The Society of Others

by William Nicholson

  The shooting seems to me to have lasted for several hours, but this is not so. Barely a minute has gone by since Stefan opened the cab door and raised his gun. The second surprise is that I have the automatic pistol in my hand and it’s warm. I have been shooting too.

  The other three are moving forward now, checking the dead men. They roll them over with their boots, and strip the guns from them, and the belts of ammunition. They squat down and unzip their jackets and pull out wallets and papers. They don’t seem bothered by the blood.

  Stefan’s standing over one of the bodies when it moves. He shouts out, and the others join him. Stefan rolls the man over, and Petra binds his wrists tight behind him with a belt. Then Stefan and Ilse haul him to the cab.

  I am super-calm because I’m in shock. I realise I must look like the others: hard eyes, blank faces. Veteran urban warriors who kill and feel nothing. But this is only the anaesthetic of fear.

  Now I’ve got a dying man beside me. It’s hard to tell how badly wounded he is. He seems not to be able to use his legs, and he’s clearly in great pain. But mostly he’s frightened. He looks at me with this helpless terror. He’s got pale-blue eyes. He’s young, younger than me. He’s whimpering.

  The plunder goes in the back of the pick-up. Then they’re returned to their seats, and we’re on our way. Stefan drives as fast as the road allows. As we go, they light cigarettes and inhale deeply and speak together in low serious voices. Ilse says something that refers to me. Petra nods and says to me,

  “You were good. You performed well.”

  I performed well. This is how they refer to the fact that I killed a man, maybe two. The firing all happened at once, so no one can be sure. I do not feel good about this. I don’t know what I feel. The men we killed would have killed us. Perhaps it was necessary. But one of them is not dead. He sits beside me, shivering.

  “What will happen to this one?”

  “He comes with us. He will help us. There are things we must know.”

  In a little while the pick-up turns off the road onto a dirt track. The track winds between trees for several miles, and we see nothing. Then without warning the track emerges into the light, and there before us lies a wide view of the plains below. Here we stop, and I get out.

  I stand staring stupidly at the view. Somehow, in my shock and confusion, it comforts me. There’s a lake, and three white specks on the water, ducks or maybe swans. Some sheep, with a shepherd among them, in a russet-red coat, talking to a boy. Beyond him reach belts of trees, and winter-ploughed fields; and further off, in a distant strip of land lit dull gold by the morning sunlight, there is a windmill. I can make out the spire of a village church, and far away, another spire. Over all, the clouds roll grey, rimmed here and there with bright whiteness, where the light pushes through. Guns and terror seem to have no reality in the face of this majestic commonplace.

  Behind me, where the track ends, the pick-up is now pulled up before an abandoned hunting lodge. It’s a high-gabled house made of brick and slate, with the ornate detailing of the late nineteenth century: trefoils in the window mullions, finials on the roof ridge. One section of tiles has fallen, forming a grass and nettle covered mound beside the front door. The glass is gone from the windows. The lead has been stolen from the guttering. But the main structure stands.

  This is where we are to hide out. There’s no electricity, no running water, but several of the rooms are more or less weatherproof. In one, there’s a stack of food supplies under a plastic sheet. Clearly they have used this house before.

  Stefan carries the prisoner out of the cab as if he’s a child, and ties him to a tree. Ilse scavenges for dead wood to build a fire. Petra starts shifting the contents of the pick-up into the house. They seem to have divided up the tasks without discussion.

  I help Petra with the baggage.

  “Shouldn’t someone see to his wounds?”

  I nod back at the prisoner, who sits hunched and shivering at the base of the tree to which he’s tethered.

  “After he’s helped us,” says Petra, “we’ll let him go.”

  I feel a surge of relief. I realise I’ve been expecting them to kill him. Somehow it’s one thing to kill a man in the heat of battle, and quite another to see him trembling and hear him whimpering and then to end his life.

  As we come back out of the house, Petra stops by the stairs and picks up a loose brass stair rod. Outside, Ilse has made her fire, and already has a blaze going in a sheltered clearing between the trees. I begin to have hopes of hot coffee, or even better, hot soup. Petra wraps a glove round one end of the stair rod and, kneeling before the fire, holds the other end in the flames. Ilse and Stefan light up their everlasting cigarettes and stand there waiting. In a little while Petra draws the brass rod out of the fire, and I can see that its end is glowing red. She speaks to the others and they flick away their cigarettes and go over to where the prisoner sits.

  “What’s that for?” I say stupidly.

  “To help him help us,” says Petra.

  I still can’t believe they’re going to do it. But the prisoner believes it. He’s struggling and jerking and whimpering, trying pathetically to shuffle away. Stefan and Ilse between them yank him back against the tree. He’s very weak, quite unable to resist. Stefan holds his head back by pulling on his hair. Petra comes to him and holds the red-hot rod where he can see it and says something to him. Then she does something I don’t watch and he screams the scream I’ve heard before. Then the prisoner starts to talk in gulping choking broken sentences. I turn and walk away through the trees.

  After a while I hear a gunshot. I make my way back. The prisoner has fallen forward, still tied to the tree, and blood pours from the side of his head. The others are smoking again, and silent.

  “You said you’d let him go.”

  “He’s gone.”

  All I can think is: I must get away. These people are not my people. They do not protect me.

  Petra’s watching me. Maybe she guesses what I’m feeling. If so, she doesn’t care. Either I’m useful or I’m not. If I become a liability, then I can go. Like the boy with the blue eyes went.

  Stefan boils a pan of water on the fire, and puts in rice and beans from the stored supplies. The three of them seem subdued. This at least shows they have some humanity left. Nobody speaks to me. They don’t speak much to each other. I sit myself down with my back against a tree, in a position where I don’t have to look at the dead man. Then I close my eyes, so I don’t have to look at anything.

  I’m sitting in the car with my father, in the old Buick he used to drive, with the bench seats. He loved the Buick because it was a relic of the early sixties, and showed he wasn’t the sort who upgrades his car every two years. Also because it was very wide, and filled the road. Right now, in my memory, it’s dark beyond the windscreen and the lights of other cars are coming at me and Cat is by my side with her hair in plaits. That makes her about nine years old, so I’m eleven. My mother has told us my father won’t be staying with us so much any more, and this is him explaining, and it’s not making sense.

  “I’ll see just as much of you as before,” he says. “You won’t even notice any difference. I love you just as much as before.”

  So what’s changed? Cat is crying beside me but not making any sound. My father drives and doesn’t even know Cat is crying, she’s too small for the lights of the oncoming cars to reveal her face. She’s crying because she won’t notice any difference other than that everything is changed for ever and there’s no safety after all. Things turn out not to last. I don’t remember Cat wearing her hair in plaits after that. It was like the plaits went with how we used to be, before the time when we wouldn’t notice any difference. Afterwards she had her hair in a ponytail, and later she cut it very short, which made her eyes look bigger, so I called her Goggle-eyes.

  I find myself wondering what my father said to my mother. Maybe the six words. “I love you, let me go.”

  I’m remembering
that car ride to nowhere because I have the same feeling now I had then. It feels like loss. Loss for ever.

  When I open my eyes a few moments later, I’m alone. The others have vanished. I stand up and look round, bewildered. I hear the sound of an approaching car. I dive into the trees to hide.

  It’s the old VW with the cracked windscreen, driven by Egon. He pulls the car up beside the pick-up and goes to the house and calls out. He hasn’t seen the dead man.

  Petra steps out of the trees, her gun in her hand. She goes to the VW and reaches inside and finds Egon’s gun. Egon turns and sees her. Then he sees the tortured body of the prisoner. Then he sees Ilse and Stefan also coming out of the trees, also holding guns. His eyes travel back to the VW. Petra holds up his gun, not to give it to him, but to show him she’s got it. I watch each move, and see how they stare at him, and I start to understand. The quietness after the torture was not pity. It was caused by the information the dying man had revealed.

  Egon has gone white. He looks from side to side, as if calculating his chances of getting away. He has no chance. He sinks to his knees in front of the derelict hunting lodge. He mumbles some words. Petra speaks, cool and clear, to the other two. Yes, they say in their language. Yes.

  Now Petra is looking towards me, and holding out Egon’s handgun.

  “Executioner.”

  I stare back. Is this supposed to be me?

  “He asks for it to be quick. One shot.”

  Egon looks at me. This is exactly the look he has given me each time before, only now, framed by its true context, it makes sense. He is asking me not to kill him. He wants to make the good world for the children who will never be his. How I wish.

  “No.” My own voice surprises me. I speak clearly and loudly.

  “He has betrayed us.”

  “Not me.”

  Petra slightly raises her eyebrows, but does not repeat her request. Instead, she walks over to Egon’s side as if she has something to say to him, and puts her gun to his brow. He looks away from me, to spare me at the last. A single sharp report, and he buckles sideways to the ground.

  I turn and run. I hear them coming after me, calling to me, crashing through dead wood and leaf litter. I run faster and faster, not knowing or caring which direction I take, plunging between tree trunks. Their voices echo about me as they give chase. I find a descending gully and bound down it, clearing the brambles with great leaps. Then the gully sheers away to nothing, and I’m falling, turning as I fall. My flailing legs strike the branches of young trees, and I tumble and crash down the mountain slope, over and over, down and down, now snagged by brambles, now smacked by frozen snow, now clubbed by trees, until at last stunned and reeling, bundled in pain, I roll to stillness.

  I am lying in a singing bed where kind hands caress me, and all my hurt is soothed away. At last I feel nothing and want nothing and am nothing.

  Dimly, as if from far away, I am aware that I’ve fallen into a fast-flowing stream. The mountain water is cold as ice. I must not let myself go to sleep. Must not sleep. Must not. Sleep.

  EIGHT

  There was once a countryman who lived in a cottage by a beech wood. The cottage was very small: one room just of a size for the countryman and his wife to cook and eat and sit by the fire in the corner, and a second room for their high-sided bed. In front of the cottage there was a small garden where hollyhocks grew in the summer, and a cobbled path that led to a road. Behind the cottage a path ran through the beech wood to a potato field where the countryman grew potatoes for market. Morning and evening the countryman walked this path, in the white frost of winter and the dappled sunlight of summer. In May the leaves glowed green as dawn, and in October they flamed golden as sunset. The potato field was stony, and planting, tending and digging up the potatoes was hard work for little return, but there was always a pig fattening in the pen beneath the apple tree, and in the autumn there were apples.

  Then one day while turning over the soil of the potato field, the countryman came upon a stone that showed a gleam of gold. He took the stone to town, and a gold expert told him that it was indeed gold, and if he dug further he might find more gold. The countryman dug further, and so it was. There was gold in the potato field, there was gold in the back yard, there was gold in the front garden. The countryman used the gold to hire labourers, and his team of men dug up the land, following the seams of gold. Soon the potato field was gone, and the front garden with its hollyhocks, and the back yard with its pig pen and its apple tree. It was plain there was gold beneath the floor of the cottage, so they dug there too. “Where are we to live?” cried the countryman’s wife, gazing on the diggings. “Don’t worry about that,” said the countryman. “We’re rich now. We’ll build ourselves a mansion.”

  They were rich, and they did build a mansion. Meanwhile the teams of diggers followed the seams of gold, and they dug up the cottage altogether, and they cut down the beech trees and dug up the beech wood and all the land round about. By the time they stopped digging, the countryman was the richest man for miles around, and he and his wife were living in a mansion with twenty-four rooms and five servants. The days of digging potatoes and chopping wood were over.

  Sitting together one evening in the spacious drawing room of their centrally heated mansion, the wife said to her husband, “I do miss a fire.” “You’re right,” said her husband, and he ordered a snug fireplace to be built in one corner, the way they’d had it in their cottage. Sitting before the fire, the wife said, “This room is so big it makes me feel cold.” “You’re right,” said her husband, and he had the room made much smaller. After that, the rest of the mansion seemed too big. “What do we want with so many rooms?” said his wife. “I hate to see them standing empty.” So they reduced the mansion to six rooms: a hallway, a drawing room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms. The extra bedrooms were for guests.

  “I miss our little apple tree,” said the wife one day. So they planted an apple tree behind the mansion, and then, for old times’ sake, they built a pig pen beneath it and kept a pig there. They had guests to stay, but the experience made the wife anxious, and they decided not to repeat it. The cook who made their meals turned out to be robbing them, and had to be dismissed. “Don’t worry,” said the wife, “I’ll cook for us myself, the way I used to.” She didn’t like being in the kitchen while her husband was in the snug little room next door with the fire, so they had the stove moved in to join him, and the sink and the dresser. Now that there were no guests there seemed no point in the extra bedrooms, so they had them taken down.

  “You know what?” said the wife. “This is so like our old cottage that I’d like to make a little front garden the way we used to have it.” So they made a little front garden with a cobbled path, and even built a road for it to go out and meet; and so that they could see it through the window the way they used to, they took down the hallway.

  By now the mansion was just two rooms in size, and so very like the old cottage that you would hardly have known they had ever moved. The countryman and his wife were much happier. “Really we had everything we wanted before,” they told each other, “but we didn’t know it. We can thank the gold for teaching us to be content.”

  So everything was just as it had been before, except that the beech wood was gone. The countryman planted a new beech wood, but trees are slow to grow. Long before they were tall enough to form a shady path down which he could walk in the white frost of winter and the dappled sunlight of summer, the countryman was dead.

  This story is told by Leon Vicino in his book. I find it very touching, because Vicino refuses to sneer at his country couple, either for their pursuit of gold or for their limited ambitions. Also I’m impressed because he allows the story’s moral to remain complex. Yes, the countryman has lost his beech wood, but he’s also been saved the drudgery of digging his potato field, and he’s been granted the subtle blessing of knowing what brings him contentment. He has been saved by the gold from bitterness and envy. Win some,
lose some.

  That isn’t the end of it, either. The more I read Vicino, the more I realise his subject, his area of enquiry, is what he calls “the well-lived life.” Vicino wants to understand, and wants us to understand, the nature of contentment. What is it, he asks, we labour to achieve, earn money to buy, fight wars to defend? When the battle is over and the long day’s work is done, what is our chosen reward? I read on eagerly, hoping for answers.

  I have been ill. Over many long days, lying in bed too weak to move, I’ve read Vicino’s words and thought his thoughts. The good people who are looking after me speak no English, so we communicate with mime. Hanna, the young mother, is so amused by my mimes that she reproduces them for her husband when he comes home at the end of the day. He gazes at her like one of his own oxen, willing but slow, entirely unable to grasp the meaning of her dumb-show. Hanna is as short and wide and sturdy as her husband, but she is far more mentally agile. When I became strong enough to want to read, I mimed fetching the book from the pocket of my coat, and mimed turning its pages. She herself I’m almost certain can’t read at all, but she understood my meaning at once.

  Hanna and Lutz are in some ways like Vicino’s countryman and wife. They live a life of hard labour and extreme simplicity, without the help of electricity or piped water. Their house is a big deep-roofed barn, divided down the middle by a timber paling. On one side, Lutz’s herd of thirty cows passes the winter, filling the house with their heat and stink. On the other side there is a tiled stove round which the bunks cluster, and a fireplace rising to a brick chimney, where hams hang slowly smoking. The roof thatch is exposed on its underside, and the eaves fall low, to within four feet of the ground. The windows are small, and now in the cold weather permanently shuttered. Hanna cooks and washes and minds the baby in an eternal twilight. For my reading I have a fat candle, which stands in a clay saucer of melted wax.