Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Hans thinks it’s his business, and so it’s mine.’

  ‘Christ,’ said another man, leaning on his spade. ‘Look at that. Another lot of bloody Jugend.’ He said the word Jugend, ‘Youth’, in a cartoon way, as the English pronounced most German words they had borrowed during the occupation: Joog-end.

  A party of boys, aged perhaps thirteen or fourteen, was being led by an SS officer across the site. They were all in uniforms, and wore swastika armbands. The officer waved his hands in the air, evidently describing the monument as it would one day appear. The Reich was reproducing an arch set up by the Romans to commemorate their own successful invasion of Britain two thousand years ago. It would be embellished with sculptures of the conquering German forces and their vanquished foes; there would be amphibious tanks and barges, Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The SS man had the boys line up before the stub of the arch, while a photographer snapped pictures, and a newsreel cameraman set up his tripod and panned across their smiling faces and up to the monument’s mighty legs.

  ‘Look at them,’ Willis said. ‘Aren’t they sweet with their little knees and their polished shoes?’

  ‘I had a uniform like that,’ Stubbs said. ‘Before the war. I was a Boy Scout.’ The scout movement, regarded as propagating anti-Nazi values, had been incorporated into the Hitler Jugend.

  ‘I bet you looked just as pretty as those darlings.’ Willis called, ‘Hello, little boys. Would you like some sweets?’

  That made the boys look around, their smiles faltering, nervous. Some of the prisoners laughed. The SS man glared, and began to shepherd the boys away.

  A Landwacht thug came by Gary’s group. ‘Back to work, you arseholes.’

  Willis snapped him a Party salute, and picked up his shovel.

  ‘Maybe you are a fucking mole, Farjeon,’ Stubbs said. ‘You’re too bloody posh to be here, you should be in an oflag.’

  ‘I’ve been in oflags. I was in one near Canterbury.’

  ‘So why are you here now?’

  ‘I have the right father. My pop is a senior civil servant in Whitehall, or he was; I imagine he’s up in York now. You’ll never have heard of him, Stubbs, but he’s a big wheel in his own circles.’

  ‘So you’re a Prominente,’ Gary said.

  ‘And so are you. There are plenty of us around. We’re here in this commoners’ camp because they like to keep us close to the coast. Even you, I dare say, Stubbs, despite your low brow.’

  ‘My dad’s just a farmer.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s also a big cheese in the trade union movement, isn’t he? A mole, me? What a bore that would be. And besides, Stubbs, hasn’t it occurred to you that our Dunkirk Harrier here is much more likely to be a mole than I am? After all, Gary, you’re a foreign neutral. You could apply to the Protecting Power and get yourself out of here any time you like.’

  ‘The war isn’t done. My war isn’t done.’

  ‘Revenge, is that it?’

  ‘You leave him alone,’ said Stubbs. ‘The Yank’s all right. Every man in here keeps Jerry tied down that bit more, and good for him.’

  Willis sneered. ‘Well, that’s what Danny Adams says to keep your dander up.’

  Gary leaned on his spade and studied Willis, trying to understand him. ‘Like this all the time, are you, Willis?’

  ‘Like what? Camp? Camp in the camp? Well, why not? I do fit in rather well, don’t I? After all this is just like public school and we’re all faggots there. Or that’s what you think of me, isn’t it, Gary? That’s the cliche you see stamped on my forehead.’

  ‘I couldn’t give a fig who or what you are,’ Gary said.

  ‘Actually I’m just playing,’ Willis said. ‘I mean, what else is there to do?’

  ‘You could try and fucking escape,’ said Joe Stubbs.

  ‘Oh, what a bore all that is, stooging and planning, stealing and hoarding, digging away at tunnels, mucking about at appells, baiting the goons! No, that’s not for me. I’m playing, that’s all.’

  Gary thought that was possibly the truth of it. There were plenty of ‘whackies’ in the stalag, as the British called them, men driven slowly mad by their imprisonment. Usually it manifested itself in manias, for excessive exercise maybe, or insane escape attempts, or you would see swings of mood, manic happiness crashing to sullenness and depression. He tentatively labelled Willis as a ‘whackie’, then. His baiting and cruelty had no end save for Willis’s own entertainment; for a prisoner, there were no ends. But still he could be dangerous, if he really had got close to Ben.

  Now there were wolf-whistles, and the men paused again. ‘Christ,’ Stubbs said. ‘It’s that SS bird.’

  The SS officer who had escorted the Jugend was returning to the monument with a woman at his side, tall, also in a black SS uniform, her hair beneath her peaked cap golden. The prisoners saw very few women. Even some of the guards turned to watch her pass.

  Stubbs groaned. ‘Look at the way she’s swinging that arse.’

  ‘Yeah,’ a man said, ‘she’s doing it for you, Stubbsy, she’s noticed you.’

  ‘Hey, look at old Matt!’

  Henry ‘Matt’ Black was in the next party, shaping facing stones. He was another private, a kid no older than Stubbs. He had actually pulled his pants down and had his fist around his stiff cock.

  ‘He’s always doing that, bloody Matt,’ Stubbs said. ‘Never got his hand off the thing.’

  ‘Everybody does it,’ somebody said.

  ‘Yes, but not bold as you please in broad daylight.’

  The guards were already closing in on Black, and the men yelled, urging him to finish himself off before they got there, as if it was a race.

  VII

  That evening there was a lot of activity in the camp. Staff cars came and went through the gates, delivering staff in SS uniforms, and boxes of equipment marked with swastikas and Gothic script which they carried into the assembly hall. The men were excited by all this activity, and the escaper types speculated on what they could steal.

  But underneath the excitement Gary sensed tension. Whenever there was any break in routine you always worried that what was already a bad situation was about to get worse. Especially when the SS showed up. Even the regular Wehrmacht guards seemed nervous.

  Gary made his way to Ben’s barracks. It was just two old classrooms knocked together. The school gear was long gone to be replaced by the stuff of a POW camp, bunk beds and stoves and light bulbs dangling from the bare ceiling, and little cupboards made by the prisoners out of bits of scrap wood. But you could still see the mark on the wall where the blackboard had once hung, and sometimes, Gary was sure, you could smell the chalk.

  Gary found Ben. He’d hoped to get a chance to talk to him. But Ben, ‘Hans’, was holding court at the centre of a little group of men, banging on about Einstein, general relativity and the life and death of the universe. Even Willis was sitting on a bunk, smoking a skinny cigarette and listening.

  It was always like this inside the camp. The kommando system split the prisoners into two groups, two subcultures. In the kommandos you had the work, and a change of scene, and some fresh air, and the comradeship of those you worked with. The housewives, stuck in the camp, had turned it into a kind of talking shop. They painted and sketched; they kept diaries; they put on stage shows and choral concerts; they organised seminars on everything from German military insignia to surrealism to quantum physics. They even paid each other in lagermarkenfor their performances. It was just another sort of escape, Gary supposed.

  And then, too, there were the love affairs. There was a lot more of that than Gary had expected; the stalag queens who painted their faces and dyed their lips with beetroot juice were just the surface. This was what you got, Gary thought, when men could only turn to each other for comfort. Now he watched Willis watching Ben, and he wondered what the truth was between the two of them.

  He waited a bit, but seeing he wasn’t likely to ge
t a chance to talk to Ben before lights-out he cleared off, went for a piss and to brush his teeth, and made for his own barracks.

  When lights-out came Gary was lying in his bunk. He listened as the stalag creaked its way into the night, a crowded ship. The twenty or so men in the room with him snored and sighed; you slept badly, no matter how tired you were, and only a few of them were asleep at any moment. Sometimes during the night you would hear soft sobbing. But there was no bunk-hopping tonight.

  The school’s old sash windows had been wallpapered over for the blackout, but the paste was cracking now and the paper peeling, so that Gary could see something of the night outside. There was an occasional splash of brilliance as a searchlight beam crossed the face of the building. The noises of the camp continued, the sharp clip of a patrolling guard’s boot, a cry as some whackie or other failed to find peace. But as the hours wore on his senses seemed to expand to fill the night, and he could hear the call of an owl, a rumble of distant traffic, the drone of a Messerschmitt patrolling somewhere over Kent.

  And tonight there was something new, unfamiliar German voices talking softly, the voices of the SS working through the night. He wondered how many other inmates listened to the same conversations, and how fearful they were.

  It was no surprise when the call for an appell came in the middle of the night.

  VIII

  Few of the men still owned watches, but one man, holding his wrist up to the glare of a searchlight, said it was after three a.m.

  The men pulled their way out of their bunks, looking for their trousers and coats and socks and clogs - no boots in the camp, to impede the escapers. Then they clattered down the stairs, bumping in the dark.

  Lights blazed in the camp offices, and in the assembly hall, dining hall, gymnasium and other large rooms. On the chill dewy grass of the football field the men lined up behind the senior officers of their own nationalities; as well as British there were Poles, French, Belgian, Dutch, and empire troops like Canadians and New Zealanders. Gary was the only American, as far as he knew, and he stood with the British, as indeed did Ben, somewhere in the dark, a fake American.

  The SS, with the Wehrmacht senior officers, walked up and down before the lines, inspecting the men casually. They spoke softly, too quietly for Gary’s bits of German to be any use. SBO Danny Adams and the other senior officers were called for a brief conference.

  Then the men were formed up into parties. The British, the largest contingent, were split into three, each of about fifty men. Gary dodged around a bit to be sure he was in the same third as Ben. Willis was here too.

  A guard called briskly, ‘Come!’ Gary’s group was the first to be led off towards the assembly hall. As the men shuffled forward Gary could smell mouldy greatcoats and the sweet stink of bodies not properly bathed for a year, and he sensed their gathering fear as they were marched around in the middle of the night by the SS.

  The men filed into the assembly hall. It was brightly lit. Gary glimpsed a row of trestle tables set up at the head of the hall, before the stage where schoolboys had once received their school colours. SS officers sat in a row behind the tables, black as rooks on a wall. They shuffled piles of paper. There were a few scientist types too, anonymous in white coats, fiddling with bits of equipment. Wehrmacht guards stood around, their rifles to hand, looking as tired and resentful as the prisoners.

  At the back of the hall an area had been fenced off by a curtain. The prisoners were led behind this. A couple of guards stood on chairs so they could see over the group. One guard, a brisk and competent hauptmann, clapped his hands. ‘Clothes off,’ he said. ‘Socks too, gentlemen. Make a pile over there. Then three lines.’ He made chopping signs. ‘One, two three.’

  ‘Come off it, Hauptmann. What about the blessed Geneva Convention?’

  ‘Get on with it, please.’ The hauptmann turned away.

  ‘What larks,’ Willis Farjeon said.

  Grumbling, moving slowly, the men complied. There was muttering. ‘Maybe it’s just a delousing.’

  ‘No. Bloody SS. They’re probably testing some new type of gas on us.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Why bloody not? I don’t see any Swiss flags out there. No, we’re for it, I tell you. Hang onto your bollocks, lads.’

  The heap of clothes quickly grew. The men were all much diminished by being stripped like this, their joints like bags of walnuts, their genitals little knots of flesh beneath their flat bellies. No doubt Gary looked just as bad. And Ben, small and skinny anyhow, looked tiny, even boyish in this company.

  They formed up into their three lines. Again Gary made sure he was in the same group as Ben. He ended up right in front of him, with Willis behind Ben. Willis winked, grinning.

  The curtain was drawn back. The prisoners were marched in their lines up the assembly hall, until the leaders were at the desks manned by the SS officers. Some kind of testing began on them, and Gary saw the flash of cameras.

  As the lead blokes were processed the men shuffled forward slowly, naked, humiliated. The bare shoulders of the man in front of Gary were striped with scars, as if at some point he’d been whipped. It all felt unreal to Gary, a strange incongruity of uniforms and weapons and naked prisoners in a school hall, and all in the deepest pit of the night.

  He turned and murmured, ‘Hans? You all right?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Ben whispered. ‘This doesn’t look too good, Gary. Not for me.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ Willis said, right behind Ben. ‘I’ll give him a stiffening if he needs it.’ He placed his hand on the back of Ben’s neck, so Ben was made to lean a bit, and he made thrusting gestures with his hips at Ben’s buttocks.

  Some of the men looked disgusted. Others laughed. ‘Hey, you’re getting a hard on there, Farjeon.’

  ‘No, that’s a Heil Hitler.’ More laughter.

  Gary swung an arm at Willis’s shoulder. ‘Get the fuck off him.’ A guard stepped closer, pointing his gun warningly. Gary turned away, and Willis backed off. ‘Just leave him alone, Willis,’ Gary muttered. He’s not some doll for you to play with.’

  ‘It’s all right, Gary,’ Ben said.

  ‘No, it isn’t. I’m not sure this asshole is even a faggot. He’s just dominating you.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Ben said, a bit more defiant. ‘But it’s, well, it’s the way it is. You know. I need a bit of contact. We all do.’

  ‘Better an abusive relationship than none at all? Is that it?’

  ‘I think you’re jealous, Corporal Wooler,’ Willis whispered spitefully. ‘But of which of us, I wonder?’

  Gary got to the head of the queue. As he stood there before the trestle table with his balls hanging out, he was examined by a team of three men, all bespectacled, all deadly serious. He was asked for his name and army serial number and stalag identification number, which he gave, and then he was asked about his family background, where he was born, his parents and grandparents, and that information he refused to give. He was also asked about illnesses, any congenital conditions, whether he had any relatives who were mentally unstable, any schizophrenia, manic depression or morphine addiction or homosexuality. More questions he refused to answer.

  The SS officers and scientists were clerkish, making notes, going through files, barely even looking at the man before them. Gary’s refusals seemed to make little difference, for they had a fat file on the table before them, each page stamped with his name and number. Though the text was German, he made out what looked to be family trees. And he managed to see, stamped on some of the files and papers, an acronym: RuSHA.

  Next he was photographed, his face in front-and-side mugshot style, his body full length front, back and sides. The scientists used colour charts to establish the precise hue of his skin and his eyes. Then his dimensions were measured, his height, chest and weight, the lengths of his limbs and fingers and toes - even, predictably, the length of his cock. With great care callipers were applied to his head. They measured
the depth and width of his forehead, the length, breadth and circumference of his cranium, the length of his nose, the width of his mouth, the distance between his ears. All this was noted down. And the scientists conferred, referring to graphs and a file of photographs, a kind of compendium of people types, erect and stoop-shouldered, large- and small-eared, clear-skinned and dark. It was all routine, efficient, a bit like an army medical, though conducted with an earnestness that was both sinister and a bit comic.

  When they were done, one of the men actually smiled at him. ‘Congratulations, Corporal Wooler. Now please go to table number one, on the stage, for final logging.’

  He had to climb up on the stage, still stark naked. Here five small tables labelled one to five sat in a row, each manned by two more scientist types. At table number one, Gary again had to identify himself. The scientists gave him another cursory inspection, before nodding, smiling, and filling in a form replete with ticks.

  ‘So,’ Gary said, ‘you’re going to congratulate me again?’

  ‘We should congratulate your parents, or your grandparents,’ one of them said, an older man with a strangulated accent. ‘Your cephalic index is seventy-seven. We have classified you as a Pure Nordic type, Corporal.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘Look in a mirror one day. Your long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow lips, tall, slender body. These are the required characteristics. And all this is backed up by your genealogy, of course, which shows a pure ancestry dating back to the time your forefathers emigrated from England. Why, if not for the present unfortunate circumstances, you would be eligible to apply for the Schutzstaffel itself!’ It appeared the scientist was making a joke.

  Gary glanced along the row at the other tables. On table five, the furthest from this destination of the Pure Nordics, there was an orderly heap of yellow fabric stars.

  Gary was dismissed, and, escorted by a guard, allowed to file back down the length of the hall to retrieve his clothes. But there was a commotion. He looked back to his line. Ben Kamen was at the testing desk. The researchers there seemed agitated; they looked up at Ben and flicked through more files. Then one of them cried out, and stabbed his finger at a photograph. He called, ‘Standartenfuhrer Trojan! Standartenfuhrer!’ Ben shrank back against Willis, but guards rushed forward and grabbed his skinny arms.