Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  Only the odd flake is still falling and the snow on the road leading out is turning to slush under the shuffle and stamp of the feet waiting for the order to march, and, Danny woodenly at my side, I look back at the desolation that we leave. Acres of paper and empty tins, palliasses, charred and fouled, uncounted hosts of clogs – how can one march in clogs? – only the precious army boots will do for this last mile – a greatcoat, that could still have been worn, senselessly sprawled as a dead man – are these to be our sole bequests to those who follow after in search of the courage and greatness that raised us to the heights we have never seen?

  Almost guiltily, I again turn my back to the bitter Eden that we are for the second time abandoning, that housed us with however much of harshness and that we now cast aside as did the lusting Bessie this sombre reject at my side. Disbelievingly I watch as the fallen angels of the guards, those once Watchers at the Gates, busy themselves with the pettinesses of our kits, and Danny suddenly, urgently, whispers, ‘Don’t look to your right!’ but of course I do and my hair seems to rise up straight as a scalded cat’s as I see that Douglas is staring at me through a window small and barred as a cell’s. ‘Irrenhaus’ states a sign on the wall in which the window is set, but this I notice only subliminally, my eyes locked with Douglas’ as in a horrifying embrace. ‘Hello there!’ he calls, his voice coy as a girl’s and soaring with an impossible clarity above the hubbub all around, but now I wrench my eyes away and pretend I do not hear, but he persists and a quick glance sickens me with the sight of his now coquettishly fluttering hand. ‘Fuck off!’ I at last yell, ignoring Danny’s restraining grip on my arm, the whole of me shuddering with nausea and rage, and Douglas seems able to hear me as clearly as I am hearing him because he at once unleashes a torrent of spectacular abuse.

  Do they, too, hear – these two SS men strutting past with their peaked black caps with the death’s-head badge and the high black boots made for wading through shit or blood? Or were they bound for the madhouse anyway, weapons the one-digit extensions of their hands? Whichever, they go round to the rear of the asylum’s concrete cube, there being no door opening onto the road, and at once there is a boiling as of bodies trying to escape through the facing window’s bars, and a shrieking that stills us as though a Biblical curse had struck us into figures of salt or stone. Then the shots come, and continue till the shrieking stops, but there is one who is still alive, and he slips past the too slowly wheeling guns and is bolting out from behind the cell and into us, his hair flaring like his flaring eyes, and we are all making way for him, but more in a fearing for our own lives than from any nobler urge, and they pump him full of bullets as he hurtles into the camp fence and claws, despairingly, at it and lies there, his arms flung wide and his eyes amazed that his scraggy body should still be yielding up so much of blood.

  They drag him then, back across the road to the asylum, and fling him like a sack against its wall, and even our guards stay silent as ourselves, as the no doubt blood-drenched madhouse from whose window – as from every other window – Douglas’ tormented image has forever been expunged.

  Then the order comes to move and we move, but pacing now as mourners do, the true nature of what we face at last starkly revealed.

  We do not pass through any further ruined cities, my German coming in useful as I hear our guards bickering amongst themselves that even that one instance was a mistake, that it was never meant that we should see one of their cities in that state. So now we meander southwards along mainly farm roads or tiny villages’ cobbled lanes, and sometimes we even find ourselves struggling, single file, along fences between homesteads and the farmers’ wives and children are watching us from behind the windows’ pretty curtains with terror and despair – and only the very occasional hatred – plainly in their eyes. ‘A beaten people,’ I mumble to Danny, but he only grunts, seeing only the snow.

  Bemused though we are by the anguish of the flesh as of the mind – I still haunted by the horror of Douglas’ death and Danny walking skewed as men will after the loss of a limb that is the loss of a wife – we none the less dimly sense that we are lurching from winter into spring. The clouds more frequently yield to the still temperate but strengthening sun, there is a shyness to the snowfalls that foreshadows their end and, once, one of the guards – who has discovered I understand Kraut and now seems to have as little to eat as ourselves – excitedly points to a flower pushing up through the shallower snow and says, ‘Schneeglöckchen!’ with an awe and a delight that only aggravates my misery and draws from me not even a try for his joy.

  But Danny and I do sometimes whisper to each other of spring, confess to each other – and to ourselves – that we are sliding into a submissiveness that invites death while all else is reaching for birth and vow, then, to cling – cling even beyond our strength – to the thin thread of the breath that is our life. But there is still so much of snow, still the undeclared distance we must go, the ever faster ebbing of our strength and will as the powerhouses of our bellies shut down and even intelligence in its ivory tower falters, hearing madness sneaking up the stairs.

  So we are sleepstaggering along this track skirting a forest of trees we will never name, the snow on either hand liquidizing into a slow slush like rotting flesh, and dusk is drawing in and we are listening for the command to stop and slump down into the deeper sleep that sometimes settles into the final foetus that is death. But they head us off under the trees where the snow still lies shin-deep, unbroken and spite-white, and we go on stumbling down a trail marked only by the spacing of the trees, grumbling without rage, driven by guards whose faces are as honed by the long march, long walking alone, mouths set in a rictus of mechanical command.

  At last they shout, ‘Stop!’ and we collapse, but they order us up again and we see them then, pacing down the line, fed and to be feared in their black caps, black boots, black gloves for murderous hands, faces fish-belly-pale, blue eyes blazing out of the nothingness beyond. There are only four of them but their presence is a horde’s, and the guards shuffle round them, saluting them with flaccid arms, inaudible ‘Heils!’ and they expostulate, threaten, rage, their voices rising to the porcine screams of their totem and god, but they are too distant for me to hear what they say.

  Then, unbelievably, we are ordered on, but now at an increased and increasing pace, till at last we are almost running, weaving, stumbling, sometimes smashing into trees, sometimes falling as the snow drags us down. Some stagger up again, some lie where they fall, and a so long supine rebelliousness begins to stir, but then the shots sound and we realize with the terror that seized us at the madhouse that those that fall by the way are the litter that we leave. An adrenalin unnatural as lust in a dying flesh goads us into renewed, terminal haste, and my kit seems lighter and grows lighter still when Danny shouts, ‘The stove! Throw it away!’ and I unhook the all-but-forgotten blower-stove from where it is dangling and swaying from my kit and cast it aside.

  At last the guards themselves tire and we slow down into our usual automaton’s trudge, but now the adrenalin that powered us has petered out beyond even terror’s reach, and my legs are floundering as though straw-stuffed or dropsical with stopped and pooling blood, and my ears are singing and my eyes are dry and hot and sometimes I sneeze, repeatedly and with an exuberance that is little short of obscene. As obscene is it when staff suddenly passes us, but, unaccountably, heading in the direction from which we came, and, although his face is as dour as ever, his flesh is glowing and trim and his gait openly contemptuous of our spiritless crawl. ‘Did you see that?’ I whisper to Danny, but he looks at me as though I am mad and when I, a few steps on, see staff sitting to one side, his head resting on his arms folded on his knees and our guard levelling his gun at him, tears we are to remember streaming from his eyes, I know that I am, indeed, a little mad and try to not hear the shot that shortly afterwards sends wings blundering through the leaves.

  Later, the hulk is walking beside me, his face quite healed, and he
tries to take back his bag, but I fight him off, shouting that he doesn’t need it any more, and, predictably, he is then Douglas, a halo like a soup plate on a head that has no face, and I say, ‘OK! OK!’ but wearily as though I pander to a fractious child. And then there are the faces that are not phantoms’, that should wrench me back into normalcy but only serve to scramble the real and the unreal into a fresh unreality that, like all illusion, has the hard stone of its genesis at its core.

  The first we pass is that of Tony and he is really not at all that bad, he lying there, flat on his back, his pince-nez slipped down on his nose, his eyes closed and only the almost bloodless hole in his skull betraying that he has not fallen asleep in some sun known only to him, and I make to break ranks and wish him well, but Danny jerks me back with as anguished as angry a cry. Camel, though, is something else. But for the old black coat that always flapped around him like a raven’s wings – ‘Hardly fit, that, for a camel!’ I insanely grin – I would not know him, his face so smashed that only one eye still glares from the gelatinous mess and the jaw with its teeth swung up so sharply and far that it seems to belong to quite some other corpse, and, even as I stare, the teeth, which were not clenched, clack together as though responding to some last shred of the brain.

  Does that, without my willing it, so penetrate my trance that I suddenly know – and know it with an unshakable certainty – that there are only so many paces still left in me, which I then studiedly take and stop.

  ‘Tom! What is it?’ Danny asks, dropping back, his eyes wildly anxious, probing mine.

  ‘I’m finished. Let them shoot me. Here! Now!’ Incredulously I listen to myself saying that, as incredulously know that I am meaning it, that this is none of my strutting on a stage. ‘Is that all heroism is?’ I detachedly wonder. ‘One step the other side of despair?’

  ‘Don’t talk shit, man!’ Danny yells. ‘It’s just nerves. I’ve been watching you getting weird.’

  ‘Weird or not, that’s the way it is.’ Under any other circumstances the pompousness in my voice would have made me howl. ‘My legs are finished! Dead! If you touch me, I’ll fall down.’

  ‘Oh, come on, mate! It can’t be that bad!’ and he tries to drag me by my arm and I immediately plummet to my knees, my feet not having moved from their stand, and our guard that cried is at once there, shouting, half-heartedly brandishing his gun, and I look at him and my eyes are telling him all that he needs to know and, slowly, he levels the gun.

  ‘No!’ Danny screams, knocking the barrel aside, seizing the guard by the shoulders, pleading with him with an abjectness that does not shame. ‘Don’t shoot him! He’s my friend. Help me get him on my back,’ and he bends down in front of me and the guard hesitates for a second that seems as long as a life, then struggles me onto Danny’s back, and Danny says, ‘Hold tight,’ and surges to his full height, but I’m begging to be put down, hysterically sobbing now that it is no use, and he shouts, ‘Shut up, you cunt! You’re all I have left! Hold tight, or I’ll bash you again between the eyes!’ and I hold tight, Danny gripping my thighs, his kit slung now to his front, my arms encircling his neck in the manner of a mother with a child, which image discomforts me with an acuteness that dismays.

  I slip in and out of consciousness, the fever in me now rapidly taking hold, my bouts of sneezing becoming ever more frequent and prolonged, but the incidences of unconsciousness are very brief, my arms instinctively tightening round Danny’s neck and jolting me back into sense each time the darkness looms. Sometimes those about us, shamed into a hankering for some finer self and vengefully proud that one of us, at least, is being spared when – according to the Krauts – he should be dead, offer to take turns carrying me, and Danny gruffly thanks them but says, no, he’s fine, and they seem to respect him for that too, understanding perhaps – as do I – that his mate is his mate and is not to be bandied about any more than a wife. That makes me feel good in even the places that hunger has lamed, but as Danny, bandy-legged from the load he bears, grimly stomps on through the snow, only his history of running and weightlifting sustaining him now, and I hear his empty belly rumbling, as also the occasional fart as a foot comes down too hard, hear even his sinews and bones cracking as he adjusts his load, almost hear even the blood pumping through his veins, I begin to feel like a child in a womb and am back to the image of the mother and child and the discomfort that that image breeds.

  Do I not pity him? Christ, am I a stone? Of course I pity him! What is more, I feel pain – a pain that is aggravated by the guilt of my knowing that I am causing him pain – which arguably could make my pain the fiercer of the two. But what can I do? Were I to struggle free of him and be shot, that would cause him an ultimate pain and reduce my dying to the petty and selfish act of a perverted will, particularly now that I find that my impulse towards death is waning with every step we take. So I go on riding him like some hideous succubus – an image, this, which I prefer to that of the child – and the trees click past in a slow computation of our going and the shots, and sometimes screams, continue to ring out above the funereal shuffle of our feet, and we begin to wonder with a renewal of immediate terror if the plan is to keep us moving till we have all fallen out and been shot and that was their goal all along.

  But then, suddenly, the forest opens out onto a vast sweep of cold but clear sky, and the stars are so bright, so close – and so unexpected – that I involuntarily duck my head as before a still overhanging branch, and there is a grass underfoot that is largely free of snow and I can tell from the way Danny’s body slants and his feet take a firmer purchase of the earth, that we are moving quite sharply downhill as into a valley, and the prisoners are breaking up into groups and heading for various clusters of lights seemingly haphazardly scattered over the darkness below.

  The guard that helped me onto Danny’s back leads about a hundred of us to one of the nearer groups of lights and it turns out to be a farmhouse and cottage with – judging by the sounds – a pigsty and chicken-run and, above all, a barn piled high with straw where the guard says we will sleep and the already bedded-down cows regard us with the unflappability of beasts used to sharing their universe with men. Danny lets me slip then from his back into the straw, then straightens up with a howl of anguish that at last turns the heads of the cows and crashes down beside me even as I pass out for that night’s final time.

  When I again wake, the cows are gone and pigeons are fluttering and huffing on the roof-beams and trafficking in and out of the open door. I am lying in a swathe of sunlight as white and warming as a spread sheet and a fine straw-dust is whirling and weaving in the sun’s long reaching through the barn. Outside, there is an uproar of cluckings and grunts and the more leisurely lowing of a cow, but there is no trace of a human voice, as there is no trace of a startled farmer querying our invasion of his farm. I am the only one awake, the straw bristling with flung-wide, inanimate legs and arms, and I become aware that my kit has been slipped from my shoulders and is now pillowing my head, an insistent hardness in the curve of my neck at first puzzling me, then, at once as an apparition, declaring itself to be my one of our two guns. At that, I turn my head, sharply and afraid, the previous night back with me with the wholeness and clarity of a dream just dreamed, but his breathing beside me is even and deep and his face cleared of strain as a child’s. Cautiously, I reach out and touch his cheek, his body again moving against mine in an act of fortitude beyond belief, but he does not stir and I trace his lips with a finger, possessing him, then sink back into sleep as into a coma, my hand still inarticulately outstretched.

  Then he is straddling me, cuffing me under the chin, the shadows grown long, the cows, back from pasture and their milking, ambling through the door into the barn. ‘Hey, you dead?’ he shouts. ‘I been hauling a corpse?’ and he gets off me and I sit up and he says, ‘Look what I’ve brought,’ and he holds up six eggs and I stare at them, battling to comprehend.

  ‘You been robbing the fowls?’

  ‘Nah.
Guard there,’ and he gestures and I see our guard is kipping just a few feet from us and grinning like he’s forgotten he’s a Kraut, ‘said we must go round to all the farms for food if we don’t want to starve, so we all split up and knock, one at a time, at a door and, each time, a hand comes out and puts an egg in your hand like the missus in there is paying you to go away. So I eat one and save one and here’s your share. But eat them slowly, mate, because this is rich stuff that the old gut’s forgotten about and some of the blokes are knowing their mistake.’

  ‘I must eat them raw? You know we don’t have the stove any more.’

  He laughs. ‘Nah, man! They’re already boiled. Salt in the water too. Guard says they all know the war is as good as over, so the missus behind the hand is one frightened Frau that’s not going to make you eat the eggs raw!’

  So I throttle back my belly and nibble at the eggs like some twitchy-nosed mouse, and ask the guard what the fuck is going on and when do we march again, and he says there will be no more marching, that the chain of command is all but smashed, and then he looks at me and adds, his ingrown taciturnity of the peasant at last opening out into the full horror of what he knows, that we were to have been marched even further south into the mountains and then shot, but the route to there has now been cut.

  ‘But can’t they still massacre us here?’ and a fresh terror is up and clawing at me at the thought.

  ‘No. These are good people. They would not be permitting that.’

  ‘So? Where do we go from here?’

  ‘Be patient. Soon they will be coming to take you home.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I, too, will be going home. To my mother, who is alone. And,’ and he pauses, looking at me with the desolateness of the condemned, ‘a priest. I need absolution – for these,’ and he holds out his working man’s hands, then turns his back to me and, later, pretends to be asleep, and I finish off the eggs, my stomach absorbing them with the sensuousness of a snail a leaf, and it is only then that I remember what my mother always told me about eggs.