The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  Suddenly they looked up at him, and in the same instant someone shouted loudly and angrily.

  Bastable looked in the direction of the shout and saw a German soldier running towards him The German shouted again and threw his rifle to his shoulder. Bastable stopped in instinctive terror, cringing from the rifle.

  Someone else shouted—it was one of the officers from the group by the car. The German soldier lowered his rifle, but still kept it levelled at Bastable’s chest. The officer barked out another order, and the soldier advanced menacingly, until he was within two yards of him.

  Now it was finished. It had all been madness from the start, from the very beginning, but row it was finished.

  The soldier swore guttural words at him, unintelligible sounds which could only be questions or orders, but which only served to increase his abject helplessness.

  He looked around desperately, taking in the sharp images of his despair, knowing that they couldn’t help him: the garden, with its sweet-williams flowering brightly, the trees—chestnut trees—the long grey car and its occupants—its peak-capped officers festooned with field glasses and pistols and maps—and the pathetic contrast of the handcart, with the old couple’s belongings—Oh, God, help me! Help me!

  The soldier shouted at him again, jerking the rifle to point his questions.

  Bastable lowered one arm cautiously and pointed at the hand-cart.

  The soldier cast a quick glance at the cart, then returned to Bastable wearing an expression of irritation rather than anger on his face.

  ‘Nein, nein—‘ The short explosive gibberish which followed was accompanied first by a vigorous shake of the steel-helmeted head and then by a nod towards the house which translated the likely meaning of the words.

  ‘Clear off at once, you stupid bugger!’

  Bastable stood his ground. He was still frightened—he was indeed so frightened that even if he had decided not to stand still he wasn’t sure that his legs would have obeyed his brain—but he was also prey to other fears which refused to release him.

  Simply, he had to have that bloody cart.

  He pointed at it again.

  The soldier sighed, reversed his rifle, took two quick steps forward and hit Bastable in the chest with the flat of the stock.

  The blow wasn’t hard, it was more of a push than a thump, but Bastable knew with a sickening certainty that if he still refused to retreat then the next one would be very hard indeed.

  ‘Halt!’

  The sharp command came from the right, out of his vision, but the soldier’s instant obedience to it transformed Bastable’s choice of evils into no choice at all: that was an officer-voice, and now it was discovery, not injury or retreat, which he faced.

  Not that faced was the right word, for he was too scared to lift his eyes from the patch of dirt on which they had focused sullenly after the thump on the chest, a circumference which just included the muddy jackboots of his tormentor.

  As he watched the jackboots they came to attention.

  The officer spoke sharply again, and the boot-heels clicked.

  A very small pebble and fragment of dried mud stood out in high relief in the pathway. A small black beetle scrambled frantically across it, zig-zagging and lurching as though aware of its danger but obstinately determined to disregard it.

  ‘M’sieur—‘

  Oh God! The German officer was addressing him in French!

  ‘M’sieur … kes-ke-voo-voolay, m’sieur?’

  Meaningless. The beetle mounted a larger pebble, slithered sideways and rolled over on to its back, its legs waving helplessly in the air. Bastable raised his eyes five degrees, to take in a new pair of jackboots. They were noticeably superior to the soldier’s boots, not only recently polished under their coating of dust but also narrower and better-fitting.

  ‘M’sieur?’

  The voice went with the boots. There were Germans and Germans, as he had good cause to know from his own experience now; yet it seemed more strange that any one of them should speak to a French peasant so courteously, thought Bastable suspiciously.

  But whatever the question he had no reply to it, only a gesture. Without looking up, he pointed once more at the hand-cart.

  ‘Comment?’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘Ach—so! Mein Gott—‘ The German officer rapped out an order so peremptorily that Bastable was startled into looking up.

  ‘Schnell, schnell!’ the officer chivvied the soldier.

  The soldier grounded his rifle hastily and pushed back the hand-cart, revealing the little old Frenchwoman, who had lain almost hidden among the fallen bundles on the far side of it.

  The German soldier bent down and gathered her up into his arms, her head cradled in the crook of one arm, her legs hanging down limply from the other. As he lifted her, one of the carpet slippers dropped to the ground. He looked questioningly at his officer, who nodded towards Bastable. The soldier marched stiffly round the cart and presented the tiny black-clad corpse to Bastable, extending her as though she was weightless.

  Indeed, she was a mere featherweight. The child he had held in his arms a few minutes ago had more substance to her, so it seemed, though perhaps that had been an illusion created by the limpet-grip and the beating heart. Either way, he had no experience on which to draw other comparisons, this was his first dead grandmother, just as little nameless Alice had been his first live baby. All he could think of was that, of all the experiences he had tried to imagine, and to steel himself against these last months, no wildest dream had prepared him for such realities.

  ‘Ay be-an, m’sieur,’ said the German officer, nodding again at him. ‘Noos aliens parlay aveck votrer patron.’

  Parlay?

  Speak.

  Bastable didn’t want to speak.

  He wanted the hand-cart.

  He lowered the corpse of the old woman into the cart and swung the handles to point it towards the house, ignoring the Germans—

  And stopped abruptly, as he saw that the German officer was already ahead of him, striding purposefully up the pathway towards the doorway, towards Wimpy.

  XIV

  WIMPY HAD acquired a hat from somewhere. When he had got it, Bastable had no idea; but now it was on Wimpy’s head—the old Frenchman’s Sunday hat, something like an Anthony Eden homburg, but a French version of it from an earlier era, with different proportions of brim and crown. The trouble was, it suffered from the same defect as the suit itself: it was just one full size too big, so that it came down low on Wimpy’s forehead and appeared, indeed, to be resting on his ears; and the net effect of the whole outfit turned Wimpy into a preposterous figure, out of a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler.

  But Harry Bastable was a million miles away from the back stalls of the Tivoli Cinema and laughter, as the German officer advanced towards this travesty; half of him wanted to run away, but didn’t know where to fun, and the other half wanted to help Wimpy, but didn’t know how to do it.

  Yet he had to do something, because he couldn’t just stand there holding the cart with the old woman on it.

  He had come for the cart, and he had got the cart. Only now he had also got the old woman, because that was what the German officer had assumed he had come for. So now he had to behave as the German officer would expect him to behave—he had to behave as the man he was supposed to be would behave!

  The decision was like a spark igniting him into action, releasing him from indecision. One moment the cart was stationary, the next it was almost running away with him: it lurched and bucked as its unsprung bicycle wheels rebounded off unseen obstacles. The old woman lost her second carpet-slipper, bouncing up and moving horribly as though she was alive again before settling finally among the bundles on which she lay. The German officer heard the sound of the cart behind him just in time to jump out of its way, almost losing his balance in a clump of delphiniums.

  ‘Onri! Onri!’ cried Wimpy. ‘Non! Non!’

  Bastable pulled back at the cart’s momentum, swinging
it broadside in front of the doorway, almost tipping its contents at Wimpy’s feet—he was aware simultaneously as he fought to hold the handles down that the child was struggling in Wimpy’s arms on one side of him and the German officer was trampling down the delphiniums in an effort to keep his footing on the other, and that the old woman’s black arm had swung out of the cart and was entangling itself in the spokes of the wheel.

  For an instant everything was moving. Then everything stopped: the child, imprisoned in Wimpy’s arms, the officer, steady in the flower-bed, and the cart stationary, dusty black arm and limp white hand, veined and mottled with old age, hanging down against the wheel.

  He caught his breath and stared at Wimpy anxiously, beginning now to doubt the wisdom of his impetuous action. He didn’t know what he ought to do next, and—what was worse—he didn’t know what Wimpy was going to do either, and it was too late to ask, with the German officer here beside them—which was worst of all.

  ‘Onri, Onri,’ murmured Wimpy, shaking his head.

  ‘Onri’ was what he had cried out before, but Bastable hadn’t the faintest idea what the word meant in English.

  ‘M’sieur.’ The German officer stepped out of the flowerbed on to the gravel path lifting his hand in salute.

  ‘Onri—‘ Wimpy loosened one arm from the child and pointed towards the cart’—gabble-gabble-gabble madame gabble-gabble-gabble.’

  Bastable regarded him with appalled incomprehension, sensing the German officer’s scrutiny at the same time, and knowing only that the German understood what had been said to him, but that he did not. He lowered the cart handles to the ground gently, to avoid bringing the old woman to life again, and wiped his sweaty hands nervously on the seat of his trousers.

  Wimpy frowned back at him, pointed at the old woman, and then swept his hand towards the interior of the house.

  Suddenly the meaning of his words became crystal clear to Bastable. In fact, it was so obvious—it was so obvious what he ought to do that he understood also why Wimpy had risked addressing him in French, on the assumption that he couldn’t fail to take that meaning. It was so absolutely and utterly obvious that it shrivelled him with embarrassment that he had been so slow on the uptake and so quick once again almost to give everything away, to ruin everything, with his slowness.

  He bent forward between the handles of the cart and lifted the body of the old woman from its resting place among the bundles and packages.

  The interior of the house seemed much gloomier than it had been on the first occasion he had entered it, as though the light which penetrated it from outside had lost some quality of brightness which it had possessed only a short time before.

  Bastable stood irresolutely by the newel-post, wondering which way to go, where to lay down his burden, yet held back at the same time by the sound of the voices behind him—Wimpy’s voice, so instantly recognizable, yet at the same time so strangely different as that ever-ready tongue curled round those alien French sounds; and the German’s voice, slower and deeper, tackling the same sounds less confidently, yet adding a harsh Teutonic abruptness which somehow made each of them even more foreign.

  He strained for a minute to try for at least some inkling of what they were saying to each other. But once again he could make no sense of any of it, from the German’s carefully-constructed phrases, in which each word was preceded by a momentary hesitation, to Wimpy’s fluent replies, in which all the words ran together in one continuous torrent of language.

  Les anglais and les anglais were all he could distinguish from either of them—they must be talking about les anglais, but that was as far as he could get.

  And yet… and yet—there was no hostility in the German’s voice, only a note of polite inquiry. Indeed, if there was an anger, it was in Wimpy’s replies . . and Wimpy did also sound impressively and eloquently French—even arrogantly French, with no more concession to his interrogator’s understanding of that language than the Tynesider had made to the SS officer back in the operating theatre.

  He closed his ears to the voices, and concentrated on his own problem to the exclusion of everything else, and the answer to it came to him immediately. There was only one place to take her, because there was only one place where she would wish to be—even though she wished for nothing now, and knew nothing, and felt nothing.

  He blundered forward past the hat-stand, down the passage.

  This time the parlour door required no brute force to open, he had swept the floor clean behind it when he had put his shoulder to it the first time.

  The old man in the chair hadn’t moved, he had only lost his watch-and-chain; and the bowl of artificial fruit hadn’t moved, it still sat in the middle of the table amid a litter of fallen plaster from the ceiling.

  Still cradling the old woman, he bent forward and caught the edge of the table-cloth and twisted sideways, dragging the bowl and the debris with him; and then dropped that edge and caught another part of the cloth, and dragged it further, and then repeated the action, until the cloth slid from the table, carrying the bowl and the plaster with it. The bowl fell and splintered, out of sight beneath him, and a cloud of plaster-dust arose from its ruin. He stepped forward quickly and unloaded the little black-clad corpse on to the bare polished surface, which had been swept clean by the slide of the table-cloth across it; and turned and fled from the room before the dust could settle on her, and on her table, and on her husband, slamming the door fiercely behind him, leaving them alone together.

  The slam of the door echoed inside his head for an instant, then was lost in other sounds outside him: the insistent far-distant pop-pop-pop and thud which was still a continuous background to every other sound, but which he instinctively sought to filter out the better to reassure himself with the closer sound of Wimpy’s voice.

  He turned his head to look and listen in the same direction, towards the open doorway at the end of the passage. There was no one blocking it now, but the lack of brightness beyond, the pale light outside, suddenly registered the passing of time, of which he had altogether lost track. This endless day was crawling at last out of its long afternoon into its long summer’s evening.

  But the doorway was not empty—or, it was empty, the rectangle of its opening, but just within it, pasted against the door itself, stood the child.

  So Wimpy didn’t need the child any more. So now she was plainly alone and terrified again; he could see that by the way the poor little mite had flattened herself against the door, her small fists clenched across her chest. And he knew, from his own experience of being held motionless by the equal forces of different terrors, why she couldn’t move. Outside, in the garden and on the road, was all the dust and noise of the whole German Army on the march, a thing beyond her understanding … but inside … inside, in her own ruined home, was another nightmare no less daunting to her—less physically terrifying, but surely more unnerving, beyond his ability to imagine.

  How had it happened? Had she been in the house, in the parlour, when the old man’s breath had rattled that last time, like Major Audley’s under the blood-stained blanket, and she hadn’t understood, any more than Harry Bastable—the great Harry Bastable—had understood—?

  ‘Grandpa? Grandpa?’

  Or in the road? Or in the dust beside the cart, when that other old heart had missed a beat, crushed by the concussion of the bombs, or by fear or by desolation at the loss of home and husband, or by all that addition of calamities, which it was incapable of withstanding—?

  ‘Grandma? Grandma? Grandma!’

  It didn’t matter now.

  She would get in the way—and that mattered.

  She would be a burden. Escaping the Germans was bad enough, but to be saddled with a child as well—he could recall vividly how little Alice had weighed him down, and how glad he had been to be rid of her at last—but to be saddled with a child was an unfair burden. She might be the very difference, the last straw of the burden, which held them back and betrayed them.

>   But it didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any choice any more than there had been a choice leaving little Alice crying by the roadside. He hated it, and he hated the damned child, and it was stupid, and he despised himself for the irrational sentimentality of it—there must be hundreds of children like this one—bloody hundreds of them— children lost, or left behind, or orphaned—bloody hundreds of them—and this one was only ene more among them … and maybe one of the lucky ones at that, because she was still alive, and because someone would look after her, sooner or later.

  So what he was about to do certainly didn’t make any sense.

  But it didn’t matter: there still wasn’t any choice.

  He couldn’t reach her quickly enough. Even before he was within arm’s reach of her he opened his arms to her. Then she was in them again, and holding him tightly again, and sharing her fear and her need with him.

  For a moment her hair was in his face, obscuring the view until he shifted one hand to press her head gently against his shoulder.

  Nothing had changed outside. There was Wimpy, standing awkwardly on one-and-a-half feet, and there was the German officer; and beyond them there was the group of officers beside the staff car, still engrossed in their argument; and behind them, on the roadway, the dust and the din rose together from moving vehicles and marching men in an endless single-file.

  Nothing had changed. For an instant Bastable forgot everything else in the sickened realization that this was the enemy—this was the German Army—and that he was still a helpless spectator, a fugitive from a defeated army.

  No! He tightened his grip on the child. No! It was impossible that it could happen like this. This was only one corner of the battlefield, and he wouldn’t believe it—he must force himself not to believe it, never to believe it!

  He could hear the guns in the distance, and his head ached, and he was bone-weary.

  The German officer looked at him briefly, just one quick dismissive glance, and then turned back to Wimpy, raising his hand to the brim of his cap.