Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  I knew in which direction Geneva lay and followed the line of the fields’ edge until I came to a gate that gave on to a small lane. I walked along this until I reached a junction where there was an obliging signpost: GENÈVE, 15 kms. This was the most dangerous time for me, I knew, out alone in the countryside in the middle of the night – a businessman with a suitcase – if I were challenged I would have no way of explaining myself and what I was doing. I needed to reach the city as quickly as possible and blend anonymously with its denizens. I kept on walking: the roads were quite empty, free of traffic. After about an hour I came to the edge of a village. A signpost gave its name as Carouge. It was by now 4.00 in the morning.

  I found an old wooden barn not far off the road and decided to wait there until it was light and the village began to stir, reasoning that with a few people about I might attract less notice. And perhaps there would be a railway station or a bus. I had a hip flask with me and a few biscuits – so I sat shivering in the angle of two walls, nibbling oatmeal and sipping whisky.

  When it grew light I took some care cleaning myself up, wiping the mud off my shoes and trouser bottoms. Dirt is the great give-away when you’re trying to be unobtrusive. Then at about half past seven I strolled into the village, hoping I looked like someone who was going to catch a train. Luckily it was a sizeable place – there was a roadside inn and a post office and the cafés and the boulangeries were open: I wandered through without attracting any unusual glances. I joined a queue at a bus stop and asked a teenage boy if this bus would take me to Geneva. He said yes, my French seeming to pass muster.

  The bus came, I boarded it, bought my ticket and took my seat. For the first time I relaxed slightly and I felt a small satisfying wash of justifiable pride course through me. Phase one complete. I looked out of the window as the suburbs of Geneva flashed by: the dangerous bit was over. Now I just had to get on with my job.

  I left the bus in a small square in what seemed the centre of town and using my street map found my way to the Hôtel du Commerce. By now I was just one of hundreds of coated, hatted office workers hurrying to start their day. I walked into the lobby of the Hotel du Commerce and walked right out again. Two policemen were talking to the receptionist.

  It could have been purely routine, a coincidence, bad luck. Perhaps I should have just strolled up to the desk and announced myself but it seemed a foolish and unnecessary risk. I walked round the corner and saw a parked police van with half a dozen men in it, waiting. This looked more ominous. I moved on through the nearby streets searching for another suitable hotel – nothing too grand, nothing too shabby. Then I found one: the Hôtel Cosmopolitan – I took it as a good omen.

  I spent most of that day in my room, calming down, taking stock. I slept in the afternoon. When I woke I called the Hôtel du Commerce and cancelled my booking, saying that I had been detained in Madrid.

  In the evening I went to a restaurant and ate a veal chop with fried potatoes washed down with a glass of beer. It was unusual wandering the streets of Geneva. There was a blackout after 10.00 p.m. (the street lights were switched off), but it was instigated more, one felt, out of a sense of duty than necessity. Life was constrained – even the meal bore signs of that: the beer was watery and I had to leave half the potatoes as they were inedible – but there was, none the less, an atmosphere close to normality. The war was elsewhere, even though near at hand, and there was no sense of that latent stress amongst the populace, that constant nagging worry at the back of your mind that you were so aware of in London. I went back to my hotel and slept well.

  In the morning I telephoned the Banque Feltri to confirm my appointment for Monday morning. ‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Peredes,’ the secretary said. ‘C’est noté.’ So far so good.

  I went down and strolled by the lakeside at lunch time and had a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie. I remember thinking how bizarre all this was, my being here in Geneva, pretending to be a Uruguayan shipowner. I felt a laugh rise in my throat and sensed for a moment – and maybe this is the allure the true spy feels – the element of sheer play underneath all the risk and the seriousness of intent, and how intoxicating it was. All things said and done, I was here playing a game of hide and seek.

  Back at the hotel the girl at reception said there was a message for me. I unfolded the slip of paper: Café du Centre, midi. demain. Ludwig. I handed it back. ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘This is not for me.’ But he was here, she said, the man, only twenty minutes ago, he asked for you, Señor Peredes. No, no, I said, trying to be calm. I asked her to make up my bill – I said I had to go to Zurich urgently.

  I went upstairs to pack and when I opened the door to my room found four men waiting for me there: two uniformed policemen with sub-machine guns and two detectives. One of them showed me an identity card and said in Spanish, ‘Señor Peredes, you are under arrest.’

  I was taken to a police station in the suburbs and shown into a room. On a table were my parachute and overalls and I was asked to identify them as mine. In French, I said I knew nothing of these things, I’d come from Spain on business. The detective who had spoken to me in Spanish complimented me on my French but said nothing more.

  I was left in that room until nightfall. I was allowed to go to the lavatory and was served a mug of unsweetened black coffee. My mind was a rowdy, shouting confusion of ideas, suppositions, guesses and counter-suggestions. I tried hard not to come to conclusions – it was too early, perhaps they’d let me go? But one question kept coming back to nag at me: how did Ludwig know I was at the Hotel Cosmopolitan? The only person in Geneva, in Western Europe, in the world, who knew I’d checked in there was me.

  In the evening I was taken from the room and led out of the rear of the police station. There I was helped into the back of a van and the door locked. There were no windows. The van moved off; after about three hours travelling we stopped and the engine was cut.

  I climbed out to find myself under the porte cochère of a sizeable villa at whose front door two armed soldiers stood guard. The detectives then handed me over to bona fide prison officers, as far as I could tell. I was taken into a changing room and asked to remove my clothes and was given, to replace them, a set of underwear – drawers and a vest – a pair of black serge trousers, a collarless grey flannel shirt and a crude grey tunic that buttoned up to my neck. On my feet I wore some thick socks and, most curiously, a pair of heavy wooden clogs. I felt like a cross between a Dutch peasant and a komissar in revolutionary Russia.

  Thus attired, I followed my gaoler along a corridor and up some stairs and was shown into a large, barely furnished room. There were some traces of its former decoration remaining – a curtain pole, a painted cornice – in stark contrast to the functionality of the furniture it contained. An iron bed (made up with blankets), a table and chair and a chamber pot. The one large window was heavily barred and against the wall was a central-heating radiator – warm.

  As the guard left he said, ‘Buenas noches.’ He locked the door behind him.

  This was to be my new home and I couldn’t help wondering how long I would be staying here.

  Life at the villa. From my window I had a fine view of the end of a lake and snowy mountains beyond. Lake Lucerne, I later discovered. Every morning a guard unlocked the door at seven and I was escorted to a washroom where I emptied my chamber pot and could shave and wash at a basin. Once a week I was allowed a shower, when I could wash my hair. I received a complete change of clothing once a fortnight. When I returned to my room, breakfast would be waiting: bread and cheese and an enamel mug of warm coffee, never hot. The next interruption was at noon – lunch: always some kind of vegetable soup with more bread. In the afternoon I was allowed into the interior courtyard of the villa, where there was a patchy lawn surrounded and quartered by gravel paths. Under the eyes of a guard I was allowed to stroll around or sit in a patch of sunshine if the day was clement. When I was ordered inside I would catch a glimpse of another inmate (dressed i
dentically to me) emerging into the courtyard for his period of exercise. As time went by I concluded that there could be only half a dozen of us in the building and widely dispersed among its three floors – rarely did I hear the clattering clump of clogs along my passageway. Then it was back to the room and at seven the evening meal was served, a plate of stew or a chop, always with potatoes and more bread and cheese. The lights went out at nine. The guards seemed to change constantly and always attempted to speak to me in bad Spanish – ‘Hola’, ‘Vamos’, ‘Está bien?’ – no matter in what language I addressed them – and they always called me Peredes.

  It was a very simple, very efficient and very secure regime. Very Swiss, you might say, and at first my mood was strangely relieved. All bets were off: ‘Operation Shipbroker’ had foundered all too quickly. I had been caught and there was nothing more I could do – the game was over and they had won. The Swiss were neutral, after all: I wasn’t going to be tortured by the Gestapo, and it was surely only a matter of time before I was transferred to a proper internment camp (I knew there were about 12,000 Allied soldiers and airmen already interned in Switzerland). Somewhere, wheels would have been set in motion and the creaking bureaucracy that governed wartime prisoners would eventually seek me out and deal with me. But as the days and the weeks went by (the guards would always tell me the date) I began increasingly to worry. This routine seemed as if it could go on for ever and I was bored to insensibility: no books, no newspapers, no writing material. But I was exercised and well fed – in fact I was putting on weight what with all the bread and cheese I was scoffing daily.

  After about six weeks I asked to see the governor – I said I had a confession to make. Some days passed. Then one evening I was led downstairs to one of the big drawing rooms on the ground floor. It was half empty but here and there were some tatty but rather fine pieces of furniture. A tall lean man in his fifties, with hair so severely combed it looked painful, stood before the fireplace in a light grey double-breasted suit.

  ‘Habla inglés?’ I asked and, on being assured that he did, I told him everything: that my name was Logan Mountstuart, that I was a lieutenant in the RNVR attached to Naval Intelligence and that I had been sent to Switzerland to pre-empt the flight from Europe of important Nazis at the end of the war. All I asked was to be put in touch with some consular official who looked after British interests or even Allen Dulles, head of OSS in Bern. Everything could be quickly sorted out.

  The man looked at me and smiled. ‘You really don’t expect me to believe this nonsense, do you, Señor Peredes?’

  ‘My name is Logan Mountstuart.’

  ‘Who is Ludwig?’

  ‘He was my contact in Geneva. I never met him.’

  ‘That is a lie. Who is Ludwig? Where is he?’

  I protested I knew nothing more of this Ludwig-person. Guards were called and I was taken back to my room.

  And so my life continued. I never saw this man again, although I made regular requests (I now believe he was Colonel Masson, head of the Swiss Military Intelligence). Boredom reached new levels of intolerability. My one distraction was that I began to keep a small farm of insects that I found in my room – silvery woodlice, a cockroach, some small brown ants – which I herded together in a small packet made from a corner of the blanket of my bed. I named them all (though the ants were hard to tell apart) and during the day I would let them roam, closely supervised, about the room. It passed the time quite effectively. They kept escaping, of course, and I kept having to replenish my stock, but each escape was a small moment of vicarious freedom for myself, as if it were me wriggling through a crack in the floorboards or under the skirting when my back was turned. From time to time I made requests to see figures in authority, but all in vain.

  I descended into a form of tolerable apathy – which I believe all prisoners experience. You surrender your individual spirit to the routine of the institution. I had no idea where I was, what I was being held for (apart from spying, I suppose) or what benefit accrued to the Swiss nation from my expensive incarceration. I had faith – almost as naively trusting as religious faith – that efforts were being made to release me and that Freya knew what had happened to me and that I was alive and well. I realized I would just have to wait.

  And then suddenly, in the late summer, I was given smoking privileges. A few ounces of loose tobacco and some cigarette papers. I learned to roll the thinnest cigarettes, thin as cocktail sticks with a few shreds of tobacco tightly packed. When I wanted a light I had to call a guard. I began to hoard my spare cigarette papers. In the washroom was an old sooty stove used to heat the water for the showers and the baths. On my way out I would scrape some flakes of soot off the outside with my nails. This soot, when mixed with urine, formed an acceptable if pungent ink. I had a safety pin holding my trouser fly together – my pen. I had pen and ink and paper. And thus began ‘The Prison Diary of Logan Mountstuart’. It took me hours to write a few sentences, scratched in laborious minuscule handwriting on my slips of cigarette paper, but for the first time since my arrest my old spirit began to stir and ease itself. I was a writer again.

  October. Peregrine (one of my woodlice) has died. Found him in the morning curled in a tight ball and when I tried to unwind him he broke in half. Poor Peregrine, he was the most docile and least adventurous of my insect crew. Lurid, fiery sunset over the lake. Terrible pangs, a physical ache, missing Freya and Stella. Surely they must know I’m alive, at the very least. My request for writing materials turned down again with no explanation. The guards accept your requests without demur and always apologize when they return empty-handed. NID must be aware I was taken. The mysterious ‘Ludwig’ knew where I was staying. (How? Was he outside the hotel, saw me arrive and followed me to the Cosmopolitan?). He would have reported I was picked up. At night I sometimes hear the drone of heavy bombers heading north to Germany. Intense gustatory memories of the apple pie I had at lunch the day I was arrested – the last sweet thing I ate. The taste of freedom? Apple pie.

  14 November. Hugo told me the date today. I call him Hugo but have no idea if that is his real name. He won’t tell me. All the guards now refer to me as Gonzago, despite my protests. Hugo seems to be on duty every three or four days. I ask him in French how the war is going and he smiles and nods and says ‘très bien’. One has a sense of the guard rota being as well organized as everything else in this place. This afternoon I banged on the door for five minutes until a guard came. I demanded to see the governor. Request denied.

  Today I went downstairs to meet ‘someone from the embassy’. Interestingly, it was three days since my vain demand to see the governor. You think you have been refused, but it’s just that they operate very slowly.

  The man introduced himself as Señor Fernandez and said he was from the Spanish consulate in Lausanne and was responsible for Uruguayan affairs. He said I was only the fifth Uruguayan to visit Switzerland since the war began. I told him my story and my true name. But if you are British, he said, looking disappointed, you are no longer my responsibility. Can you get a message to my wife? I asked. Of course, he said, your wife in Montevideo? No, I said, in London. He spread his hands, ‘es muy dificil’. I told him Freya’s name and begged him to write down the address, which he did, eventually. ‘Just write one line,’ I said. ‘Tell her I’m alive, that’s all. Can you do that?’ He gave a nervous smile and said he would try.

  [1945]

  January. The new year passed in solitude and silence. I wrote a poem to Freya on a slip of this paper, then rolled some tobacco in it and symbolically smoked the cigarette. I’ve been in this place nearly a year now and am beginning to be tormented by some unpleasant suspicions. I’m growing convinced that there is a link between my arrest and incarceration and what happened in the Bahamas. I’ll never forget the Duchess’s words: we still have powerful friends. For example, why was I recalled so quickly after the de Marigny arrest? And just who is this Colonel Marion who dreamt up ‘Operation Shipbroker’? How come Ia
n knew so little of what was going on? I mull over the chain of events and dislike the questions that are raised: what about the police who were waiting for me at the Hôtel du Commerce? Or the speed with which my parachute was found? Just filthy luck or some darker force operating?

  This life is like a slow but gentle torture and for me the most terrible aspect of my imprisonment is the loneliness. For the first time ever I feel truly lonely: I’m without the comfort afforded by others, my loved ones, my friends. It’s not a question of solitude: one can bear solitude, but no one likes to feel lonely.

  Sexually my libido is subject to some crazy rhythm.

  Sometimes I masturbate six or seven times a day with all the unreflecting prowess of an adolescent schoolboy. Then three weeks will go by without a lascivious thought entering my head.

  I’ve abandoned my insect ranch: they die from cold – or when I put them near the radiator they die from heat.

  It’s most peculiar possessing so little in the world. You could say that the clothes I wear, my bed and its bedding, my table and chair, my chamber pot (and its rag for arse wiping), my tin of tobacco and my thin sheaf of cigarette papers and my safety pin represent the sum total of my worldly goods. And they can’t really be described as my possessions – they’ve been lent to me. I think of my cluttered house in Battersea, my thousands of books, my paintings, my papers, my crammed drawers and wardrobes… Suddenly to have my world, my stuff, reduced to this meagreness makes me feel without ballast, without identity.

  The lake as I see it from my window has many moods and this modest view has become the focus of my aesthetic being. All beauty, all transcending thoughts, all stimulae and evaluation derive from this circumscribed panorama of Lake Lucerne. I think if they were to brick up this window I’d go mad within hours. Today the angle of the sun makes the lake a sheet of burnished silver. High thin clouds mist the sky’s blue ever so slightly. I can see half a field of corn shading from pale green to the first hint of ripening sand-yellow. I wish there was a road and some human traffic. I can watch the birdlife for hours and once, just once, I saw a small steamer with a thin scarlet smoke stack come into view, turn and sail back beyond the window edge.