Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Live Bodies

  Maurice Gee has long been considered one of New Zealand’s finest writers. He has written more than thirty books for adults and children and has won numerous literary awards. His novels include the acclaimed Plumb, widely regarded as one of the finest New Zealand novels ever written, Sole Survivor, In My Father’s Den, Going West, Blindsight and Access Road.

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  LIVE BODIES

  MAURICE GEE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  For Emily

  Acknowledgements

  The early chapters of this novel owe much to the late H. O. (Bert) Roth, whose activities in communist underground groups in Vienna in the 1930s are recorded in his papers, held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. I have several times quoted directly from Bert Roth. I also made use of a published short story by Somes Island internee and escaper Odo Strewe, and used material from his file, and those of other interned aliens, held in the National Archives of New Zealand.

  The Oral History Section of the Alexander Turnbull Library made several useful tapes available to me.

  I am grateful to Mr J. C. Klingenstein for allowing me to read his memoir of his days as an internee on Somes Island. (This is also held in the Turnbull Library.)

  Others I would like to thank are Mrs Anna Maria Tretter and Mrs Maria Collins; Rhondda Grieg; Carl Freeman; Henk Heinekamp; Michael Noonan and Nelson Wattie.

  ONE

  When I am a little drunk, and that is as drunk as I ever get, I lose my resentment and my fear and all knowledge of a social existence and know my being as molecular, like this wine in the glass, French wine, Swedish glass, or like the good cloth of my trousers that once was wool on the back of a Southland sheep, and grass before that, minerals in the soil, rain sucked from an ocean on the other side of the world… You see where I am heading? It is enormously comforting to make the journey into the universe and into time and understand that I come from there and will go there and that consciousness will be put aside. I look into the upheld rosy orb. It was the clay and gravel of Bordeaux and now it becomes part of my flesh and I will send it on somewhere else when my body decays: perhaps it will become grape again in the time that stretches like a field, and I shall be part of some man or woman in the twenty-first, the twenty-second, the twenty-third century. How one basks in that: to be forever, with fear and resentment put aside, and longing, gratitude, disappointment, love … I’ll not make a list, it would become the dictionary. The social existence, affective existence, put aside and lids placed on the trashcans and honey pots of the past, and on that trashcan, future, too, and ‘now’ made safe by an arrangement of molecules, by the expansion that reduces …

  It is a credit to me that drinking has not become an addiction. A bottle lasts all evening and one evening a week is all I allow.

  Tonight I am denied that escape. Consciousness has been digging a tunnel. It breaks out now and looks into the open air. You cannot intern, inter me, consciousness says. There is a thing that must be understood, or at least held in the light: Kenny’s betrayal of all I have done. How it spoils my happy conceit, how it sends me scurrying backwards, looking for some other place to hide.

  There are not many. Vienna? That is no place. Or no place I can rest in and make Josef Mandl free of care. My Nancy-life? Not there either, for Nancy, she-and-I, are all right for a time and then Kenny begins to scratch at the edges with his fingernails.

  There is only one and, if I can, I’ll go there, with the friend who keeps me company.

  I look out the window into the night and it is dark. No moon, no stars. I cannot see. But I can know. Out there is my narrow place. It will not change and will not go away.

  Willi and I dug a tunnel once. We burrowed for freedom in the ground, and it was a joyous enterprise, although I was terrified of collapsing walls and suffocation. To pass beneath the wire, that was a joy, scraping with my Dutch hoe six feet beneath the roots of the grass on an island in a harbour at the bottom of the world. I have read the note that betrayed us. It is fastened with a rusty pin in a file that carries Willi’s name – Enemy Alien: Gauss, Wilhelm Theodor Georg – and it reads: Stope escappes. Socialist Gauss and dirty Jew diggen tunnel under House 7.I have taken the rusty pin from my file too: Enemy Alien: Mandl, Josef Maximilian. I was Willi’s follower (‘a simple-minded young man but untrustworthy and thoroughly unreliable’), so the note in mine is merely a transcription. Willi deserves the original for he was an ‘original,’ although they never used that equivocal word of him. They allowed him nothing except his influence over me.

  Where were we going as we lay on our bellies and scraped at the hard earth with our broken hoe? I had calculated how far we must dig, and drawn a map. I was the mathematician, the cartographer, and he the planner and the leader. He said ‘there’ so we went there, which was the YMCA hut forty feet outside the wire. We would break up in the night like moles beneath its floor and wait until the guard on the path strolled off for his cliff-edge pee – voiding into the void – and his squatting smoke in the lee of the flax bush (his hands cupping the cigarette were like a masked lantern), and we would free the loose base board and wriggle out. We crept bent-legged through the gap he left and climbed down to the water, using Will’s cat eyes and fox ears, and his nose for human stupidity, which was present on this island, he said, in greater concentration than he had ever known.

  I would do the next bit: make the canoe. Assemble the ribs Steinitz had made in the carpenter’s shop, lash them with twine, fish out the waxed canvas from its hole in the rocks – Braun had placed it there while hunting for seagull eggs – stretch it and lash it to the skeleton, and we would have our two-man coracle. Which might, Willi said, hold only one. We would have to see.

  ‘You go,’ I said.

  That would be best. I am stronger, for the rowing.’

  I think it would have held only one. I think perhaps it would have sunk halfway to Eastbourne, and Willi would have drowned in the black night, in the harbour at the bottom of the world. He had told us on our first escape, rowing to Petone beach, that he was afraid of bottomless water. How we cackled, Steinitz and I. Willi confesses to an imperfection. Our laughter increased, it bounced across the black water into the dark. Anything would have started us off, euphoric as we were with our easy freedom, and Willi dipped into the sea and splashed us with brine. ‘F
ools, they will hear. The night carries noise.’

  Which escape do I write about? When they brought us back from the hills above the Hutt Valley and marched us into the compound, I thought, Well, it’s over, we tried, but Willi said, ‘Next time we will know what to do.’ Next time was the tunnel and the canoe. I discovered another imperfection in him: he was terrified of being enclosed. His fear was different from mine. I was afraid the roof would cave in and suffocate me, he of being unable to stand upright and spread his arms. I heard him groan and heard his elbows thump on the walls as he tried to make himself more space. Once he screamed and came backing out, his boots in my face, and I backed out and we stood in the pit under my bed. I felt him gulping air and wringing his body this way and that and rising on his toes and flexing his arms above his head. ‘I cannot be a worm, Josef. You will have to do it.’ We climbed the ladder and spread our scrapings round the piles of the hut, and after that I was the one who worked on my belly. I dragged the earth back in flour bags and left Willi to scatter it.

  The others in Hut 7 knew about our digging. Steinitz was not coming this time. He thought the tunnel too dangerous and believed the canoe would sink even though he had shaped the ribs himself. Moser pointed out that those who stayed behind would be punished for our escape.

  ‘How can they punish you?’ Willi said. ‘Will they drag you into a cellar and shoot you as if you were in Munich or Berlin?’ The lights would go out earlier, he said, that was all. Inspections would be held at 2 a.m. Even the rations would not be cut.

  ‘We are escaping for all of you, to keep you alive. We are dying on this island. Measure yourselves. Every day you shrink a little bit. When Josef and I are free, you can stand taller.’

  ‘And how tall will you stand when they bring you back?’ Moser asked.

  ‘We will be men who have escaped. We will hold our shoulders square.’ He raised his fist – the red salute: ‘And give this to the scum in Hut 5.’ He perceived connections, read emotions, removed blocks; knew words and gestures; was a master of coarse acting and shifted us where he needed us to be; but knew we became private when the lights went out – was never surprised by the private life – and waited with his smile to be betrayed.

  The tip-off came from Hut 7, although the letter was written in 5, the Nazi hut. ‘Dirty Jew’ is evidence of that, and ‘diggen’ rules out the Italians and Japanese. But only the inmates of Hut 7 knew about the tunnel.

  So there at 3 a.m. were Lieutenant Dowden, swagger stick erect, moustache jumping, and Sergeant Pengelly (Scheisskerl to Nazis and Internationalists alike) and half a dozen privates with rifles and fixed bayonets rousting us nine half-naked wretches from our beds. Our feet scuffed the gritty floor, our eyes blinked at the silver blades aligned at us. Only Willi smiled. ‘So,’ he said, and left the rest unspoken: we are betrayed. They herded us into a corner and left two men like sheep dogs holding us while Dowden tapped and pointed with his baton, conducting the search, and Pengelly shouted orders – why do they shout, these sergeants?, they deny their humanity – and the privates overturned beds and manhandled trunks from under them and banged the floor for hollow sounds with boots and rifle butts.

  I was the one sleeping over the hole. How cold it had made me in the night, that shaft that might drop to the Pole; and how I dreamed of wriggling to Vienna and breaking out on the Kahlenberg and sliding on my skis down to the city and meeting there, in broad streets, Mother, Father, Susi, Franz. An iron band fixed itself round my chest when I woke. My family had backed away as though from royalty, with large eyes and fixed smiles on their lips. A dream, only a dream, yet it hung on, squeezing me, while the men ranked in this wooden hut, snoring, farting, dreaming, were the dream.

  The soldiers pulled floor boards up and shone torches down the hole at our Dutch hoe and pickhead chisel and hurricane lamp, our rucksack of sheep’s tongues, condensed milk, herrings, dates. Plenty there to refuse to talk about.

  ‘Whose bed is this?’

  We would not say. Willi curled his lip at their stupidity in lumping all our gear in a heap.

  ‘Mandl,’ Pengelly said. ‘Mandl was here.’

  ‘Show me your hands, Mandl,’ Dowden said.

  I had dirt under my fingernails. So had Willi. Dowden already knew his prey, was simply demonstrating his British superiority to the Berliner and the Jew. He sent a private down the hole to hand up our gear, then sent him crawling round the piles where he found the ribs of the canoe, which Steinitz had numbered one to seven, and the interlocking sections of the spine on which the fool had written, Patented by Werner Steinitz, Somes Island Detention Camp, Wellington, New Zealand, 1942. (What a pleasant boy Steinitz was, a perfect blue-eyed Aryan who hated Nazis, and how he loved shaping wood and working out new ways of fitting this piece with that, of calculating stress and using weight against itself. He sank into a mind-deadening fear as the Japanese came down the Pacific. They would ship him back to Germany where the Gestapo would murder him. He tried to swim to Point Howard one night, and fought the policemen who picked him out of the sea, biting an ear, breaking a thumb, and earned himself a year in Mt Eden jail. He was a little mad when he came back, quiet and slow, and had forgotten how to work with wood. At the end of the war the Tribunal sent him home – was kind enough not to put him on a ship with the Nazis – and he became a labourer in Essen, a cleaner-up, but took to drink, his wife wrote, and died in a fall from scaffolding. Apart from Willi and Moser he was the only one I tried to keep in touch with.)

  They marched us to the hospital and locked us in the operating theatre.

  ‘It was Moser,’ Willi said. ‘It is their trick.’

  ‘Yes, Moser,’ Steinitz said.

  I turned away from them, allowing these anti-Nazis their bit of Blame the Jew. I climbed on a chair and looked out a high window at the dawn lighting up the hills of Wellington. I was easy in my mind now that escape was done with. I don’t have to go down that hole any more, I thought. I lay on the floor and went to sleep (Willi had taken the sick trolley) and remember waking up pleased that I had had no dreams. Steinitz was banging on the door, demanding to be taken to the lavatory. I climbed on the chair again and looked at the ragged hills and the flimsy houses and tried to think of a reason why people might settle in this vertical place – lean into the wind and rain, cling to the hills – and thought, There’s an emptiness here I’ll come to like, and a dumb stupidity, I don’t mind that. If they’ll let me off this island I might stay in their town. It was not simply relief at being out of my hole, for I remained in the larger hole and my sanity was under threat, but a recognition that bleakness and simplicity might be endured and a way found to a life in spite of them. I had come from a place with too much history.

  Today, this very minute, from my desk, I look at Somes Island. A jewel set in silver. Cancel that easy metaphor. It is set in my forehead, a third eye through which I look at the other side; it presses like a thumb on the beating membrane, fontanelle. Was I so young, so unformed, when they took me there?

  Perhaps on the morning when I peered from the operating room I saw my house. I looked towards Wadestown and Tinakori hill. The slopes black with pine trees under the hurrying sky were balanced like a stone that might crash down. I live now in one of the houses under threat, above the fault line on the tilted hill, and when the ground trembles in an earthquake I stand in a doorway and grip the jamb or I kneel under my desk, obeying the rules, but know it is the deep-rooted trees that hold me safe. Pine trees, my daughter says, have shallow roots, but that is mere botanical knowledge. They go deep enough for me.

  I watch the island. My third eye, the island, watches me. Light narrows to an aperture; and light from the other side, where I lived in a great city between East and West, reaches me through that tightened place, giving each thing I see new lines and darker shades. The boys and girls marching in the Woods wear no merry faces, the fists they raise in the red salute are made of bone and their song goes nowhere, their song becomes a dirge.

 
; The island was my war. It’s nothing special. Others have their lens for looking at the other side – a better one, a worse one. I can be rid of mine by trying hard. That, as they say, is the way to go. I have no taste for retrospective prophecy or for the elegiac mood but am happier remembering matter-of-factly, thinking flat. Willi believed in that way of progressing too.

  We compared our cities once, while sneering at this one. We had been at the wharf unloading coal and had washed ourselves clean in the sea. The Nazis had played at sabotage, letting sacks slip over the side, and Pengelly marched them back to the compound, leaving Willi and me to finish the job. We took our time and sauntered up the track when it was done, without a guard, and stopped to roll a smoke by the little graveyard above Leper Island.

  ‘Look,’ Willi said, ‘they paint camouflage on the oil tanks there’ – pointing at Seaview – ‘but they leave the tops to shine in the night. The moon makes a target of each one. These British do not deserve to win the war.’

  ‘New Zealanders,’ I said.

  ‘It is the same. They cannot decide to be who they must be but play their little British Empire games. There are no cliffs of Dover here.’

  Sargoff the Russian went by with a dozen herrings strung on flax. (Why he had not been released when the Germans invaded Russia nobody knew.)

  ‘He is more at home in this land than Dowden with his tippy-tap stick,’ Willi said.

  Sargoff would pickle the herrings in vinegar and sell them for sixpence each to whoever had the money – usually the Germans who had signed their adherence to the Reich and so received pocket money through the Swiss consul. I could have had it, being classified a ‘German through annexation,’ but had refused, as all the anti-Nazis and Internationalists had. I made my few pence from working in the gardens and polishing paua shell for the shell-workers. Willi had his ducks, a more profitable business. He financed our escape by selling eggs, and had eight pounds in coins in a bag tied to his belt when we got away to Petone beach. They would have drowned him if we had sunk.