by Tom McCarthy
Kennscht mi noch?
The phrase stays with him as the sky falls away. It seems to flicker all around the machine, seeding the air with a significance whose essence eludes him. “Do you still recognise me?” the painted words have asked him. Tilting his head back as he waits for earth to gather him, he wonders who the “me” is, or what time, what tense, what moment might be indicated by the “still.” The RE8 flattens out a little. A last dark, elongated kite balloon flashes by, burning. The plane hits something, but it’s not the ground: it feels more like a buffer, a soft boundary beyond which the air has a heavier, slower texture. He can feel this texture all around him too-see it as well: it’s silken, swirling about his shoulders and enveloping the whole machine, thin fibres at its rear expanding and contracting in the slipstream like a jellyfish’s tentacles, shooing the world away. Within its canopy, the humming of the plane’s struts and wires is amplified and softened; light is filtered, made to glow. Then the light dims, the sound fades out and there’s nothing.
iii
When he wakes up, there’s brown fabric covering his vision. It’s right up against his eyes: a diagonal grid that stays still as he glances left and right. Inhaling, he breathes in again the rich and honeyed smell of cunt. Touching his hand to his face, he feels the thread of Cécile’s stocking. The peep-holes have slipped down towards his mouth; he gouges a finger into one of them and tears the whole thing off. His view’s still blocked by fabric, though: the white, silky stuff that wrapped the machine as it fell forms a sac around it. Serge runs his eye down past the tail, to where the sac’s thinner fibres are-and sees, at their end, lying on the ground fifteen feet away, a human figure in a harness.
“It’s a parachute,” he says to Gibbs. “We hit a parachute on the way down.”
His voice is strangely muffled: he can hear himself-but only silently, inside his head. Gibbs doesn’t seem to hear him either: he doesn’t answer-or if he does then his voice isn’t loud enough for Serge to pick it up. Serge turns round. Gibbs is dead: stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit. Serge unclips his own harness, levers himself from his seat and drops to the silk-coated ground. Pushing his hands against a roof and walls of silk, he makes his way along the soft, white tube towards the opening by the strings and, emerging through this, prods the man tied to them. He’s dead too, head split open from its impact against the earth. He must have jumped from the burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally-or, rather, on a diagonal descent-dragging him with it.
Serge looks around him. The landscape is nondescript, brown and broken, like all the front’s terrain. Twenty or so yards away, a section of it jumps into the air as a shell lands on it. The explosion is silent: it’s as though he were watching one of Widsun’s films. Even the rushing air and the earth clods it brings smacking against his face carry no sound in their wake. He traps one of the clods against his skin, holds it out and inspects it. Viewed from this close, the earth takes on a similar resolution to the one it has in those photographs he shoots for Pietersen, pockmarked and lined with patterns. He lets it drop, from sympathy: it’s been churned up enough. Watching it fall past his groin, he realises he’s still got an erection. He looks about him, embarrassed, before remembering that there’s no one else around. He could be anywhere. The fact that they hit a German kite balloon’s occupant, or ex-occupant, on the way down suggests they were heading east, in which case… Should he torch the machine? As he wonders this, the pressure grows inside his ears-and with it comes, at last, a sound. It’s a quiet one, resonating at a low frequency and emerging from inside the parachute: an electric buzzing spilling out of the inflated pod. He heads back through its opening towards the broken wings and bent propeller blades that, like a set of irregular tent-poles, hold the structure up. The buzzing’s coming from the cockpit-from the back half of it, his half…
Pulling himself up again and peering in, he sees that it’s his spark set making it. The six-volt battery has fallen from its spot and half-smashed on the cabin’s floor; the wires issuing from it are sparking intermittently; and the unregulated flow of electricity into the tapper key is making the latter twitch, as though the current-and with it, the entire signalling regime-had been reversed and the set were now receiving rather than transmitting. Serge reaches past it for the medicine box, then realises that the two phials he picked up from the houseboat are still in his pocket. He takes one out, rolls back his sleeve and injects its contents into his forearm, then leans over Gibbs and grabs hold of his Verey gun.
“Silk pyjamas.”
Did he say that or just hear it in his muffled head? He looks at the buzzing radio set again. The sparks are spreading further down the wires now, spreading too across the cockpit’s floor, where engine oil is flickering alight. Serge drops the Verey gun, yanks what remains of the transmitter loose, lowers himself to the ground once more and walks slowly down the tube again, then past the dead parachutist and across the churned-up landscape. He turns back after a while and, cradling the spark set in his arms, watches the parachute and machine burning. The silk turns black, then orange, then falls away to reveal the wooden skeleton beneath it blackening as well. Small collapses and eruptions take place within the flames’ mass, but they make no noise: the only sound’s the low-resonating buzzing which, despite the spark set being both smashed and disconnected, is still echoing inside his head. He stares at the flames for what could be seconds, minutes or hours, then turns again and walks away.
After a while he finds himself strolling beneath mutilated willows at the edge of what must once have been a picturesque country pond. The water, frosted over in parts, has a rust-brown texture laced with silver threads of mercury. Pieces of shell-casing, ripped and jagged, protrude from its surface. At its sides yellow, erect reeds tremble and shudder. Serge can’t tell if it’s wind or buffeting from ordnance fall making them move. He can’t hear any rustling-but he does start hearing a high-pitched note, breaking through the buzzing in his head: it seems to come from somewhere else, somewhere exterior. Is it connected with the reeds, their oscillation? He can’t tell. The ground around the pond is coated with military refuse and metallic dust, as though fragments of the sky had flaked off and fallen to earth. Birds are moving among these: jackdaws, crows and ravens, picking through the pieces with gestures as mechanical and irregular as the broken parts themselves. Smoke drifts around their beaks. As Serge comes near they all take off and fly in a long, funerary procession towards nearby woodland, their shadows strafing the ground.
He follows them. What draws him towards the woods isn’t a reasoned need to find cover or hide, but rather the high-pitched note piercing his ears: it seems to carry from among the trees-to emanate from within their dense mass with a kind of intent, like an electric summons. The sound grows louder as he threads his way between the trunks, as though held in and concentrated by the canopies and branches, bounced back up by moss to linger at head height. Listening to it more carefully, he discovers that it’s actually composed of several notes and pitches, weaving into and out of one another like the strands of interference you get when you nudge through the dial. When he stands still and tunes his ear to them more finely, the notes amalgamate into two trunk-tones: the high-pitched one he first picked up and, nestling within its sonic shadow, a deeper one that has the pitch of trumpets. Together, the two tones form a melancholy wail, like the long-drawn-out scream of a fall that never hits the surface towards which it’s falling.
An animal darts past his feet and vanishes as soon as it appears. Was it a fox? A dog? It had something in its mouth. Serge, still cradling the broken spark set, presses on into the woods. More animals disperse as he comes near. They’re all holding things between their teeth, grey morsels laced with scarlet; even the black birds perching in the trees pinch titbits in the beaks down which they peer at him disdainfully. He’s come to a spot where all the trees are crippled: trunks riven, branches snapped, both scorched and
covered in large patches of tar. Tar coats the ground in intermittent patches too, countering its winter hardness with soft, insulating accretions. The accretions grow more frequent as he treads towards a small clearing secreted among the trees: the tar-coat covers the floor of this almost completely. Men are sitting on the tar as though on a padded blanket, backs propped against the trees’ bases, packs and weapons at their feet. There must be ten or fifteen of them, wearing German uniforms. They’re all dead. They slump against the trunks like over-ripened fruit that’s lost its shape, begun to rot. Their faces all wear grimaces, as though frozen in a grotesque laughter bordering on the insane. Serge looks at their mouths: some of the jaws are dislocated and hang loose; two of them have been ripped open by shrapnel wounds extending from the chest, or neck, or cheek; one has been blown off entirely, leaving a hole through which broken shards of jawbone poke.
The sound’s loud here. The men’s deformed mouths seem to be either transmitting it or, if not, then at least shaping it, their twisted surfaces and turned-out membranes forming receptacles in which its frequencies and timbres are unravelled, recombined, then sent back out into the air both transformed and augmented, relayed onwards. Their eyes, despite being empty of perception or reaction, seem electrified, shot through with a current that, being too strong for them, has shattered them and left them with a burnt-out, hungry look. Their clothes have streaks of red on them. The tar’s black is streaked with red as well, just like the Albatros’s fuselage. It’s a bright red: a kind of scarlet, rippling across the tree trunks like an ensign fluttering in wind. It gives the tiny, overhung clearing a cosy glow that complements the sweet smell of tar and corruption lingering about its air. The sound vibrates about the air too, infusing the whole scene with what feels like a kind of heat: it seems as though, despite the cold, the earth were sweating, yielding up these phantoms, passing their bones and flesh on through its strata, up past layers of frosted mulch and tar, delivering them back to life, albeit in a dead form. They almost seem to move. One of them is moving: dragging himself upright against his tree trunk, then, placing one foot in front of the other, lurching forwards along a line that leads past Serge towards the clearing’s far side.
“You’re alive?” Serge asks him as he passes.
The man halts in his lurching for a moment. His head turns in Serge’s direction and bobs unsteadily above its shoulders while the eyes take in the spark set and still-bulging groin, before turning away again. His neck has a big hole in its side that Serge can see right through. After a while his legs jerk back into action and carry him flat-footedly along his trajectory.
“Where are you going?” Serge asks as he walks away.
The man doesn’t answer. He’s not listening to him: he, too, is tuned in to the high-pitched noise; he’s drawn by it, is following it to its source. Serge watches his thin, feminine form slink away behind more tree trunks. Just before it disappears, it passes something soft and white. Another parachute? Serge starts walking in the same direction. The noise is growing stronger: louder, more precise. As he steps forwards, he starts murmuring zone-call sequences: ones he’s sent in the past, or might have sent, or might be sending even now, somehow, to someone waiting at the far end of this air that seems to have become all noise and signal:
“BY.NF. BADSAC7 SC-CS 1911; BY.VER. BUC2 SC-CS 1913…”
He murmurs whole strings of them, one after the other, repeating and mutating as they travel from his lips into the woods. He does this for no reason other than that it makes him feel good: at one with the blasted trees, the electricity, the tar and deformation. It produces an effect, though: after a long, repetitive stretch in which he might or might not retrace his own steps at least once (the sequences of trees seem to repeat as well, but never quite in the same way; the soft, white thing among the trees glides half-into, then out of, view again), men in German uniforms appear from among the trunks and branches. These ones are definitely alive. Their weapons point at him; their undeformed mouths move; they eye the spark set with suspicion.
“What?” Serge asks. He can’t hear them.
Their guns jerk upwards; their mouths move again.
“Was?” he switches to German.
“… Feng ennerf,” one of their voices weaves its way into the high-pitched noise’s mesh.
“Was?” Serge asks again. It sounded like “Thing enough,” “Fending off,” something along those lines. He points to his ear. “Schwer zu fassen.”
“… Enner,” the man says, mouthing the word slowly.
“Enna?” Serge asks.
“… Engnis,” the man tells him, not unkindly.
Serge smiles back apologetically. It was somewhere like “End this”-or perhaps, conversely, “Endless”… A new soldier appears and the others turn to him and talk. This one is more smartly dressed, an officer. He steps over to Serge and takes the spark set from him; as he does, the high-pitched noise stops suddenly and Serge can clearly hear the man say:
“Zu Gefängnis. Prison. You are prisoner.”
iv
He’s sent away from the frontier: eastwards, to the interior. Having ascertained that he’s an officer, his captors group him with his peers and transport them initially in first-class carriages, then second-class, then third, downgrading their conveyance every hundred miles or so. Eventually they find themselves in cattle trucks. A German corporal and three privates stand guard above them, jerking and swaying in front of neat fields, canals, factories and towns that follow one another with a progression whose logic seems both perfect and impenetrable. Occasionally, they pause at stations; while they’re handed bread and coffee, women stare at them malevolently from the platforms; as the train pulls off again, sliding past houses whose doors wear wreaths and crosses and whose windows, covered by black blinds, transmit in Venetian Morse the same message each time, Serge understands why. On every road, in every town and village, columns of soldiers pass by marching in the opposite direction, the neat stamp-and-click of their swift footfall drawing briefly into line with the rhythm of the steam and pistons’ chug and hissing before disengaging, fading and dying away…
He gets passed through a series of processing stations and transit camps. At each one they ask his name and rank. His answer to the former question never fails to elicit a humorous comment:
“Chafer? You are Insekt, beetle?”
“Carrefax,” Serge answers, stretching the x out into a long, steam-like release of breath.
“Käfers? Then you are more than one: many Insekts!”
After running through the fourth or fifth variation on this exchange, he finds himself inducted into an Offizierslage in Hammelburg. Hammelburg is a barracks town: the prison’s just a section of the town that’s been wired off from the surrounding streets. The dormitories in which the prisoners sleep eight or ten to a room line a cobbled square that’s hemmed in by sharp-angled red- and brown-slate roofs rising above the yellow and red houses, tradesmen’s premises and municipal buildings that jostle and collide with one another with Germanic closeness and compression. The guards who police the penned-in sector of the town are old, shoddily dressed, confused. Several of them limp; one of them’s missing an eye. On the far side of the wire, in the same square, new recruits are drill-marched up and down all day long. Often, when the prisoners are lined up in the open during roll call, the recruits cast anxious glances their way, as though trying to catch a glimpse of what awaits them. Serge tries to smile back each time one of their eyes meets his, as though to reassure them that it’s not that bad-until it strikes him that what’s putting the fear into their faces might not be the enemy but rather their own veterans: the thought that they’ll end up like that…
Roll-call is taken round the clock: in the square, in the dormitories, routinely first thing every morning, without warning in the middle of the night. When they’re not standing to attention, prisoners mooch around, play bridge, attend (or deliver) lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from history and medicine to religion,
or study French, German or Latin. Serge inscribes himself in Moreton’s course on Problems in Philosophy.
“The history of our thinking on free will hinges around the question of determinism: are events pre-scripted, as it were-by God, our cells or an invisible engine driving history’s course? And even if they are, are we still free to choose to do what we were destined to do anyway-standing face-to-face with its implications, in full awareness of its consequences? Hume thought so, and allowed this liberty to, as he put it, ‘everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.’ ”
“Our current situation kind of pisses over that one, doesn’t it?” Serge asks.
“Not necessarily,” Moreton answers, pushing his glasses up his nose’s bridge, “not necessarily. To find our way round that we’d have to look to our captors’ philosophical tradition. Rudolf Steiner has recently argued, after Schopenhauer, that we’re free when we’re able to bridge the gap between our sensory impressions of the outer world, on the one hand, and, on the other, our own thoughts.”
“So if I think of barbed wire fences, then I’m free?”