A House in Order

by Nigel Dennis

  I was got up from my bench and marched into the next room, where the older officer had sat himself behind a table and given himself two aides, who sat on either side of him. One of these was an interpreter, who began by asking me all the routine questions – name, number, rank, regiment, and so on. This completed, he began on the serious stuff, and I was provided with a chair, the better to answer him.

  Q: Explain shortly how you came to be in a glasshouse.

  A: Pardon, please! I was left outside it by the soldier who captured me.

  Q: What soldier captured you?

  A: Pardon, but I don’t know. A soldier who found me on the road, after the others had been taken prisoners.

  Q: This soldier captured you and imprisoned you in the greenhouse?

  A: No. He left me near it and went away. It was cold, so I went in.

  Q: This is a ridiculous story. Would you like to change it – before it is too late?

  A: Pardon, I swear it’s true, it really is.

  Q: What would you say if we checked on your lying by finding this soldier and asking him to corroborate it?

  A: Pardon, I wish you would: please do exactly as you wish.

  The young officer was sent off to do this business, in which nobody believed. The interpreter started again:

  Q: How long was it from the time this imaginary soldier captured you and our discovery of your hiding-place this morning?

  A: He left me here the day before yesterday, in the evening.

  Q: Where did you spend yesterday?

  A: In the greenhouse.

  Q: In the shed, you mean?

  A: No, pardon, not in the shed. I didn’t go into the shed because you would think I was trying to hide.

  Q: We think that still. Don’t you?

  A: I swear, I really do swear – all yesterday I was in the greenhouse.

  Q: Lying on the floor – camouflaged as part of the rubbish?

  A: Sitting in the chair – just sitting in the chair.

  Q: It takes us only a few minutes to shoot a spy. But if they are wise spies – spies who are frank with us – we decide sometimes not to shoot them at all…. Where were you yesterday?

  A: On the greenhouse chair. Please, please, I promise you!

  Q: This is a very tedious charade. With every lie you add to it you step closer to the hole in the ground you are going to … Now, think again, Mr Cartographer-so-called … Do you ask us to believe that you sat all day on that greenhouse chair and were not observed?

  A: What else can I ask, when it’s true? I hoped and prayed to be observed …

  Q: Why?

  A: Why, because I hoped to go to prison.

  There was some unpleasant laughter at this, but I noticed to my terror that I was being looked at with more respect, as if I were a brave fellow doing his best to spin a yarn.

  Q: Mr Spy. If the first part of your story is in any way true, why were you not captured with the rest of the 3rd Battalion?

  A: I got in a panic and hid in a cupboard. Then, after they were marched off, I realized I had been a fool, and ran after them.

  Q: When you were briefed, before you started on all these strange travels, what were you told about this house? What importance was it said to have?

  A: I never dreamt there was this house.

  Q: Then will you, pray, accept our congratulations on waking up to it?

  There were more smiles at this, and increased respect for me.

  Q: Well, my poor fellow, you will be going the way of others like you in a few minutes. Have you really nothing helpful to tell us?

  A: I am not in this war at all! I swear! I am a victim, not a soldier.

  A: No, you are not a soldier, you are a spy. But you are wearing the uniform of a soldier – which means a coffin, as you know … Now … tell me again, where did you spend yesterday? I shall not ask again.

  A: On the greenhouse chair – I swear by God!

  I cannot say how high their regard for my courage might not have risen had the young officer not returned at this moment. They looked at him in a casual way at first, and then, noticing that his expression was deeply serious, they waited for him to speak with attention. I knew at once that he had found my stupid soldier and that my story had been confirmed.

  After listening to him once, they made him repeat his report and asked him certain questions, keeping very quiet and controlled as they did so. But when they had finished with him and could no longer doubt what he told them, they quite forgot that I was in the room. They sent men running to bring in yesterday’s guards: they got to their feet and exchanged short remarks that they could hardly bear to speak. Every so often, one of them let loose a sort of blaring neigh – and every so often one of them remembered me as the cause of the catastrophe and fixed me with an eye that had lost the power to focus. Soldiers were marched in: I was pointed out to them: they shook their heads and were marched out. This went on for a couple of hours, until they had run out of victims and were obliged to sit down and recognize their own official responsibility for so much shame. I am sure that nothing was made better for them by the fact that they had my word – which they now believed – that I had done everything that cowardice would permit to help them maintain their reputation for efficiency and spryness.

  If there had been anything I could have said to improve this situation, I would have come out with it at once, because I felt in more fear of my life at this moment than I had at any time before. But the more I felt this fear, the more I shook and trembled, and the more I did so the more loathing and indignation I worked up in them. For some time they seemed to need me in the room, like doubting Thomases, but once they reached the stage where there was no denying me, they got me out of their sight and I was put back on my bench in the ante-room. Here, I was fed again by a corporal, like a slug being given poisoned bran.

  They went on talking among themselves, but apart from their voices there were no sounds in the house. But in the middle of the afternoon, somebody arrived and came swinging down the verandah talking in a strong, cheerful voice: he swept in next door where the ghouls sat and, surprised but still cheerful in his tone, asked, I suppose, if he could share the secret of their funeral.

  I heard them tell for the next hour. He only interrupted to ask questions at intervals and though he spoke shortly and sharply his voice stayed spirited and he even hummed a short tune. Being used by now to a general dirge, I started trembling again and wished I had had the courage to have kept everybody’s spirits high in the first place by agreeing to be a secret agent.

  At last, the young officer opened my door and I was led in. The new arrival was sitting pretty casually in the principal chair, but I only needed one look at him to know that his easiness was a mark of rank. The officer who had interrogated me before appeared now to be obviously a ‘Second’ – one of those square, dogged people who spend most of their lives either fearing promotion or wondering why they never got it. But the general atmosphere was much more cheerful and agreeable, as if a way had been found to disperse the shame. The door onto the verandah had been opened and the interpreter was told to ask me:

  Q: Can you see through that door?

  A: Not very far, without my spectacles.

  Q: Where are your spectacles?

  A: The man who captured me put them in his pocket.

  Q: Can you see that man on the verandah now?

  A: I think I see his form, though not his face.

  Q: Very well. One moment, if you please.

  My soldier’s figure disappeared from sight, followed by a squad of riflemen. We all sat in silence for some minutes until the rifles went off. Soon after, the young officer came in, carrying my spectacles. The interpreter began again:

  Q: Are these your property?

  A: Yes, certainly, they are certainly mine.

  Q: Are they in good order?

  A: Oh, pardon, I am sure they are.

  Q: Do you care to put them on?

  A: Oh, thank you.


  Q: Can you see better?

  A: Oh, much better, thank you.

  Q: How can a man who trembles like you draw maps?

  A: I don’t know. It is only my living.

  There was general amusement at this, as if everyone was feeling happier now and shame all but buried.

  Q: So you have come to stay with us, have you?

  A: I did my best to be arrested.

  Q: The colonel suggests that your best was not very intelligent?

  A: Oh, no, that is quite right.

  Q: When you stand up with your glasses on, can you see the prison where your friends are?

  A: Yes, I can see it.

  Q: The Commandant of the prison has got wind of you and is expecting you. He has your bed aired.

  A: Oh, thank you very much.

  They were very well pleased with this: it does not take much to restore military esteem.

  Q: The Colonel thinks, however, that for the time being you might be happier in your greenhouse. Do you agree?

  A: I agree to anything.

  Q: The Colonel says that when he first heard your story, he was quite sure it must be rubbish. But after one look at you, he was equally sure that it must be true …

  Here they laughed continuously for a long time.

  So he does not regard you as a dangerous man, but he would like to know if you are aware of what happened to the soldier who brought and left you here?

  A: Yes, most certainly.

  Q: And he assumes that you have no dearer aim in life than that of avoiding being shot the same way?

  A: Yes, certainly.

  Q: He bids you ‘Good afternoon’ then, thanks you for your ready cooperation – and asks if it will continue until he has decided what to do with you?

  A: Oh, yes, I swear, I swear. I am very grateful.

  They then left the room, led by the colonel, who seemed entirely delighted by the way things had gone. I was taken back to the greenhouse and a bucket for my use pushed through the back door of the shed.

  *

  All was the same as forty-eight hours ago – the dusk falling, the east wind coming up, the thermometer dropping (approx. 36 deg.). But they had gone through all the muck in the shed and the greenhouse very efficiently: it was all there, still, but arranged and ordered in files, in the military way, so that there was far more room than there had been before. I was given some disinfectant powder to throw on my droppings, and then two army blankets and a waterproof sheet. This sounds generous, and even friendly, but I remember thinking that military acts are not what they seem to be. One’s disinfection only matters because it stops one’s germs reaching people of importance, and a rubber sheet is to prevent government blankets from having to be replaced. But I didn’t spend much time thinking of their motives. The only thought in my mind was how I could please them and impress them with my obedient behaviour, to make my life more secure.

  Not being fools, they took care now to see that their guards included the greenhouse in their patrols. I took note of two of the guards that night. One had a black eye and a horribly bruised ear, the other had a nose swollen up to a huge size and his whole face was inflamed. Every fifteen minutes after nightfall one or other of them opened the greenhouse door and looked me over with a torch, before continuing his round: in this way, they impressed on themselves the importance of keeping an eye on me, and impressed on me the sort of punishment that was handed out to men who had not done their duty. These two battered men were kept on guard the whole night through, in constant movement for twelve hours: by morning, they could hardly stand. I never saw them again after that.

  I was brought a proper evening meal, including thin beer. They brought me no knife, but my dirty predecessors had left behind three putty-knives, brown and caked, for me to choose from. I cleaned my plate and mug very thoroughly with dirt off the floor and left them neatly just inside the greenhouse door. This was done to please them, of course, but acts of cleanliness also come naturally to a person who takes greenhouse hygiene seriously. I put the rubber sheet longwise down the exact centre of the shed, and left the door into the greenhouse open, so that my figure could be plainly seen, stretched out.

  I am sure I didn’t sleep at all that night, nor was it the flashing of a guard’s torch every quarter of an hour that kept me awake. I simply found that as soon as I lay down, I trembled all over and couldn’t stop. I kept thinking of how my glasses had been returned to me and how strange they had felt when I put them on after two days without them: I knew this strangeness was normal, as it is with false teeth that have been taken out too long, but it was all mixed in my mind with the soldier’s taking them from me and folding them away in his breast pocket, and the sound of the rifles going off after they had been taken from him again. I kept driving myself silly by hearing his loud, loutish whistling and the trudge of his boots, and whenever I did so, I got the shakes and my stomach heaved and rumbled. I kept telling myself that I was safer now, probably, than I had been at any other moment in the last two days, but this was no consolation at all; the whistling and trudging went on and on in my ears, the rifles of the firing squad went off at regular intervals, and again and again the young officer came in and handed me back my folded glasses. From time to time, in this sleepless worry, the guard’s torch would flash and I would see a bit of a bashed face reflected in the dirty, moonlit glass as he turned away: then, the pointlessness of keeping me alive and unharmed would agitate me through and through and I would fancy my glasses being taken off again and folded away for the last time, and hear my own screams as I was propped up in front of the rifles. And so it went all night, one horrible scene after another, real and imaginary, until the sun showed up and the shaking guards, white under their red bruises, were marched away by a corporal.

  For breakfast, I got a mug of chicory coffee and a good hunk of the rough sort of bread that I have always considered the precious answer to constipation. The humidity in the greenhouse was high, in spite of the holes in the panes, and as I drank my coffee and rubbed away at my cloudy spectacles the glass round me sweated in the rising sun and the wet surface shrank into numberless moist patches surrounded by grime and dirty webs. I saw suddenly the big prison camp below me and could watch the prisoners coming out to work in the cool sunshine, all in batches, looking as disciplined as usual. They were under the orders of their own NCOs, who shouted at them as loudly and pompously as they had always done, so that as I sat over my mug and saw their marching figures through the smeary glass, I could hear my mother-tongue bellowed into the enemy air as if there had been no change and no surrender, and their prison no more than another barracks. But I was a good deal changed myself, because I shuddered to hear the bellowing and dreaded the thought that at any minute I might be hauled from my windy shed and boxed up again with the rest. Not that such fears ever stayed the same for long, because each time I thought of the cheerful brutality of the men around me, all my shakes and trembles began again: in fact, whether I looked at the house on my left or the prison on my right, I could feel nothing but terror of an enemy – enemy friends, enemy foes – and the fear that one or other would kill or flog me in the end.

  While these thoughts were going through my head I had noticed a handful of enemy guards leave the camp by the big gate and swing down the road. I watched them only very idly, having so many worries on my wretched mind, so it was only when they reached the bottom of the gravel path that my heart jumped and I realized that they were probably coming for me. Having exchanged the usual absurd ritual with the house guards, they turned, sure enough, up the path, and in a minute were halted at attention so close to me that my hair stood on end.

  They were commanded by a sergeant, who carried an envelope. This was conveyed into the house. The squad remained at attention, looking straight ahead, but the sergeant allowed himself the privilege of turning his head and, slowly and carefully, staring into the greenhouse and looking me up and down with the most horrifying eye I have seen in any man’s face. If he h
ad spoken one word, or even crooked one finger at me, I would somehow have got to my feet and crawled the few yards that separated us; but he gave me no sign at all, except for the ugliness in his eyes, so I sat like a stone in my chair, cold all over with terror.

  At last, the young officer came down the verandah and stood at the top of the steps into the garden: he, too, carried a neat, stiff envelope. The sergeant saluted him very smartly, and the young man returned the salute with one of his own – very correct and very distasteful, as if saluting, in such a circumstance, could not be done without neuralgic pain. He spoke a few words to the sergeant in a voice that was high and clear but like a Chinaman’s mew, and when the sergeant answered, firmly but respectfully, he listened with all the civility that rudeness can imply. He then gave a couple of short mews by way of answer, and held out the envelope to the sergeant, holding it between two fingers. The sergeant came up the steps to take it and managed without much loss of dignity to catch it as it drifted from the fingers and began its journey to the ground. They then exchanged salutes again, the young officer’s not being noticeable as his back was to the sergeant and he was moving quickly away down the verandah.

  The sergeant now turned his four men back the way they had come, doing so in two movements. The first was a left turn, in which he joined; it brought the five of them face to face with me, their ten eyes staring fixedly at mine through the glass door. He kept them in this position for a full quarter of a minute, under the pretext of slowly buttoning away the lieutenant’s envelope: only when I was on the verge of screaming did he order them through another turn and marched them away down the path. It seemed to me that the four men in the squad formed a square as they marched, leaving room for my ghost in the centre.

  I got up from my chair when they passed the guards at the bottom of the garden and began to rub my fingers over the stubble on my face. I remember thinking that it might be better to cut my throat with a piece of glass than go on suffering such horrifying shocks, but I also remember that that was the only thought I had time for, because the interpreter, moving at speed down the verandah and followed by a soldier, came to my door and said sharply: ‘Your inspection will be at noon sharp, Mr Cartographer. That is in three hours.’ The soldier then dumped a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush outside the door, and the two of them went away.