‘Can I have a mirror?’
‘All in good time.’
‘A mirror. Please.’
‘There’s one above the sink.’
The nurse supports him under the armpit as he levers himself out of the bed and shuffles three paces. When he looks in the mirror he is immediately sick into the basin, a reflex prompted not so much by vanity as shock. The skin on one side of his face, from his brow to his jaw, is tarry black and swollen. The act of vomiting hurts because it stretches the skin further, but he is unable to weep in pain, his tear ducts having been cauterized. Where once he had eyelashes, eyebrows and hair, he now has only charcoal.
The nurse helps him back to the bed and he lies down and closes his eyes. When he opens them again it is dark. He turns towards the wall so that he can retreat once more into sleep. When next he opens them it is daylight and the nurse is sitting beside his bed.
‘Mr Northcote, there’s a visitor to see you.’
Charles turns his head awkwardly and sees Maggie standing in the doorway. She is holding a bunch of flowers. ‘Hello, Captain,’ she says too lightly, keeping intense contact with his eyes for fear of straying to his cheek and neck. ‘How are you feeling?’
Charles blocks her sightline with his hand. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he says. ‘Please.’ He turns his face to the wall. ‘Go away.’
Three weeks later when a letter arrives from Buckingham Palace informing him he is to be awarded the George Cross ‘for conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger’, he lets it fall from his grip to the floor.
The day after that another letter arrives. When Charles sees Maggie’s signature at the bottom of it, he stops reading. She has written almost every day. He wants to weep, but cannot. It will be kinder this way, kinder to her. She need not feel guilty about abandoning him if he abandons her first.
V
Alsace. Autumn 1943
ANSELM’S ONLY DISTRACTION DURING THE DAY IS WORK, THE SS ARE right about that. Arbeit Macht Frei. Work does set you free – the freedom of the emptied mind. But it also kills you. It had not taken him long to determine the true purpose of this maze of compounds and sub-compounds divided by high fences and watchtowers. It has not been built to provide slave labour for the Reich – that is a moderately useful by-product – but to work prisoners to death.
As this is an Arbeitslager, a work camp, the prisoners must march every day to one of three destinations: the granite quarry, the forest or the construction site. All are within a mile radius but even this distance is enough to leave a starving man exhausted. The work at the quarry involves breaking rocks and carrying them to boxcars mounted on rails and is considered the hardest, leaving men crippled in pain. Those sent to clear the forest must transport sleepers and this is considered easier, because a single man cannot lift one on his own – it takes four or five – and so the burden is shared. But the work at the construction site is the most survivable.
The depth of the ferrous concrete here suggests that the underground tunnels and caves being built into the sides of the Vosges mountains are intended to withstand a heavy air raid. The rumour is that this is to be a site for one of the Führer’s Wunderwaffen – a rocket of some kind. But, in a most unGermanic way, there appears to be no deadline for completion. Sometimes there are iron girders to move, but mostly the work involves the stacking of cement bags, and these are light enough for one man to carry, with the cement powder moulding itself into the shape of the neck and shoulders.
This is their ‘education’. Political prisoners must be taught the error of their Bolshevik ways. Homosexuals must be taught the unnaturalness of their base appetites. Only the Jews cannot be re-educated. They have no place here, other than those few who arrive because of an administrative mistake.
The other prisoners consider them untouchable; such is the efficiency with which their golden-haired masters have educated them. All respect the caste system here. First come the elegant, swaggering SS officers with their love of Musik and Hunden. Then come the dogs themselves, their hot breath pluming in the cold, straining to be let loose on the prisoners. Then come the prisoners, dead a thousand times over, without hope, without pride. They jump to attention, they run, they eat the non-nourishing, liquid food they are served not out of any desire but habit. They try to survive another day but know they are at the mercy of men capable only of cruelty and contempt. And thanks to the complex social structure that has been imposed on them, the political prisoners know they are superior to the homosexuals, and the homosexuals, the non-Jewish ones at least, know they marginally outrank the Jews.
All except Anselm. He pities the Jews. What have they done? At least he has knowingly broken the law. He tries to recall his trial but his memories are clouded. Yes, it is coming back to him now. There was a trial, after he was deported. A lifetime ago. He was tried under Nazi depravity laws. Appeared before a judge.
The judge’s face swims into his memory. He is spitting out the word ‘degenerate’. That was his crime. They sent him here to this slave camp to be re-educated, or to die. And perhaps he does deserve to die. Perhaps he is, like they say, disgusting and depraved. Perhaps he is a degenerate. He no longer knows. No longer cares.
Anselm had been among the first to be sent to Natzweiler-Struthof when it opened for business in the spring of 1941, not long after the Alsace region of France was annexed by Germany. Of the thousands who have passed through the gates of the camp since it opened, most have died through exhaustion and starvation, and many, he has heard, through execution and medical experimentation. He has seen prisoners simply beaten to death, with neither anger nor hatred but indifference. He has seen those desperate few who have tried to escape – beyond the wire, beyond the painted skulls and crossbones, beyond the fierce Gothic script that warns ‘Achtung! Minen!’ – made an example of, as if examples were needed. He has watched as they dance on the gallows for the entertainment of the other prisoners, a grotesque jitterbug that can last minutes. The failed escapees are never permitted the kindness of a drop that will break their necks cleanly. And always they are stripped naked first, that final denial of dignity, that German passion for order and symmetry. Anselm has concluded that the SS like to send people back to their maker in the same state they arrived.
On one occasion Anselm witnessed a pink triangle being forced to undress in front of the prisoners assembled for the roll call. A bucket was placed over his head and he was ordered to do a waltz on his own. While the guards laughed, their dogs strained on their leashes. He was then told to run. All Anselm could think, as he witnessed the animals tearing the poor wretch apart, was how hungry they must be. He could relate to their hunger. There were times when, deranged by starvation himself, even he felt he could consume human flesh.
We are not so different from the dogs, Anselm thinks now as he stands to attention in the square. We are trained to respond to whistles. We cringe at the whip.
As three SS-Standortärzte, garrison physicians, now arrive, wearing white aprons over their uniforms, Anselm closes his eyes. They read out ten numbers from a sheet. Anselm’s is among them. He steps forward. The other nine are wearing the pink triangle as well. The doctors line them up and listen to their chests with stethoscopes, pick up parts of their skin with tongs, examine their eyes with torches. They also inspect their genitals.
Are we to be experimented upon?
Anselm contemplates this possibility without emotion. Two are sent back. The rest are marched to a block where food is waiting for them. There is a metal tray which serves as a mirror. Anselm gazes into it as he eats. He is unrecognizable, even to himself.
For the next month, the selected prisoners do no work. They are given warm showers and the use of soap. They are fed well, fattened even. Finally they are lined up and sent to the Ka-Be, the Krankenbau or infirmary. There is new equipment in here: tubes and bottles, metal contraptions, pulleys. The surfaces are clean. On the wall, a picture of a louse and the words ‘Eine Laus, dein Tod’, a louse
is your death. Here they are made to remove their pyjamas and line up once more in front of a doctor who is of below average height but who looks taller because of the straightness of his back. Before him he has a row of syringes arranged on a tray. They are filled with a clear liquid. There is a tap marked ‘Wassertrinken verboten’.
When it is Anselm’s turn to step forward he does not look down, but he does wince as he feels a jagged-edged pain – a needle entering his testicle. He closes his eyes tight against it. There is a sensation of heat for a moment, then cold. Then the same procedure is done on the other testicle.
He risks a word in German. ‘Warum?’ The doctor eyes him with curiosity for a moment before saying in an even voice, ‘Hier ist kein warum,’ there is no why here. But Anselm thinks he knows why. He has overheard the doctors talking, assuming the prisoners cannot understand German, or not caring if they suspect they can. By injecting synthetic hormones into the gonads, testosterone, they believe they can cure Aryan children of the future who might be afflicted with ‘the homosexuality gene’. He looks at his groin now. It is swollen. Already there is bruising where the needle has entered.
VI
London. Spring 1944
FOR ROUGHLY TWO YEARS OUT OF THE PAST THREE, CHARLES HAS been a visiting member of the Guinea Pig Club, in East Grinstead. Though it is mostly made up of RAF pilots with burn injuries, membership is open to anyone who has undergone experimental reconstructive plastic surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital. Anyone, that is, who likes a drink. And few like drinking more than Charles.
He feels at home whenever he is there. The Guinea Pigs are allowed to wear their service uniforms, or civilian clothes, instead of ‘convalescent blues’ and may come and go from the hospital at will. Local families, meanwhile, are encouraged to treat them as normally as they can. East Grinstead has become ‘the town that does not stare’.
Part of Charles’s treatment has included the ‘walking-stalk skin graft’, a new reconstructive surgical procedure that involves taking skin from one part of the body and grafting it on to another. He has also had belladonna laid over his eyes and endured a complete immersion of his skin in saline solution. The treatments have certainly improved his appearance. In half profile, left or right, it is no longer obvious at first that he has any scar tissue at all. But in full profile, it is soon noticeable that one side of his face, extending from his hairline to his neck, looks papery: more smooth, dry and sallow than the other weathered, greasier, pinker side. In the three years that have passed since his injury, his eyebrows, lashes and hair have mostly grown back, at least in the areas where there is no scar tissue.
Good though the Guinea Pig Club has been for his self-esteem, it hasn’t prepared him for his return to the world beyond East Grinstead. Londoners, he finds, do stare. Children point. Outdoors, he tends to wear a wide-brimmed fedora, regardless of the weather, because it casts a shadow over his face. Around his neck he wears a cravat. He finds the silk is soothing against his burns.
Lately he has taken up permanent residence at his old club, the Chelsea Arts, and in the privacy of his room here he tends to wear a kimono. In other ways he has developed a certain perverse vanity, spending hours staring at his reflection while sitting at his triple-mirrored dressing table. Sometimes he plucks nasal hairs with a pair of tweezers, or dabs at his skin with cold cream, or parts his hair with a comb so that it better covers the mottled side of his brow. But most of the time, unlike the people of East Grinstead, he stares. During his three years of surgery and convalescence he has been unable to contribute to the war effort, other than a few light duties as an ARP warden, doing blackout checks. All he has really been able to do is paint.
As he sits here now with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, pouring himself his second glass of whiskey in ten minutes, he shakes his head. A bottle of Irish rarely seems to last more than a couple of days, but it is medicinal. His doctors told him if he didn’t come off morphine his kidneys and liver would fail, so they started giving him a ‘Brompton cocktail’, invented in the Royal Brompton Hospital for tuberculosis patients. A combination of morphine, cocaine and highly pure ethyl alcohol, the body absorbs it quickly and it doesn’t kill the patient.
When it became clear he was becoming addicted to this, too, the doctors started supplying him with the whiskey he requested. Alcohol is as good a substitute for pain relief as any, they said, perhaps recognizing that this particular patient has few pleasures left and, with his disfigurement, cannot now expect a pretty girl to marry him.
Perhaps they have sensed that Charles drinks to numb a pining heart, the attempted drowning of private sorrows that have learned to swim. Perhaps they have even sensed he is not the marrying kind. Who knows? Doctors are contrary. But they are right about the alcohol. And when he is away from the club bar, he likes to drink from the silver hip flask.
He had telephoned Hardy’s mother to ask for her address, so he could send it on to her, but she had insisted he keep it. She had heard about the George Cross and asked him if her son had suffered. Charles couldn’t help but hesitate for a second before answering. No. She said she understood.
While he still thinks of Hardy from time to time, he thinks of Anselm every hour of every day. When the air-raid siren sounds, Anselm. When the tiled walls of the Underground shudder and the sheltering families draw their loved ones close, Anselm. When he picks his way past the rubble of bombed houses in Chelsea, Anselm.
It doesn’t help that the Chelsea Arts Club is one of Anselm’s old haunts. And as a place of convalescence, it is not without its faults either. The rooms are cramped and gloomy and it has a number of steps that are difficult to negotiate on a crutch. But it is cheap, there is a good supply of Irish whiskey and in truth Charles no longer needs the crutch, he has grown used to it and he likes to keep it as a talking point, a way of deflecting attention from his face.
The club also enjoys a steady supply of venison, rabbit, salmon, woodcock and grouse, none of which is rationed, and all of which are generously supplied by the club’s country members. These delicacies are a welcome antidote to the dreary blandness of wartime London. This week alone Charles has had saddle of rabbit braised in wine and truffled goose livers.
Above all, he feels at home here. His room smells of white spirit and oil paint, and it is scattered with evidence of his semi-bohemian life – a canvas primed in readiness for inspiration, an easel set up but empty, unwashed plates, his crutch, unopened bills, empty whiskey bottles, a half-eaten slice of Kipling cake, overflowing ashtrays, a hurricane lamp, dirty underwear, half-empty cups of tea, a palette upon which colours have been squeezed only to be left to dry, and a bowl containing a ping-pong ball, a collar stud and some cufflinks.
Of his old friends, only one has been to visit him: Dr Eric Secrest, also known as Funf. Now with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he has been awarded a DSO for his work in Burma. As he delighted in explaining to Charles, his regiment is nicknamed the Handbags, ‘which is the main reason I wanted to join it’.
Eric has now returned to England as part of the preparations for D-Day. On his visit he had looked more like the White Rabbit than ever and, in his usual loud, distracted and impatient way, he had told Charles that he needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, stop drinking so much and get himself back into the action. ‘Paint a few battle scenes or whatever it is you do.’
Though still painterly, Charles’s work has become more abstract lately. His injuries have even changed his technique for the better, making it bolder – the burns on his fingers having forced him to hold his brushes in a looser way. When he showed his ‘Biggin Hill’ series of paintings to a director of the Royal Academy, they were well received and exhibited.
But he knows he is struggling to find his own style. Most of his work, stacked facing the wall, has featured injured pilots recovering at the Queen Victoria Hospital – not only burns victims but also amputees whose remaining limbs he twists and distorts in gruesome abstractions. Not quite the propagan
da Sir Kenneth Clark had in mind. He needs his muse, and every day he checks his pigeonhole in the hope that there might be a letter from him.
He sighs now as he angles one of the side mirrors so that he can see the scarred side of his face and begins to sketch it in charcoal. Distracted, his eyes fall on the air-raid warning sign on the back of his door. It never fails to make him smile. ‘ARRIVAL OF AN IMPENDING AIR RAID WILL BE GIVEN BY A FLUCTUATING OR “WARBLING” SIGNAL OF VARYING PITCH,’ it reads. For some reason it amuses him that ‘warbling’ is in inverted commas, as if whichever civil servant wrote it was aware that the word didn’t sound very warlike.
When he closes his eyes the same two images always come to him, one after the other. The first is of his own eyes reflected in those of Anselm as they held hands for the last time by the balcony window over Piccadilly Circus, the moment they heard the hotel door being opened, fearing what might be on the other side.
The second is of Hardy’s face melting like wax, his mouth open in a silent scream as he perishes in the flames. Love, sex and death. The only three subjects that matter, especially when the world is at war. But what personal vision can he bring to them?
As he sits at his dressing table, he tries once more to sketch a self-portrait but sees only the stranger in his life, himself. He then pulls in the two smaller mirrors hinged to the sides of the larger central mirror, so that his profile is reflected back an infinite number of times, to a vanishing point. He frowns for a moment then opens his mouth as wide as it will go, stretching the skin on his cheeks painfully. He looks like a taut rubber mask. Munch’s infinite scream.
In one side mirror, his face is still handsome, in the other it is disfigured and ugly. The middle panel shows his divided self in full. In disgust, he slams his hand flat against the top of it, causing it to spin around 180 degrees and nearly catch him under the chin. He is now staring at an empty expanse of unvarnished wood, the back of the central mirror. He tilts his head to one side, his eyes looking unseeing at the corner of the room, and then he spins the mirror around again so that he is looking once more at his reflection. He spins it again so that he is looking at the blank wood … It is like a blank canvas … He rummages in a drawer for a softer 2B pencil and finds one under the presentation box that contains his George Cross. He then sketches the outline of an elongated face, giving it a mouth that is gaping wide in a mute scream. He adds a flying helmet and, without taking his eyes off the sketch, he reaches for his oil paints and begins dabbing.
The Road Between Us Page 14