‘You’ve got a daughter, yeah?’ the man said. ‘Say hello to her.’
I remained silent. I recalled that there was something I had planned to do if ever one of the guards came down there, but I could not remember what it was.
He then said something like: ‘We need to show the people back home that you are still alive. They need proof, otherwise they won’t pay up.’
And he added something I had forgotten until this moment. At least I think he said this, but I cannot be sure because my mind was delirious and weak from hunger at the time.
‘We’ve been asking your people in the Foreign Office for years, but they keep ignoring us.’
Have I imagined this? The words have been so long buried they have decomposed in my memory, become worm-filled and barely recognizable.
After a minute, the guard lowered the camera and, when he pressed a button again, it made a two-tone pinging sound. When he gestured for the newspaper to be handed back, I hugged it to my chest like a petulant child.
‘You want to read it? OK, mate.’ The guard smiled and handed me his torch and then he climbed back up the ladder, pulling it up after him.
I shone the torch on the newspaper and read the words ‘Daily’ and ‘Telegraph’. They had some traction. The Daily Telegraph. I remembered this newspaper. There was a photograph of a woman on the front page. She was in tears and was trying to cover her face from the intrusion of the camera lens. There was a man next to her. He was wearing a pinstripe suit and a tie and he was consoling the woman, with putting an arm around her shoulders. He looked familiar. They both did. It took me a long time to realize it was Niall and Frejya, they had both changed.
My eyes slid down to the words below the photograph, and, after a moment’s confusion, the ability to read returned to me. ‘Ten years after his UN convoy was attacked in Afghanistan, the British diplomat Edward Northcote was yesterday declared officially dead.’ According to the article, Frejya was said by friends to be ‘devastated’. She had asked that the media and the public give her and her family space to grieve in private. ‘For Edward Northcote’s obituary see page 28.’
I looked at the date at the top of the page – 31 March 2011 – and realized it meant I had been there for ten years. As I tried to take this in, I found myself edging backwards from the precipice of my silent madness hysteria. I shone the torch around my cave and saw dozens of cobwebs, each an intricate piece of engineering. I also saw my attempt at art, how I had once used my own excrement as paint to daub the wall.
As my eyes roamed the walls, I saw for the first time that there were Arabic words scratched there. It no longer felt like my cave, my home. It was much smaller than I had imagined it. I realized that for all those years of not seeing the walls I hadn’t appreciated how limited my space was. The yards had sometimes seemed like miles.
I numbly turned the pages of the newspaper until I came to the obituaries. There I saw another face I recognized. My own. It seemed to be guiding me gently out of madness, showing me where to place my feet. My lips moved as I read about my own life, and death.
II
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, EDWARD IS SITTING UNDER A TREE again, unshaven, listening to TMS on the radio. Hannah approaches with something hidden behind her back. ‘Guess what I found in the garage,’ she says. Before he can answer, she produces a cricket bat. It looks old; dark with linseed oil. In her other hand she has a tennis ball. ‘Fancy a game?’
He takes the bat and shakes his head. ‘I don’t believe it. A Gunn and Moore. Dad bought me one exactly like this for my tenth birthday. It was his favourite make.’ He runs his hand over the face of the bat. ‘This has hardly been used. I wonder what it’s doing here? Germans don’t play cricket.’
‘Are you going to bat to me or what?’
‘Bowl to you. OK. We can use the tree as the stumps. Go and stand in front of it and take your guard.’
When Hannah starts tapping the ground with the bat, as if tamping down bumps, Edward laughs. ‘OK, Michael Atherton,’ he says, ‘I’m going to teach you what a googly is. Ready?’
They play for a few minutes, until Hannah loses the ball by hitting it over the wall. ‘Four!’ she shouts.
‘Actually, six,’ Edward corrects.
Later, while Hannah works on her painting, sitting on a wicker chair in an alcove of the Doric temple, Edward sits nearby trying to read the book of poetry on his lap, but he cannot concentrate on the words. His gaze keeps rising from the page to his daughter’s face. He feels mesmerized. It is Frejya. Her tangible double. Without looking up from her easel, Hannah loosens her hair before gathering it into a band and says: ‘You’re staring at me again.’
To divert himself, he points at her tattoo. ‘It’s Sanskrit, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it means Father.’
Edward wishes he hadn’t asked. Her answer seems to be charged with meaning. ‘I thought we could have mozzarella and beef tomatoes for lunch,’ he says, looking down at his book. ‘There’s some pesto and vinaigrette that could go with it. Something simple.’
‘I don’t mind, you know,’ Hannah says. ‘You can stare at me if you want.’ With a creak from the chair, she leans forward to pat his head. As she stands up and walks past him, he notices the marks left by the wicker chair on the backs of her legs. His arm rises up involuntarily and his fingers lightly trail her hip as she passes. The hand remains suspended in the air for a few seconds after she has gone.
Resisting the urge to follow her back to the house, Edward wanders towards a barn he has noticed on the east side of the garden, along a path scythed through nettles. Stacked against its gabled end he finds a pile of seasoned but unchopped logs. Inside, there are dead leaves on the wooden floorboards and house martins fluttering under the cobwebbed eaves. Stacked randomly against the walls are harnesses, pitchforks, rakes and spades, and weighing down some musty sacks in the corner, an axe.
He practises swinging it above his head, narrowly missing the low beams of crankled oak. Its shaft has been worn smooth and shiny from use, the sweat of several generations ingrained in its wood, and as his own hand slips down from its shoulder, and over the gentle bow of its belly, he feels a chemical pulse pass through his muscles.
The logs all appear to be from the same tree, a beech, and, judging by their circumference of about five feet, it had been an old and tall one. Edward selects the biggest and knottiest as his chopping block, dragging it sideways into position, and then he lifts a smaller one on top of it. Working from the outside in, following the grain, he is able to split one log every four or five minutes. When the heel of the axe becomes too firmly embedded, he picks it up with the log still attached and rotates it in the air. Then, in an underarm action, he uses the heft of the log against itself by bringing the blunt side of the axe down against the block. It makes a satisfying noise, a clean and brittle crack. It also seems to be giving off a smell. A red smell. Is that resin? Yes. A red, sappy smell of beech resin. His sense of smell seems to be returning in glimpses, and it is bringing back memories of chopping logs in Norway, at his in-laws’ cabin near the fjords, with Frejya bringing him out a cold beer.
Drawn by the noise coming from behind the barn, a repeated sound that is sometimes an echoey crack, sometimes a thud, Hannah collects from the fridge a bottle of cold French lager and walks towards it. At the corner of the barn she stops. She has seen her father, but he hasn’t seen her. Even from a distance of twenty yards the sweat on his brow is visible, glistening in the sun. She watches as he swings the axe in an arc above his head and then brings its blade down on the log, splitting it cleanly in two. How contented he seems as he bends to pick up the pieces, tosses them on a pile beside him, places another log on the block. The swing again, the muscles working in harmony, the unselfconscious grunt. She has never seen her father in this way before, fine-looking and fervent in the bright sunlight. The dark and disturbing world he described in his notebook seems a million miles away.
His chest still heaving, Edwar
d takes a break to pull a splinter from his palm. He takes in the pile of logs and feels a deep and unfamiliar sense of communion with nature, as if an entangled part of him is coming loose. More than that he feels masculated again, no longer the impotent captive. His brow feels gritty with dried sweat and dust, and his hands are tingling from the vibration, and this makes him feel not tired but exalted. Oddly transcendent, too, as if the monkey chatter in his head has been stilled and he is being led to his own calm centre.
‘Feeling better now?’
He turns. Hannah is watching him from the corner of the barn, a lit cigarette between her lips. As he studies her he feels a tenderness in his fingertips, like an erogenous ache. ‘Yes, surprisingly so,’ he says.
She takes a drag and eyes him as she gives a long out-breath. ‘Let’s see those muscles, then.’
Edward flexes a bicep and grins.
As she walks towards him she flips the porcelain cap on the bottle of beer and holds it out by the neck. ‘Brought you this.’
‘Thanks.’
After handing it over she drops to her knees slowly and, as if preparing for execution, lowers herself until the side of her head is flat against the chopping block. ‘Look at these rings,’ she says, running her finger over the clammy surface of the log as she tries to count them. ‘Each one a year. This tree must have been here for a century.’ Her voice seems distant, as if she is talking in her sleep.
That night, when her father has gone to bed, Hannah looks under the magazine again for his notebook. It has gone. She rests her hands on the chimneypiece. The key she had found the night before catches her eye. She passes it from one hand to the other, back and forth several times as she thinks, then she heads downstairs and tries it in the locked door she had found on her first morning here. It turns easily.
She feels for a light switch but when she finds one and flicks it no bulb comes on. Recalling the torch on top of the fridge she collects it and, casting its beam around the room, sees it is a gallery of some kind: half a dozen framed charcoal drawings of scenes from what looks like a concentration camp. There are identical skeletal prisoners in striped uniforms. A gallows. Some sort of a roll call. One shows a prisoner being crucified upside down. Her hand rises to her mouth as she takes in another sketch, this one depicting a naked man being hanged. Another two prisoners are apparently copulating on a gallows while a soldier points a rifle at them.
Her grip loosened by shock, she drops the torch and backs out of the room.
After breathing deeply for a few seconds she nods to herself in determination and walks back in. She now notices the dustsheet over a cabinet at the end of the room. Removing it, she sees a glass-topped display case similar to the ones containing butterflies upstairs in the entrance hall. Inside it is an SS ceremonial sword with two gold tassels on its handle, a silver cigar holder with the SS initials engraved on it, some white fencing gloves embroidered with the letters SS in gold thread and three bowls with gold-plated rims and small swastikas in the centre.
This time she runs out and slams the door behind her.
Back in the kitchen she puts the torch back on top of the fridge with trembling fingers before moving to the sink and splashing cold water on her face.
III
THE NEXT MORNING, HANNAH EATS HER BREAKFAST IN A thought-filled silence. She has not slept well, feeling unsettled by her discovery that their host appears to be a neo-Nazi. As she lay awake she weighed up whether she should tell her father what she had found, before insisting that they both pack their bags and leave. But she has decided it would be best not to. Not yet. He seems happy here, happier than she has seen him since his release, and she doesn’t want to introduce anything that will change his mood. Besides, he has finally started coming to terms with his years of captivity, enough to write about what happened. She is sure he must be finding that process therapeutic, so much so that he might soon be able to talk about it too, if not to her or Uncle Niall then to a professional.
She must look distracted because when her father comes down to breakfast he asks: ‘Everything all right?’
‘I was thinking I would quite like to get out of the house for a while,’ she answers too airily. ‘I found those bikes that Mike mentioned. They were in the stable propped up against a wooden horse. Do you fancy exploring?’
‘You go. I think I might stay here and do some more writing.’
‘Writing?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Some ideas I wanted to get down on paper.’
‘Your memoir?’
He falters. ‘Yeah. A draft of sorts.’
‘Can I read it?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s incomplete. There’s something missing, but I haven’t worked out what yet.’
‘A resolution?’
‘Yes, maybe.’
Having arrived at the house from the right, Hannah decides to turn left at the main entrance gate. Seeing the tennis ball she had hit over the wall, she stops to pick it up, dropping it into the bike’s basket. Five hundred yards further on she comes to a sign which points to ‘Camp du Struthof’ in one direction and ‘La chambre à gaz’ in the other. Puzzled, she continues cycling and comes to a structure made from wooden scaffolding, a gateway. It is partly concealed behind a line of trees and hanging from its central beam is a wooden sign reading: ‘Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof’. There is a middle-aged woman in a baseball cap posing for a photograph beneath it. Grey tendrils of hair are spiralling out from under the cap, as if trying to escape.
Behind her Hannah now sees three parked coaches in a semicircular area with a public lavatory and a hot-dog stand. Two boys are playing with a football there, bouncing it against a wall. She parks her bike and walks to the entrance gate. Here she finds herself looking down on a perimeter of concrete fence posts covering an area about three-quarters of a mile square. Wire is suspended between them, some barbed, some, judging by the plastic insulators, electric. The camp is constructed as an amphitheatre with a series of terraced platforms linked by steps. The wooden barracks are painted blue-grey and are separated by grassy slopes.
At the highest point of the valley there is a white stone monument the size of a three-storey house. It coils around itself in the shape of a spinnaker. Carved into its side is the outline of a man.
There are perhaps fifty tourists wandering around inside the perimeter and coming from one of the buildings is the sound of a young child having a tantrum. The other visitors are silent. Hannah steps forward so that she can read a small sign. ‘This camp where so many martyrs died for their homeland is more than a cemetery. A most absolute dignity is requested. Decent clothing and behaviour are required. Smoking and pets are not allowed.’
‘Hello, Hannah.’
She turns to see the diminutive, stooping figure of François emerging from what looks like a ticket office. He is walking with the aid of a crooked stick that seems to have been chosen to mirror his posture, two twisted roots rising from the earth.
‘Oh, hello,’ Hannah says, trying to hide the confusion in her voice. ‘I was exploring. We didn’t even know this place was here.’
‘I wondered when you would find it,’ François says. ‘I helped liberate it during the war. Now I help out as a guide.’
‘Was this a concentration camp? Here, in France?’
‘It was, yes. One of the smallest. It was a work camp. What they called an Arbeitserziehungslager, a labour-education camp. But many thousands of people died here from starvation and exhaustion.’
‘Did you say you helped liberate it?’
‘I was a major in the Free French Army, in charge of coordinating the Resistance from London. There were some Jews and gypsies in this camp – the Untermenschen as they called them, the subhuman races – but most of the inmates were political prisoners. Frenchmen. Resistance. Communists. Homosexuals. Come, let me show you around.’
They follow a tarmac path curving down the slope and come to a squar
e where the dust is red. ‘This was where they had the roll call,’ the old man continues. ‘They had to assemble here at five o’clock every morning, then again at noon and in the evening.’
Hannah, thinking back to what she has seen in the hidden room, points at a raised platform. ‘What’s that?’
‘The gallows. The original rope is in the museum. Whenever there was an escape attempt the prisoners would be forced to watch the executions.’
He raises his stick and prods with it in the direction of a building made of brick. ‘And that is where the kapos slept, the prisoners who saved their own skins by working as guards. The inmates hated them. They were sadists. Some of them were worse than the SS. Let me show you something.’ He comes to three rows of sturdy red-brick barracks. ‘This is the thing about which I am most proud. The Museum to the Resistance. I helped set it up.’
Inside they watch grainy black and white footage of the liberation of the camp by American soldiers, as well as images of prisoners marching to a quarry. A framed photograph shows de Gaulle inaugurating the camp as a French national monument in 1968. Alongside this are other black and white photographs of executions and beatings.
‘Their efficient prison system required that log books be kept,’ François says, tapping a thick ledger with his walking stick. ‘In here are listed the prisoners’ names, nationalities, political status, date of entry, and also dates of death and cause of death.’
Once outside again, François says:‘See this building here? Come. This was the medical pathology room.’ He leads the way, making a sharp tapping sound on the stone with the stick. ‘In here SS doctors performed experiments on live patients. The homosexuals usually. The Nazis would try to “cure” them. Sometimes the patients would be given the opportunity to undergo “renunciation tests”. If they succeeded in being aroused by the prostitutes provided for them, they passed.’
‘François, I have to ask you something,’ Hannah says, raising her sunglasses up on to her forehead. ‘I probably shouldn’t have, but I went into the locked room at the house last night.’
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