Labels and Other Stories

by Louis de Bernières

  Weber’s face twisted. ‘I’m going to go back there,’ he said, his voice bilious with disgust. ‘I’m going to find that son of a bitch and kill him with my own hands.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Dr Iannis, shaking his head mockingly. ‘There were those who were ashamed of what had been done. The man who accused Julia Galiatsatos is now under the ground with his skull in fragments. I attended the case, and I was not overly sorry to lose the patient.’ The doctor tapped the dottle out of his pipe and looked very levelly at the leutnant. ‘You’ve been here how long? And you still don’t understand us at all, do you? You see us, and our image makes no more impression on your retina than the shadow of a ghost; you hear us, and our words bounce off your brain like an olive falling to the ground. All you listen to are the half-baked, monstrous and monotonous oversimplifications that are born of your own ignorance.’

  Weber was on the point of rising to his feet and commanding ‘That’s enough, Doctor’, but he restrained himself. His sorrow and remorse had acquired an appalling taste of wormwood. He wondered whether he would ever be able to cleanse the war from his memory and imagination. He struggled with a steadily growing conviction that he had accidentally become estranged to the common purpose of mankind, that he had taken an inviting fork in the path that had led first to thorns, and then to an abyss.

  ‘So you killed a woman,’ added the doctor, ‘and you came here to confess. Why don’t you confess to a priest? You are a Catholic, I presume.’

  Weber took something from his pocket. It was a small smoked sausage from Bavaria. He laid it on the table without saying anything about it, as though the action were not his own. He looked up at the doctor, his mouth working, his face wan with tiredness and self-contempt. ‘I am a Lutheran, but I went to a priest anyway.’ He looked away, and added, ‘It is sometimes not enough to confess to a priest.’

  Weber stood and replaced his cap on his head. He squared his shoulders, briefly resembling the proud young grenadier he had once been. He stood to attention and saluted the doctor. It was not the Hitler salute, but the military one that had been in use before, and which was now forbidden. The doctor did not respond, unsure in any case of what might constitute a suitable response. Weber let his hand drop to his side, and he walked stiffly and self-consciously to the entrance of the yard, where he turned to look around it for the last time. He nodded to the doctor, and without another word he left.

  Pelagia came out as soon as he had gone. She went to the table and picked up the sausage. Her mouth watered almost uncontrollably, the hunger whelming up so strongly from her entrails so that she felt faint, and had to sit down.

  ‘I suppose you heard all that,’ said Dr Iannis.

  Pelagia nodded her head, and, holding up the sausage, asked, ‘What shall we do with this?’

  Both she and her father remembered how Antonio and the other Italians had used to bring them food that they had stolen from their own field kitchens and messes, and they fell silent for a moment. The doctor suppressed the salivation in his own mouth that was threatening to make speech impossible, and said as disinterestedly as he could, ‘You eat it, koritsaki mou. You’re young, you need the protein more than I do.’

  ‘You have it,’ she said, offering it to him.

  ‘Really, I couldn’t. I’m not hungry.’

  Pelagia understood the generosity and necessity of her father’s lie, and she put the sausage back on the table. ‘I’m not hungry either,’ she said.

  Later that evening, after they had dined on the roasted corms of spring flowers, Pelagia came out into the yard and picked up the sausage. She sniffed it, and was tempted to bite into it. Instead she went out into the village and walked about with it distractedly until finally she gave it to an emaciated dog, one of the fortunate ones that had not yet been eaten.

  THE TURKS ARE SO WONDERFUL WITH CHILDREN

  Robert and Susan Freeman were perfectly cut out for one another. For one thing, they were both only children, whose parents had died when they were young. Robert’s had perished in a boating accident in the Lake District, and Susan’s had died separately, a year apart, each of cancer. Both Robert and Susan had been brought up by elderly relatives, and had no one left in the world by the time they were in their early twenties, so that when they met on the same Public Administration course at university, it seemed rather wonderful to have so much in common, and it was almost inevitable that they should forge a bond.

  If they fell in love with each other at university, it was immediately afterwards that they fell for Turkey, in the year before they were married, when they were taking that crucial first holiday together, the one wherein people discover whether or not their relationship really has any future. They had not only fallen even more in love with each other, but had also become enamoured of the country itself, which had turned out to be quite different from their expectation. They had gone there in some trepidation, expecting to encounter the slavering rapists, torturers and assassins of popular European myth, only to find a humorous, honest, hospitable, polite and affectionate people with a marvellous cuisine, whose main fault was a tendency to expound their opinions at extraordinary length and with many repetitions of the same point. You couldn’t win an argument with a Turk because you were filibustered, and so Susan and Robert sedulously avoided all political discussion.

  Robert and Susan enjoyed the way in which Turks employ their tractors as a kind of family car, idling along with a trailer-load of relatives, and they enjoyed the slow chaos of Turkish life in general, but what appealed to them in particular, on that idyllic first holiday together, was that the Turks were so kind to animals. Our couple were unashamedly soft-hearted about animals, and this kindness was such a relief after previous experiences in other countries. Robert had once been to a place in Greece where there was a dejected three-legged dog, which the locals had named ‘Ecevit’ so they could kick it every time it came limping up to beg for food. He had, too, been shocked by the pitiable state of the stray cats, as visitors to Greece always are. Susan, on the other hand, had once been to Italy to visit a friend with a palazzo in the Tuscan countryside, who had a well-loved but sick rabbit that the vet had refused to treat, on the grounds that it was not a proper animal. He had then offered her his mother’s recipe for coniglio al forno. She had seen a bullfight on Spanish television once, watching it with fascinated horror through the fingers that she clamped over her eyes, and had never been back to Spain again.

  The Turks, however, were surrounded by clean, sociable, trusting, well-fed, contented dogs and cats, and they even erected wire cages on the beaches, to protect the nests of turtle eggs. On Calis beach there were comical men on bicycles with enormous vernier calipers who measured the colossal creatures when they struggled ashore, grunting extravagantly like wrestlers as they attempted to turn them over and tag them. In short, it was pleasant to go to a place where the folk were as sweet-willed towards animals as most of the British are. When he was feeling sententious Robert liked to say, ‘The real index of civilisation is when people are kinder than they need to be,’ and by this reckoning the Turks were civilised indeed.

  It was when they were blessed with a child, however, that they realised that the Turks were also wonderful with children, and this became the true reason for their repeated return.

  Little Vinnie arrived in the third year of their marriage, and to begin with he had been a perfectly normal baby, which is to say that he had yelled, excreted and slept. He did, however, gnaw at Susan’s nipples as if he were a dog at a bone, and she had soon been obliged to change over to a bottle, whose teat had regularly to be replaced. It was as soon as he could crawl that it was fully borne in upon them that their child was going to be difficult. Screaming with pleasure, he took to throwing himself on the family cats, grasping handfuls of their flesh, and wrenching it. One by one the animals suffered the equivalent of a feline nervous breakdown, and lost all sense of bladder control. All three of them left home in the same week to find themselves alternat
ive accommodation, where their equanimity was ultimately restored. Vinnie began a similar campaign against the dog, so that, as soon as he crawled near, the persecuted animal would have to spring to his feet and flee to another room. Robert and Susan assured themselves that Vinnie would soon grow out of it, that he was, after all, only a child, but already they felt distinctly uneasy.

  When he could toddle, Vinnie learned the delights of switching off essential electrical appliances. He turned off the fridge several times, so that occasionally the kitchen was flooded on account of the unplanned defrosting, and once he turned off the deep freeze just a day after Robert had returned from a superstore with a month’s supply of meat. When Susan opened the lid a week later, she beheld a monstrous heaving of maggots, and a sordid flood of brown, green and yellow slime. Seconds later, a smell from the vilest imaginings of Satan assaulted her nostrils, and she fell backwards and fainted, burying herself beneath a cascade of tin cans, rice and jam jars.

  When he began to talk, Vinnie destroyed Susan’s and Robert’s social life. It is, of course, an invariant law of nature that children cripple their parents’ social life, as well as their sex life, and indeed any other kind of life they may be attempting to lead, but Vinnie went far beyond the point of mere disablement. He did not merely cripple it, he literally destroyed it.

  It began with the telephone. It would ring and Vinnie would pick it up, say ‘Goodbye’ in his childish treble, and put the phone back on the hook. The phone would ring again, and the caller would say ‘Vinnie, is your mother there?’ and the boy would say ‘Yes,’ and put the phone back on the hook. It would ring once more, and the agitated voice would go ‘Vinnie, please go and fetch your mother, I’ve got to speak to her,’ whereupon Vinnie would put the phone back on the hook and fetch his mother, who would come to the phone only to find the receiver in place, and nobody on the other end of the line.

  It continued with Vinnie’s treatment of callers who arrived at the house. He was normally very clean, but if there was a visitor, that was when he chose to do both kinds of business in the middle of the kitchen floor. Vinnie liked to creep up behind the sofa and pull the hair of any woman who happened to be lounging on it. If anyone was a smoker, Vinnie would appropriate their lighter and try to set fire to the coats and scarves that they had left hanging on the pegs in the hallway. If anyone brought their little girls, Vinnie would prise their dolls away from them, and twist off their heads. He would take worms, earwigs and woodlice from the garden, and pop them into the mouths of babies, and he taught himself how to let down the tyres of cars as they stood in the driveway outside.

  As his verbal abilities improved, it emerged that he had a strong streak of psychological cruelty. To women he would say things like ‘Why are you so ugly?’, and he once announced to a very venerable and frail gentleman that ‘I expect you’re going to die quite soon, aren’t you?’ When his interlocutor bravely assented to this proposition, Vinnie just said, ‘I expect we’ll all be glad, won’t we?’

  Susan and Robert suffered their child for four years before they took him to see a child psychiatrist.

  Dr Pedicue had a room in a social services centre. It was filled with comforting and pleasant things, such as a goldfish tank, building blocks, mechanical toys, teddy bears and child-sized chairs. He was a patient man who had encountered many a demented and many a haunted child, and on the first visit he sent Robert and Susan away whilst he performed the normal developmental tests for intelligence and spatial reasoning. Vinnie came out slightly above average, but when the parents returned they found the doctor nursing a terrible bruise on his forehead. Vinnie had knotted his shoelaces together, and he had taken a fall, cracking his head on the edge of a desk. The most sinister thing was that Vinnie had apparently not laughed. He had smiled, complacently.

  The next time, Vinnie took the tests for manual dexterity and verbal ability. When his parents came back, they found Dr Pedicue, grim-faced, sitting behind his desk, with two shiny red objects laid out on the blotting paper in front of him.

  ‘How did Vinnie do?’ asked Susan innocently, and Dr Pedicue motioned to the two objects in front of him. ‘He scores well for manual dexterity,’ said the doctor. ‘Look at that; I was only out of the room for a few seconds.’

  Susan and Robert looked down at the two dead goldfish. Each one had had a biro inserted into its mouth and jammed down its throat as far as it would go.

  ‘I can’t find anything wrong with your son,’ said Dr Pedicue, after four more visits. ‘I mean, there’s nothing technically wrong with him that I can find. I can’t give you a diagnosis.’ He paused for thought, wondering whether or not it was wise to continue, until finally he said, ‘May I speak off the record?’

  Susan and Robert nodded, rightly anticipating the very worst. ‘Sometimes we get appalling parents who produce absolutely faultless and wonderful children,’ the doctor told them, ‘and sometimes we get perfect parents who produce children so awful that they ought to be subjected to euthanasia before they inflict irreparable damage on the human race. I can’t explain this. I mean, usually it’s awful parents who have awful children, but sometimes you get these inexplicable exceptions. Your child is one of these.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything then?’ asked Susan fearfully.

  ‘If I can’t diagnose, I can’t treat,’ said the doctor, raising his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘I mean, your child is obnoxious and malevolent. He’s evil, and that isn’t a condition I can look up in my manual.’ The doctor leaned forward. ‘Between you and me, and I hope you won’t take offence, I know this isn’t very professional, but your Vinnie is just a gobshite. He’s a snake-in-the-grass. That’s the only diagnosis I can give. All I can do is offer you my sympathy.’

  Susan and Robert hung their heads, and Dr Pedicue went over to the window and stood there for a few moments with his hands behind his back. Then he turned and said, ‘I don’t know if you’re Catholic or not, but if you are, you might try exorcism. I think that in your situation I would be desperate enough to try it. And I’m an agnostic.’

  Vinnie’s parents grew more dejected and despondent by the day. They had no friends left; cautionary word had spread amid the local coterie of babysitters and, in rotation, the nursery schools of the area had resorted to expulsion, so that there was no prospect of a moment’s peace at home. Susan gave up her job because Robert’s was better paid, and they sold her car in order to make ends meet. Her life became a dismal succession of torments, incarcerated as she was, with a diminutive but endlessly inventive demoniac.

  One evening, as she was getting ready for bed, Susan sat in front of the mirror at her dressing table and realised what Vinnie had done to her. Her skin was lined and sallow, her cheeks were sunken, there were black hollows under her eyes, her cracked lips twitched at the corners, and her thick black hair had thinned and greyed. Her hairbrush removed generous tufts with every stroke. Suddenly she put her hands to her face and began to sob. Robert came up behind her and placed a trembling hand on her shoulder. After some minutes, when her tears had subsided, she said, ‘He’s my child, and I can’t love him. Oh Robbie, I just want to kill him. I can’t bear it any longer, really I can’t.’

  ‘We’ll take him to Turkey,’ said Robert. ‘This is a window of opportunity, if you think about it. We can do what we’ve been talking about. It’s probably now or never.’

  Turkey was the only place where Vinnie began to resemble a normal human being, and Robert and Susan had often wondered why. Vinnie was quite a pretty child, with his mother’s creamy white skin, black hair and dark brown eyes, and in Turkey he was for most of the time firmly clamped in the arms of a succession of affectionate Turks. Robert and Susan had a theory that Vinnie was slightly frightened by the men, with their aroma of lemon cologne, their dark-roast skins and exuberant moustaches, their extraordinary toughness and physical strength, their pungent cigarettes, and their tea-stained teeth. Seized by one of these men, hugged to within an inch of his life, his hair ruf
fled into a mop, Vinnie would subside into something like the resemblance of a natural little boy. The women, thought Susan, confused Vinnie rather than intimidated him. Marriage turns Turkish women into something broad-backsided and formidable, but they have rather sweet round faces framed by the customary headscarf, and any stranger’s child within convenient reach is perched on a sturdy hip in order to have its face crammed with lokma, lokum and baklava. ‘The Turks are so wonderful with children,’ sighed Robert and Susan, every time they went there, amazed by how tractable Vinnie would become.

  It might have seemed strange, had they told anyone, that Robert and Susan should have decided to take a trip to south-west Turkey in July, when it was unbearably hot and bona fide connoisseurs stay away on account of the tourists, and when, to cap it all, they were in the middle of moving house from East Anglia to Cornwall. It might also have seemed strange that they were landing at Izmir airport rather than the one at Dalaman, when they were ultimately headed for Fethiye. They had their reasons, however, and their main concern was simply to reach Fethiye by Tuesday morning. Besides, some of the landscape on that long drive was absolutely wonderful. Often you came upon bands of nomads in their goatskin tents, weaving carpets on looms that they set up outdoors, and sometimes you still saw working camels, with azure prayer beads hanging from their halters. You might come round a bend on the road and see before you a view so stunning that you just had to stop for a while and look at it, even if your darling child was kicking your seat, or blowing his nose into his fingers and trying to smear it on to the back of your neck.