by Tim Binding
“Bit over the top, I grant you, but they’re only pictures.”
The Captain touched her cheek, saying, “You must understand, Veronica, that this picture is more valuable, more sacred than everything in this house. It would be the same if one day Mrs Hallivand came to church and found the vicar with a boy on the altar. Ernst was on the phone immediately. It is very bad for the Major, considering the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
The Captain ignored her question. He straightened up and poured himself another glass.
“So Ernst will move in soon, Bohde hanging on to his coat-tails. I will find a smaller place, of my own perhaps. However, before I go…” He looked at her closely. “I thought tonight you might like to accompany me to the Casino.”
“The Casino.” She felt her heart race.
“Yes, and afterwards, if things have quietened down, perhaps you would like to come back to the Villa. For a late supper and a nightcap.”
She could not believe it. He was asking her back to the Villa. She did not know what to do, whether to fling her arms around his neck or to appear calm and indifferent. She wanted to do both. She wanted to be calm and indifferent but she wanted to kiss him too! The Villa! Unable to resist, she leant across and kissed him, opening up the sweet tang of wine that ran loose in his mouth, pushing herself on top of him, struggling out of her blouse and brassiere, his lips travelling greedily down, sucking in great swollen mouthfuls of her as the boy intruded suddenly on her thoughts, irritating her, he has no right, this boy, to interfere with her in this way, why should she think of him when she had the Captain lapping hungrily at her breast. She had tried to persuade him to have a wash the other day, had lit the gas to her father’s fury and boiled kettle after kettle, dragging the tin bath close to the fire, rigging up the little curtain that she sheltered behind when Da was around, but when she had showed him he had recoiled, not from the prospect of soap and warm water but for the danger it could bring him. “The guards,” he said, pointing a finger to nis head, indicating thought, and then of course she understood. A clean boy would be noticed, a clean boy would be singled out and strung over the rafter he had told her about, where others have been beaten, the blood running down onto the floor until sometimes…he dropped his head. Did he mean pass out or die? It was unimaginable. It annoyed her sometimes the way he exaggerated his stories in order to gain sympathy, yet only the day she’d seen a foreign being kicked all in a heap by one of the Todt officials before being slung in the back of a lorry and left there all day. Horrible, simply horrible, but there were bound to be one or two sadists like that in every army, and there’s no knowing of course what the foreign might have done, and pushing over the loaf for the boy to cut it himself she began to question the wisdom of even feeding him, for there was colour coming back to his cheeks there was no doubt of it. Wouldn’t they notice that and wonder why? Beat the truth out of him. When he had gone she had stripped off herself and sat in the tepid water, scraping the sliver of soap under her arms, thinking how it would feel to wash the dirt from him, feeling the transformation as his rough patchy skin grew soft and glowing, the stink of his imprisonment replaced by the scent of perfumed soap, his clothes, shirt, trousers, jacket discarded and in their stead Victor Hugo’s silken dressing gown the Captain liked to wear.
She pulled Zepernick’s head away.
“You’ve picked a fine night to ask me, I must say,” she murmured, banishing the boy back to his hut. Oh, the Villa!
“Why, what is wrong?”
She digs him in the ribs.
“Tomorrow, Zep! The first day of the show. You haven’t forgotten, have you? You promised.”
“Ah, yes. I forgot.” He approached the subject cautiously. “Molly will be there, remember.” Veronica stiffened.
“No, no. You are not to worry. I have spoken to her. She will be with Major Ernst that evening.”
“Ernst?”
“Yes. It is all arranged. She belongs to Ernst now. He has made it plain. If I wish to continue here…”
“What does Molly think?”
“It does not matter what Molly thinks. If she hadn’t been so…visible.” He pulled her close. “And you, you must not do this, not show your beauty to everyone all the time. Otherwise I might lose you too.” He stroked her hair. “It is you now for me. Does that please you? And perhaps, if Molly is very upset, I could meet her secretly, like I see you now.”
“Thanks very much!”
“It was a joke, Veronica! Don’t be jealous. It is not good to be jealous in such circumstances.”
He sat up and started to take off his shirt.
“The Casino will be fun tonight. I have told them I am going to try and drink the boot again. No one has tried twice and succeeded. But I will. Now come and give me a good fuck, there’s a good girl—”
“The boot?”
“It’s a drinking tradition. It looks easy but it is not. It also makes you quite drunk. The last fellow, Schade, feil down and cracked his head open.” He caught her look of concern. “He was a fooi, anyway. He was the one who was involved in the black market, with Herr Poidevin and his daughter.”
“Poor Elspeth, yes.”
“You know her?”
“Everyone knows Elspeth.”
“She was lucky, her and her father. If I had my way they’d be up in Fort George. They know more than they say. Not only about the smuggling. This matter over Isobel and her father. It does not fit right. Any other time and I would not mind. But with certain other events and the Major acting so strangely, it worries me. I fear they might all be connected. The cement in her mouth. Her dress. The jacket and hat missing. She wore them that afternoon and yet they have vanished. What happened to them? Is someone wearing them now?”
He moved to her once more but she pushed him away. She knew what she had to do. This would be her one chance. She could feed him this morsel in the same manner as she fed him her flesh. It would be the seal of her success, the stamp in her passport, the key to the Villa’s door.
“A jacket,” she said, “what sort of jacket?” knowing full well what the description would be, recognizing it the moment he had spoken the words, seeing it hung up over the back of the kitchen chair, seeing the smudged label underneath the worn collar, seeing—a woman’s jacket yes, with the darts on the front and cuts in the side, a woman’s jacket with leather elbow patches and a pretty collar and small wooden buttons.
“You know,” Zepernick said, “her corduroy jacket. She wore it all the time, riding, walking, probably…” he reached out and sucked on her again, “…in it too,” and Veronica, regaining her composure, remembered that indeed Zep was right, she had seen it on her any number of times, up at the rehearsal rooms, slung over her shoulders or left half trailing on the floor in that careless wealthy manner she had found so irritating, an expensive coat that only the rich would treat so casually, remembering how Isobel would piek it up and hurry into it, on her way to some other social gathering to which she, Veronica, would not be invited. An unexpected surge of resentment flooded over her. She wanted to join with this man and put paid to all the years they had been excluded, denied the things for which they had striven so hard and which still evaded them, and without hesitation, knowing that she could bring it off, she prised his lips away and bent down, kissing his chest and his stomach, and told him quickly, glorying in her ability to deflect his hands and his curiosity from the warm certainty of her body. Why, she had seen just such a jacket on a boy, this very morning. “Today! On a boy! Where? What’s his name? Do you know his family?” Zepernick raised her up, firing his questions rapidly, assuming that it is a native boy she was describing, one of those miscreants who fired catapults from behind drystone walls, of all the inhabitants the most insistent in their insolence, and she, a shiver of excitement running through her, said, “No, not one of ours, Zep, one of yours, a foreign,” the cold intelligente suddenly flickering behind his eyes, like the flare of a lighted match. �
�A foreign?” he repeated, and she nodded. “You know, one of the Todt workers,” conscious of her nakedness and the leeway it afforded her, making up the story as easily as instilling freshness into those tired words of lust. She could picture it in her mind’s eye, see the Pollet below her and the foreigns marching past, remove the boy far from her own home and place him in their midst with his red pantaloons and his white shock of hair and the strangely cut jacket that hung down on his slender frame, describing how he had clambered into the waiting lorry parked at the end, marvelling how it was all working out in her favour, how the Captain sat up, alert, his hands pressed together as he asked, “Did you notice the lorry number, or a name on the side?” and she shook her head, knowing instinctively that this would be an observation too far, but seeing a way out, wanting to convert her invention into something more tangible, she leant back and said, “Funnily enough I do know where he goes, or rather where he went,” knowing full well that he was still there, was there right now as she talked, “for I was up by St Andrew last week seeing a patient and saw him with the other foreigns up there, at the hospital tunnel at La Vassalerie Road.” As she said it, the pang hit her, wishing that the Captain had never mentioned the jacket and that her mouth had travelled the full distance and become so full with him that she would have been unable to speak of the boy at all. “The hospital?” he said, and she, fearful for a second that she had betrayed her own complicity, that that was something she shouldn’t know, added quickly, “Perhaps he had nothing to do with it, I don’t want any trouble,” and laughing he assured her, “Don’t you worry, Veronica, he’ll not harm you,” but though she shook her head, saying no she didn’t mean that, the Captain wasn’t listening, he had forgotten her, even as he kissed her and pulled on his shirt and told her not to worry, that he’d come by soon and make it up to her, running his hands up and down her trembling front, hurrying her down the stairs as she pulled on her coat before bundling her out of the door. And as she stood there and watched as he ran to his car, as she heard the engine scream down the hill, she realized that there would be no Casino that night and no Villa, and that far from coming closer to him she had set herself apart from him again, drawn another Occupational line in the sand. She stood out of breath, alone, and looking down the hill and the little town below she suddenly saw what she had done and understood the awfol ease by which one achieves betrayal.
Twelve
The Dutchman has been working for three and a half weeks now, first outside, on L’Ancresse Bay, pouring cement into the great swell of the gun emplacements, and once that had finished down here, in the tunnel alongside the boy. Though he understands only a few of the words the boy speaks—a broken mixture of English, German and what? Polish? Russian?—he has started to follow the boy, for it is he, rather than the older man (who does not have as much spare energy), who has been nursing him through these difficult days. So he stands behind this boy at mealtimes, sits opposite him in the bouncing lorry, leans his back against the same creosoted hut wall on their meagre day of rest, and now pushes the wagon that the boy has to fill with rocks and stones and clawing clumps of clay, before bringing back an empty one for him to load in return. Though the work is without pity and the tunnel without end, the boy seems to be gaining an unacknowledged authority over these excavations by the day. He takes pride in showing van Dielen the bewildering dimensions of this labyrinth, the endless series of domed rooms, the huge mysterieus length of it, the great reservoir dug for the water and near the connecting tunnel, on which he is now working, the tiny room disguised by the mud-caked sheet of metal behind which they sit and drink water from a stolen canteen. The old man and the young boy have taken it upon themselves to look after van Dielen, though he has uttered not one word of thanks, nor indeed made any sound at all, even when pushing the empty wagon back up to the tunnel’s head (a task which paradoxically is harder than pushing a full-laden truck down to the entrance). Indeed his lack of speech seems to endear him to them.
Perhaps they are tired of hearing their fellow prisoners’ constant complaints; perhaps his silence, his expressionless face, his slow methodical gait, are welcome changes. They clap him on the back on the few occasions he has seen fit to nod and they grasp his arm when he puckers his mouth or shrugs his shoulders in answer to a question. During the hut hours, when he remains motionless and unblinking, they sit on either side of him, patting food into his limp hand, handing him his tin of watered soup, and at night they lift his feet up onto the bed and draw the blanket close. It is not that he has difficulty in moving. Once set in motion, loping along four abreast, shovelling shingle, breaking lumps of granite in the flint-flashed dark, there is a rhythm to his life that he can run to, holding his own alongside the best of them, but when he stops he sees no reason for starting again. The motor within him has seized up. Take this morning for instance. The triangle had been rung at half-past five, and the boy had swung his legs down and shaken him awake before trotting off to the line of pails. Normally the old man would get him moving, leading him outside to the assembly point, but this time he had forgotten. Van Dielen knew the rules, he had seen it happen often enough, that the last one to stumble out into the frostbitten air got his backside warmed; knew too that the later the arrival the greater the heat, and he did not wish to be beaten, no, he wanted to dig, to lose his life again in the sweet darkness of the island’s heart, but he did not stir, could not; there was something about his plank of wood and the old coat that the boy had wrapped around his shoulders that night which prevented him from moving. He lay there, looking at his bandaged feet, hearing others coughing their guts out onto the sawdust floor, scraping handfuls of lice from their armpits, belching and farting and squirting excrement into the nearby bucket, before scrambling out to stand in shivering lines while the overseer marked them off: he heard it all and yet did not move. The coat was so warm, so familiar, the scent of it so heady, so dreamlike, not the immediate smell of sweat and tar and dank green water, but something else, deep within the lining and soaked into the collar. He pulled it up over his mouth and nose and inhaled. It was as if he was lying on an operating table, breathing in ether through a mask, lurid visions of lost worlds looming up as he feil into a gathering mist. There were faces floating past, eyes creased with the sun shielded by a straw hat, a head of hair in pigtails bouncing on a donkey, a woman in a white dress standing on a raised veranda, the dying sun setting her skin aflame; scènes too, bridges and towers and ribbons of road. He wanted to follow them but his feet were too far away, wrapped in lead, feet that had once walked deserts and crossed ravines, measured out metres and yards, lain in between those of a good woman, run races with a barefooted sprite. He thought he had forgotten most things but briefly he understood that he had not forgotten, simply viewed it all in a different perspective, one in which he played no part. No wife, no daughter, no name, no past. They knew him not when he was alive and he knows them not now that they are dead. His life is but a shadow, a dark irrelevance and one in which he will take no further part. But oh, those pigtails! That barefoot sprite! Then the coat was thrown aside and the blanket torn off and he was pulled to his feet and dragged out by the wrist, his left arm trailing on the floor like he was a monkey in his keeper’s grip, and stood underneath the beams where the two hooks were fixed. Behind him he heard others laugh and shout words of encouragement: ‘If this doesn’t get him talking, nothing will’, ‘Bet he faints after ten’, “Don’t worry, mate, it happens to all of us’—and out of the crowd the boy had stepped forward and pointing to him, had stuck his finger in his ear, making out that the explosions in the tunnel the previous day had made rendered the Dutchman temporarily deaf, and though it had not saved him completely, for by this time his arms had been raised and tied and the whip placed in the man’s hand, the overseer, after shoving the boy rudely aside, had struck him only five times, the flail of leather strands, oiled and supple and fixed to a wooden handle, breaking on his back like the splutter of Christmas crackers. After a fi
nal kick in the shins and a long intimidating bellow in his ear, he was cut down, where he stood shaking while the men dispersed, before the boy, the coat back on his shoulders, returned to lead him to the waiting lorry and the day’s work.
And now it is near the day’s close. Soon the evening shift will come and replace them. He is pushing what will be his last but one full wagon, marvelling at his own hands and his own wealed back and the long strength of him. He knows he should be growing weaker, as are the men around him, but he is not. It may have something to do with the boy, who returns to the billet every night before dawn with hunks of bread and strangely composed pies, the cement dust which Unes his pockets its gritty salt, but it is food nevertheless, wonderful food, cold and concentrated, and they chew on it, him and the old man, chew on it and gulp it down, great lumps lodging in their throats, falling asleep to the sound of it churning their stomachs, their juices working like drains. Their farts are becoming different from those of the other men, smelling of meat and vegetables and the laws of decent digestion, rather than those occasioned by sawdust and dysentery. They wake and lift their blankets and waft the meaty fumes towards their nostrils. It is a pleasure shared.
As he nears the tunnel entrance van Dielen hears commotion. Up by the black rubber doors and the great block of light that waits outside stands a group of officers. There is the large fat man who once gave him chocolate, the man who beat him, and another, a handsome man who looks in awe at the great length he has stepped into and the noise he hears bellowing from deep behind its dark and fetid mouth. The man with the chocolate is waving his stick about, pointing towards the very spot on which he stands. Indeed for a second, the two of them, van Dielen in the remnants of his Tootall shirt and Harris tweed trousers, Major Ernst in his black uniform, peer at each other before a couple of fellow workers ease van Dielen aside and start to push his wagon out to the waiting lorries. The wheels grind on the hard concrete floor. Ernst starts shouting in the overseer’s ear. The handsome one walks up and down impatiently. Then the doors swing open and the wagon disappears into the crack of blinding light, and in the flare of darkness that descends, when the doors close once again and the noise ceases and he can see nothing, the conversation comes singing down the tunnel, like voices floating on a summer’s afternoon across a clear and flattened sea. “Looking for a young one,” the fat man says. “Got himself caught up in a murder, the slant-eyed little cunt. Red trousers and a brown coat. You got anyone like that? A woman’s coat, you understand, with…” and he cups his hands in front of his chest, weighing imaginary flesh. They laugh one and all. The overseer nods. He is eager to help. He consults his clipboard. “Ja, ja”