Fireshadow
Page 3
The old Vinnie would have made the walk without stopping to look at a rock pool. The old Vinnie wouldn’t have been here in the first place. More likely down at the Galleria, hanging with his mates, eyeing girls and making a lot of noise – drawing attention to himself. He’d be making plans for the weekend with Marie or one of the others. Dancing until the small hours, late night coffee with the gang on the way home . . .
A water insect swerved its erratic way across the pool, landing here and there on the quicksilver of the water itself, its miniscule weight changing the surface tension just enough to make his reflected face swell and stretch. The old Vinnie didn’t have that red welt of shame running from his neck, below his chin, up the right side of his face and nose, under his eye and back to where his ear was a twist of skin and cartilage. The old Vinnie was dead.
This new Vinnie, who stared back from the greeny-grey surface of the water, this was a different person. No, perhaps not person, not even certain of that yet. A different creature. This was something new, something without a place, without friends. A creature whose very image was a reminder of all that the old Vinnie had despised – fear, cowardice, shame. This was a being who could embrace isolation, who chased silence.
A rock eased into his searching hand, and the hated image shattered into a thousand rippling shards. Vinnie turned back to the path.
Here on the other side of the creek the forest seemed to draw in and the path narrowed to a thin trail not much wider than his shoulders, running between a swamp-like clump of ti-trees. The trail was straight, raised slightly off the marshy ground on a causeway of piled earth and lined with decaying railway sleepers. It was firm and easy to walk on.
The end of the trail was only a couple of hundred metres up a slight hill, an arrangement of gates and fences marking the entrance to the old prisoner-of-war camp.
June 1943
‘Erich, would you mind passing the antiseptic?’
The query, like all the doctor’s requests, was uttered quietly and Erich took the large brown bottle down from its shelf in the dispensary cupboard and passed it without comment.
‘Thank you.’
The infirmary fell again into silence, broken only by the soft crackle of the pot-belly stove. Outside, the rain fell in sheets, as it had for three days now, turning the parade ground to mud and soaking anyone caught out in it for more than a couple of seconds. Already the camp hospital was busy with cases of colds and mild influenza.
‘Steady now.’ The doctor’s voice was reassuring. The patient, a burly private who had sliced his leg open with an axe, swore in German as the sharp sting of the reddish-brown liquid bit into the wound.
‘He doesn’t speak English, Herr Doctor.’
‘I know, Erich, but sometimes the actual words aren’t important, it’s the way that you say them.’
Erich didn’t reply, just as he didn’t respond to most of Doctor Alexander’s musings. Instead, he checked the fire, finding it low and the hopper out of logs.
‘I will need to get some more wood.’
‘That’s fine, Erich.’
Stepping out, Erich shivered as the cold slammed through his thin uniform. Despite the rain and dropping temperature he still refused, even after a week, to wear any of the crimson Australian issue uniform. At first the doctor had tried to persuade him.
‘At least wear the coat, Erich, or you’ll end up in here as a patient, and I can’t afford that.’
But Erich knew that his silent resistance sent a message to everyone, Australian and German alike, that despite his age he wasn’t the sort who would bow to pressure in the face of the enemy. Never. Unlike some others, he wasn’t about to surrender simply because he’d been captured.
During his first couple of days the other men had passed remarks, commenting on his youth and pride, but on each occasion he’d simply fixed them with a cold stare and refused to be drawn by their stirring. The novelty had rapidly worn off and he’d soon been left alone.
The wood pile was under a tarpaulin behind the mess hall. Erich ran through the sleeting rain, enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs after the claustrophobic fogginess of the hospital. Water sluiced in icy streams down the back of his uniform and shocked him with its touch, but he revelled in the intensity of it, in the living power of the storm. In many ways the orderly position was a good one. The hospital was one of the few camp buildings that was heated and insulated against the invasive cold, and the doctor seemed a reasonable character, if a little staid.
Lightning flickered somewhere a few miles distant and the overcast was lit briefly. It was the middle of the day but so gloomy with thick, low clouds that the perimeter lights had been switched on, and through the rain no-man’s-land bathed in the ethereal glow usually reserved for darkness.
At the timber pile he pulled back the tarpaulin and retrieved a couple of large logs, shoving them into the front of his jacket to keep them as dry as possible during the short sprint back.
‘You there!’
The day grew suddenly brighter and Erich found himself caught in the sharp glare of one of the tower spotlights. Through the rain a voice floated, tinny and amplified.
‘Stay right there.’
The light stayed unwaveringly upon him, and a green figure in an Australian uniform detached itself from the gloom near the compound gate and hurried through the mud, rifle held ready.
‘Whatcha think you’re doing?’
Erich recognised the guard as the young one who called the names through the megaphone at morning roll. He didn’t answer, waiting until the guard was standing right before him.
‘You speak English?’
‘Ja.’
‘Right. So what are you doing here? Stealing wood?’
‘Not stealing. For the stove in the hospital. The doctor sent me.’
The guard snorted. A few tufts of red hair sprouted from under the brim of his slouch hat. Erich could see a smattering of pimples dotting his chin.
‘Not likely, mate. He always sends Domenico for this sort of thing.’
‘I am his new orderly. Domenico is back in the forest chopping wood, and has been for a week.’
The guard’s eyes narrowed.
‘You better watch how you speak to me, Fritz.’
The insult drew no response and the two stood eyeing one another in the rain, Erich acutely aware of the Australian fingering the trigger-guard of his rifle. He drew upon all of his self-control. No fear. Not in the face of the enemy.
‘Come on.’ The guard waved his rifle at the hospital. ‘Let’s check your story out, and you better not try anything. Understand?’
Erich trudged back through the mud, up the steps, and into the infirmary. The guard, rifle levelled at the middle of his back, followed.
If the doctor was at all surprised to have an armed guard follow Erich into the room, he didn’t show it.
‘Thomas. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘This bloke was nicking wood from the pile.’
‘Not at all, Thomas. This is Erich, my new orderly.’
The boy threw a sullen look at the far end of the room, where Erich had dumped the timber into the hopper and was busying himself re-stoking the fire.
‘Wasn’t informed about no new orderly.’
‘I’m sure the paperwork has been held up somewhere in administration, Thomas. You know how things are around here. You can take my word for it, though. Erich is simply doing as I asked.’
‘If you say.’ Thomas seemed reluctant to let it go.
‘I do say.’
The boy turned to leave, but the doctor stopped him. ‘And Thomas . . .’
‘What?’
‘I’d consider it a personal favour if you wouldn’t bring a loaded rifle into the hospital in future.’
‘Can’t leave it outside. Regulations.’
The door slammed and the guard was gone.
‘I’m terribly sorry about that, Erich. Thomas is only young, and at times can tend to be a little . . . enthusiastic. He’s really not a bad boy, for all that.’
Erich shrugged.
The man on the bed moaned again and Doctor Alexander returned his attention to his patient. Standing by the fire to dry out and warm up, Erich considered the look in the young guard’s eyes and wasn’t so certain.
Four
Vinnie
The morning heat grew strangely muted as Vinnie weaved between the crumbling remnants of the old prison camp. Very little remained, just some concrete foundations and a few low stone walls. Grass covered the clear areas of ground, but much was already tangled and overgrown. The old town site, where he had camped, seemed shunned by the forest, but the same was not true here. Jarrah saplings, already well on the way to two-hundred-year adulthood, were interspersed among the ruins, bringing with them clumps of dappled shade and undergrowth and attendant wildlife. Tiny birds picked and hopped, and the buzz and drone of insects played a constant background to the morning.
A quiet unease edged into his mind as he walked. This place had a sense about it. Once he wouldn’t have been aware of it, but now there it was, a fluttering awareness, unsettling the calm he was chasing.
At one corner of the camp the stump of a jarrah that had once served as a guard tower stood alone in a clearing. The tree itself was long dead, its life severed when its crown was cut off to leave a base for a platform, years since removed. Still, the trunk had endured, had kept solemn vigil over the departure and decay of the camp. Its wood was marked in the places where iron rungs had once been hammered into the living timber.
Men lived here, thought Vinnie, studying the tower. Lived and worked and died here, in the bush, and the real prison wasn’t the rows of wire and the spotlights and the armed guards. The real prison was the forest itself. He studied it; pressing in, always there, beyond the perimeter, alive, dark and threatening.
A cloud drifted across the face of the sun, and the sharp relief of the morning faded into haziness. In Vinnie’s imagination young men, soldiers of foreign armies, marched through the muddy trails of the Australian forest, cowed and startled by its brooding atmosphere.
Under a clump of scrub at the far end of the camp a blackened, unnatural mass caught his attention, almost missed in the quiet of the morning. Coils and coils of rusted barbed wire, lay exactly where they had been cast years ago, entwined and entangled now with native thorn creepers. The years had dulled the shine of the steel, pitted it with oxidised craters, but the knotted spikes still looked sharp, vicious.
Crouching, Vinnie stretched a hesitant finger. The skin of his fingertips was still soft and pink and the spike left a small impression, a gentle dimple in the tender new flesh, and briefly Vinnie was a modern sleeping beauty, pricked by a spindle of darkness and falling into a cavern of sleep – descending through layers of thought and feeling into a dark cell of night – waiting for someone who would wake him and bring him back into the world, into a proper life, out from this half-world of shadows.
It took some seconds for Vinnie to shake off the despair, to return to the world of the real. There were no fairytale spirits here. All that lingered in this place were the passing hopes of the men who had been brought here, lived for a while, and, in the way of things, moved on.
Making his way back towards the trail, a patch of mossy ground stood out from the surrounding brush. A carpet in a small, shaded clearing that the forest had still not reclaimed, right at the edge of the site. Something about the velvety smudge of dark green was incongruous and Vinnie tried to work out exactly what.
The sun emerged, the shallow contours of the ground fell again into perspective and Vinnie saw it clearly. The moss grew in the shape of a large heart – perfect in form and symmetry. It was not natural. The earth here had been shaped by human hands, and now that the image was clear Vinnie could see the remains of the rock border that had once bounded it.
Strange to think that in this secluded corner of the bush someone had laboured to create this shape. For what purpose? As a symbol of lost love? Someone left behind, or killed in the war? Or was it just an attempt to introduce something recognisable into this alien landscape – some reminder of the familiar shapes and sights of a European homeland? Walking back along the trail to his camp site, Vinnie turned this mystery over in his mind.
The end of the trail loomed with unexpected speed, like the end of a long green tunnel. Reaching it, Vinnie was startled again by the unusual silence that pervaded here, but he was alarmed when that silence was broken, suddenly and harshly, by the lilt of disembodied voices, floating across the clearing like smoke in the morning air.
August 1943
‘Doctor, what is this word?’
Erich carried the ageing medical textbook to the desk, indicating with his finger the unfamiliar term.
‘Cauterise, Erich. It is when you use a hot iron or flames to literally burn the infection out of a wound. It’s something we have to do occasionally, and also when we desperately need to stop some bleeding.’
For the last few days, at the doctor’s suggestion, Erich had been spending his spare time reading from the old medical texts that were kept on a small shelf behind the doctor’s desk.
‘It sounds primitive.’
‘Much of modern surgery is based on primitive techniques, don’t forget that. In any case, you should remember that fire can be a strikingly effective antiseptic measure, if nothing else is available. Very few diseases can survive extreme temperature. Sometimes burning is all you can do.’
Erich offered no further comment as he returned to his seat by the fire. The rain had lifted and the sun glistened wet on smoky green leaves. After a week of constant drumming on tin roofs the world seemed silent, the morning still, cold and crisp. There were no patients at the moment, and Erich found himself falling into contentment, which he knew he must resist.
‘I suspect we will be busy later, Erich.’
Doctor Alexander spoke without looking up.
‘Why?’
‘The change in the weather. It often brings accidents with it. Men get careless, distracted. Axes are swung haphazardly, footing lost in the mud. Rarely does a change like this herald good news for you and me.’
‘Should I do anything to prepare?’
The doctor considered.
‘That’s a very good suggestion. Can you prepare a tray of bandages and mix some more antiseptic?’
Erich set to the task without reply. As he rolled bandages and mixed the brown Condy’s crystals with boiling water, he could feel the old man’s eyes on his back.
‘Is something wrong, Doctor?’
‘No, not at all, Erich. I was just thinking to myself what a great deal of aptitude you show for this kind of work.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘Not at all. What do you plan to do after the war?’
‘After the war?’
‘It can’t last forever, you know.’
Erich stopped, mid-bandage, considering, reminding himself that the old man behind the desk was still his captor, the enemy.
‘I think I will wait and see who wins first, Doctor.’
‘A wise answer, Erich. But may I offer a suggestion?’
Erich said nothing.
‘Regardless of who wins, you should consider most carefully joining the medical profession. A young man with your intelligence and ability could do a great deal for the world.’
‘I don’t think so, Doctor.’
Thoughts of after the war, of home, were dangerous. Already, after only a few weeks of camp life, Erich had seen what happened to men who let themselves become caught up
in dreams of home and of peace. They became complacent, domesticated, sacrificing their pride for a quiet life. They stopped fighting. Men like Stutt and Günter were now little more than lapdogs for the Australians and English. Men with no honour.
‘And why not?’
Erich considered the best reply. ‘Because I suspect that my father would not approve.’
‘Why on earth not? It is a very respectable profession for a young man, I would have thought.’
‘My father has other plans for me.’
Erich pictured the stern figure of his father, striking and severe in his brown Wehrmacht uniform. He recalled the pride that had tempered his father’s anger at the discovery that his eldest son had lied his way into the military, deceived his way into his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. For generations, Erich’s family had supplied officers to the Kaisers, and Erich was certain that it would be impossible for his father to consider any path but a military one for his only son.
‘And what plans are they?’
‘He will want me to follow his path.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He . . .’ Erich stopped himself just in time. In the companionable warmth of the hospital he had almost allowed himself to be lulled into giving information, important information, to this man, this enemy.
‘. . . he is in business.’
The explanation sounded weak, suspicious even to Erich, but the doctor, twisting at his moustache, seemed to accept it.
‘That is a pity, Erich, because I believe you would make a fine doctor someday.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘In the meantime, however, I would still like you to study these books. For purely selfish reasons, I’m afraid, because the more you know of anatomy and medicine, the more use you will be to me.’