Gunga Din was one of them. A regular feature in his daydream-film repertoire.
When he ‘screened’ one of his films he usually started as the beginning and went through the entire film, scene by scene, as well as he could. A sequence that only took an hour in the cinema could easily take him a whole morning or evening. So long as he was engrossed in the film, he was lost to the world. This pastime comforted him whenever sad thoughts or the fear of never seeing his loved ones again became too much for him.
His generous mother had often handed him and his sisters a few coins so they could go sit in the folding chairs at the Sunday film matinée. They spent a great deal of their childhood in the flickering light of Deanna Durbin, Laurel and Hardy, Nelson Eddy and Tom Mix, while their parents strolled through town exchanging platitudes with other members of the middle-class citizenry.
James could recall his sisters, Elizabeth and Jill, without effort. Under cover of darkness they used to giggle and whisper to one another while the hero kissed the heroine and the rest of the audience howled.
The memories, the films and the books he had consumed throughout this schooldays prevented him from going crazy. But the more shock treatment they subjected him to and the more pills he swallowed, the more frequently he got stuck in the middle of a scene, foiled by a sudden hole in his memory.
Right now he couldn’t remember what Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Victor McLaglen were called in Gunga Din. But it would surely come back.
It always had before.
James rested his head heavily on the pillow and fingered Jill’s scarf under the mattress.
‘Herr Standartenführer, don’t you think you should try to get up and walk around a bit? You’ve been snoozing the whole morning. Don’t you feel well?’
James opened his eyes and looked straight into the nurse’s face. She smiled at him, getting up on tiptoe so she could insert her arm under his pillow and ease it up. For months James had been feeling like answering her or showing faint signs of improvement. Instead he stared at her emptily, his face expressionless.
Her name was Petra and she was the only really human entity he had seen there thus far.
Petra had arrived as if sent by providence. The first thing she had done was to see that the nurses left Werner Fricke, the man opposite him, in peace with his calendar calculations.
Then she stood up to a couple of the other nurses so that bed-wetting or eating food in an unsuitable manner was no longer punished so severely.
And finally, she took special care of James.
It was obvious he had aroused her sympathy from the first time she saw him. Others in the ward had benefitted from her special care, too, but so far James had been the only one who could get her to stop at the end of the bed with a sad and vulnerable expression on her face. How can she feel anything for a man like Gerhart Peuckert? James wondered, assuming she was just a naive and unimaginative young girl who had landed in the nurses’ training college at Bad Kreuznach straight from convent school.
She was clearly quite inexperienced in life. Whenever Petra mentioned her mentor and guardian angel, Professor Sauerbruch, to her colleagues, her eyes shone with devotion and her hands worked even more swiftly and surely. And when a patient went amok and cursed everyone to hell, she promptly made the sign of the cross before running to get help.
The most probable explanation for Petra’s partiality for James was that she was a rather diminutive, shy, romantic girl with natural appetites, who also thought he was quite handsome with his white teeth and straight shoulders. The war had been going on for nearly five years. She had scarcely been more than sixteen or seventeen when hard and exacting hospital work had become her everyday life. How could she have found an outlet for her dreams and fantasies in the meantime? It was hard to believe she’d ever had the opportunity to love or be loved.
James had nothing against the possibility that he might have stimulated her imagination. She was a quite nice and pretty girl. For the moment he was being cautious and taking advantage of her care. So long as she was there to force some food into him after the shock treatments and close the window if the draft started making his shoulder muscles stiff, he knew his body would not be the first thing to fail him.
‘This is no good, Herr Standartenführer,’ she continued, pushing James’ feet over the edge of the bed. ‘You’re not much help. You want to get better, don’t you? Then you must get up and walk!’
James stood halfway between the beds and began edging his way to the central corridor. Petra nodded and smiled. It was this form of special treatment James was less keen on. It drew the attention of the other nurses. It gave him a kind of priority status that could lead to reprisals and repercussions in the name of justice.
However it was not the possible outcome of this situation that James feared the most. More and more he sensed a kind of vigilance and tension in the room. The feeling came over him like a sudden tap on the shoulder. And this day it was there again. James glanced across the corridor through half-closed eyelids.
It was the third time that day that Bryan was staring at him, trying to attract his attention.
Bryan, stop staring at me, dammit! It’s much too obvious! he thought. Bryan’s pleading eyes were fixed on him. Petra took James by the arm, chatting to him as usual about this and that as she led him over to the window beside the trolleys at the opposite end of the room. Behind him James noticed that Bryan was struggling to get up. It was only one day since his last shock treatment, but this didn’t hold him back.
The little nurse’s stream of words stopped when James began hauling her back towards his bed. He was not going to be trapped in a corner with Bryan. Noticing James’ reaction, Bryan let his arms flap down limply by his sides. He leaned back dejectedly in his bed as James marched by with the eager Petra.
Right now you’re weak, Bryan, but tomorrow you’ll perk up again, thought James. I’m not going to feel sorry for you. Just leave me alone. You know that’s best! I’ll get us out of here, trust me! But not now. They’re watching us! James heard Bryan’s bed creak and felt his despairing gaze boring into his back.
The pockmarked man, whose name was Kröner, strode quietly after them and slapped Bryan on the shoulder. ‘Gut Junge, upsy-daisy,’ he growled, shaking the bars of the next bed’s bed-end.
Back to Gunga Din, James thought frantically, as he wriggled out of Petra’s grasp and back into bed. What did they call those bloody sergeants? Think carefully, James, you know you know it!
Kröner sat down heavily, staring at Petra’s retreating bottom with its fluttering white bow as she finally continued her rounds. ‘Lovely bum-bum, isn’t it, Herr Standartenführer?’ he said, addressing James.
Every word was like stinging ice.
The big man folded his legs under him, bumping his knees against the side of the bed until the entire iron frame rattled. James never reacted to his question. Sooner or later he would stop talking.
The men beside Kröner sat straight up in bed like vultures and stared across at Bryan, who was burrowing into the blankets until he finally lay down in the messy pile, exhausted. Relax, Bryan, James begged silently, otherwise they’re going to get us!
Chapter 12
The names came to James from the depths of sleep, taking him so much by surprise that he opened his eyes and stared into the ward’s semi-darkness. The two remaining sergeants in Gunga Din were called McChesney and Ballantine.
Heavy breathing and scattered snoring brought him slowly back to reality. A faint beam of light penetrated the bomb shutters. James counted to forty-two. Then the beam came again. The men in the watchtower behind the SS barrack buildings swung the searchlight around another couple of times as part of their routine before creeping back to the shelter of the tower’s tar-papered roof. It was raining for the fourth night in a row, and only two nights ago the sound of bombs over Karlsruhe had reverberated along the rocky slopes, causing the guards outside to run around shouting shrill commands.
&n
bsp; The patient in bed number 9 had drawn his legs up under him and begun sobbing quietly to himself. He was a hauptsturmführer who had been pinned by a tree trunk for over ten hours during an attack on the Eastern Front, while flame-throwers from his own striking force devastated the countryside. They were the only two in the ward who had been awake that night. Now only James was left.
He breathed heavily and sighed. That afternoon he’d made Petra blush. As usual she and Vonnegut, the porter with the iron hook, sat studying the casualty lists before Vonnegut cast himself over his newspaper’s tiny crossword, tapping his pitiful artificial limb on the table in irritation every time he was stuck for a word.
Vonnegut was keeping to himself because there’d been a bad mood in the ward all day.
There was an icy coldness between Petra and the senior nursing officer. First the senior nurse had adjusted the nursing badge on Petra’s headscarf and pushed some loose strands of fair hair back in place beneath it. Then Petra had adjusted the nursing officer’s party emblem on her right lapel and polished it with her sleeve so the enamel encircling the white text, saying Verband Deutsche Mädel, shone a bright red.
Towards evening, when Petra should have gone off duty, the nursing officer had sent her replacement over to another ward on the pretext that she was to assist some novices. It was clearly an act of revenge and Petra, her eyes flashing, made threatening gestures at her as soon as she turned her back.
It was difficult to avoid falling for her as she stood there rebelliously in her flat shoes, oatmeal-coloured dress and white apron. James smiled every time she bent down and scratched herself behind her knees where the black woollen stockings irritated her most.
She turned around and caught his gaze as his eyes were dancing over her figure. It was an intimate moment.
That’s when she blushed.
Restless movements from Kröner in the next bed usually meant he was about to wake up. ‘Die in your sleep, you swine!’ James whispered inaudibly, and forced himself to go on thinking about Petra. At that moment she was probably asleep in her bed in her attic room above them, dreaming of the way he’d looked at her, just as he was lying there now, thinking about how she’d looked back at him. Perhaps James would have been better off without these fantasies. It was hard to be young and full of erotic stirrings he could never pursue.
Flickering in the darkness James saw, through his eyelashes, the image of Kröner turned towards him, examining him. James cautiously shut his eyes tight, waiting for the whispering to start again.
The nightmare had first manifested itself late one night, over two months ago. The hard click of the night nurse’s heels had woken him. She had just crossed the corridor towards the staff lavatories behind the stairs leading into the yard. Right in front of him a silhouette was bending slightly forward over the head end of the next bed. There was not a sound in the room apart from two quick jerks from the foot end of the bed. Then the shape adjusted James’ neighbour’s pillow, walked quickly back to the other end of the ward and lay down in one of the beds.
When Vonnegut tapped the foot of the bed the following morning he found James’ neighbour dead. He was black in the face, tongue sticking vulgarly and grotesquely between his jaws. The protruding eyes looked desperate.
Rumour had it that he usually hid remnants of food under his pillow and must have choked on a fishbone. Holst, the surgeon lieutenant, shook his head as he lent an ear to the senior nursing officer, who whispered a few words. Dr Holst thrust his fists into his coat pockets. He brushed aside a couple of questions from Vonnegut and saw to it that the porters removed the body before the security officer and head doctor had a chance to make trouble for the staff on duty in the ward.
In his drugged and foggy nocturnal state James had witnessed a murder.
Several faces popped up from their beds, ducking from side to side as they watched the nursing helpers change the dead man’s bedclothes and leave the bed smooth, fresh and empty.
At lunchtime a patient got out of his bed, walked towards James and lay down in the newly made bed. He was the one who had stolen James’ idea of helping the nurses on their rounds. There he lay until the helpers brought in dumplings and leg of pork in the enamel food containers. His blubbering and whining were to no avail as the staff pulled him out of the bed. But this had little effect.
Every time they turned their backs he crept back into the bed, pulled the blanket right up to his chin and lay there, clutching it tightly. Not until he lay stretched out in the bed did he settle down. When this scene had repeated itself a few times the staff gave up and let him lie where he was.
However impossible it was to comprehend, James had just got himself an assassin for a neighbour.
James had no idea what was going on. For the first few nights he was too terrified to fall asleep. Whatever this lunatic’s motive might have been, if indeed there had been one, he would be capable of doing it again. So it was safer to sleep during the day and stay awake at night, counting the number of times his neighbour turned around heavily in the creaking bed. If anything happened he would shout for help or get up on the bed to reach the cord that hung from the wall and had been suitably shortened so the patients wouldn’t be able to pull it at all hours. Which no one thus far had attempted to do.
On the third night following this episode the ward lay in total darkness. The light in the corridor had been switched off for once and all the shutters closed. From around him came the sound of snoring and heavy breathing, easing James’ anxiety and making him relax. After re-enacting one of Pinkerton’s exploits he resorted to the last film he had managed to see in his happy Cambridge days, a magnificent epic by Alexander Korda, and dozed off.
To start with, the hushed, whispered words slid almost imperceptibly into James’ dream. Like foreign bodies they blended disturbingly with a love scene and didn’t stop when James’ eyes flew open with a start. The words were real and they were concrete. Subdued and measured. Not at all those of someone mentally unbalanced. They came from the pockmarked Kröner, the killer lying beside him.
Other voices in the darkness joined in the conversation. There were three altogether: Kröner’s and the men in the next two beds.
‘I had to make a scene, damn it,’ came the voice from the furthest bed. ‘That bitch of a nursing officer caught me reading Vonnegut’s magazines.’
‘That was a stupid thing to do, Dieter!’ growled Kröner at James’ side.
‘What the hell is one supposed to do? If you aren’t mad to start with, you go mad from lying here with absolutely nothing to occupy yourself!’
‘All right, but from now on, keep away from those magazines. You’re not doing that again!’
‘Of course not. Do you think I started doing it for fun? Do you think it was funny being stuck in the loony cell for days? I’m not ending up there again. Anyway, they’re starting to liquidate those crazies now,’ he continued. ‘What else can they do?’
‘What the hell do they scream for? I thought it was only Stuka pilots who went that crazy,’ whispered Horst Lankau, the broad-faced man in the middle.
James felt his heart pounding and his head growing light from lack of oxygen as he fought to control his agitation and follow the conversation at the same time. His temples throbbed as he slowly inhaled through his teeth so his breathing wouldn’t drown out the quiet whispering beside him. Apart from the circumstances, the conversation was quite normal. None of the three had ever been the slightest bit mentally deranged.
Not until morning did James fully realise how shaky the situation could be for himself and Bryan, if they were not the only ones who were feigning illness.
The greatest problem was that Bryan knew nothing. If he kept on trying to make contact, it could be the death of them.
James would have to avoid him at any price, ignore any attempts to make contact and anything else that might connect the two of them.
What Bryan would do about it was up to him. They knew each other so well that pr
esumably Bryan would eventually realise James would only act like that if felt he had to.
Bryan would have to learn to be on his guard. He would, indeed.
Kröner’s manner of speech was cultivated. Behind the enormous, gnarled figure and the pockmarked face was an able-minded, well-educated and entirely self-centred man. It was he who was in charge and made sure they stopped talking if there was an unexpected movement or strange sound. Kröner was always on the alert and in constant activity, while the other two – the broad-faced man and his skinny companion, Dieter Schmidt – slept most of the day so they could keep awake for the nightly discussions.
Everything he did had one simple purpose: to survive in that hospital until the war was over. In the daytime he was friends with everyone, patting them on the cheek and running errands for the staff. At night he was capable of murdering anyone he thought stood between him and his goal. He had already killed once.
During a night like this the whispering could last a couple of hours. The nightly control had been intensified somewhat since the affair with the fishbone and the night nurse could be expected to turn up in the ward at irregular intervals. She would wave the beam of a dynamo lamp to and fro over their faces. And the ward was always as silent as the grave.
But Kröner lay there ready, waiting just a moment to make sure the room was perfectly still again after the beam danced out of the room and the slight noise from the twisting finger movements that powered the little dynamo had disappeared in the direction of the nurses’ guardroom.
The whispering didn’t start up again until he gave the sign. And James pricked up his ears.
Kröner had strangled the man simply to be closer to his confederates so they could talk. As long as James constituted no threat to them, he had nothing to fear.
He would even have been able to sleep peacefully, if it weren’t for the stories the malingerers told.
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