‘Hey,’ I say to Danny, ‘you know that eggs can stop you shitting for a week?’
‘Who the fuck cares?’ he grins and, as if on cue, two hands – like the hands that held the eggs – are setting down two buckets of milk just outside the door, and we whoop and apportion it, each of the hundred mouths getting little more than a few sips but savouring them all the same, and I realize that I am not sneezing any more and that the hot dry eyes are moist with what, shamingly, just might be tears.
In the morning, we try out my legs and, at first, I am walking as if they are two sticks, but, later, they loosen up and I take my place in the egg-scrounge, which means that, in the case of Danny and myself, the harvest is doubled and we land up with more eggs than we can comfortably – or wisely – consume in one day. So we hold half over till the following day and I suggest to Danny that we take that day off, but he says, ‘No way! We must grab what we can. Now! Jesus, they can’t go on giving us eggs! It would take a million hens for that!’ And that very next day he is proved right, but very pleasingly so, the eggs beginning to be replaced by a duo of sometimes a slice of wurst and sometimes a slice of black, home-baked bread. ‘This is the life!’ he exults. ‘Goodies from heaven, like the Bible says! Or are we back at the start and I am a he and you – what are you, mate?’ and he makes a pass at my crotch which I slap aside, and I marvel at the difference that a few eggs and a sip of milk can make, although the difference is mainly in the mind and the body still so sad an also-ran.
The valley round us plays its part in our rejuvenation, it being now clearly spring – the snow only holding out in the more sheltered places and along the banks of the several streams – and the grass, green as a baize and even as though scythed, is as spangled with flowers as a young girl’s dress spread for a picnic or a love, and, once, Danny grips my arm and says, ‘Look!’ and there it stands – a stag – massive antlers flaring, nose snuffing the wind, and the whole as out of place – and beautiful – as some mythical beast magically raised.
We pass through a village once – that is if it can be called that, it consisting of not much more than a post office and an inn – but the inn is alive with light and talk and the beery smell attracts Danny like a lamppost a dog. ‘A pub!’ he exclaims. ‘Let’s go in!’ and I say he’s crazy, that they will throw us out on our arse, and he says that they have already done much worse to us than that, and we go in.
The silence is only momentary as we come through the door, but still long enough to assure us that we have been seen. Then there is a concerted and studied effort to convince us that we are no longer seen, and we sit down at a table in a corner, our knees touching under its minuscule round, and look up to find that the proprietor, ensconced behind his stubby bar, is not at all averse to our knowing that he is seeing us, is, in fact, studying us with an intentness that is as speculative as it is unashamed. Then, nodding to himself as though arriving at a decision, he heaves himself out from behind the bar and heads for us across the hardly bigger than a bedroom’s floor, his paunch flopping like a half-filled sack, his eyes steely in a face that is otherwise all cherry-red cheeks and snow-white fuzz fit for a Santa Claus.
‘You are English?’ he says, rather than asks, one gnarled hand resting on the table with a heaviness that makes me wince, and Danny says, ‘Yes,’ unabashed, and I, nervy as all hell, nod though I’m not. ‘Wait here,’ and the hand that was on the table is swinging back to the bar, and I look at Danny and he looks at me and I say, ‘This is it. Let’s duck,’ but he laughs, ‘Don’t fuss, mate! You’re forgetting. We won the war, we call the shots,’ and I say, ‘OK, you tell him that when he gets back,’ and then the old guy is coming back, but now holding a tray from which he unloads two tankards of draught beer, two small glasses of schnapps and a plate of liverwurst, thickly sliced.
I stare at him, bemused, Danny now hardly less taken aback. ‘Please,’ I say in my best Kraut, ‘there must be some mistake. We have no money to pay for this.’
‘I am not asking for money,’ he retorts, his English excellent, a smile transforming him. ‘Now eat, drink,’ and, to me, ‘Money is not feminine,’ and goes.
We look at the food, the drink, the schmaltz on the walls, listen to the schmaltz spewing from the bar’s ancient radio, and I pick up one of the glasses of schnapps and say, showing off, ‘You are supposed to drink this first,’ and Danny picks up the other glass and we chink them and he says, ‘Our first night out,’ and I crack back, ‘I thought you were never going to ask,’ and he kicks me in the shins as we hit back the schnapps with a gasp, and someone at last glances round and slyly grins. Then we steadily eat our way through the wurst, down the beer, and, when we leave, the radio is belting out that sloppy song about the bint that is forever standing under a lamppost beside a barrack’s gate, and, outside, we, too, bellow out the words till long after the music can no longer be heard, and hook an arm around each other’s neck, we staggering, then, over a radiant, grown turbulent earth.
Almost I begin to insanely accept that Danny was right – that this is the sweetest Eden of them all – but, the next day, we are standing outside the barn before the start of the scrounge-around and the guard grabs my arm and whispers, ‘Look!’ jerking his head towards where the forest ends, and there is no mistaking them – the black caps, black boots, black gloves – the whole that of stick-figures dipped in the blackness of a drying blood, of toys fashioned by a malevolent hand, but the menace still there and, incredibly, something of the tawdry sadness, the dusty standing on an abandoned stage, of the woman in the song.
‘We in danger?’ I whisper back, the old terror immediately aroused.
‘No, it is too near the end now. Also, it is not the first time I am seeing them there.’ Then drily, ‘Maybe they are wishing they were me.’
So it is not they that are the threat. But omens, they fade back into the forest, though not so readily back into my mind.
It is four days later when they arrive. Danny and I are dawdling back from a scrounge, the sun low in the west, when we see them coming down the slope to the barn, disappearing behind its blind side, maybe ten of them, walking single file like guinea fowl back home. When we get to the barn, they have already hassled the guys out – the guard, too, he standing to one side, shivering like snow’s on the ground again and he with nothing on.
Their whatever he is – he is not flashing any rank – swanks over to us, hardware truculently in his hands. ‘You prisoners?’ he asks, voice high and thin like they’ve hacked off his balls, squat nose flaring like a bull scenting cow. We nod and he snaps, ‘Get over there,’ gesturing with the gun to where the other guys are standing, bowed legs for a runt already wheeling him round.
‘Who says?’ Danny growls, giving him the eye, and he whirls back, moistly petulant mouth tightening into a snarl, startlingly white eyelashes exclamatory as a girl’s. ‘The US of A, soldier!’ he shrills, the bowed legs trying to straighten into a tighter squeezing of their oval of air, and now all of us get to laughing till we’re feeling we’ll fall down, as much of hysteria in our laughter as the black baying of our rage, and he waits, entrapped and knowing it, and we stop and he says, sulkily, letting us stand where we are, ‘OK. Show’s over. This guy’ – gun’s barrel levelled now at the guard – ‘What do you want us to do? Shoot him and let him lay, or kick him in the ass and let him go?’
Ashamedly, we face the guard, ashamed that we should have been asked to be his judge, ashamed that any man should so tremblingly try to hide his fear while the eyes so mercilessly betray the last tatters of his pride. ‘Remember,’ the eyes implore of me, fawning as any about-to-beaten dog’s, and I do – death again but a vagary of his will away, the night, with its shots and screams, the sudden antechamber of my own oblivion beyond recall.
Danny beats me to it, though, ‘Neither,’ he says, his tone thrusting at the runt like a blade. ‘We don’t shoot him and we don’t kick him in the arse or anywhere else when we let him go. Right?’ and he glances round
at the rest of us and we say, ‘Right!’ as one, and the runt looks at us as though we are no better than the guard, then shouts, ‘Vamoose!’ flapping his gun as though he is shooing a fowl, and the guard stares at him, not understanding the word, and I, at last, say, ‘Go, friend,’ and our eyes meet over the barriers of blood and tribe for a moment that is endlessly prolonged. Then he flees, shamblingly, not even taking up what is his.
The shot rings out as he is about to round the barn and slams him against its wall, but he does not fall. Then there is a second shot and he begins to slide, one hand fumbling for a purchase on the wall, and I am running, and Danny is running, and we reach him as he hits the ground and rolls over, face to the sky. Blood is already pooling under him and spilling from his mouth, and I kneel beside him and take one of the peasant hands with its broken nails into mine, and he grips it with a frenzied strength and struggles to speak, the words bubbling up through the blood, as Danny raises, then cradles, his head. ‘What is he saying?’ Danny asks, his voice stolid with the helplessness of having watched many die. ‘Something about his mother,’ I say, striving for a similar submissiveness in the presence of death, and lean closer to the tortured mouth to hear, but the bubbling stops and, even as I watch, the desperate eyes still into their final, alienating glass.
Gently, Danny lays the head down and we pace, together, to where the rest are standing, rooted as though the bullets had struck them all. ‘Why did you do it?’ I ask of the runt, my voice oddly everyday’s, the actor in me, even now, sincerely prompting that this is the way it should be done.
‘For practice,’ he says, his eyes insolently alive, and he casts around for his men’s dutiful titter, but they are stonily silent, looking only at the ground, and, for the first time, something of an uneasiness seizes him and he turns back to us and begins to make like he doesn’t understand, ‘So why all the fuss? He was only a cock-sucking Kraut. All Krauts suck cocks. Didn’t you know that? Jesus, after all this time in camp, surely you are not that fucking dumb!’
‘That cocksucker saved my life,’ I say, still levelly. ‘It’s you that’s a cocksucker, you goddam Yankee shit!’
His eyes tell me that I have gone too far as he has gone too far, but he is thinking that he sees a way out. ‘Well, now,’ he says, stretching it slow and long, again looking round at his men, ‘why would a Kraut want to do that? What did you do for him that he would want to do that? Maybe here it’s the other way around. Maybe here it’s you that’s the one. Yeah! You been sucking his cock, siphoning it when he’s got the hots?’
Again I am too slow, as he is too slow. His head is still swinging round from its circling of his men, when Danny has tripped him onto his back, seized the rifle by the barrel, smashed its butt into the again rising face – smashed the face again and again till teeth are spilling from it like corn from a cob, and the jaw is crushed, and the cheekbones, and it is beginning to look like another Camel down there on another sure spot for a spook. But then the runt’s men at last move in, wrench the rifle from Danny’s hands, wrench him away from the blinded, heaving mess on the ground, let him go again when his own blindness heals and he sits down and stares at the nothing between his knees. Then they pick up the runt and cart him off like he’s meat, and one looks back and yells, ‘Never saw a thing!’
For the first time since we came, we knock on the farmhouse door and the farmer, a gnarled root of a man with eyes clear as the nearby streams, nods with no hatred in him and says, to me – did the dead man tell him I understand German and why is it no longer so easy for me to say ‘Kraut’ or ‘guard’? – that he saw it all and here is a blanket, and he goes with us and we roll the body onto the blanket, and he hoses away the blood and receives the blanket into his home with careful and slow hands, closing the door and saying that they will trace the mother and everything will be arranged.
Then we wait for them to fetch us, not knowing which way to go, not any longer really wanting to go, our roots – incorrigible parasites that they have become – already seeking anchorage in a transience of spring, its no longer snow-fed streams’ ebbing flow, a wandering stag that fortuitously stood, an inn with a radio that sang of a ghost of the mind, a dead body behind a locked door that will not open to us again. Mercifully, the waiting is not long. Even as dusk comes, they are here – four trucks with another batch of Yanks who barely give us time to grab our kits, give us no time at all for looking back, thunder us for two hours through a landscape we will never see.
The airfield is not what it used to be. The signs – one tellingly askew – still speak of ‘Flugplatz’, but it is Yanks and poms that are rushing round, loud-hailers in their hands, and the runways bounce the planes, the craters still but rawly filled, and the terminal’s window, smashed, haggardly gapes like that mouth I am struggling to not recall. The trucks offload us alongside the runway nearest the terminal and a pommy staff, well over the hill, droopy moustache as mournful as his hangdog eyes, comes to us with a clipboard and sorts out our nationalities, units, names. ‘Sleep here tonight,’ he drones. ‘Right here. Nice night, so there’s no problem there. Tomorrow, sparrowfart, all onto the planes. Brits on planes to Blighty and straight to your homes. Rest’ – what, I suddenly wonder, happened to the Russian? – dead in a forest, bones stripped clean, or did he again swap camps before the axe fell? – ‘rest on separate planes to Blighty and into camps and wait there till your own chaps take you home.’
Suddenly it is here again, crashing down between us like a sawn-through tree – the separation that had faced us once before, but had been thwarted by a vagary of war. Had we, like children living only for today, really thought that there would be no second reckoning, that, then, the tree would still not fall? I look at him and he looks back, our eyes the eyes of creatures that, spines crushed, reach out to each other across a widening gulf, and I raise my hand. ‘How long,’ I ask, my voice struggling to be my age, ‘will we be in those camps?’
‘You a South African?’ I nod. ‘One month, three months, who can say?’ Then – sensing my pain? – ‘“Camps” doesn’t mean prison camps! You will be able to get around, get to know Blighty while you can.’ At once, we are what we were, our months expanding into years, our todays our blind sole unit for the measuring of time, and when, leaving, he indicates a monolith of food parcels beside the runway and, with a first glimmering of humour, adds, ‘All yours,’ we cry out as at our murder or rape and rush to cart parcels away to where each of us has decided to sleep, and are then no longer a hundred funny men in yesterday’s funny clothes, but a hundred desperately sick and messily amoral deviates and servitors of greed making whoopee under as sick and gibbous a moon.
Leaning against our twenty parcels each, knowing well that we can never take them with us, but, as in the case of our pending parting of the ways, not admitting it – vowing, rather, to defend to the last man out of two this so useless a hoard – we slowly eat our way through a parcel from our stock and take the measure of each other with the ancient serpent-eyes of the replete. ‘Hey,’ Danny says, solemnly as though I would not be knowing this, ‘we are free,’ and again we size each other up, but now there is more than our being free to our sniffing of each other’s sides, and we have been achingly aware of this ever since the turmoil at the barn. There is an explosiveness in us as in a cat’s fur before a storm, a primal, reactive energy that bloodshed and death breed, that seeks now to out as every cumulative force must, whether it be a lava or merely a pus, and I shift uncomfortably as one holding back an embarrassing wind.
‘I say we are free!’ Danny now yells. ‘Free to do as we fucking well want! So wrestle, you!’ and he’s all over me like the big kid he sometimes was at camp, teeth nuzzling into my neck, making as if to sever its veins, throat roaring like a ravening wolf’s, lissome, cunning body twisting round me like it has no bones, one pinioning switching to another with unpredictable shufflings of technique, but never any grabbing of the balls, breaking of the skin, drawing of blood. We laugh and pant, roll ar
ound like angry cats, though we are never that, lie for long moments, rigidly entwined, eyes staring into eyes, breath meshing into breath, then start again, knocking over our parcels’ stack, not caring about that, not letting the tumbling parcels interrupt the intricate subterfuges of our limbs.
Then, suddenly, I want out, am inwardly crying for him to stop, not even thinking, though, to cry out aloud, for that would be to expose my state. Is he feeling the same? Why do we both no longer laugh or shout, mutter picturesque and meaningless threats? Does he, too, realize that this is no longer a childish game, that, stealthily, it has become the oldest game of all? Silently we wrestle on, seriously now as though we sought a death, eyes unseeing, fixed, as eyes painted on a mask – or those that watch a sky beyond a sky, a self within a self? Convulsed, he stops first, face to my face, permitting that I overpower him, knowing that I cannot, then flings himself off me, lies, face down, alone.
In the morning, dawn not yet showing in the east, he is up and at a nearby tap, and I see that he is wiping the stain off the front of his pants with a wet palm. When he is finished, I get up and ostentatiously do the same, but he does not react, just stands there, moodily staring at the busyness of the planes. So I say to him, straight, carefully censoring any pleading out of my voice, ‘You still wanting me to visit you because, if so, how must I get to a place when I don’t even know where the fuck it is?’ He does not answer me, just takes one of his mother’s letters out of his kit and tears off the portion of it that carries his home address, then passes that to me and goes on staring at the planes. ‘Well, puh-lease,’ I say, sneering louder than any clown, ‘don’t do me any favours if it’s going to bust your gut!’ But then I notice that his hands are trembling and that his moodiness is something quite else, so I turn him round to face me, which he quite willingly does, and now I do plead, almost hearing time running out, ‘Look we wrestled and we were randy, so we came. That is all. I didn’t bugger you and you didn’t bugger me like so many of the guys in the camps were doing all the time. We were free and we were happy fit to bust. So we bust and now you’re wanting me to slash my wrists? For that? Get lost!’
Bitter Eden Page 18
