The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  ‘I’ve got my own car.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the red monster I saw you drive up in.’ He followed her outside and dutifully admired the sleek lines of the Alpine. They talked about styling, gears and engine capacity for a few minutes before parting like strangers.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Got any batteries?’ was Leila’s greeting next morning. She was shaking an ancient transistor radio whose cracked casing, like most of her other possessions, was accidentally daubed with oil paint in several colours.

  There was a burst of France Inter news as she hit the radio and jolted a loose solder joint. She put the tranny down carefully beside her easel, talking to it like a dog. ‘There now. Stay still and don’t move.’

  To Jay, she confided: ‘Machines are like men. To make them work, you havta know where to hit.’

  She seated herself at the easel in front of a painting of the village of St Martin in blues and greys under lowering storm clouds.

  ‘Winter landscape,’ she sniffed into a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s powerful,’ said Jay.

  ‘That’s the sort of remark friends make when they mean: I don’t like it. Oh hell, why should you? I don’t know if I do yet. Do you want coffee? Help yourself.’

  Leila picked up her palette. ‘It’s in that red pot on the stove. Chuck another log in the fire while you’re there. And how was your night of love?’

  Jay rinsed a cup from the crowded sink and poured herself a coffee. It was never obvious when Leila expected a reply to the questions she broadcast in all directions. ‘That picture on the easel wasn’t there yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘I lied.’ Leila squeezed paint from a nearly empty tube. ‘I didn’t come back here to eat aspirins and feel sorry for myself. I left because I couldn’t take any more of that intense gazing into each other’s eyes that you and Merlin were indulging in. I spent the night painting.’

  ‘You’ve been working all night?’

  ‘You’re saying all the things that get up an artist’s nose.’ Leila sat back on her stool and stared at the canvas. ‘I wanted to capture the light during that break in the storm yesterday afternoon when I was walking along the tow-path with Merlin.’

  The words cued a déjà vu. It was a while since Jay had had one. And they were always such trivial moments: the cup of coffee in her hand … the picture on the easel … Leila turning on the stool, palette and brush in hand and saying: ‘… along the tow-path with Merlin.’

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’ Leila stared at Jay.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I never know with you. Your musician’s pallor worries me. You ought to get outside more and collect some free vitamin D. I’d like to paint your portrait one day, you know. An action portrait, while you’re playing. I see you … I don’t know quite how, but not in modern clothes at all.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of medieval costumes I wear with my Early Music ensemble.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Lella’s excitement bubbled over. She lit a Gauloise and stared at Jay through the smoke, devouring the lines of her face, then stabbed a paint brush at her friend. ‘You should be wearing one of those pointed hats with muslin they used to wear then.’

  ‘A hennin. Strictly speaking, they’re rather late: fourteenth, fifteenth century, but I do have a couple.’

  ‘Is that what I call a wimple?’ asked Leila.

  ‘No, a wimple is simpler, like a nun’s veil.’

  Lella studied Jay’s face. ‘It’s a deal. Let’s do it.’ She spun back to her easel. ‘You didn’t tell me how it was with Merlin.’

  ‘Nothing to tell,’ said Jay.

  Leila bent towards the easel, intent on adding some detail with a small brush, the large one clenched between her teeth. ‘What a waste! You’re crazy. How often do you meet a dish like Merl?’

  ‘That camping car of his,’ said Jay. She watched her friend concentrate on applying the paint. ‘It wasn’t parked outside the restaurant when I drove past.’

  ‘It has wheels. That’s the idea.’

  ‘I wanted to thank him for dinner last night.’

  ‘Mm.’ The grunt was hardly audible through the two brushes now clamped between Leila’s teeth as she used a third one on the painting. ‘He’s gone to Oradour.’ She removed the brushes and dragged a mouthful of Gauloise smoke into her lungs.

  ‘Doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it?’ she exhaled and picked tobacco off her lip, leaving smudged of red oil paint decorating her chin like badly applied lipstick. ‘I forget you ignorant musicians only read what Bach and Mozart wrote. If you ever read newspapers, you’d know that one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War happened at Oradour-sur-Glane.’

  ‘I remember the name now,’ said Jay. ‘What’s Merlin doing there?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’

  He didn’t tell me anything about himself, Jay thought. He seems so open and yet he’s really quite a private person, hiding behind the questions he asks people and the stream of amusing anecdotes.

  Leila flicked the cigarette ash into the sink. ‘He’s using up some leave that’s due to him after three months of sitting out there in Saudi Arabia, covering the Gulf War. There’s a book he’s been writing for years. So he’s working on that for a few weeks. That’s what the camper’s all about. My mobile office, he calls it.’

  ‘What’s the book about?’

  ‘Massacres,’ said Leila.

  Jay recoiled. ‘Are you serious?’

  Leila dumped the cigarette end into her coffee cup. ‘Have you got a road map?’

  ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘The English,’ Leila shook her head sadly, ‘were invented on the sabbath. It was God’s day off, so He let one of the apprentices do the job, hence the missing part between the ears. Now get out of here and let me paint in peace, will you? And give my regards to Merlin.’

  ‘How did you know I’d go after him?’

  Leila put down her palette. She crossed the room and took both Jay’s hands in hers. ‘You’re a musician, Jay, you listen to people’s voices. I’m a painter, I watch their faces. Something changed in your face, the moment you met Merlin. You look different than you did before. And I think he’s the same about you, so go for it, girl.’

  *

  Jay picked her way down the street where life had stopped in mid-afternoon on 24 June 1944.

  She looked around the village of Oradour. In a workshop lay the tools abandoned where the saddler had been working when the SS arrived and cordoned off the village from the rest of the world. Next door, a carpenter’s tools lay where he had put them down in mid-task. The scales in the butcher’s shop had been weighing meat rations that afternoon until the butcher and his customers were rounded up for slaughter themselves; the useless machine now stood rusting on the counter of the shop. Outside the grocer’s shop, prams were parked where mothers had snatched their babies from under the muzzles of the rifles. And in the main square the doctor’s car was still parked where he had left it that day after arriving for a routine medical examination of the children in the little school, to find them all standing in the open air with their hands up. When the main body of troops left four hours later, all the inhabitants of Oradour, with the exception of a handful of terrified and wounded survivors, were dead: shot, battered to death, asphyxiated by smoke or simply burned alive.

  Jay shuddered. She did not need to read the details in the leaflet she was holding. Just looking at the village where the clocks had stopped forty seven years before, she could feel the echoes of horror and violence numbing her mind. It started to drizzle and she wondered whether the sun ever shone on this desolate village of the dead.

  Further along the main street was a now roofless church, where a notice board recorded the murder of 543 women and children by men who spoke their own language. Most of the SS troopers were from Alsace and Lorraine; many of the children they killed were refugees from Lorraine. Setting fire to a churchful of screaming victims, the soldiers ha
d cracked jokes with each other as they went about their hideous task that balmy June afternoon.

  Jay found Merlin in the church. He was standing before a huge mass of melted bronze. The furnace fuelled by the body fat of the hundreds of victims had generated temperatures so high that the church bell had melted and fallen like a blob of wax onto the floor below, with the iron clapper protruding intact from the shapeless mass.

  There was a pair of Pentax cameras slung around Merlin’s neck but he was not using them. He stood motionless, head bowed, beside the melted bell as though in prayer and seemed unaware of Jay’s arrival. She stepped back outside the church, leaving him to his vigil. There were no other visitors in the village. When five minutes had passed and he still had not moved, she went back into the church and walked quietly up to him. His face was haggard and seemed ten years older. He looked at her without reaction or recognition, consumed by inner conflict.

  ‘Merlin?’ Jay kept her voice low. It was both a church and shrine where they stood. ‘Are you all right?’

  He did not reply but scanned the desolate scene of the massacre with head lowered, as though the cameras were a burden made of lead. Jay was puzzled. Surely he must have seen worse things in his career as a war correspondent, or at least fresher scenes of bloodshed than this memorial to a crime half a century old? She took Merlin’s arm and tugged gently. Without bothering to protect his cameras from the rain, he let her lead him out of the church and along the tramlines of the cobbled street that led to the car park. They were halfway back when he spoke for the first time. His voice was hollow and hoarse.

  ‘I was here,’ he said. And again: ‘I was here.’

  Her face screwed up against the rain, Jay tried to follow his meaning.

  In 1944? It wasn’t possible. ‘No, Merlin,’ she said uncertainly.

  When he turned his face to her, eyes fixed on the far distance, she saw that some of the droplets running down his cheeks were not from the rain.

  ‘I … was at My Lai,’ he said.

  Chapter 6

  The chapel in the Valle de los Cantos had been stripped empty and decorated with long red banners that reached from roof to floor. On them the black swastikas stood out boldly in their white roundels. Carved into the top of the wall was the legend: Ein Führer! Ein Volk! The huge oaken table in the centre of the chapel was surrounded, like King Arthur’s round table, by twelve high-backed chairs. In front of each, instead of a place setting, was a silver dagger bearing the runes of the SS.

  Hermann Kreuz was pleased with the décor. Now that Germany was reunited, half the motto on the wall was again true. He pivoted on one heel, reading aloud the other words carved into the stone: Ich schwöre Dir, Adolf Hitler … The words of the sacred oath of the SS faded into shadow, but everyone present that evening would know them by heart. Adolf Hitler might be dead but the Führerprinzip lived on.

  Kreuz barked commands to the two guards responsible for the décor, making them level a banner here and straighten a chair there. The sound of a car horn outside brought a smile to his thin lips. Isolated by his cold intellect, he had no true friends, but once a year he enjoyed the ritual reunion with old comrades, recalling the time when they had briefly ruled more of the globe than the Romans ever conquered. That night they would sing the old songs, renew their oaths and re-dedicate themselves to an ideal greater by far, in their view, than the lily-livered democracy which had temporarily replaced it.

  The Dobermans were tied up and howling mournfully as the small convoy of dusty chauffeur-driven BMWs and Mercedes with German and Austrian number-plates drove slowly down the track into the valley. As each vehicle drew level with the checkpoint, a guard directed the driver to the correct guest house, in which were laid out a selection of the drinks and food most enjoyed by the guest in question. The television set was linked to the satellite antenna on the roof of the main house and tuned exclusively to stations ‘back home’.

  The passengers got out and stretched, enjoying the warm sunshine after the long motorway drive. The youngest were past seventy now and some considerably older. Kreuz looked twenty years younger than his guests. An almost skintight crew cut disguised the thinning of his hair. His well-massaged face and neck were nearly wrinkle-free. As each car arrived, he trotted forward in his track suit to shake another old comrade’s hand, to slap the aged shoulders and drink a toast in the open air. The guests’ glasses were filled with Veuve Cliquot champagne. Kreuz’s held sparkling mineral water; he never drank anything else.

  One after another, he evaluated the physical fitness and mental capacities of his old comrades. None of them kept anything like as fit as he did; two now walked with sticks, almost all wore glasses and several had pot bellies. Kreuz concealed his revulsion for the way they were letting themselves age. They have forgotten, he thought, that the brain controls all; fighting the physical process of ageing is but another triumph of the will.

  The yearly reunion of Das Reich had two functions. In the daytime it was the annual general meeting of a company whose assets included a dozen tourist hotels and nightclubs on the nearby Costa del Sol, plus shares in several of the new thousand-yacht marinas. Kreuz was the legal president and managing director of the company. He knew that the following day they all had a busy agenda to work through, with a huge cash-flow problem caused by the recession in tourism, aggravated by the arrival on the Costa del Sol of new money from the Arab countries, Hong Kong and Korea. But the first priority was the ritual swearing in of the new generation of Das Reich so that the spirit and ideals of the SS would walk the earth long after its founder members had been promoted to Valhalla. And that was something about which Hermann Krcuz cared very deeply.

  *

  Merlin’s camper was a rented US model. It had cruise control, a shower, a flush toilet and thermostatically controlled heating but, as Jay discovered, it did not have food. She drove to a small local supermarket for supplies and then headed south to a campsite which the checkout girl had thought was open in winter. On the journey along the bank of the winding River Glane she made repeated checks in her rear-view mirror to make sure that Merlin’s huge vehicle was still lumbering along behind.

  He did not speak while she prepared the meal, but sat immobile and grey-faced at the table. Mentally Jay compared this behaviour with the engaging, outgoing man with whom she had dined the previous evening. In the hard light of the overhead fluorescent tubes, she noticed odd lines in Merlin’s face that were not from smiling or laughing. Inside the self-assured, handsome television reporter with the toothpaste smile, was another Merlin Freeman very different from the man the viewers knew.

  They ate in silence: ham and eggs, washed down with a bottle of the local red wine, followed by bread and cheese. Merlin chewed the food automatically and without apparent appetite. When Jay had finished, she reversed the roles they had played in St Denis and placed her hand very lightly on his. ‘You made me talk a lot about myself yesterday, Merlin. It’s my turn to ask the questions tonight.’

  He was eating the American way, using a fork in his right hand. He stabbed the fork at her and said harshly, ‘Reporter’s caveat: answers can damage your mental health.’

  Jay searched his eyes. She could read nothing there. ‘I’ll take that risk,’ she said.

  Merlin waited. What is it about Jay? he wondered. To her, I won’t lie. Is it because she’s tough enough to take it? Or is there something else?

  ‘Wasn’t that the real you, last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he mocked her. ‘The amusing, cynical correspondent, that’s me.’

  ‘Well, was that the real you in the church?’

  He was silent.

  ‘I’m not much good at asking questions,’ she said. ‘You could help.’

  ‘Unfortunately I’m not much good at giving answers.’

  There was a pause while she sought some clue in his face.

  ‘Leila told me you’re writing a book about massacres.’

  ‘The book of massa
cres,’ he said.

  Jay thought how much more easily Leila would have pried her way towards the truth. It had never been her nature to intrude on other people’s privacy, but in Merlin’s case she felt that there was both a right and an obligation to do so. It was something to do with that first moment of recognition on the river bank – like a debt to be repaid, but she could not quite put a finger on it.

  ‘You said you were at My Lai,’ she began.

  ‘So what’s the next question?’ Merlin interrupted her harshly, wanting to get it over with.

  ‘Did you kill people there?’

  Merlin glanced up at Jay’s face then lowered his eyes again.

  She had to know now: ‘Women and children?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He waited for her to reject his hand that was stained with blood. Instead, he saw and felt Jay’s fingers curl and grip his wrist with a firm pressure.

  Saving a drowning man, was the image in her mind. Hold on, Jay. Don’t let go of him. ‘Then the book is a kind of atonement,’ she suggested.

  ‘Jesus!’ Merlin jerked his hand away from hers and stood up. ‘Do you think atoning is that easy? You sound like some cheap shrink telling me to talk about it and it’ll go away.’

  He was shouting now. ‘That My Lai shit wasn’t some bad dream! It was a walk in hell we took that day.’

  Jay watched him pacing around the camper. ‘But what’s the good of reminding yourself again and again? It was a long time ago, Merlin. You must have been a kid.’

  ‘I was nineteen.’

  He took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. ‘Look. I want to explore in print what it is that makes these things happen, Jay. What we looked at this afternoon was a rare excess – a fortissimo extravaganza, in musical terms. A festival of violence. But massacres on a smaller scale happen all the time.’

  He pulled a pile of research papers from the shelf above Jay’s head and unfolded a map on the table between them. ‘See these places marked in red? There are over a thousand sites in France alone where civilians were deliberately killed during the Occupation: a few Jews, or a dozen members of the local Resistance rounded up and just blown away. There’s nothing rare about a massacre, believe me. You have to understand that the men who did that,’ he jerked his head in the direction of the village of death, ‘were not inhuman. What they did was uniquely human because no beasts do it.’