C

by Tom McCarthy

  The nose wrinkles as the glasses slide down them again. “Well, I suppose, if you put it that way: yes.”

  The men in the Offizierslage are definitely free to queue-for food, mail, laundry, medical supplies or almost anything else. Queues form around the camp at the slightest provocation. One day, bored, Serge persuades two pilots to line up with him in front of the door to a coal cellar just for the hell of it: within five minutes twenty other men have fallen into line behind them without even asking what it is they’re queuing for. The food queues break down into two types: those for the camp food with which all prisoners are provided, and those for the food sent in Red Cross parcels to individuals and distributed among recipients’ compatriots. The French eat the best: their tables are adorned with marinated mackerel, cold chicken, foie gras, peas and ham, all sent in tins. The Russians eat the worst: sustained by nothing but dried fish, they spend their time and energy building a chapel with ad-hoc interior decorations. Serge visits it one day to find they’ve fashioned icons out of wood splinters and strips of cloth, using dirt, resin, wax and blood to paint emaciated saints with sorrowful faces: eyes turned ever upwards, importuning the skies for delivery, or at least for an explanation of their circumstances. The English are somewhere in between: they get sent tins of tongue, pork shoulder, broad beans, brawn, the odd plum pudding. All of them eat better than the guards, though, who are restricted to the very slop they serve out to the prisoners: turnip stew, broth with horse-meat in it, liquid cheese and nine-tenths of a loaf of black bread every week. They’re visibly hungry. They make the prisoners kick back a little of their Red Cross supplies, but know better than to demand too high a cut: the parcels would stop coming if they did…

  It’s not just the guards who are hungry: townspeople habitually gather beneath a third-floor dormitory window overlooking Hammelburg’s “free” sector to beg food from the prisoners, who toss hunks of their regulation black bread to them. Sometimes they’ll throw in a chunk of meat, wrapping it in paper after removing it from its tin. The tins themselves they never throw: these are precious.

  “Why?” asks Serge as a lieutenant holds his wrist back when he makes to chuck one from the window on his first day in the camp.

  “Tunnelling,” the lieutenant nods back at him.

  “You do that here too?”

  “All the time, young fellow, all the time: what keeps us sane.”

  He’s not overstating the amount of time spent tunnelling-although whether it keeps them sane or not is another question. On Serge’s very first evening, and all subsequent ones, as soon as roll-call has been taken and the lights turned out, the men, moving with balletic deftness, cover the window with a blanket, light several candles, remove a bed from the room’s corner, lift up two of the floorboards beneath it and, tying a long cord around the designated tunneller’s feet, send him head-first into the hole armed with two empty tins to dig with. As the roll-call’s fall and cadence is repeated in the dorms along the corridor one after the other, fainter and fainter every time, they watch the cord worming its way into the ground-two cords: a second, smaller string held in the burrower’s hand is attached, Ting-a-Ling-style, to a third tin that’s perched on a shelf back in the room. If the tunnel collapses or the tunneller begins to faint, he pulls on this, the tin falls and his comrades yank him back, feet first. That’s the idea, at least. Yet more tins, bases all removed, have been laced together to form a loose tube: this is shoved down the hole as far as it will go, to provide air in the manner of a snorkel. It amuses Serge to see the vegetables on the tins’ labels heading into the ground, in a long column, one after the other-as though, having shed the grit and lowness of their origins, become refined to the point of weightless, bulkless images, they’d now come full circle and were sinking back down to rejoin their dirty, material roots. The sound of hacking, scraping and panting spills from the tube’s opening into the room’s air; some tunnellers sing quietly to themselves, or strike up strange, subterranean monologues whose sense, if they had any in the first place, is distorted beyond any comprehension by the hollowed-out reaches along which they travel.

  “Where does this tunnel go?” Serge asks one night as a man they all, despite his shortness, call “Lofty” toils away beneath them.

  “Go?” the dormitory captain, a colonel named Craddock, counters.

  “Where will it come out?”

  “That’s proscribed knowledge. Escapee Committee take care of all that. They dispense info on a firm need-to-know basis.”

  “Shouldn’t it be ‘Escaper Committee’?” Serge asks. “I mean, strictly speaking, the prison is the escapee, the thing escaped from. We’re escapers-and in fact not even that, not having yet escaped. More like escaper-aspirants. Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”

  “That’s proscribed knowledge too.”

  “You mean you’ve never met them?”

  “I’ll have passed them in the square, chatted with them, played cards and so on. Perhaps we even share this dormitory with one or more of them. But their identity qua Escapee Committee members is at all times and in every circumstance withheld.”

  “Then how do you know which direction to dig in?”

  “It’s communicated to us via intermediaries, on a need-to-know basis, as I intimated. The committee have it all worked out: I’ve heard they’ve got a chart of all the gas-pipes, sewers and what have you, and are using those as guidelines-following them, crossing them, whatever. There’s a logic to it all…”

  The man listening at the door hisses and signals to them to restore the room to its original state. No sooner has the corner bed been slid back, candles snuffed out and men reinserted beneath sheets than a guard shuffles into the dorm and moves up and down the rows, counting heads. As he passes the bunk on whose top half Lofty should be lying, the man in the lower half pulls a string to make the dummy that’s been placed above him roll over in its sleep.

  “Did you see the way his hand flopped?” Craddock asks as soon as they’re all up and at it again. “Wasn’t realistic enough. We should stitch it to his face: that’s how people sleep.”

  “Or have another string to control the whole arm,” another man says.

  A third, spurred by talk of strings, retrieves the alarm-tin from its hiding spot beneath the bed and returns it to its shelf.

  “You okay down there, Lofty?” Craddock stage-whispers down the tube. He lowers his ear to it, then decides: “We’d better haul him up.”

  Lofty throws up across the floor when he emerges. Someone else goes down to bring up his loose earth, which they add to the mass stuffed in draws and cupboards, behind wall-panels, beneath other loose floorboards. As the weeks and months go by, it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out. Men throw up often when they emerge from the hole; several of them, over time, become too scared to tunnel. Not Serge: he likes being down there, for one reason more than any other: it’s the only place in camp where he can masturbate. There’s nowhere else you get the requisite solitude. He wonders if the others do that too: wonders if that’s what lies behind the panting, or if the murmurs unravelling along the breathing tube are fragments of dialogues held in the dark with soft, imaginary mistresses…

  He never gets brought face-to-face in full awareness with an Escapee (“Escape,” he realises as spring runs into summer, would have avoided the inaccuracies of that term) Committee member, and by autumn has started harbouring doubts about their existence. Their logic, if there is one, is skewed: tunnels frequently run headlong into impassable sunken metal joists, or into one another, or surface in other dormitories, or even, on more than one occasion, cause small sections of the cobbled square to collapse while prisoners and guards are standing on it. One tunnel still in progress in November, not originating in his room, is rumoured among the inmates of several dormitories to have breached the camp’s wire fence, although nobody will say which dorm it leads out of, where and when i
t will eventually surface or who will exit the camp through it-facts that lead Serge to suspect that it, too, might be no more than a collective daydream. He never finds out whether or not he’s right: in February, by which time not a single prisoner has managed to escape, he’s transferred to another camp.

  This new one’s several hundred miles away, in Berchtesgaden. He’s moved around by rail again, one train after the other. The landscape changes: lowlands criss-crossed by canals give over to ravines along which brooks sparkle and fall. Sheep and cows become lopsided, grazing on sharp inclines; the shuffle and click of soldier columns is replaced by solitary figures weaving their way down hillside paths towards small stations, heading back from leave. The train starts groaning as it strains against the gradient; its puffs grow shorter and more frequent, as though it were running out of breath, which it could well be: the air does seem thinner. More refined too: Serge misses the smell of smoke, of oil and tar…

  The Offizierslage in Berchtesgaden turns out to be just beyond it, separated by a stretch of rocky scrubland from the village above which it perches: used to be a monastery, one of the guards tells him. The guards here are more on-the-ball than their Trier counterparts. The officers are sharper too, but not unfriendly. The Feldwebel runs a bridge club composed mainly of his prisoners, jovially telling them they’d better not escape as it would break the fours up. He even lets them leave the camp-but only on parole. The parole system’s so absurd and contradictory it could have been devised by one of Moreton’s philosophers: prisoners are handed their freedom on condition they won’t use it, and must pledge to this condition with their word-whence the convention’s name. They trade this word against a pass that’s issued to them at the front gate as they leave; on returning an hour or so later, they hand the pass back, and their word becomes their own again. For Serge, the whole practice belongs to the same order as the sleeping dummy: it’s as though, each time he takes the word-card out, he duplicates himself and leaves a double behind as a marker. Or perhaps the other way round: he’s the double, his sensations and encounters as he wanders round the village and the fields no more than dummy ones, hallucinations given the air of veracity by contractual and linguistic strings. He even dreams once that he’s strolling around an airfield nestled in the monastery’s shadow (in reality there is none), climbing into a machine, taxiing across the grass-all perfectly legitimately, sanctioned by parole-then, as he takes off, trying to explain to some vague, airborne invigilator that the word, the word, has altered, and now lies back in the camp with his stuffed simulacrum, leaving him at liberty to fly back to the front. The invigilator, still faceless, asks what the new word (password? keyword? call sign? it’s not clear) is, posing the question by quietly whispering: “Kennscht mi noch?”

  One day, during the second spring of his captivity, American prisoners arrive in the camp. They receive much better parcels than the others: salami from New York, ground beef from Chicago, endless medical supplies. Serge sets about befriending their dispensing medical officer, and trades several jars of honey and crab-apple jelly sent to him from Versoie against phials of diacetylmorphine.

  “You like your sister, huh?” the dispensing officer, a Barney from Queens, New York, joshes him the third time he negotiates a trade-off.

  “Sorry?” The question takes Serge aback.

  “It’s what the Negroes call it up in Harlem.”

  “Call what?”

  “This,” Barney answers, pointing at the phials. “Sister, dope, Big H: heroin. You don’t call it that here? I mean in England?”

  “No,” Serge answers him after a pause. “I don’t think we do.”

  The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once both perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gorse curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy…

  The tennis courts, or at least one of them, have some basis in reality: there’s one down in the village. Officers less lethargic than him play games on it regularly, while others look on, mingling with villagers whose resentment of the enemy’s been pushed to one side by their need for food. This suits the prisoners just fine: they trade some of their tins (useless for tunnelling in this rocky terrain) against civilian clothes, which they then smuggle back into the camp and mix and match in covert fashion shows conducted with a view to finding what the French officers call “un look” that will enable them to sneak past the gate wordlessly and uncontracted. Serge, happy to spend whole afternoons watching the ball arcing back and forth across the gridded net and bouncing among painted lines, gets charged one day with slipping some of these clothes on under his own, but, too lazy to take his shirt off, pulls them on over it instead, an oversight that results in him getting caught out at the gate and sent, sisterless, to solitary for two weeks.

  The first few days are dreadful, full of fits and fever. By the fifth these have subsided, leaving him wakeful and alert. He notices that two veins on his forearm have collapsed, like shallow tunnels. By the second week he feels quite good: resilient, self-sufficient-and besides, there are advantages to being alone. He spends the last three days of his confinement masturbating. There’s a smell that seeps from the cell’s walls, floor and ceiling when he does this, and only when he does: it’s musty, earthy, old but somehow fresh at the same time. Although he always starts out trying to picture Cécile-her back, the blind, the brass knobs of her bedstead, wobbling shadows on her wall and broken eggshells-these images soon give way to new ones of tunnels viewed from the interior, of fruit and vegetables being returned to earth, of tins with strings attached…

  By the time autumn’s come round again, the Lage’s guards have become lax. They start going around without their uniforms, in civvies. They don’t bother checking prisoners’ parole cards, instructing them instead to collect them from and slot them back into a set of pigeonholes outside their cabin. “Punching the parole clock,” the Americans call it. As the men sally out around the village, its inhabitants come up to them and, speaking in whispers even when there’s no one there to overhear them, say:

  “Kaiser kaput…”

  The officers start wearing civvies too. They appear in camp less and less frequently, then withdraw from it completely, leaving a dwindling number of guards behind. In late October it’s decided by someone or other, and communicated down to all the men, that the escape plan will be put into action. Two prisoners, dressed as local tradesmen, collars turned up to cover their faces, walk out of the gate. Not only does their exit go unchallenged, but their absence isn’t even noticed in the following days. Two more men leave, disguised as cooks; then three more, hauling rubbish bins; then four, got up as nothing in particular. Then there’s an exodus: men leave at will, realising that the remaining guards simply don’t care enough to stop them.

  Serge travels through the countryside with one other prisoner, a pilot from the 55th Squadron named Hodge. They stick to small paths and open fields, sleeping in ditches, pilfering from farmsteads clinging to the edge of hills: eggs, chickens, even dried maize. On the roads below them, they sometimes see troops marching away from the front. One day, they’re sitting on a wooded slope watching a battalion of infantry cross a river, waiting until they’ve disappeared so that they can cross it in the other direction, when a British aeroplane, an SE5, appears overhead and starts strafing the soldiers. They all run for cover: some of them duck beneath the bridge’s columns where these join the land; others throw their packs and rifles to the ground and plunge into the water; the majority of them, however, crawl up the very slope on which Serge and Hodge are sitting.

  �
�English Offiz-ee-er!” Hodge says, a tad unwisely given what’s just happened on the bridge, to the soldiers who surround them with bemused looks. No longer having guns to point at them, the soldiers just stand facing them, motionless. The sound of the SE5’s engine dwindles as it goes in search of other prey. A sergeant, one arm streaked with blood, shows up.

  “Wer sind die?” he barks at his men.

  The men repeat what Hodge has told them. The sergeant steps right up to Hodge and, with the arm that’s not hurt, pulls Hodge’s coat back. He lifts his jersey up, then tugs the shirt loose from his trousers.

  “Das ist keine Englische Uniform!” he growls.

  “What’s he saying?” Hodge asks Serge.

  “You’re not in uniform,” Serge translates for him.

  The injured sergeant looks at Serge, then yanks at his clothes too. He’s civvy-clad as well, cap-à-pied.

  “Deshalb sind sie Spione!” shouts the sergeant.

  “What’s he saying now?” Hodge asks.

  “He says we’re spies,” Serge tells him. “Technically, he’s right.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “I imagine we’ll be shot.”

  He’s spot on. The next morning, after being held in the same woods (the battalion camps there while it licks its wounds), Hodge and he are marched towards an area where the trees clear and the hillside flattens off.

  “A pleasant location,” Serge comments. They didn’t pass it on the way through the woods yesterday, despite coming from the direction in which it lies.

  Hodge doesn’t answer. He’s gone white. The sergeant who captured them presides over the ceremony. Still holding his bad arm in his good one, he orders his soldiers into line and, standing to the side of them, barks commands. As these mix with the click and shuffle of the rifles’ pins being pulled back, Serge experiences a familiar buzzing in his groin. He looks up. The trees’ trunks seem to incline slightly inwards as they rise. The sun’s out: blocked by the trunks in places, it casts shadows on the ground. Among the mesh of twigs and moss an insect’s moving, traversing the huge geometric patchwork of triangles and semi-circles formed by the alternating light and shade. At one point it pauses briefly, as though remembering something, and then trundles on. Finding its path barred a moment later at an obtuse angle by a twig that, to it, must seem as monumental as a fallen oak, the Käfer mounts this, then slips off again, then mounts once more. Watching it rise several times its own height, Serge gets a sense of elevation too: without leaving his body, he can look down on the whole scene. The arrangement of the soldiers, their position in relation to the clearing’s edge, the shapes formed by their planted feet, the angle of the guns against their shoulders: somehow it all makes sense. Seeing it this way, as though from above, appreciating all its lines and vectors, its vertical and horizontal axes, and at the same time from the only place from which he can see it, the spot to which he’s rooted, affords him, hand in hand with the feeling of rising, the vertiginous and pleasant sense of falling. It’s not just him; everything seems to be falling back into this moment, even the sky: a breeze is touching down now, making the trees rustle. From among the sound’s static there forms, like a clear signal, a familiar phrase: