Claeys stood up off his seat to look over the passing hedges. The camp was somewhere near now. The driver said, two kilometres. Surely, Claeys thought, surely with that dead town so near the men in this camp could realize the extent of the upheaval, the need for a pause before their journey could be organized? Surely they must see the disruption, this town, the one-way bridges over every stream far around, the roads pitted and impassable? Yet … what real meaning had these evidences? Really, they were too negative to be understood, too much again of something long finished. It was not as if something positive, like an army passing, held up one’s own purpose; not even a stream of aircraft, showing that at least somewhere there was an effort and direction. No, over these fields there was nothing, not even the sense of a pause, when something might be restarted; instead a vacuity stretched abroad, a vacuum of human endeavour, with the appalling contrast of this vegetable growth continuing evenly and unconcerned. That was really the comprehensible evidence, this sense of the land and of the essence of life continuing, so that one must wish to be up and walking away, to be off to take part not in a regrowth but in a simple continuation of what had always been. For every immediate moment there was food to be sought, the pleasures of taste to be enjoyed: what was more simple than to walk out and put one’s hands on a cap-full of eggs, a pig, a few fat hens? And if a grey uniform intervened, then it was above all a grey uniform, something instinctively obstructive, in no real sense connected with the dead town. The only real sympathy that ever came sometimes to soften the greyness of this grey was a discovery, felt occasionally with senses of wonder and unease, that this uniform went walking and working through its own mined cornfields and sometimes blew itself up—that therefore there must be a man inside it, a farmer more than a soldier. But the grey was mostly an obstruction to the ordinary daily desire for food, for fun, for something to be tasted. The day for these men was definitely a day. It was no twenty-four hours building up to a day in the future when something would happen. No future day had been promised. There was, therefore, no succession of days, no days for ticking off, for passing through and storing in preparation. There were in fact the days themselves, each one a matter for living, each a separate dawning and tasting and setting.
Suddenly Claeys heard singing, a chorus of men’s voices. A second later the driver down behind the windshield heard it. He nodded, as though they had arrived. The singing grew louder, intimate—as though it came from round a corner that twisted the road immediately ahead. But it came from a lane just before, it flourished suddenly into a full-throated Slavic anthem—and there was the lane crowded with men, some sitting, others marching four abreast out into the road. The car whirred down to a dead halt. The singing wavered and stopped. Claeys saw that the driver had only his left hand on the wheel—his other hand was down gripping the black butt of a revolver at his knee. (He had never done this driving through German crowds earlier.)
‘It’s not the camp,’ the driver said. ‘These are some of them, though. The camp’s a kilometre up the road.’ He kept his eyes scanning slowly up and down the line of men crowding in the lane’s entry, he never looked up at Claeys. Then the men came a few paces forward, though they looked scarcely interested. Probably they were pushed forward by the crowd behind, many of whom could not have seen the car, many of whom were still singing.
Claeys stood upright and said: ‘I’d like to talk to these… you drive on, get round the corner and wait. I don’t want that military feeling.’
The men looked on with mild interest, as though they might have had many better things to do. They looked scarcely ‘displaced’; they had a self-contained air, an independence. There was no censure in their stare; equally no greeting; nor any love. Their clothes were simple, shirts and greyish trousers and boots: though these were weather-stained, they were not ragged.
Claeys jumped down. An interest seemed to quicken in some of the watching men as they saw how Claeys was dressed—béret, plus-fours, leather jacket. It was because of these clothes that the military in the car gave Claeys no salute as they drove off; also because they disapproved of this kind of nonsense, and this may have been why they neither smiled nor waved, but rather nodded impersonally and whirred off round the corner. They might, for instance, have been dropping Claeys after giving him some sort of a lift.
So that Claeys was left quite alone on the road, standing and smiling at the crowd of expatriates grouped at the entrance to the lane. The car had disappeared. It had driven off the road and round the corner. There, as often happens when a vehicle disappears from view, its noise had seemed to vanish too. Presumably it had stopped. But equally it might have been presumed far away on its journey to the next town.
The men took a pace or two forward, now beginning to form a crescent-shape round Claeys, while Claeys began to speak in English: ‘Good afternoon, mates. Excuse me, I’m Pieter Claeys—native of Belgique.’ None of the men smiled. They only stared hard. They were too absorbed now even to mutter a word between themselves. They were searching for an explanation, a sign that would clarify this stranger. They were unsure, and certainly it seemed unimpressed. ‘Good afternoon, comrades,’ Claeys shouted. ‘Gentlemen, hello!’
Without waiting, for the silence was beginning to weigh, he turned into French. ‘Suis Claeys de Belgique. Je veux vous aider. Vous permettez—on peut causer un peu?’
He repeated: ‘Peut-être?’ And in the pause while no one answered he looked up and above the heads of these men, feeling that his smile might be losing its first flavour, that somehow an embarrassment might be dissolved if he looked away.
The country again stretched wide and green. Claeys was startled then to see sudden huge shapes of paint-box colour erecting themselves in the distance. But then immediately he saw what they were—the wings and fuselages of broken gliders. They rose like the fins of huge fish, tilted at queer angles, grounded and breathlessly still. Difficult at first to understand, for their shapes were strange and sudden, and of an artifice dangerously like something natural: brightly coloured, they might have been shapes torn from an abstract canvas and stuck wilfully on this green background: or the bright broken toys left by some giant child.
Glaeys tried again: ‘Gijmijneheeren zijt blijkbaar in moeilijkheden. Ik zou die gaarne vernemen….’
The Dutch words came ruggedly out with a revival of his first vigour, for Claeys was more used to Dutch and its familiarity brought some ease again to his smile. It brought also a first muttering from the men.
They began to mutter to each other in a Slav-sounding dialect—Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian?—and as this muttering grew it seemed to become an argument. Claeys wanted instantly to make himself clearer, he seemed to have made some headway at last and so now again he repeated the Dutch. This time he nodded, raised his arm in a gesture, even took a pace forward in his enthusiasm. But now one of the men behind began to shout angrily, and would have pushed himself forward shaking his fist—had the others not held him.
It was not clear to Claeys—he felt that the Dutch had been understood, and yet what he had said was friendly … he began to repeat the words again. Then, half-way through, he thought of a clearer way. He broke into German. There was every chance that someone might understand German; they might have been working here for three years or more; or anyway it was the obvious second language. ‘… So bin ich hier um Ihnen zu hilfen gekommen. Bitte Kameraden, hören Sie mal….’
The muttering rose, they were plainly talking—and now not to each other but to him. The crescent had converged into a half-circle, these many men with livening faces were half round him. Claeys stood still. Overhead the summer sky made its huge dome, under which this small group seemed to make the pin-point centre. The green quiet stretched endlessly away to either side, the painted gliders stuck up brightly. No traffic.
‘… Bitte ein Moment … ich bin Freund, Freund, FREUND….’ And as he repeated this word ‘friend’ he realized what his tongue had been quicker to understand—that none
of his listeners knew the meaning of these German words. They knew only that he was speaking German, they knew the intonation well.
He stopped. For a moment, as the men nudged each other nearer, as the Slav words grew into accusation and imprecation, Claeys’ mind fogged up appalled by this muddle, helplessly overwhelmed by such absurdity, such disorder and misunderstanding.
Then, making an effort to clear himself, he shook his head and looked closely from one man to the other. But the composure had gone: they were all mouth, eyes, anger and desire—they were no longer independent. And this was accumulating, breeding itself beyond the men as men. They had become a crowd.
Knowing that words were of no further use, Claeys did the natural thing—wearily, slowly he raised his arm in a last despairing bid for silence.
An unfortunate gesture. The shouting compounded into one confused roar. One of the men on the edge of the crowd jumped out and swung something in the air—a scythe. It cut Claeys down, and then all the pack of them were on him, kicking, striking, grunting and shouting less.
Claeys must have screamed as the scythe hit him—two shots thundered like two full stops into that muddle, there was an abrupt silence and two men fell forward; and then another shot and the men scattered crying into the lane.
Those three soldiers came running up to Claeys’s body. They shot again into the men crowding the lane; but then the men, bottled up in the narrow lane, suddenly turned and raised their arms above their heads. The soldiers held their fire, their particular discipline actuated more strongly than their emotions. Two of them kept their guns alert, gestured the men forward. They came, hands raised, shambling awkwardly. The other officer bent down to Claeys.
He was almost finished, messed with blood and blue-white where the flesh showed. He was breathing, trying to speak; and the officer knelt down on both his knees and raised Claeys’s head up. But Claeys never opened his eyes—they were bruised shut, anyway. And no words came from his lips, though the officer lowered his head and listened very carefully.
Through the pain, through his battered head, one thought muddled out enormously. ‘Mistake … mistake….’ And this split into two other confused, unanswered questions, weakening dulling questions. Broadly, if they could have been straightened out, these questions would have been: ‘Order or Disorder? Those fellows were the victims of an attempt to rule men into an impeccable order, my killing was the result of the worst, that is, the most stupid disorder….’
But he couldn’t get the words out, or any like them. Only—weakly, slowly he raised his right hand. He groped for the officer’s hand, and the officer knew what he wanted and met the hand with his own in a handshake. Claeys just managed to point at the place where the men had been, where they still were. Then his head sank deep on to his neck. Again the officer knew what he wanted. He rose, his hand still outstretched from Claeys’ grasp, like a hand held out by a splint. Then he started over towards the men.
Instinctively, for this hand of his was wet with blood, he wiped it on his tunic as he walked forward. Without knowing this, he raised his hand again into its gesture of greeting. There was a distasteful expression on his face, for he hardly liked such a duty.
So that when he shook hands with the first of the men, proffering to them, in fact, Claeys’s handshake, none of these expatriates knew whether the officer was giving them Claeys’s hand or whether he had wiped Claeys’s gesture away in distaste and was now offering them his congratulation for killing such a common enemy as Claeys.
A Saving Grace
THE hour before dusk, when birds begin to rustle about their perches in the bushes, when the hot afternoon is grown old and cool. The house stood empty across the garden. Some windows were shut, others open; but since the sun was falling somewhere to the left and behind, this garden side stood veiled now in light shadow. Each of the windows, whether open or shut, presented a black rectangle without reflection. Their white sills and frames emphasized such a black rigidity, and within no curtains could now be seen—for the curtains were dark as the new shadows prowling now inside each hidden room. In that warm late-afternoon light the grass of the lawn—high and uncut—glowed liquid. Light shone through the transparent tegument of each green blade, though the tallest tips like feathered spears were tarnished with the sun’s ageing gold. The grass led straight to the veranda, with its thin white pillars, its white trellised ironwork hung over with green creeper. From this veranda four black windows peered, and in the centre two glass doors stood open revealing a great mouth of darkness among the other blind dark eyes. In such a still air, the house isolated and empty seemed in some way to be moving within itself. One remembered that here was no deserted place—that it was furnished with well-known things, that only for the evening was it empty of people. The vibrations of living had never deserted it. It seemed merely to wait, busying itself quietly about many unseen duties—accumulating perhaps a little dust, sinking by a millionth of a fraction into the earth, expanding here with the heat and there contracting again into itself. It seemed concerned with holding itself together, holding itself in readiness for the return of its children, holding and waiting.
Meanwhile the sun stretched itself over a sky that widened with the cooling of the day. Such evenings, tranquil and clear, cloudless and of a still pristine loveliness—may seem not so much true in themselves as of the memory of other such times, immobilized in the past, irretrievable. They are thus themselves imperfect—for the other lost evening assumes the real raiment of perfection. The entity of such times is made up of a sadness, of the word ‘nevermore’. They breed a lost melancholy that is not unpleasurable: rather, it is to be tasted, drunk like some opiate potion of non-desire, for reminiscence of this kind is no more than the ghost of hope, the remainder of hoped-for evenings evoked by the first summer weather now recollected, hopes that were perhaps never realized but which in themselves became the blood of life and now even as memories still invigorate with a shade at least of their ancient ambition.
Thinking thus … pondering that after all such melancholic mysteries are never so curious but have their explanations—so often in the simple terms of this or that biological decline—thinking and looking idly across the lawn at the house, the creeper-hung veranda, I was surprised suddenly to see not as before the empty dark square of the open french windows but instead the figure of a woman standing framed by the same inner darkness. She seemed to be wearing white, a broad white hat and a flowered white dress reaching to the ground. It looked from my distance like a dress cut in the fashion of some years past, and I thought—some visitor for a charity, some elderly parishioner wearing the dress of summers ago who had now wandered in through the open front door? So I was rising to show myself—when the figure moved, advanced and I saw who it was. Moreover, a large dog, a Great Dane, came pounding out behind her. I knew both. I sat down. They were my Aunt Hester and the dog Daniel. They had both been dead for what—thirty years?
Both Danny and Auntie Hester I knew well. Danny was my father’s dog, a close companion; Auntie Hester was not a real aunt, but a neighbour, intimate with the family, who had looked after me during my mother’s absences (how well I remember her veil, her wide feather-brimmed hats, the air of perfume about her and the strangely exciting atmosphere of the furniture of her house so different to ours. I suppose Aunt Hester might have represented the first breath of a woman other than mother, a stranger, intoxicating even to a child and fabulous). So, knowing them indeed so closely, feeling at the sight of them never criticism but always a close and safe affection—for the first second I felt nothing odd about their appearance, they were in my mind too familiar. Death cannot age, no change can waste the shape of memory—so this picture, momentarily realized after a pause of several decades, hardly at all seemed strange. Until reason came to say they were dead.
I heard all the old stories croak: ‘Pinch yourself.’ I did. It made no difference. Aunt Hester walked onto the lawn, and with Danny panting his tongue out beside her she
stopped and remained standing somewhere between the white tubs of wallflowers. She stared towards me, though not quite directly—more at the trees beyond my shoulders. The feeling was that she was looking through me—rather than I, as tradition would suggest, might have been looking through her. She was certainly not transparent, certainly as solid as she had ever been: the sun managed to catch and glow palely in the top of her white hat, she threw a dark shadow along the ground to her right.
Then—through the same window—stepped Mr Chisholm! Sun-yellowed flannels piped his long bowed legs, stretched tightly at his paunch, and above the striped shirt and rowing tie sat a straightly perched straw boater. His down-stretching brown moustaches draped with gravity the roundness of his redly genial face, his eyes glared a ceaseless weak exasperation. He too was dead.
But I had scarcely realized his whole presence before my real aunt, Aunt Connie, same out. She advanced, stopped, and stood with the other two. (None of them seemed aware of the other’s presence, no word was spoken, no greeting made.) Connie was the Aunt with the bone. In her cupboard, deep behind the cheeses, she had said she kept a long and thin white bone. With this from time to time she had terrified me. Her dark hair piled into an overhanging loaf on her frowning forehead, her pale eyes with their dark circles, her long teeth—these had lowered over me when sometimes I was alone in her charge and she had discovered a misbehaviour. ‘Well,’ she would say, pressing her lips against her teeth, ‘well, do you want a taste of my bone? Do you want a feel of Aunt Connie’s nice white bone?’—then a pause, and slower—‘Shall—I—get—my—BONE?’ Yet, Aunt Connie was as dead as the others, long ago asleep under the granite angel.
Then the shapes of Ella and Bridie came out, edging and quicker than the others, as though their black uniform and white cap-strings might soil the air, the pathway of masters and mistresses. They stood close together, away from the others and a little behind. And, instantly, as though chasing these their maids came my father and my mother, leading by the hand a young sister May. May had died in a fire one night in a boarding-house by the seaside—she had been only sixteen: my father and mother had come back from a concert to find the fire already dying down. Father now took up the centre of the group, with mother at his side, smaller than him, sallow and wistfully shrunken against his huge black-coated frame. He stood erect, his hair and beard as black as ever, his six-foot of height and great corpulence giving somehow the impression of an immense black-coated butcher, a man of thick white muscle and strong blood, certain of the stance of his boots and the blunt thud of his chopper.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 6