He sat on the dusty ground. The villagers, young and old, stood in a group behind the truck which had carried them all here. Three human-shaped bundles were unloaded from another of the trucks, much as he had been. One of the old women was retying her headscarf. Her fingers seemed to fumble with the knot. Then Sol realised that they were all looking across the compound.
A procession was making its way past the front of the communications hut towards the vans. Two soldiers led the way, flanking a blindfolded man. A soldier behind him nudged him in the back with his rifle when he wandered to left or right. One arm had been secured behind him; the other he carried in a sling, for his shoulder was dark with blood which had soaked the side of his jacket. It was the partisan who had tried to shoot him, Sol saw. Two more soldiers followed and then, blindfolded likewise, with both her hands tied behind her back, came Thyella.
These soldiers were not Greeks, Sol saw, but Germans. Two of them marched alongside her with their rifles shouldered, holding her by the arms, for she would jerk and shrug every few paces in an involuntary fashion. They pulled her along between them by main force. Two officers brought up the rear.
The van driver had jumped down from the cab and now held open the back doors. As the wounded man was pushed into the interior he gave a sharp cry of pain. Thyella spun about, an answering cry breaking from her. She pulled herself free and kicked out at her invisible captors. The startled soldiers jumped back but then, realising her helplessness, one neatly tripped her and she fell heavily to the ground. She rose, only to be tripped again. The other of the soldiers laughed. At that the captain barked an order and the two bent to pick her up. The doors of the van were slammed shut. The vehicle reversed. She must have understood then that the injured man was being taken away. She began to curse the men she could not see. The soldiers dragged her down the side of the building and out of sight. The two officers watched, then walked back to the communications hut and disappeared inside.
The Greek soldiers swigged water from their canteens and talked loudly among themselves. His fellow prisoners stood motionless and expressionless, even the youngest children, as if none of this existed. As if nothing had happened at all. There was no sign now of the German soldiers or their captive. Then a Greek officer shouted to his men and they sauntered over, six or seven of them, swinging their rifles. Under their direction, the old women and children moved obediently towards the nearest of the huts. Struggling to stand up, Sol felt a hard prod in the small of his back and fell forward onto the ground. As he turned over, he was prodded again, this time in the stomach. A soldier stood over him, rifle pointed at his chest. On the far side of the compound, the door of the communications hut opened. One of the two German officers emerged from the hut and signalled to the Greek officer. He, in turn, pointed to Sol.
Behind the wooden huts stood the nucleus of the original camp: long low structures built of plastered stone and roofed with clay tiles. The white-washed walls of the nearest building were studded with small barred windows. Cells, Sol discovered.
He sat in a corner, rubbing his ankles. The cords binding his swollen hands and feet had been cut. The feeling was returning. It was almost dark outside but a dim square of light showed through the barred opening in the wall high above his head. The heavy door was punctured by a peep-hole, closed from outside. Beyond it was the central corridor which divided the building. As he had been escorted in, a guard sitting outside a cell midway down its length had jumped up, waved them back and pointed to a door two cells before the one he kept vigil over. Sol waited as the door was unlocked. At the far end of the passage was an open door and a larger room beyond it. An old woman wearing a headscarf was mopping the floor, watched by a soldier who sat on a desk pushed back against the wall. A faint smell of urine reached his nostrils. Above the woman's head, two ropes hung down. He dredged three words from his memory and again he could not remember their source. Tension too decays.
He heard trucks start and stop, later some shouting, but distant. Something scraped loudly over a stone floor and, a little while after, footsteps sounded outside, the old woman and her escort. They passed his cell and the sound faded. A door slammed and the noise boomed down the corridor. Thyella would be in the cell where the guard had sat, less than ten metres away. But why, Sol wondered, had he been singled out?
He settled back against the wall and fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed he was running and it was agony, but it was impossible to stop. There was a long dusty road which led to a range of mountains. He ran through gorges so narrow that he could brace his legs between their sides. There was the village, already ablaze. And there the fissure in the cliff behind. There the tree where a man was being hung, or suspended, but he could not see how. There was blood. Something terrible was being done to him. Was he alive or dead? The waxen faces of those already hanging stared down at him and he ran again. Here was the stand of trees. He had to get through the undergrowth. It seemed to take an age. She was in there, somewhere, crouched over a man whose blood welled between her fingers. The blue-eyed partisan beckoned him forward, a young man. He was in the wrong place. The partisan raised his rifle quickly. There was not much time. The soldiers rushed forward with their injured comrade, wielding him as though the wound in his groin were a kind of weapon. The shells thudded down and the trucks roared like tethered animals, maddened by the noise. Where was Thyella? Everyone was waiting. The last shell whistled through the sky, growing ever more shrill, screaming louder even than the injured man, stretching itself through an impossible duration. There was one figure still standing, further up the slope, above the hut. Get down, he urged himself, cowering, shrinking from the sound. He buried his head in his arms, trying to burrow his way into the cell floor.
The screaming was a siren. The thudding of the shells were explosions; they were going off outside. He heard men shouting some distance away. A flash lit the cell in wan light for an instant. The following thud a second later. He awoke to the realisation that a battle was underway. A machine-gun stuttered dull syllables in his ears. Distant rifle fire. Nearer, an engine caught. Much nearer, he thought. The engine ran louder, then quieter, then louder again. A truck. But no headlights. Something, or someone, scrabbled over the roof of the cell block. He strained his ears but the engine noise drowned out the sound. There was a shout outside, which was repeated, and then an answer came. Her voice. A quick volley of words. Then gears crashed and the engine revved. Suddenly Sol knew what was about to happen. He threw himself across the floor and rolled. The engine drowned out the sounds of the battle as it approached at full throttle. In the next instant his world collapsed around him.
For some seconds there was nothing to see except clouds of dust. He coughed, his eyes streaming. The noise of the truck's impact resounded in his ears. The vehicle lay partly buried in rubble and pinned beneath the collapsing roof. A section of wall larger than himself lay beside him. Smashed roof-tiles covered the floor. They were trying to drive the truck out again but the engine whined where seconds ago it had roared. He felt for his legs, gripping them with both hands, then tried to move forward. His limbs seemed to take for ever to stir.
Outside, the pitch-dark was revealed as a rolling cloud of dust by a flash from the far side of the camp. The driver had cut the engine of the truck. There was movement off to his right. A different engine-noise broke into his hearing and something moved around from the other side, men running, a group of five or six. The vehicle-noise grew louder and then a van identical to the one into which the injured partisan had been thrown drove towards them, its back doors flapping as it bounced over the uneven ground. The gunfire was intermittent now, almost perfunctory. The van skidded to a halt. The figures ran towards it, five men carrying guns. One woman. Sol pulled himself forward, ignoring the pain which stabbed his feet, grunting with effort. The group were climbing into the back. He looked up, knowing he would not reach the vehicle in time.
‘Wait!’
One of the men pointed his gun towards t
he source of the sound. Thyella's head turned slowly. Her eyes found him and her arm knocked down the man's gun. The gears engaged. He drew breath to shout again but the sound never left his mouth. Thyella had raised her finger to her lips, for silence, and the gesture seemed to him so unexpected and unlikely that he obeyed.
He came to his senses as the wheels of the van found purchase in the dry soil. Her face sank back into the darkness and the vehicle carried her away. She and her liberators were gone. He shouted after her. He was still shouting when he heard the sound of men running. A rifle-bolt was drawn back. He turned and raised his hands. The captain motioned his men to stand back.
‘A Vlach shepherd who speaks German,’ he remarked.
The officer looked up at the truck half-buried in the wreckage of the wall, then down again at Sol. ‘You will be questioned in the morning. When Colonel Eberhardt arrives.’
Not tension, but terror. Terror too decays. Who though?
Because when the second hour had elapsed, the fear that had first gripped him, when they came for him a little after daybreak, would no longer sustain itself. Beneath terror was a well of hopeless boredom. He was afloat in it, for now. The sweat had poured off him at the sound of their footsteps, quick and purposeful over the stone floor. The scrape of the key and the heavy report of the door slamming back against the wall. They had run at him, descending upon him.
He had been frogmarched backwards down the corridor. Fragments of fallen roof-tiles cracked beneath the guards’ boots. The smell of urine grew stronger. Damp plaster and stale cigarette smoke. They had pulled the chair forward and tied him to it by the wrists and ankles.
He faced a wall which had been painted pale yellow, then grey, then a dull red and finally whitewashed. The successive skins had bubbled and peeled away in patches. He shifted to dislodge a splinter which pricked his back. It was a heavy chair, made of posts and rough planks, built so that it could not be toppled over, no matter how violent its occupant's exertions. In front of him was the desk he had seen earlier, an ordinary wooden table. Two metal-framed chairs had been placed behind it. A single drop of sweat was creeping down the back of his left leg. He breathed slowly and deeply.
The panic which had seized him at the first sight of this place had not left him, not even when all but one of the men had left the room. They had marched back up the corridor, leaving him with a single guard, who sat behind him, out of sight. He heard the man's chair creak from time to time. The panic only sank and came apart in him. There were stains on the floor, stains which an old woman and her mop could not lift. The terror was there, but it was eventless, a meaningless disturbance. His thoughts were of no consequence. He, Solomon Memel, led to nothing.
An object had been placed on the table. An instrument? He did not know. It was wrapped in cloth. Grey sacking, which he recognised, and which the partisan had recognised too. They had taken him away and killed him. But Sol had not seen what the cloth contained.
The guard shifted and his chair creaked. Time in the room was measured in the relative brightening of the light entering the barred window. Voices sounded outside once or twice, but Greek voices, and incomprehensible to him. Vehicles came and went at a distance. It would be hot in the sunlight and the lake tempting with its sheet of unbroken cool water. He sank into apathetic languor, an abandonment of the self to whom the next minutes or hours would bring Colonel Eberhardt and what Colonel Eberhardt meant. The guard behind him stood up. Sol felt his skin prickle. The guard stretched and sat down again. Sol's stomach clenched and unclenched. He looked down once more at the object on the table, wrapped in grey cloth, denied him for now.
The prelude would be the sound of the door at the far end of the corridor, then approaching footsteps, sharp and confident. There was work to be done. Whatever casual conversation had been carried on from Eberhardt's arrival would be brought to its conclusion, an anecdote hurried to its end and polite laughter, normal noises. They would remark on the damage done to the building in a matter-of-fact way. Their voices would encourage him in a self-deception that normality might still embrace him too, that he was within its pale. But then, at some point in the corridor, those sounds would end.
The report of the outer door rolled the length of the corridor and reached his ears as an armful of wood dropped on a stone floor. Footsteps, then silence, the guard behind him jumping to attention, the click of his heels, his salute. Underneath the whitewash the wall had been painted red. Grey under the red. Yellow under the grey. The stone had sweated out its salt under the sun which beat outside. The door slammed shut.
Three men had entered: the captain, a Greek and the man who must be Eberhardt. The captain removed first his cap, then his tunic. The Greek wore no uniform, only the green armband. Eberhardt he barely saw. The last two were somewhere behind him. The room was silent. The captain leaned forward, placing his hands on the table to either side of the implement in its cloth wrapping. He looked over Sol's head to those behind him, then down again.
He said, ‘Name and rank.’
Sol's response, it appeared then, proved unsatisfactory. His subsequent responses too proved equally unsatisfying, even provocative, repeated as they were three or four times, with increasing degrees of urgency. The questions and his inadequate answers locked them both in cycles of repetition; it was impossible to proceed before he had fulfilled the captain's need for this or that fragment of information. Something was being constructed out of these materials, an elaborate narrative that he could not comprehend. But it involved their escape from these repetitions. The captain wanted something better than the truth, something compelling and plausible. More significant.
‘You are either a deserter or a traitor, or both,’ began the captain again.
His responses to these points too proved inadequate, or incoherent, and were disbelieved. The surpassing tale which the captain laboured to assemble could not be built from the shoddy materials Sol supplied.
‘Geraxos let you live for a particular reason.’
Yes. But why? Why had that happened?
There was a sink in the corner behind him. He had not seen it but he heard water splashing. The captain was washing his hands.
‘You thought she would take you with her? She would have slit your throat in a second. Shall we ask her comrade? We have him, you know. Or perhaps I should show you. It wouldn't have been only your throat . . .’ He had held up a crudely-made knife with a short hooked blade.
At a certain point, the Greek took over, although it was the captain who continued to ask the questions, or make the statements to which Sol was required to assent.
‘Once again. How many? For how long? These are simple questions. We do not wish to hear about the state of your feet. Simply, how many and for how long?’
Then he nodded again to the Greek.
‘Once more.’
There would be a pause while they changed position and the man settled himself. The words grew jumbled, seeming to repeat themselves, but with slight variations and changes. He grew confused as to the point when he should attempt to speak and when to listen. His answers grew confused too; inconsistent with each other, which was indicated to him. The captain grew frustrated. His edifice toppled as fast as it rose. Its foundations were rotten. Sol tumbled out material. He said, ‘None’ and ‘No’ and ‘I don't know’ and ‘Neither’. But it was no good.
The captain nodded and nodded again.
He said, ‘I am not German. I am Romanian.’
He said, ‘I am not a soldier, or a criminal.’
The captain nodded for the final time.
He said, ‘I am a Jew.’
‘Look at him.’
Sol turned his head very slowly to the left, away from the voice, which was Eberhardt's. The Greek was standing against the wall, soaked in sweat from his exertions. The man looked askance at the officer, then relapsed into impassivity. Sol realised that he himself was drenched in cold water. To revive him? His hands and feet had been untied.
/> ‘Look at his features, the nose, the brow, the way the eyes are set back in the head. Don't worry, he cannot understand a word we say. Even if he could he would take no offence. Think of him as a domesticated animal.’
Eberhardt reversed one of the chairs across the desk from him and straddled it. The captain had hung his jacket there, Sol remembered. He had removed it when the Greek had set to work.
‘And Thoas led the Aetolian warriors, men of Pleuron, Pylene, Olenus and Chalkis by the shore and rocky Kalydon,’ recited Eberhardt. He tipped his head to the man standing. ‘Look at Homer's warriors now. What have they become? Oh, there is no need to answer these questions. Captain Müller has dealt with all that.’
Sol had moved his mouth as if to respond. It was very important to respond, even if there was no definite answer to give. He relaxed his face, but one of the cuts around his mouth had begun to bleed freely. Eberhardt leaned his elbows on the table and studied the package which still rested there. His fingers toyed with the frayed edge of the sacking. He looked into Sol's face.
‘You can survive,’ he said. ‘You, Solomon Memel, the Wandering Jew from, where was it?’
Sol formed his lips carefully around the syllables. Clarity too was important. Eberhardt nodded.
‘As a Jew you would by rights be sent to join your brethren in Salonika, although precious few remain there now. Which means a rather arduous journey north. Even more arduous than your journey south, I would venture. Captain Muller was right to assert that your situation could worsen considerably. But it could also improve, Herr Memel.’
In the Shape of a Boar Page 24