All of which is, of course, very comforting, but we have as many doubts about the Russian as about the Krauts, he having told us hair-raising tales of how he cut Krauts’ throats with naked razor-blades – where from and how? – and then expertly dribbled his way through the Kraut lines en route from his camp to ours because the food in ours was better than in his. Some of us think he may not be a Russian at all but a German spy who is feeding damaging griff back to the Kraut brass and even Camel, for once, curbs his urge to go one better in the telling of tall tales.
But, apart from lending us hope – however baseless and doomed it may be – he also tells a pretty as well as tall tale, describing, with so much of the imaginativeness of the poet that he seems, how these monolithic Russian tanks – ‘bigger than anything we have ever dreamed’ – lumber and wheel on the ice-clogged lake that is further from here than we think and is ‘round and shining with a yellow-green light like it’s the moon dropped down’. Whether we will one day find out the truth, is anybody’s guess and, eventually, the ghostly commotion stops and does not recur and we, in turn, no longer listen, straining out through the night to the mystical – mythical? – lake and only dimly sometimes wondering if this was not, after all, the first of the Signs?
There are miracle days in which only those who have been in them can believe – days when the low, feathery clouds are suddenly waddling away as though some downy-arsed goose had got up from its squat, and you are seeing that the blue sky has been there all this while, only the blue has never been so near to being not and the brittleness of the air is such that you think to push your finger through it, and the sun is not really a sun, but more a burnished brass that does not even begin to soften up the snow.
It is such a day and my hands are deeply in my pockets, warming my balls, and my breath is a speech bubble with nothing in it, and I am staring through the fence with the intense vacuity that only prisoners achieve, when this Kraut comes up close on the other side and says in a struggling English that, soon now, it will be spring. I start, then grunt, in German, that the cold in my bones is telling me that nothing’s changed, and he asks, surprised, where I learnt German, and I say, ‘Here,’ and then he asks, ‘Why?’ and I shrug, not daring too heavy a foray into a still only half-mastered tongue.
But my shrug does not put him off. As plainly pleased as he is surprised, he flatters me by dropping the English, and I battle to understand as he tells me with a clear longing of his wife and child, and where he comes from and where he hopes to soon again be. But then somebody shouts from a sentry box and he readjusts his rifle strap as he repeats that soon now it will be spring – ‘already its heart beats under the snow’ – then leaves, only looking back once to whisperingly add, his eyes strangely and entreatingly sad, ‘For you – this spring.’
For a long while I stare at where a corner of the fence axed him from my view, toying with a hesitant hopefulness, not daring to fully engage it, wondering if I have been shown a Sign less fanciful than the tanks on a lake that is like a ‘moon dropped down?’
There is nothing ambiguous about what happens next. It brooks no denigration or denial, is, like the Apocalypse, overwhelmingly what it is. It is not as explosive, though, as the Apocalypse, nor as brutally seminal as the Big Bang. On the contrary, the first intimations of it are subliminal – a droning on the far perimeters of sense that is as irritating and inescapable as an insect circling a high light in a windowless room. Slowly, relentlessly, the droning swells, narrows in, is eventually no longer a resonance more of the mind than in the ear, but a troubling of the air itself, a vibration that sets a single yet clinching speck of dust to a settling on the back of my hand.
We go out then, stand in our thousands, looking round, seeing only the usual monotonousness that we see even when we close our eyes. But the droning does not let up, grows louder, is at last so loud that we start shouting in order to be heard. ‘What is it?’ we ask each other, at first a little foolishly, expecting the rational explanation that will send us, laughing, away. But only bafflement answers bafflement and we begin to feel estranged and afraid, to shiver a little in another of the rare clear winter days.
Then someone screams, ‘There! There!’, swinging an arm up at the sky directly over our heads, his eyes huge and exalted as though he witnessed the heavens opening and childhood’s angels descending in a swirl of robes and wings. ‘Christ Almighty!’ I whisper with more of reverence than rote, my head flung back till my neck cricks as I watch the vast armada of planes passing seemingly slowly on their way to whatever culmination they seek. Dropsical with death, the bombers forge with a blind obduracy through the thin, yielding tides of the air, and the fighters flit about them with the silver glitter of gnats and someone is shrieking, voice a eunuch’s with delight, ‘Watch those babies go!’ But one of the Krauts sneers that these are their planes, not ours, but we have already seen that the machine guns in the sentry boxes have swivelled skywards even though the planes are out of range, and when a lone battery somewhere out on the plains opens up, its guns sounding like popping corks in the overriding roar of the planes and the shells exploding humiliatingly far short, we whoop some more and the guard turns away and shambles off, ageing as he goes. Only then do I realize that Danny is gripping my arm as tightly as any tourniquet, and I turn around, but my arm could be a wooden post for all he knows and tears are streaming down his face with the shamelessness of water gushing from a stone.
Inevitably reaction sets in, but, like an old love, the original euphoria never quite goes away. We are still soldier enough to know the meaning of mastery of the skies and the Kraut colossus, that straddled us with so casual a contempt, is at a stroke the tumbled idol and the sunken fables of our own bloods and soils are rising up again as from an enchanted sea. Put less elegantly, we are the stabled horses, still fetlock-deep in straw and our own dung, but knowing now that soon the doors will open and we be let out to gallop, tails up and knotted and arses farting at the wind.
All too soon comes the testing of this new spiritedness, a testing that we know but too well and that is all the more agonizing for its being known. The Red Cross parcels that, under the Krauts, had been so unfailingly distributed that we had come to regard them as a right rather than a gift – sometimes even (after the fashion of the Israelites and the manna from God) criticizing what they held – summarily stop. As summarily are the despised Kraut rations then reduced – sometimes even halved – and the last and the surest Sign of a second tottering of our haven of cards is prowling the barracks with slavering jaws, staring over a bunk’s edge with luminous eyes.
But, this time, we hold firm, particularly when the still lingering vision of the heavenly armada is reinforced by rumours too strong to be only rumours that our tottering is the Krauts’ tottering and the very shuddering of our Eden is a reason for hope. Fired by a bonhomie born of an incipient nostalgia for what will one day be what was, we renew our contact with the no longer dour staff (does his bête noire of Douglas briefly haunt me there?), and, incredibly, Camel comes to visit us, clearly throttling back his more irreverent self and proffering Danny his hand as though the hand he is seeking never socked him in the teeth. I tense when I see that, but Danny takes his hand, albeit a little stiffly, and Camel and I carry the conversation until Danny, even more astonishingly, asks Camel if he still paints, and Camel nods and Danny says he would like to have a painting of himself to give his wife when he gets home, and Camel gapes, clearly at a loss for words, then, unable to any longer repress his truer self, asks, ‘With or without clothes?’ and I close my eyes in anticipation of that ever eager fist, but Danny says, in a tone as neutral as the Kraut soup, ‘With clothes,’ and I open my eyes to see that Camel is grinning and Danny is grinning back, leaving me the odd man out, but who cares?
The current about the camp, as within the camp itself, is running too swiftly now for that painting ever to be done, but a breach is healed and, on one of his increasingly frequent visits, Camel suggests that we g
o with him to visit Tony, and I instinctively touch the scar on my cheek and, as instinctively, glance at Danny, neither of us having even mentioned Tony’s name since the mauling of me in that unforgettably foetid little room. But Danny says, ‘OK. Tony’s all right,’ which is the first indication that he has ever given me that the confrontation between him and Tony on that climactic day must have been more complex than I supposed.
There is a silence, but more of surprise than hostility, as we pass through to Tony’s ‘space’. He greets us as though we have never been away, his eyes only briefly fleeing as we first come in, but he does not offer us tea, it being not to be had any more and all stalls (as with every other ‘business’, including ours) closed down in a repeat of the ‘crash’ of two years before. But there is no repeat of his apathy of then and an emotion close to true affection seizes me as I watch the now almost savagely emaciated face glow with an ardour worthy of a less ephemeral cause than shunting actors around on a stage.
‘It will be our swan song,’ he enthuses, ‘the most difficult thing I have ever done! You have this bloke who’s going to the dogs with booze and women and what have you in a bungalow somewhere in Africa where there’s lots of greenery coiling round the walls and leopards coughing in the wings. He deals in diamonds and slaves which means – naturally – that he is a white bounder whose rich Brit dad has kicked him out of the house with enough of a remittance a month to shut his mouth and keep him a continent away. Now that sounds like a load of corn and it is, but there’s also this young native girl who’s shacked up with him and she’s the one that makes this play the one I want to do before our deliverers come to drag me out of here!’
‘Who’s going to play the part of the girl?’ I dare to ask, curiosity overcoming caution as I realize the magnitude of the task Tony is setting not only the actor but himself.
‘Present tense, Tom, not future. Not knowing how much time we have left, I have speeded up rehearsals to the point where I lie awake at night picturing the balls-up there is going to be on opening night.’
‘Which is –?’ Camel prompts.
‘In a week’s time,’ and Camel says, ‘Christ!’ and Tony turns to me again and says, ‘You don’t know him, Tom. Not your sort. Nor, for that matter, mine. But, when it comes to plays, I’m looking for actors, not friends, and he is good.’
‘What does this creep do to the girl?’ Danny cuts in and, although his tone seems normal enough, I’m wishing we were somewhere else, the conversation veering now towards perilous ground.
‘Give him one guess,’ Camel says, making it worse, and I making it worse still as Camel’s usual dry lasciviousness jerks a laugh out of me that is more nerves than mirth.
‘Shut up, Camel!’ and Tony seems genuinely annoyed, then turns and lays his hand on Danny’s knee, which does not flinch. ‘I will send you each a ticket for opening night. Use it or throw it away. It is your choice. But be sure of one thing and that is that I would never have offered this part to Tom, not only because he would have turned it down, but because it would have offended you who are his mate and whom I too respect, as I am sure you are knowing by now.’
Back at the barracks, I look at Danny with real concern. ‘You getting to like gays?’
‘Nah. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, you and Tony seem to be doing just fine, and you are not exactly kicking Camel in the face, and you did not say you are not going to see this play which is going to be a pretty rough man-loves-man affair, if you are asking me.’
‘You getting jealous?’ Danny taunts, having fun, and though I know he is having fun, the bizarreness of such banter fazes me and I stare at him, at a loss for a reply. He relents, then, punching my arm. ‘Hey! I’m just bulling you, man! But Tony is all right. He’s got savvy and a heart and he’s not all the time thinking about that one thing. If they were all like him, I reckon I could learn to live and let live. Camel I’m not so sure about, but he hasn’t bothered me yet and I’m thinking he won’t after what I gave him back there. About the play? Well, you heard what Tony said. “Use it or tear it up.” I’ll see how I feel when the time comes.’
Tony sends us our tickets the next day, the bearer being a youth who looks like one of Tony’s ‘straights’, but they say you never can tell. I hand Danny one of the tickets and he looks at it, then hands it back to me, saying, ‘Keep it with yours,’ he having no patience when it comes to matters such as this, and I stash the tickets in the hulk’s now getting very tattered kitbag. ‘Did the poor bastard ever get buried?’ I belatedly wonder, rolling the bag back under Danny’s bunk, a small sadness skittering through me like a dead leaf in a wind.
Danny clams up that following week, aping our shrunken – and still shrinking – stomachs which I have come to picture as sly, voracious louts that snap up every least scrap of food, then shovel it into our systems with nothing left over for a turd. Occasionally and uncontrollably, though, they do let off vast farts that reek of the turnip soup we so loathe but dare not any longer refuse. At times, masochistically driven, I stare into our fragment of mirror and flinch at the cadaver that stares back at me, or I feel my hipbones and shudder at their jutting and am almost grateful that it is too cold to strip down and the Krauts are to be thanked that their frequent herding us into the delousing chamber is preserving us from the peculiarly Ite pestilence of lice.
Danny is not, however, sullen as are our stomachs – is, I sense, merely worrying with his usual tenacity at a problem which concerns only himself, but which he will eventually resolve and then share, and I am only surprised at what the problem was when, on the morning of the show, he looks at me with faintly challenging eyes and says, ‘We can go,’ and I know that he is knowing that I will not be asking, ‘Where?’ What I am asking myself is why did he seemingly so agonize over a matter which he originally dismissed with the words, ‘I’ll see how I feel when the time comes’? But I am none the less selfishly pleased by his decision because, from the start, I have wanted to go to the show, partly because I have come to love the stage and partly because it will take my mind off my stomach for an hour or two. However, I am still – and hardly less selfishly so – concerned that the nature of the play will revive Danny’s old intolerance of gays and disrupt the present pleasant status quo.
I could, of course, have gone on my own, but would not have, which – considering the moodiness that would have ensued – is also not as selfless as it sounds, and I am being at my most selfish when I say, ‘OK, but remember I warned you that you might not like the play.’
‘Maybe I’m going because it is what it is,’ and my astonishment shows and he grins a little grimly as he adds, ‘No, it’s not quite that simple, mate. Nothing is that simple. I thought this place would have taught you that before it taught it to me,’ but he does not explain further, instead turns his back to me as though signalling that the subject is closed, then stretches his arms up straight and yawns, but I’m thinking that the yawn has a stagy sound. Then he drops his arms again and, his back still to me, asks, his tone carefully offhand, ‘You wanking much these days?’
It is as though he has fisted me in the gut, we – despite our otherwise closeness – never having discussed anything this personal before, but I try not to rock the boat too hard, ‘Who says I’m wanking at all?’ and I’m hating the coyness of the question even as it slips out of me beyond recall.
His shoulders shake, but with as much discomfort as mirth, ‘Come off it, mate! You a girl? I thought we were mates enough to talk about anything between ourselves. And, anyway, I’m not fishing around just for fun. I’ve got something big on my mind.’
‘Well, no,’ I confess, embarrassment still moving in me like a mess of ants. ‘Not for a long time, if you must know. I suppose it’s the shit food.’
‘Same with me,’ he grunts. ‘Don’t know when last.’
‘So what’s the problem? Why are you pitching me this crap?’
For answer, he gropes under his palliasse, takes out a sheaf of letters,
selects one and passes it to me, his eyes still not meeting mine. ‘Read,’ he says and goes to stand in the barracks door, staring out into the inexhaustibly falling snow.
The letter is from his wife, the handwriting girlishly fine, the date four months earlier than the camp censor’s date of barely a fortnight ago. It teems with crudely sloppy sentiment, is concerned only with herself, is awakening in me a dark resentment that has a truer name that I flee. The concluding words leap out at me from the page, ‘Pray to Jesus, dear, that this war will soon be over. I am only human, you know. I am a woman and I’m needing my man!’
Decisively, I refold the letter, return it to its envelope, toss it onto Danny’s bunk, and he comes over and I say, trying for humour, but the tightness in me still plainly to be heard, ‘Ja, looks like you got to work overtime when you get home!’
He does not at first reply to that. Looking at me levelly, seriously, he instead says, ‘I understand how you feel. I would feel the same if –’ and he nods at the letter, then lets the sentence hang. ‘Nah, that’s shit. I am feeling the same. Right or wrong, it will be hard when the time comes.’ Then he narrows in to land, ‘Why am I showing you that letter? Don’t you see? It’s like you said. Like she’s saying,’ again he indicates the letter. ‘These women of ours – there must be some bint waiting for you too, man! – if they are not having it off with somebody else – and I can’t see my missus doing a thing like that, not with my mum there, that’s for sure! – they will be so hungry for it when we get back that they will be wanting us to give it to them before we even close the door, and here you are saying – and I am saying – that we can’t even get it up any more, haven’t even been wanting to wank for we don’t know how long! Jesus! Every time I read that letter and feel this dead meat between my legs, I’m wanting to go anywhere except home!’ He stops, breathing hard, rubs a small moisture from his hands, his eyes wider than I have ever seen them and more than a little mad. Then, almost pleadingly, ‘Do you think they will understand what it was like here, that we have been only half-way men most of the time? Do you think they will be patient, will believe us when we tell them we have grown to be just plain scared?’
Bitter Eden Page 15
