The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  In one office a whole wall was devoted to mugshots of kids. Viessmann was especially proud of this display. They were the ones who had found homes, either with middle-class Kurdish families or in the West with foster parents.

  Vaughan did his best to ask questions, and was met with answers that pointed out the obvious, until he asked how running a multinational business related to what he was doing at the camp. At this, Viessmann was transformed. His imperiousness deserted him, and he was reduced to an enthusiastic babble: ‘A young mind is a healthy mind,’ he said. ‘Businesses have to learn how to realign themselves for the twenty-first century, providing care as well as nuturing profit.’ He advocated the study of children in group activity to promote his theory of business as play. Children were good motivators and organisers, he said, much less inclined to boredom, and up to a certain age nonexclusive. Viessmann the pedagogue: what we can learn from the little ones.

  I thought of my grandchildren. Bored and whiny. Demanding. Divisive. Given to squabbling on a level that would impress the Balkans. Incapable of amusing themselves. Hostile.

  Recognition was not instant, as I had been expecting. When it came, it was a real shock and quite unexpected, a combination of a shaft of sunlight coming through the window and the particular angle of Viessmann’s head at that moment. It was not Willi Schmidt that I read into Viessmann but Beate. It was her I saw in him.

  Did I faint? According to Vaughan, I stood up and fell over. Then I was in a sanatorium-like room with half a dozen beds and too weak to get up.

  My first visitor was Viessmann, playing the concerned host. He laid a dry hand on my brow and asked if I shouldn’t be flown to another place with better facilities. I wondered about that because the room I was in already had what looked like a lot of expensive medical equipment. Viessmann said that many of the children they found needed treatment.

  We then embarked on a surreal conversation, starting with my asking if he was Beate’s father. He didn’t miss a beat. He said he had no children apart from the ones I saw here. He said the special quality of the local air made for lightheadedness and poor judgement. I looked for signs of guile and found none (saw only Viessmann and nothing of Beate now). Every question he met with expert deflection: Betty Monroe he admitted to knowing, no more; Carswell was Beate’s former husband, no more; Karl-Heinz he passed on, without a pause. ‘I am sorry I don’t know that name.’

  ‘Willi Schmidt,’ I said. Viessmann turned and looked at me. Not a glimmer, not even a chink. ‘I was pretty sure Willi Schmidt was a friend we had in common.’ I said it slowly.

  He repeated the name, sounding as if he was saying it for the first time. ‘No,’ he decided.

  He offered me something to help me sleep. I declined and asked for Vaughan. He told me Vaughan had gone for provisions with one of the trucks. The news scared me. He paused by the door and again offered me a sedative, then asked, ‘Who was this Willi Schmidt?’

  The first betrayal of curiosity. Mischief made me bold. ‘Willi was the most interesting man I ever met. A pity you didn’t know him.’

  A truck came in the evening. Through the window I saw Viessmann in the compound talking to armed men in plain clothes. They stayed fifteen minutes before driving off. I imagined Viessmann telling them where they could find Vaughan. I imagined Viessmann shooting me full of something while I slept to ensure I didn’t wake up. Willi Schmidt’s casual remark in Strasbourg as he had prepared to shoot me: ‘It’s making me hard doing this,’ said in an offhand way, with an air of pleasure and mild surprise, that old delight in himself. ‘Go fuck yourself, Willi,’ I had told him, and he chided me for my lack of originality.

  Viessmann found me stumbling around the compound in the dark and guided me back to bed. I felt old and impotent mocked by the memory of Willi’s curiosity at his own tumescence, and tired to death. I asked Viessmann what the camp had by way of entertainment. He looked as though the word didn’t exist in his book. Would he show me where helived? I asked Viessmann, man of manners, too polite to refuse. His living quarters included a sitting room with armchairs. I didn’t think he would have any drink, but he produced a bottle of Scotch, raised his glass, and said ‘Cheers!’

  We asked polite questions of each other. He did not wince when I told him of my suburban Floridian background, but I sensed distaste. He had a house, as I had guessed, in the hills of Buda. Before that he had lived in Locarno. He confirmed that he was executive director of a pharmaceutical concern, based in Switzerland but in the process of relocating to Malaysia. I asked about the Kurds bombing his factory and was surprised by his answer: ‘They were quite right. These are practices that must be stopped.’ The First World could not continue to exploit the less fortunate in the way that it had.

  Did the rebels know that he was the man whose factory they had bombed? I asked. Yes, he said. He had talked to them about it and now employed Kurdish doctors to ensure that there was no more malpractice.

  We had drunk most of the Scotch, yet Viessmann remained so sober that he was able to refute anything I threw at him.

  I asked how he managed to look so fit and young. Diet, yoga, and exercise, he said. And plastic surgery, I wanted to add. Viessmann didn’t have Willi’s teeth. I had expected more tension between us. I had expected him to give off something, some scent that let me know he knew I was on to him. But he looked as if he had done years of controlled breathing and could take any lie detector test.

  He asked about my sickness. I said it was undiagnosed. I had run away before the tests could be done. ‘It could be nothing, or it could be galloping through me. Unlike you, I have treated my body abysmally.’

  ‘Are you afraid of death, Mr Hoover?’

  It was the first time he had called me by name. I didn’t like the way he placed it directly after the word death.

  ‘Foolish not to be,’ I said.

  Viessmann stared at me, unfathomable. The lights of an approaching vehicle moved across the room.

  ‘That’ll be Mr Vaughan and the others with the supplies,’ said Viessmann.

  I stood up, drunk and dizzy. Viessmann said I should get some sleep. I said we called it insomnia where I came from.

  Vaughan

  TURKEY

  HOOVER WAS DRUNK AND DEPRESSED. Viessmann was uncrackable, he said. He was angry with me for going off. ‘You could have said no,’ he said.

  But my trip had given me a chance to question the two young women who had gone along with me. In fact, they told me nothing. They were unencumbered and cheerful. They got to look after children and drive around in four-wheel vehicles. Greta was Danish, and Astrid was German. They were bland and middle-class, polite and without curiosity, trusting and uncritical. We had driven a hundred miles to a food depot, loaded up, and come back. After forty miles we had exhausted our conversation. The girls were hazy on the nature of the local conflict. They had trouble grasping the statelessness of the Kurds and their consequent persecution by their host governments in Iraq and Turkey. ‘They are like cuckoos!’ Most of the helpers stayed only about two months, on account of the remoteness. Nearly all of them had ended up there through word-of-mouth while travelling.

  Dora they knew of. Dora had worked in the office. I had expected to find mention of her name reassuring, but it had sounded quite alien. For the first time I understood Hoover’s real dilemma. He was hanging on to something that wasn’t there, something that Willi Schmidt, dead or alive, had relinquished long ago. Either way, Willi was gone.

  For a long time Hoover lay staring at the ceiling, saying nothing. He seemed obscurely afraid, in some deep way he could not articulate, and was beyond consolation, afraid both of the conscious world and of his unconscious mind.

  I had to wait till very late before he drifted into sleep. On leaving I checked out of the window. All the lights in the camp were off. The generator was switched off. There was a deep silence. The stars outside were the brightest I had ever seen.

  Children slept peacefully. Toys lay stacked nea
tly in the toy room. There was a games room for the adults, with table tennis. Beyond the games room, the kitchen. Everything was in order and made perfect sense, yet on another level none at all. Why weren’t the kids being looked after by their own people? Why were no Kurdish adults present?

  In Viessmann’s sitting room I found a few esoteric paperbacks and books on business analysis. Two glasses and a bottle of Scotch were on a table. In the corner stood an old cabinet, with doors and a lid, which turned out to be an ancient record player, an old wind-up gramophone, the likes of which I had not seen in years. I idly wound the handle and watched the dusty turntable turning, hearing the old music. Count Basie. Billie Holiday. Duke Ellington.

  Jazz records from the 1940s. Willi Schmidt’s jazz.

  I felt that old skin scrawl on the back of the neck which accompanies any unpleasant discovery, until recently associated entirely with Dora.

  There in the cabinet cupboard I found what remained of Willi Schmidt.

  Willi’s records. Old 78s that had somehow survived breakage. Konrad Viessmann had shed everything of Willi except his records. Willi’s records in Konrad’s cupboard.

  I wanted to wake Hoover, but another clue, registered subconsciously, lurked just out of reach; not a conversation or a remark. I went back to the office. Everything was still. I drank a Scotch and stared at the photographs of the children on the wall and wondered about them. They were all the same age, for a start. Why not eight- or ten-year-olds? Why not girls?

  A light went on. It was Viessmann, on the case, looking as if his being there was the most normal thing in the world. He was dressed and alert. I asked what time it was. He said it would be dawn soon. I told him I hadn’t been able to sleep. He regarded me with an intense and hostile irony. We both ignored the pistol he was holding.

  I looked again at Viessmann and asked myself: What if they were all mad? What if Viessmann was as mad as Himmler and Karl-Heinz, not mad in the usual everyday way, but deeply, historically mad?

  I turned to the photographs on the wall. Childhood memories of early Bible stories flickered in my mind’s eye. The flight to Egypt and the massacre of the innocents, in which King Herod killed all children under the age of two years in the certainty that one of them had to be the son of God. Viessmann stared at me. He looked expectant. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, knew I should keep my mouth shut and look after Hoover and make sure we got out alive, walking if we had to.

  I said it anyway, knowing what it meant. I turned and pointed at the wall of photographs and said, ‘You’re looking for the Chosen One.’

  Vaughan

  TURKEY

  THEY BURIED ME IN a black box. With enough room to lie down. The only sound was the hoarse noise of my own panic. Terror rolled in, unstoppable. The first dull moments of consciousness giving way to a body rush of panic.

  Pushing upwards with both hands I could make the briefest chink of light appear. Buried alive: you drool and howl and cry for any form of human company, even the worst would be better than such stark isolation. You cramp. You make up stories: you are in a bunk in a dark room; you can get up and move around any time, it’s just you choose not to. Before Viessmann coshed me with his pistol butt, I had asked him not to hurt the old man, because he was dying, and felt ashamed calling Hoover an old man. I remembered Viessmann’s grunt as he swung his arm.

  Like a surfacing dream, the images hold only a moment before you are back in fucked time. This dark box is it. Even if they let you out, you will carry the box in your head as long as you live.

  They are inventive in their cruelty. I was allowed out at night. The rattle of unlocking, followed by the longest silence. I pushed the lid up. No one around. A dusty circle and darkness. A bowl of food and water some yards off. Stones uncomfortable on bare feet. The only warning, a soft scuffle before the dogs flew out of the night, savage-fanged beasts with crazed eyes.

  Fear multiplies. The heart hammers. The dogs leap. Two beasts big enough to rip a man apart.

  But the dogs halt, as if frozen. They are tethered. They attack relentlessly, stopping you reaching the food, a margin of inches. Their frustration mounts the more they strain. The box would be better than this, you think as you stand there, a basilisk of fear.

  The first time, the dogs withdrew when someone started taking pot shots into the night, a signal that time outside was over. I grabbed the food and scurried back. The second time I crawled back into the box voluntarily. The third time I didn’t come out.

  Fear is not linear. It is a state that is both constant and in waiting. Fear is not articulate. It is the antithesis of words, beyond proper description. Language can only approximate fear. Language is the start of countering fear. Fear is easily taught. It is infectious. Carswell’s wish: to create a virus out of fear. He told me.

  Terror is not quantifiable. There is nothing to distinguish one person’s terror from another’s. Terror is invasive and all-consuming. Terror and fear are individual to the sufferer, while negating that person’s individuality. The rest, to paraphrase Hoover, is just talk shows and ambulance chasing.

  They slowly let me join their world. We were in a detention camp. More prefab huts, barbed wire, and signs clear in any language: Beware, mines. The camp had the rough economy of a child’s drawing. See, it said, this is all we need to break you: makeshift buildings and large, cruel open spaces, designed for a primitive malevolence. The scale of the place was not immediately apparent. The vast emptiness all around was more so—a brutal landscape under a cloudless sky, both stripped of any softening features.

  I was let out of the box by two men with machine pistols, who took me into the rocky wilderness outside the camp, gave me a shovel, and made me dig. The inference was obvious. I dug slowly, hoping they might grow bored or change their minds.

  In a situation like this, you fail to create a distance between yourself and what is happening. You hope you will not be as afraid as you know you will be. You try and think of nothing, a blank for the blankness to come. Other times your brain struggles with a ferocious energy that reminds you of the leaping dogs.

  It turns out you are there only as a punchline for their joke. They make you kneel down before the open hole and shoot you. Except they miss. Put the bullet past your head. Then they see if you are still capable of standing up and walking away.

  Sometimes they did that two or three times a day. My job was not without purpose. The graves got used anyway.

  Then one day the guards took me instead to another part of the camp. I tried to equate this change with hope, as much as my precarious self-control would permit. We passed into another fenced-off compound where a large building of several storeys was being hastily constructed. This rapid building programme was a combination of rickety wooden scaffolds, low-tech construction, high-tech equipment, and brutalised forced labour. Any clumsiness resulted in a pistol whipping. The beaten prisoner would lie where he had fallen, an obvious object of contempt to everyone for having been too stupid to avoid punishment.

  Our destination was an area beyond the site sectioned off by heavy security, including a network of surveillance cameras, which twisted and rotated on top of their perches like mechanical crows. Compared with the chaos of the site, there appeared to be nothing going on here. The cameras supervised order and emptiness. The area consisted of a dozen or so of the ubiquitous prefabricated huts arranged in a neat grid, with paths in between. I glimpsed the occasional discreet professional presence. Two young men wearing white medical coats escorted two children by the hand. In a refuse section I saw a Chinese woman emptying slops and thought of Frankfurt.

  After the degradation I had been subjected to, the warmth and order of the hut into which I was shown was almost too much. I experienced a flashback to Sol describing being escorted to see Karl-Heinz and Willi for the first time. Two men were waiting. They were in their thirties, professionals dressed in civilian clothes. I stood there, deferential, with bowed head, not daring to look up; how quickly you learned.
One wore Timberlands. The boots looked like something from a lost world.

  The Timberlands man spoke a little English. They needed an opinion, he said. They had been told I was English. In the background a woman worked at a console. I felt shamed in her presence, not that it mattered as she did not even look up.

  The Timberlands man showed me some technical drawings which had been supplied by an English contractor. They appeared to be the wrong drawings. At the bottom the company address was Bury St Edmunds. I stared dumbly at the three words, which no longer made any sense, on their own or together.

  Extraordinarily, they told me to speak to the supplier. I even dialled the number myself, and there followed a disconcerting two-minute conversation where I spoke first to a nasal-voiced receptionist, then to an undermotivated executive named Tibbit. Here was Middle England at its most resentful; a cure for any homesickness.

  The muddle over the drawings was ungraciously admitted. The ones that had been sent were meant for a heating system and two industrial boilers somewhere in Russia. No translation had been sent, either.

  The Timberlands man fretted in the background. He looked afraid that someone would reprimand him for the mistake.

  I was told the correct drawings would be faxed straight away for reference, with the originals forwarded by courier. As I tried to take in these mundane details I wondered if they had any idea in Bury St Edmunds where their product ended up. I asked Tibbit what the proper drawings were for.

  Crematoria.

  I put the phone down very slowly. A guard was summoned to take me back.

  I was being led down a path between the huts when a man hurried out of a door just up ahead. At first I thought he was another of the white-coated doctors, but his uniform was different. The top was tight fitting and waisted.