Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

  "We are waiting, Commander."

  Amanda shook her head, dumb.

  Scappini sighed. "The same old story. Why do spies insist on making it difficult for themselves? Captain Mazursky did not even need an invitation before he told us everything he knew. What an extremely pleasant fellow, by the way. I am not normally fond of Canadians. Their habit of shooting prisoners is beginning to get on our army's nerves, and I fear they will get a somewhat hostile reception when the invasion comes. But he was very co-operative, unlike his friend. Please be easy on yourself, Commander Nightingale."

  Amanda took a long, frightened puff on her cigarette and remained silent.

  "Now I have to go through the dreary routine of counting up to three. I begin with One. Why did you get yourself into this mess, Mrs. Nightingale? I would have thought the British war effort was well enough represented in your family by your brave husband. Why didn't you stay home in Northminster with Derek and Antony?"

  "Oh don't! Please don't mention their names!" Amanda cried hysterically.

  "Two. You know, I think spies are masochists at heart, Bimbo?"

  "I would not be surprised," said Bimbo, speaking for the first time, in English. He spoke it in a heavy German guttural, his esses sibilant, and pronouncing «would» as "vould".

  "They live by the principle of the stick and the carrot, but carried to extremes in both directions. Not just a kick and a nibble. The carrot is the George Medal presented to them at Buckingham Palace by the King. The stick is hot iron against their bare flesh. They cannot secretly conceive of one without the other and they seek both. Their quest in life is what the equestrian community calls dressage."

  "What does that mean?" Bimbo asked.

  "Your French is impeccable, Mrs. Nightingale. Tell the good sergeant what dressage means."

  "It means, well, training," Amanda muttered.

  "What kind of training?"

  "Like… like," Amanda could hardly speak through the dryness of her throat. The words seemed to be ripped out of her. "Like… the breaking in of a horse."

  "Exactly," said Scappini with the delight of a schoolteacher addressing a bright student. "Exactly. And it has a further meaning. In another sense it means a raising up, an erection. There you have in one word the whole world of the spy masochist, his heaven and his hell."

  "You are probably right," said Bimbo in a tone of voice which said he did not care one way or the other.

  Scappini pursued his harangue. "As you are well aware, Mrs. Nightingale, it is time for number three. Before I say it, I want to make one last plea to you. You are about to share, with human understanding, the feelings of a beast of burden, like a horse or a mule. The moment I say the word three, you pass out of my hands and are delivered to the mercies of the sergeant here. This man occupies the very lowest stratum of the soul. Do you know what his nickname is? 'Bimbo', the nickname of a small boy. He is a man now but he still has the nickname of the child whose pleasure is in ripping the wings off flies and blowing up frogs until they burst. He enjoys this. Torture is his meat and his mistress. And once he starts on you I doubt if I can stop him even if I try. Why suffer the agonies of Saint Sebastian merely to give this moron sexual pleasure? Do you understand?"

  Amanda gazed at him in horror. She did not dare look into the face of the other man.

  "Answer, woman!" Amanda almost leaped as Scappini slammed the desk flat-handed. She nodded hastily.

  "So long as you do, I have done my best. Number three. In the words of our Fuehrer, my patience is exhausted. Actually it is not exhausted. I am bored and sickened by this whole farce. I do not enjoy inflicting pain and I would have taken any excuse not to do it. The people I would like to hurt are those chinless, bucktoothed wonders at 64 Baker Street who send these overgrown Girl Guides to have their fingernails torn out and their bodies burned. And all for nothing. Stand up."

  Amanda rose heavily to her feet, her head down.

  "I am sorry," Scappini repeated. "My memories of England before the war are most pleasant. I would not be surprised if your husband had seen me playing Rugby for Oxford. But the decision is yours alone. Be so kind as to remove your upper garments."

  "What?" Amanda regarded him, stupefied. She had expected that they would tear her clothes off in some hellish way, but not that she would be invited, almost politely, to strip.

  Scappini spoke clearly, as though to a backward child. "We are going to hurt you, and we will continue to hurt you until you have given us the worthless information we need, so that we don't get into trouble ourselves. We are all traditionalists here, and pain by hallowed tradition from Jesus onward is applied to bare flesh. Strip to the waist, that's all."

  Involuntary Amanda's eyes went to the woman, Sass, who looked at her as she had done throughout the interrogation, totally devoid of expression. Her presence seemed to add to, rather than mitigate the horror of exposure. She managed to say, "Would you ask the… would you ask the woman to leave the room. Oh, please don't hit me again." Scappini's hand reached up to stop with a gesture Bimbo's upraised hand.

  "Do not be impertinent to German womanhood," Scappini said. "Now get a move on."

  More than the pain to come, Amanda could think only of the woman as the spectator to her ordeal. Dry-eyed but sobbing within herself, she removed her jacket and hung it on the back of her chair with reflexive tidiness. She unbuttoned and removed her blouse, under which there was only her brassiere. This she unhooked and, with her eyes closed, dropped it on the chair.

  "Come here," said Bimbo. She opened her eyes and followed him, her hands cupped absurdly over her breasts. There was something hideously obscene in the fact that both their torsos were nude, hers smooth, his coarse and hairy. It was as if they were about to share some recondite rite of baptism. He indicated the pulleys, took one of her hands neither roughly nor gently, from her breast and snapped the cuff on the wrist. As he did so his hairy arm touched hers, and the contact of his bare skin gave her a violent frisson of revulsion. He did the same thing to her other hand and stepped behind her to adjust the pulleys. Her arms were jerked upwards, her breasts rising with them. She was conscious of many small things, of the sweat rolling in great, visible trickles down her body, of the stiffness of her nipples and above all, oddly though vividly, of the twin tufts of hair in her armpits, her last disguise, dreamed up by some psychological genius in Scotland as the ultimate proof she was Yvette Angelvin, schoolteacher from Fruges. She wished she was shaved.

  But the most mortifying of all was her position before the woman. She stood directly in front of her desk, as though set up specially for her diversion, and so close that the German woman could have leaned forward in her chair and touched her flesh. As it was, she took off her thick glasses, wiped them with her handkerchief and replaced them as she might have done sitting in the front row of the orchestra at the theatre.

  The two men regarded her distended body with frank, uninterested eyes, the eyes of specialists: as a doctor regards a body for healing, a masseur for massage, a lover for loving. These men were torturers whose only interest was in the most efficacious manner of inflicting pain.

  "Soften her up with the estrapade," said Scappini. "She has a strong body and it will absorb a lot of pain before it breaks. We will finish her off with the fèrro rovente. Isn't it funny that so many words of torture are Italian or Spanish? Dates back to the Inquisition, I presume. Heaven knows what people in our métier would have done without Torquemada. Spacatura is another one. I don't think you would enjoy spaccatura. By the time it is finished with you, the tatters of skin and blood that remain will be screaming for confession. We will apply it shortly before giving you extreme unction. But of course you are not Catholic. С. of E."

  Nerves twitched around Amanda's eyes and mouth. As the two men passed around, busy with ropes and whips, they put their hands on her body, not lasciviously but as they might pass their hands round an inanimate pillar of marble. One of them unhooked the top two clips of her skirt and set it lo
wer on her hips, exposing her navel. She watched the sergeant out of the corner of her eye, as a tied animal might, not daring to turn her head. She saw him select from the table what seemed to be a thin horsewhip. Her soaking shoulder blades flinched. If she were only dry and not drenched in this terrible acrid Niagara of sweat that weakened and debilitated her. And if only the woman was not there, sitting at her desk and staring at her. Bimbo, the brute with the name of a clown, swished the whip contemplatively, waiting for the word from his officer. He stood to Amanda's right, and the errant thought ran through her brain that the man must be left-handed, or else he was about to lash her back with the back of his hand. And then the awful realization became a reality as the whip, as sharp as a razor blade, lacerated her breasts from nipple to nipple, and the explosion of pain seemed to leap from her womb. Amanda shrieked.

  But she was still conscious when it was all over. Distantly, through the successive multicoloured films of pain that racked her, through her thudding eardrums, she knew it was over because she heard the typewriter resume. The spectacle was at an end. The Vestal Virgin had enjoyed the sacrifice. Now once again it was work before pleasure. Amanda had lost the strength in her legs long before and hung helplessly, supported by her blackened wrists. Her hair was not blonde any more but dark with sweat, and fell matted over her face and unmarked back. Her head lolled, her face was contorted. The two men examined her with interest, prodding and fingering her breasts.

  "That's enough for the present," she heard Scappini say. "Her screams have deafened that damned eardrum of mine that was affected at Mersa Matrûh, remember? I think after she had thought things over for an hour or so she will be extremely reluctant to resume where we left off. We have plenty of time."

  The men unshackled her, and she cried out as she dropped on all fours. She gazed dully at the red, tiled floor, watching the sweat fall from her as though she were a wet sponge. Pain occupied and governed her. Every nerve end screamed. Her veins and arteries streamed adrenalin. She was knotted in agony at her core.

  One of the men, which she did not know, took her by the armpits and lifted her to her feet. She reeled stupidly around the room but managed to stay upright. She looked brokenly at her tormentors, at the woman typing as though nothing had happened. Her hair was over her eyes, her arms dangled, all consciousness of her nudity was gone. Scappini sat himself at the desk and picked up a document. "Take her back to her room," he said. It was all over for the time being.

  Bimbo made no attempt to push or touch her. He walked down the corridor before her as he had done earlier. Amanda followed, staggering almost from wall to wall. Her room was now bathed in a sombre twilight. Amanda hardly noticed that Bimbo on opening the door had, like a gentleman, let her pass ahead. She fell on her back on the bed, looking with blind eyes at the ceiling, touching her blazing breasts, tenderly, questingly, as if by feeling she could determine what remained of her. She was aware vaguely that her skirt was being removed and then her shoes and thick peasant pants. She was not surprised. She had no emotion left for anything. It was what her English officers would have called part of the exercise. It was all so clearly predictable, so unimaginative, so Germanic: the hot irons, the rack, the lash, and now the rape.

  What surprised her was her consciousness of the act as it was performed. While she was chiefly preoccupied with keeping his hairy chest off her breasts, pushing and pushing upward until her bruised wrists were exhausted, she was still able to feel, and he was an unexpectedly smooth lover, quite different from the apelike lout who had thrashed her only a few minutes earlier. Amazed at herself and in terrible pain though she was, she even sighed a little when he rose from her.

  An indefinable moment later, she screamed. It was as if some great bird, white as a wafer, hovered over her for a brief flash of time, and Scappini was on her. She struggled, subsided; defeated, beaten, used up. She prayed that she could faint. But only for a moment. Impressions were piling too quickly on impressions, shock upon shock, whiplash on whiplash, rape on rape, and, not least, Bimbo sitting there quietly on the next bed, cigarette glowing, watching, his eyes never leaving her. Just as when the woman had watched her being lashed, it seemed to Amanda that she was again acting the star part in some macabre form of Guignol, at which people watched and applauded. Suddenly she found herself liquefying, draining, and all at once the dam burst. It was as if at one and the same moment she was falling down a bottomless well like Alice in Wonderland and at the same time rising weightlessly into the sky like the Virgin Mary. She heaved, groaned, and shouted, bucking Scappini on her wet belly as though he were on a trampoline.

  She sank into a blackness that must have been something close to a swoon, and felt as though she were gliding through space, performing rolls, dips, and turns. Such a physical mutation had never occurred within her before, never, never, never, never. With Guy there had never been any question of it. Even Lucien had not drawn her so completely over the precipice into this wingless flight. She put her hands over her face and tried to understand.

  The next thing she knew, a lighted cigarette was stuck into her mouth. An uninterested hand took her arm and lifted her to sitting position, sending a stab of pain through her breasts and making her say "Christ!" With difficulty she opened her eyes, removed a speck of tobacco from her tongue. Scappini and Bimbo sat side by side on the bed, facing her, their bodies white blurs in the gathering gloom. Even in the darkness they seemed to look different. Bimbo's low brow was corrugated and a grin completely changed his expression. Scappini too was grinning. She had seen the evil of his smile, but a smile is not a grin. His shoulders heaved. He started to laugh. Bimbo followed him. Both of them laughed. They roared with laughter.

  And an incredible thing happened. Amanda found her mouth curving painfully, because her smiling muscles had not been used in a long time. A terrible hysteria was bubbling like a geyser inside her, insanely. She tried to fight it down, because it was mad, but it was too strong for her. It was bursting out of her. She started to laugh too, and once she started, she could not stop. They all laughed together, the three of them, the two torturers and rapists and their victim. Bimbo could not sit up. He threw himself back on the cot, holding his ribs, shouting "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Scappini tried to stand, staggered over to where Amanda sat, flopped down beside her. He could not sit straight, so he put his arms round her bare, shaking shoulders.

  Only when their ribs hurt too much for them to bear, did they slowly pull themselves together. Amanda wiped her streaming eyes.

  "Nothing like a good laugh," said Scappini, his voice still shimmering with mirth.

  "How do you feel, Amanda?" Bimbo asked.

  It was such an ordinary question, so much a part of everyday intercourse, so commonplace, that its very innocence took Amanda's breath away.

  "Feel!" she exclaimed. "I feel awful." Bimbo had called her Amanda! That reminded her that she had not given way under torture. "And my name is Yvette Angelvin."

  "Well, what are you laughing for? " said Scappini.

  "I don't know why I'm laughing. That's what I am asking myself."

  "For a French country teacher you speak extremely good English," said Scappini. "Almost as good as I do."

  Amanda did not quite know what to say to this, so she ignored it. "You may have driven me mad," she said, more to herself than to the others. "The agony I am in may have unhinged my reason."

  "You'll get over it," said Scappini, noticeably lacking in sympathy.

  "Get over it!" Amanda cried. "These are my breasts, my womanhood! Even if the pain goes away, I am ruined, scarred for life."

  "You'll get used to it," said Bimbo.

  "Get used to what?" Amanda screamed, startled and terrified again.

  "Everything."

  Amanda put her hands to her head. Somewhere the awful riddle had a solution. After all she was not dreaming. She was there. She was a prisoner of war. These men were her masters, Germans. The pain in her bosom was not part of her imagination. But neither was her or
gasm, or the ache in her ribs from laughter. Laughter! My God! Laughter!

  "Yes, everything," said Bimbo. He rose to his feet. Amanda, seated, watched him change, bemused, hypnotized. He was moving. It was as if she were examining a great clock without a minute hand, only a second hand, moving not smoothly but irregularly from thirty seconds to forty-five, to sixty, where the clock stopped. She lay on her back. She had become Pavlov's dog and accepted what he offered, with what for her was a considerable degree of aplomb. But her strange friends were not prepared to let her off with the merely predictable. There was Scappini. Even for Lucien, whom she loved, she had not done it, because it was something she had always thought of as horrible and unnatural.

  The sides of her mouth felt as if they would split, and she thought she would vomit. A puff of wind hit her plate like a faint air spray and then her mouth flooded, making her retch, choke, and like a drowning man, swallow and swallow until it was all over. As from Bimbo, she had not had time even to notice, but presumed everything was all right because he was standing, shaking himself like a dog after a swim.

  They pulled her to her feet, not without difficulty, because she was in a state resembling shell shock, and giving little, spasmodic gulps, as a person does who tries to fight down seasickness. If they had not held her steady, she would have fallen. One of them slipped her arms into what appeared to be a German army shirt and buttoned it down the front, making her gasp as the coarse material scraped her bosom. She saw that the men also had put on shirts, and they stood there, absurdly, with their three pairs of shanks, two hairy, one smooth, shining in the gloom, rubbing against each other, Amanda's shirt half way to her knees, the others showing twin crescents from the base of their buttocks.

  "Come on," said Bimbo.

  "You are always saying 'Come on' to me," said Amanda wearily. "Come on where?"