Alphabet House

by Adler-Olsen, Jussi

  Bryan had to open his eyes.

  They would have to play the game as well as they could.

  Chapter 5

  The more Bryan thought about it, the more certain he became that he had done the only right thing. He had opened his eyes cautiously, making his ‘new’ condition known. During the course of the day, the orderlies and soldiers passed through the car constantly without paying any attention to him.

  Beside him James lay completely motionless. Presumably asleep, maybe making up for the long night’s vigil. Every time one of the Gestapo women watching over them stretched or dozed off for a moment, Bryan flung his arm over towards the neighbouring bed, trying to attract James’ attention. Once James turned his head and sighed deeply. Otherwise nothing happened, which worried Bryan more than the slamming doors of the SS soldiers’ rounds.

  The security officer showed up regularly.

  The first time Bryan felt the cold eyes scrutinizing him, his heart stood still. The second time, he made sure to keep his gaze fixed solely on the neutral shadows on the ceiling. But even though the black-clad figure stared straight into Bryan’s open, dead eyes several times, not once were his suspicions aroused.

  Bryan had plenty of time to look around. Now and then a faint ray of sunlight broke through the flickering shadows on the window above him and settled in diffuse waves on the death-marked faces in the neighbouring beds.

  Time dragged on.

  The train had been running quite slowly since sunrise. Sometimes it almost stopped. Each time sounds of nearby cars and human activity were heard, indicating that they had passed through yet another town.

  As far as Bryan could reckon they had to be travelling southwest and had already left Würzberg far behind. They could be making for Stuttgart, Karlsruhe or one of the other towns not yet paralyzed by bombardment. It was only a question of time before these monuments to past grandeur would also be razed to the ground. Their mates in the RAF would come during the night and the Americans during the day, until there was no reason left to come.

  Bryan lay waiting for James to wake up. By now it was almost dark. The next guard to come on duty looked tired. This was already her third watch. She was a beautiful woman. Not nimble and young, but with the same compelling radiance as the smiling older women with flowing bosoms that Bryan and James used to undress with their eyes on the sands of Dover. Bryan forced himself not to look. This woman – his guard – was not smiling. She was already deeply marked by all she had gone through. But she was still lovely.

  The woman stretched and let her arms drop heavily to her sides as she stared into the twilight at the shadows of the snow that was falling again in large flakes. A life of privation and inevitability was reflected in her gaze. Then she got up slowly and went over to the window. For a moment she was lost in thought with her forehead resting against the misted pane, enabling Bryan to act.

  James lurched as Bryan hit him. Several tentative shakes had not been sufficient.

  James’ transition from sleep to rude awakening took place with no sudden movement or sign of surprise. It was this self-control that Bryan had always so greatly admired.

  The still-drugged eyes calmly followed Bryan’s gestures, trying to read the exaggerated movements of his mouth. Then his gaze clouded over and his eyelids grew heavy, stubbornly safeguarding the comforting sleep from which he’d just emerged. Bryan’s eyes flashed a warning as to what might happen if he didn’t pull himself together.

  James began to nod comprehension. Keep your eyes open, said Bryan’s sign language. Pretend to be crazy, said his lips. Then we’ll have a chance, his eyes pleaded, hoping James would understand.

  You’re the one who’s crazy, mimed James calmly in return. He obviously disapproved of Bryan’s suggestion.

  And if it comes to an interrogation, what can they do if we don’t answer? Bryan tried to continue his silent reasoning, but James had already decided. You first! he gesticulated, as though the case were settled. Bryan nodded.

  In a way, he was already in full swing.

  That night the light in their carriage was switched off, though not before the doctor had made his rounds. The Gestapo woman returned his respectful greeting with a curt nod and followed his every movement. Having taken the pulse of one of the new arrivals, the doctor glanced along the row of beds, inspecting each patient in turn as he strode past. At the sight of Bryan, who lay with wide-open eyes and blanket half on the floor, he made an about-turn in the middle of a stride and summoned the guard. After a heated exchange she rushed out the back of the carriage, leaving behind the echo of the door as she slammed it shut.

  The doctor and nurse who had been fetched from the rear carriage bent over the bed, their heads almost touching Bryan’s face.

  It was impossible for Bryan to figure out what they were doing, compelled as he was to stare stiffly into thin air. Only once did they enter his field of vision, offering a clue other than the physical manoeuvres to which he was being subjected.

  One thing happened after another. First they shone a light in his eyes, then they shouted at him. Next they struck him on the cheekbone and talked to him in subdued tones. The nurse laid her hand on his cheek and exchanged a few words with the doctor.

  Bryan was waiting for her to reach for her sharp tool, the nurse’s badge on her collar, but couldn’t afford to turn and face her. He held his breath, waiting tensely for her to jab him. When she did so he reacted by rolling his eyes so the carriage ceiling revolved like a carousel and made him dizzy.

  The next time she jabbed him he repeated the act, showing the whites of his eyes as they jerked from side to side in their tear-filled sockets.

  They discussed him briefly, shone the light in his eyes again and finally left him alone.

  In the middle of the night James began humming tonelessly with his mouth wide open. The guard glanced up instantly, looking around in confusion as if she were expecting an enemy invasion to come from all directions at once.

  Bryan opened his eyes and managed to turn slightly on one side before the light was switched on. The sudden contrast blinded him for a moment. He, too, had been in his own world.

  The illusion was extraordinarily successful and effective. Not only was James’ expression vacant, foggy and quietly manic, but it also had a trace of pain and apathy about it. The total impression was grotesque and repulsive. His hands lay relaxed on top of the blanket, but they were curled at the wrist and filthy with excrement. Lumps of shit stuck to his nails and brown smudges ran all the way up under his arms, clinging to the light covering of armpit hair. Blanket, pillow, sheet, bed guard and shirt – everything was smeared with a stinking, sticky mess.

  James had finally given way to nature’s call.

  The guard stepped back in revulsion, her arms held tightly to her chest.

  The doctor, nurses, assistant nurses and security officer had all returned to their quarters. The last thing Bryan heard before he dozed off again into a light, vigilant sleep was James’ plaintive, atonal and eternal humming, growing fainter and fainter. The injection they’d given him had started to work.

  Chapter 6

  The sensation of flies dancing on his eyelids and the gentle rocking of a pitching sea in the summer wind with cold spray settling like dust on his cheek had been competing for a long time with irrelevant sounds and an increasingly severe pain in his back. Then, in the trough of a wave, the water rose and hit him in the corner of the eye. Bryan blinked and felt the next splash more distinctly. The strange, massive pain in his back was spreading down his thigh.

  Big, feathery snowflakes whirled over his face as he opened his eyes and drowsily tried to tune in to reality.

  A narrow strip of snow-laden sky emerged above him, separating the station roof from the stationary train. Around him, stretchers were being removed. SS soldiers were getting off the front end of the train, one by one, their packs and rifles slung over their shoulders.

  A couple of them hopped over the edge of the platf
orm and walked further along the tracks, chatting and joking casually, with helmets and gas masks dangling from their backs.

  Soldiers on their way home.

  With a grating, screeching sound, the rear carriage was detached from the rest of the train to reveal a view of hills and the town’s buildings that were emerging from the mist. Another couple of snowflakes landed on Bryan’s cheek, momentarily combining dream with reality. He raised his back a bit to lessen the effect of the coldness radiating from the ground and slowly looked around for James in the jumble of stretchers on the platform.

  A row of vertical posts supported the station’s half-roof, creating a passage of less than six foot towards the wooden building. Stretchers were stood up against the wall in scattered blankets of snow. Some of the patients had already been taken away. Bryan fell back resignedly, imagining that he and James had already been split up. The dry rumble of an engine started up as yet another lorry backed up to the skids at the far end of the platform.

  Several men appeared and inspected the recumbent patients. Slapping their arms sharply against their bodies to shake off the loose snow in the folds of their coats, they grabbed hold of the nearest stretchers. After a while Bryan’s was the only one left on the platform apart from a stretcher that was half-hidden by a postal lorry. At the end of his blanket the sharp imprint of naked feet stuck up, crowned by a dark, reddish patch. Bryan looked down his body and cautiously wiggled his toes. A piece of coloured paper was pinned to the edge of his blanket, shining like a splash of blood against the white background.

  Through clusters of wind-driven snowflakes another building was discernible in the distance. The majority of the railway carriages had been moved there. Small black dots were calling out happily as the carriages approached. Bryan recognised the mood. He, too, knew what it was like to be received by family and friends after a long period of active duty. He prayed wistfully that it would happen again.

  A moment later, soldiers slowly began to stream out of the foremost train carriage. Not cheerful, expectant lads on their way home to a mother’s cooking or a sweetheart’s embrace, but weary, stooping men whose forward movement was propelled solely by the constant push from behind. A man on the platform received the first of them, took hold of his arm and led him along the train past Bryan. The rest followed passively, escorted by armed soldiers in overcoats.

  The men getting off the train were SS officers from all the different corps. Elite German soldiers, authentic Nazi heroes. Bryan could scarcely tell one from the other. Suddenly his distaste surfaced. Distaste for all those collar insignias, skull and crossbones, riding breeches, stiff, peaked caps, medals and decorations. Here was the enemy he had learned to hate and fight against so savagely.

  The stream of expressionless soldiers and bobbing stretchers continued towards the pallid, whitish light of the opening at the far end of the platform. Another lorry was backing up to the skids.

  Its arrival was drowned out by the crunching sound of boots in the frosty snow. The last man in the column shouted at the escort in front and pointed at Bryan and the other stretcher.

  Some soldiers took hold of them and followed the sagging flock of men.

  As they reached the end of the train they put the stretchers down for a moment. It took time to fill up the lorry. A railway worker started to walk across the rails, knocking the switch points with a long pole as he passed. A soldier shouted at him threateningly, gun raised. Dropping the pole in the snow, the man slithered back the way he came, finally disappearing behind a big sign that towered between the sets of tracks. Freiburg im Breisgau it said, in proud, clear letters.

  Not a single one of the officers who stood there waiting had said a word. Everything had taken place under strict supervision, making it impossible for Bryan to look back and see whether James was lying on the stretcher a couple of feet away.

  It must have been quite late in the afternoon. The sun would soon be setting. The street seemed deserted, apart from the SS officers guarding the area in front of the freight station.

  So this was their destination for the time being. Freiburg, a town in the Rhine district by the French border in the southwest corner of the German Reich, which was only thirty miles from the Swiss border and freedom.

  Two rows of figures were seated in the semi-darkness on benches in the back of the lorry. Between them, several stretchers lay sideways across the floor, so tightly packed together that the ends stuck under the feet of the seated figures. Luckily Bryan had been placed under a soldier with short legs whose boots didn’t rest as heavily on his frozen shins.

  When the last stretcher had been loaded, the accompanying soldiers jumped in and rolled down the tarpaulin, while the escort closed the tailboard.

  The sudden darkness made it impossible for Bryan to see. The shape beside him was lying quite still. Forty men were breathing heavily and irregularly. There were a few scattered murmurs and grunts. Two guards squeezed down side by side at the end of the bench and talked quietly to one another.

  Then Bryan felt the shape beside him move. A tentative hand groped the side of his body and found his chest. There it remained.

  Bryan seized it and returned its quiet squeeze.

  Gradually, as the silhouettes acquired faces, Bryan realised the lorryload of patients had several things in common. But one was more obvious than the rest, the common denominator that now included himself and James.

  They were all mentally ill.

  James had already tried to make him understand this with meaningful glances, pointing out one or two men in particular.

  Most of them sat quite still, heads bobbing from side to side as the lorry rumbled along. A few sat tensing their necks, eyes fixed on an imaginary point in the air. Others twisted their arms together awkwardly and rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth, alternately clenching and spreading their fingers.

  James rolled his eyes and pointed to his open mouth. They’re pumped full of medicine, Bryan deduced in agreement. They, too, had been sedated and the poison was still in their bodies, as exhibited by their slow-motion reflexes and unusually sluggish brain activity. If they’d had a chance to stand up, they would have fallen over.

  Bryan began to feel a mixture of relief and renewed anxiety. So the red tag meant they were mentally ill. This had been their objective and therefore they were relieved. But now they’d been lumped together with this group of mentally warped soldiers, and what did they propose to do with them? The master race’s care of the incurably ill could easily be implemented with a syringe, or even more simply with a bullet.

  Those were the rumours.

  The civilians at the freight station had obviously not been meant to see them. And now they lay in darkness, rumbling towards unknown territory. Two soldiers had been set to watch over them. This was the source of their worries.

  Bryan tried to smile at James. James showed indifference. He still didn’t see any occasion to worry.

  At every bend of the road the legs of one of the soldiers swung to and fro above Bryan’s feet. The railway had to bend, twist and turn itself through the snow-covered terrain alongside fields, drainage trenches, small streams and natural inclines and slopes in the landscape. Their journey took them around the southern edge of Schwarzwald and the town of Freiburg. They had passed a lot of small stations and stops on their way that could have been used for unloading if they should be sent southwards. So Bryan had to assume they were heading north or northeast into Schwarzwald itself.

  In all likelihood the idea was that they were meant to disappear here in some way or other.

  After another hour’s drive the transport came to a halt.

  Several men in white were already prepared to receive them. James’ stretcher was pulled out over the edge of the lorry before the two of them managed to give each other a farewell squeeze. The two porters who had taken hold of Bryan’s stretcher slipped on the slippery ground, almost dropping him. In front of them was a dark, pebbled clearing, encircled by a narr
ow border of dead fir trees.

  Behind them towered dense formations of snow-crowned pine trees that provided shelter from the worst gusts of wind. The landscape faded away into the valley below in a mist of snow crystals. There was not a single light to disclose any sign of life down in the Promised Land. Bryan assumed Freiburg was now directly south of them.

  They had been driven a roundabout way.

  The courtyard was partly hidden behind the windbreak. The badly shaken-up passengers were hustled around the stretchers and trudged apathetically behind the soldier in command. Another lorry came into view, empty and with the tailboard hanging open. The flock of men who had left it had been lined up further down the compound where several three-storey buildings could be seen. The pale yellow gleam from the windows shone softly over the yard. Bryan gave a grunt when he saw the Red Cross sign painted on the sloping flat roofs. It resembled an ordinary hospital, apart from the numerous sandbags heaped up against the walls at regular intervals, the barred windows on the second and third storeys and numerous guards with dogs. Seen from the outside, the rectangular boxes were far superior to the hastily assembled reserve hospitals to which the wounded RAF men were sent in ever increasing numbers. ‘But don’t let yourself be taken in,’ thought Bryan, as he was carried towards the buildings.

  Little by little, the patients were grouped at one edge of the compound. All in all about sixty or seventy men stood waiting as the stretchers passed by them. Further ahead, the rear porter carrying James tried to push back the arm he’d let flop over the edge of the swinging stretcher. Against a background of glazed yellowish frost, two fingers stuck out from the others in discreet disregard of danger, waving a V-sign back towards Bryan.

  Several yellow buildings, slightly staggered in relation to one another, became visible from where they were now assembled. Two of them had their foundations carved solidly into the rock, whereas the rest were scattered over the tree-encircled plateau that constituted most of the area. The tops of several posts could be seen above sticking out above a lush undergrowth of holly. They supported the fence between the walls of rock. Furthest away a steel-wire fence cut roughly through the area, the frost on it sparkling in the glow of the occasional lights. Down by the gate stood a small group of officers, talking in a cone of light beside a black car with a swastika on the front door and pennants swaggering on the front fenders. An officer stepped out of the group and beckoned the guards from the nearest building over towards him. On receiving their orders they ran the hundred feet over to the assembly, guns erect and coats flapping, to pass on the commands.