stick-thin, mannequin-like bodies being bulldozed into their final resting places: that was one of them. It was unbelievable

  It was life and death, you see. I had lived, they had died.

  Because of a whim, a twist of some invisible string, I had been turned into something indestructible. Those poor people had lost everything. Their homes, their families, their hope and their lives. They had been exterminated on an industrial scale a
nd I wondered at the mentality that would allow this to happen: indeed, to be part of. I wondered if the darkness within me could lead to horror such as that. And the idea terrified me.

  So I would go to Poland and to Auschwitz, not only to see for myself what I had fought against and won. But also to see if I cared.

  Although visits to the camp had been available for Westerners before the breakup of the USSR, I had never tried to go. It had, of course, been compulsory for the schoolchildren of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, where it had been used as propaganda against the West. But by 1996 it was open to everyone and tickets were available to buy from street vendors on the streets of Krakow. So on the sixth of August 1996, a one-hundred-year-old man looking like a boy named John Foster climbed aboard a rusting coach and travelled to the camp.

  We pulled up outside Auschwitz I. The more infamous Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, was a couple of miles down the road. Where we stopped had once been a Polish Army barracks which the Nazis had converted into a camp when they invaded. It was now the main museum of the Holocaust.

  The tickets included a guide who would show us around. She was a middle-aged woman whose father had actually been interred at the camp. She knew what she was talking about and spoke in a matter-of-fact way that somehow perfectly encapsulated the horror of what had gone on there.

  We wandered through the camp. It was strange to be there in high summer with the hot sun on my face, as most of the footage I had seen was from when the camp had been liberated by the Soviet army, back in the snowy January of 1945. There were trees lining the barracks and the warm air glowed gently on the brickwork. It was actually rather pleasant to start with.

  The guide led my group with through the infamous gates with its legend of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ forged in wrought iron above it. We stopped at various different places, being shown where prisoners were tortured, where prisoners were hanged, where prisoners were shot. She showed us a room where human hair had been piled up to the roof and old, rusted spectacle frames sat tangled together, the last remains of people who had once lived and loved and smiled and wept but who were now long gone. I began to wish I hadn’t gone.