In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘One!’

  Uncle America unbarred the door and propped it open to admit air and light. He recited the next two numbers. A hunk of dense bread would be produced from the man's pocket and while Sol slurped and chewed the man would begin to talk. Sol listened for dull echoes of the Ancient Greek he had learned long ago at school, but those days seemed even more remote than the language he had carried from them and he deciphered only fragments, which broke through Uncle America's opaque accent then sank again and were lost. There were reticences in his ramblings, or subjects which ran up against the limits of their improvised language sooner than others. He could not tell whether Uncle America truly misunderstood him or only chose to. But when he had finally asked after the woman, he had only needed to trace a rough form with his hands and Uncle America had nodded and replied: ‘Geraxos gave her name. She is child of child of . . . other woman.’ Uncle America clasped his hands and tried to pull them apart. There was some family bond which he could not unravel.

  ‘Thyella,’ the man said. Then his expression grew troubled as though there were something incomprehensible, even to himself, in what he had said. Or in Thyella herself. Then he had begun to explain that if Sol tried to run away the other andartes would shoot him. He, Uncle America, would shoot him too.

  ‘But how could I run?’ Sol burst out as the other's meaning crystallised. He pointed to his feet. Uncle America appeared baffled. Then, understanding, he began to laugh, for Sol could barely stand unaided. Uncle America supported him when he escorted him outside to relieve himself and even then Sol winced with pain. These, however, were his only respites from the hut's interior gloom. Outside, he could breathe out its fetid air and draw fresh into his lungs. It was mountain air, thin and cold. The land rose on either side of the hut, while the ground before it fell away, widening as it descended to stands of trees below. It was an offshoot of the valley which could be made out behind the trees and thick undergrowth at the bottom. Its mouth thus shielded, it would be hard to tell from the valley below that this place existed. The hut stood almost at its head. There was no sign of any other habitation, or of human presence at all. Once, Sol saw woodsmoke rising in still air somewhere off to the south-west. He assumed it signalled a village, or the camp of the andartes. One arm was slung over Uncle America's shoulders; with his other he pointed to the thin plume of smoke. Uncle America grinned amiably and rubbed his stomach. The next day he brought a piece of cooked meat and watched while Sol devoured it then licked the grease from his fingers. But he did not confirm that the smoke indeed came from the andartes’ camp, or that Geraxos's enemies were in the next valley or across a river. Similarly, it had taken a whole afternoon to explain the relationship between himself, his cousin and his cousin's parents who had lived in the nearest town. But in that time Uncle America had never once mentioned the name of the town.

  Sol's frostbitten feet began to regain their normal colour. Two of the nails on his right foot were only loosely attached. He could almost stand on his left foot, although the pain quickly became unbearable. The hut grew more oppressive by the day. Was he being protected, or imprisoned, or only held until the time came to dispose of him? Then, for three days running, Uncle America did not appear and the younger men checked on him in pairs, one remaining in the doorway looking out while the other placed his food on the ground. He remembered one from the night when Geraxos had questioned him but no flicker of recognition passed across the man's face. On the fourth day, two more had come, this time with Uncle America.

  ‘We walk tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Feet good.’ He waved a hand at the back of the hut, meaning north, Sol supposed. The mountains again. There could be only one answer. He nodded quickly. The other two talked quietly among themselves. Their faces were impassive but their movements were quick. One rolled a matchstick between his teeth, took it out, reversed it, tapped it against his leg, replaced it and repeated these actions over and over again.

  ‘What is happening?’ he asked Uncle America.

  The other shook his head. ‘Tomorrow.’

  But tomorrow arrived that same afternoon. Sol was standing when he heard machine-gun fire rattle from further down the valley. He lost his balance and let himself fall to the floor. He had rebandaged his feet as soon as the men had left and tried to think what he could do. They would shoot him if he could not walk; that was what the visit had meant. But he could not walk. And tomorrow was already here.

  He pushed open the door of the hut and began to crawl around to the side. If he could reach the ridge at the top. . . .

  He did not know what he could do if he reached the top. The machine-gun fire was intermittent, short bursts alternating with longer ones from a more powerful-sounding weapon. It seemed to be growing simultaneously both nearer and more distant. He picked out single shots. Nearer. The fighting was spreading. And crawling was as agonising as walking. He was not going to reach the ridge.

  He stopped and looked down on the roof of the hut, which was barely distinguishable from the ground out of which it rose. Twenty impossible metres to the top. Perhaps fifty to the bottom. Another burst of gunfire. But where from? Where am I, he wondered. He began to drag himself down to the trees and undergrowth at the mouth of the cutting. Hide there, he thought. Every jolt of his body registered now in his feet. The bones within were being broken into splinters and driven into him. He pulled himself down the slope. There were two kinds of gunfire: near and far. The heavier weapon seemed to have ceased, but the near gunfire was now very near. Another twenty metres to the trees. The heavy undergrowth would hide him. He would be safe. Then an andarte stepped out of the cover directly ahead of him.

  The man raised his gun and took aim at Sol. But he must have looked up from the gunsight, Sol deduced later. He had faced his intended victim and Sol had seen that the partisan's eyes were blue; the same blue as the old man's. Then puzzlement spread over the andarte’s face. He lost his footing and fell, clutching his shoulder. The crack of the rifle came a second later. But not his. The partisan lay on the ground. From somewhere behind him, deep within the undergrowth, a man screamed and continued screaming. Someone barked an order, the voice high and excited. Stand up, he told himself as two soldiers ran towards him, the first swinging the stock of his rifle to catch him in the ribs. He must have stood up. They would have shot him on the ground.

  He saw the woman as he fell, for no more than an instant. Thyella was kneeling on the ground in front of the trees, surrounded by soldiers. Her jacket had been pulled open to expose her breasts. Her hands had been tied, or perhaps they were clasped behind her? One of the soldiers had put his rifle to the back of her head.

  Flashes, parts of things, all emerging and falling back into blackness. He wanted to hold them still and they would not stop or be hurried into coherence; they gathered at their own pace. In front of his face was hard earth with a single smooth stone embedded in it. He was lying on his front. His head throbbed. So it had been a village, he thought, regaining and surrendering consciousness.

  It was still there when his eyes reopened. An area of packed earth was ringed on three sides with cottages built of rough stones. Behind the dwellings rose their raw fabric, a face of grey rock. Some of the soldiers had taken cover in front of the cottages. They looked up nervously at the heights, but there was no firing now. At the other end of the village, a second group had taken up position around a deep recession in the cliff face. A heavy machine-gun had been set up there. Its operator aimed the barrel into the fissure. The cottages were loosely grouped. Their focus was an open-sided structure which appeared to have been built around a tree. A planked roof encircled the thick trunk and was supported at the corners by drystone pillars. Within it was a group of men who wore no uniforms, only green armbands. There were tables and chairs. From his lowly position, Sol could see that they had one of the andartes in there. Two of them held him upright before their commander, who sat behind a table. There was something on the table, wrapped in grey sacking. The commander unwrapped
it and held it up to the partisan but Sol could not make out the object. At the sight of it, the captive's head began to shake, in refusal, like an animal rejecting harness. The men holding him struggled to control him. Their commander shouted and the partisan was frog-marched across Sol's field of vision, then behind. The captive began to bellow as he was dragged away, the voice growing fainter. There was a brief period of silence, but the final cry reached Sol's ears as clearly as if the act performed on the man had taken place only a few paces away: a high shriek.

  He did not know how he was here. He had been pulled to his feet by the same soldier who had knocked him down. The ground drove spikes through the soles of his feet; the world reeled around him. A soldier was being carried out of the trees by four of his fellows. He was screaming, the same scream Sol had heard earlier. Blood soaked the soldier from crotch to knee. His companions struggled to hold him. A voice had shouted in German, ‘Put down your weapon!’ Where was Thyella, he wondered? Where was Uncle America? The day's flat white light dimmed and surged and dimmed again.

  There were two rifle shots, but very distant. The men stationed near the cliff face looked at each other. The men wearing armbands fell silent. Then, from one of the houses emerged two men in German uniform. One shouted an order in Greek to the regular troops. The men in armbands were ignored. Sol watched them approach until they stood over him and he could see only their boots.

  ‘A Vlach, she says,’ said one of the officers. ‘Crippled. They found him in the mountains.’

  ‘So?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘No. Colonel Eberhardt's orders were explicit. We need them all.’

  ‘Haven't Kariskakis's thugs had their fill yet?’

  The two men passed out of his earshot. He was ‘crippled’. Perhaps he would not have to stand again. The officers re-entered his field of vision as they walked towards the men waiting in the shelter built around the tree. Wehrmacht uniforms: a captain and his sergeant. The sergeant was replacing his pistol in its holster. So?

  A group of soldiers ran past carrying jerrycans. There was no sign of either villagers or andartes. There were men behind him. Someone shouted an order in Greek. The first explosion went off. Sol smelt the smoke before he saw it. A thick black pillar climbed heavily into the air then leaned and fell into the one rising next to it. He heard an engine start. But how? There was no road here. The smoke thickened. He saw the men around the break in the cliff pull back in twos. Black with fat. Not black. Why must he think of this? Klopstock? Trakl? Neither. The houses were empty. The smell was mineral, older than flesh. His eyes streamed. The smoke was not ‘black’, but ‘dark’. And the brighter the flames, the thicker the following darkness, which engulfed the houses in a choking cloud, the village, the retreating soldiers and finally even the cliffs which rose above them all.

  ***

  Where the rue Cuvier met the rue Jussieu, Reichmann had touched his elbow. Sol remembered it as the first physical contact between them. One after another, three cars nosed their way out of the narrower street and across the stream of traffic to turn left. Horns sounded.

  Reichmann asked, ‘It might be more correct then to see Die Keilerjagd as a witnessing of an annihilation. I am thinking of its first metaphor, this rendering down, this burning which reveals and obscures, very quickly, and then consumes its material. An annihilation of its own poetic material, perhaps. You look doubtful, Herr Memel. I was considering that first adjective, in a work which contains many such compound-words and no adverbs at all. They are held under great strain, their components often in outright opposition. Isn't the whole poem to be read in this kind of light, by this flame which flickers then disappears in the darkness of its own smoke? In an inevitable darkness: no fire without smoke, so to speak?’

  A thin strip of patchy grass ran almost the length of quai Saint Bernard. Men in blue overalls were at work with trowels. Plastic containers filled with brightly coloured bedding plants lay beside them. The river flowed smoothly past, opaque with mud. The two men looked down from the pavement above.

  Reichmann exclaimed, ‘You wrote your way out! The darkness is not a metaphor, but literally true. Your whole journey was made under the conditions imposed by the cave, where every step was a guess and every direction was taken by chance or in ignorance. Its darkness was your true ignorance. Because what happened to you was real. No, excuse me Herr Memel, because the poem assumes the full burden of your experience, your real experience. It is a map of those conditions, those violent uncertainties. Without it you could not have found your way out. It was an undiscovered trail, a mountain pass where none was thought possible. But it had to be walked to be found and marked. And the region was called?’

  Sol told him again.

  ‘Exactly!’

  Upriver, the latticed arches of pont d'Austerlitz framed diamond-shaped fragments of a leaden sky. A Métro train rumbled across in a long flicker of electric light.

  ‘Exactly so, and yet you wrote it. Even if you had never committed a single line to paper, you wrote it, Herr Memel.’

  They turned their heads at the sound of bells. Notre Dame was striking the hour.

  ‘One might even say that the poem's first image is not the toppling column of smoke, not Kalydon's ruin or the burning of a remote village, but a face. Atalanta's face. Thyella's face. Because Die Keilerjagd was lived before it was written, and her face was the first image you saw, was it not? Herr Memel?’

  ***

  Thyella, the opening in the rock and its jagged edges, a tree hung with men. The smoke rolled and broke around him, cloaking then disclosing these images by turns.

  It seemed the attacking force had manoeuvred their vehicles up a dry river-bed to within marching distance of the village. The Greek soldiers shouted to one another. They were laughing now and smoking cigarettes. They did not mix with Kariskakis's men, who walked ahead. The German officers were nowhere to be seen.

  Five grey army trucks and two smaller vehicles were parked in a semi-circle where a meander of the river had swept out a broad pan of gravel. The soldiers on guard nodded to their returning companions and resumed their scrutiny of the heights which rose on either side, jagged ridges of bare stone. Sol was pushed over a tailgate and pulled forward by the two soldiers guarding the prisoners already gathered in the truck. They were old women and infants. He lay on his stomach and looked up into young and ancient faces, which looked back at him without expression at all.

  They waited. The other trucks were turned around. Pebbles crunched beneath their wheels. Then there was a commotion and the two guards began to shout. Something landed heavily on the backs of his legs. He strained to look over his shoulder and Thyella's face stared into his. Her lip was split and one eye almost closed by a black bruise. Someone had rebuttoned her jacket. Her hands were tied behind her back. She was breathing heavily. Then German voices sounded outside.

  ‘No, no, idiot. Get her out!’

  There was an exchange in Greek with the guards in which all he caught was the repetition of a name: Eberhardt. The floor of the truck thudded as two more soldiers jumped in. The woman was pulled upright and hauled out. An argument was going on somewhere outside. A dozen or so soldiers climbed in, pushed the prisoners closer together and settled themselves towards the tailgate. The truck's engine started. It was manoeuvred forward and back. The convoy moved off.

  The river-bed rolled them from side to side as the truck lurched down the channel and over the boulders left there by the vanished river. The soldiers were silent, looking up at the surrounding mountains. The dry bed was exchanged for a track and the convoy crawled along. Twice they were forced out while the vehicles were nursed up inclines too steep to be taken loaded. When the light failed a halt was called. Sol and the other prisoners spent a sleepless night.

  They resumed at first light. The track seemed to deteriorate and at every halt their escorts would finger their weapons and forget the cigarettes which hung limply from their mouths, scanning the upper
slopes. The eventual road was little better. The old women clung to the children, rigid with an apprehension that, Sol slowly understood, derived from the vehicle rather than the fate towards which it carried them. Not one uttered a sound. By contrast, the soldiers grew more talkative as the mountains became hills and then a long level road. They drove through clouds of dust thrown up by the preceding vehicles. Sol lay face down on the floor of the truck, hands and feet both numb.

  The next thing he knew he was coughing and the trucks had stopped. The soldiers were shouting again, confidently now. He was pulled backwards, by his feet, and deposited on the ground. The old women rose stiffly from their positions, helped by the children. The soldiers waved their rifles.

  They were in a compound surrounded on three sides by wooden barracks and fenced with high barbed wire. A bare flagpole stood in the middle of this area and beyond it were the two smaller armoured vehicles, parked in front of a low building protected by sandbags. A radio mast projected from its roof and wires looped from one corner to a nearby telegraph pole. Two unmarked vans were drawn up alongside it. The motor of the nearest idled and a man in civilian clothes sat with his legs hanging out of the open door.

  The fourth side of the compound gave out onto a lake, its far shore barely distinguishable in the failing light. A reed-bed had been cut down to afford a clear line of fire, or perhaps only to expose the view. A stubble of green stumps pricked the surface of the water. Across the lake a line of low hills approached, almost meeting the shoreline before veering away. The roofs and low bell towers of a town were visible between their lower slopes and the water.