*
Upstream The beginning of the end was an unmistakable bad smell. It stinks of cow shit, Heinzl said. It did. They had just finished yet another night shift in the laundry and from the other side of the ventilation grid they heard mooing cattle and something sounding like large wagon wheels grinding across the cobbles outside. From one of the windows in the stairwell, they looked out over the exercise yard and it looked like a marketplace, packed full of wagons loaded with every kind of furniture. Between them, cows, goats and pigs ambled about. Where the prisoners used to line up, someone had placed a fodder bin full of hay and a long tin tub that served as a water trough. They later learnt that Soviet companies had reached the edge of Münchendorf and the local farmers had spent the whole night trying to move themselves and their animals to safety. The decision to evacuate the prison must also have been taken that night. The order went from room to room: all prisoners were to line up in the yard. They had to stand along one wall, all three hundred and sixty-nine of them, hardly anyone above the age of twenty, packed so closely together that they had to contract their back muscles not to touch each other. The day was bitterly cold, with a strong wind driving rain showers that felt like hail against their faces. Above them, an armour-plated sky, covered with heavy, leaden clouds. After about half an hour, the prison governor, accompanied by two officials, came outside. He was in full uniform. Adrian had never seen him like his. It was hard to work out what he was saying, above the wind and the rumbling of the penned-in cattle and the shouting of the soldiers who were trying to inch two covered trucks towards the main gate (the drivers sounded the horns and hung outside the side windows screaming at the cows, who took no notice). Adrian picked up only a few words but remembers that the prison governor held a pair of black leather gloves and was slapping them nervously against his Sam Browne belt while he might have been speaking about heroic courage and the invincibility of the Germanic peoples and so forth. They had heard that kind of thing many times before. He also spoke of the delinquent prisoners who had shamed the native land. However, despite their evil deeds, he wasn’t leaving them to their fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks but would transfer them to safety. To the last man, he said. Or, anyway: in so far as he was able. Or, he might have said something quite different because now the wind was fierce and strong enough to tear the fodder bin from its wooden supports and send it tumbling across the cobbled yard. The noise was so violent it hit the shaved juvenile necks like a blow. When the hand holding the gloves pushed the governor’s hair out of his face one last time, Adrian noticed his cheeks, dark with untrimmed beard growth, were glistening with tears. The camp guard shouted Attention! and then they were made to walk back to their cells to pack and sign receipts for their possessions. Yet another convoy of army vehicles had arrived at the prison, and one of them brought the unit of military police detailed to escort them. They lined up again to be counted and, afterwards, the guards set about tying them together in pairs and then running a long rope from the front pair through to the last one. It took hours before all the names had been called and the ropes tied and secured. Finally, in the afternoon, the prison gates swung open and the prisoners marched off. They were like a manacled chain gang, bound by hands and feet, and guarded by a dozen armed men from the special police who walked along the line on both sides. For as long as he lives, Adrian will never forget this march and the journey on the river that followed. For one thing, he can’t ever get his head round why their tormentors were so dedicated to taking them all along on this mad exercise. Was it because they regarded the risk of them falling prey to the enemy as a greater threat? Or, was it that they had no idea what to do with them but brought them along by default or perhaps because they were simply property, just as the farmers tried to take their goods and chattels with them? But the prison governor’s face had been streaked with tears while he spoke. Could it be that he was convinced that even for lowlife like Adrian Ziegler or Viktor Zobel, the kind of people he and his comrades-in-arms had been trying to wipe off the face of the earth, there might after all be some freedom to find in the crumbling Reich? Or was the plan that they would all go down together, murderers and victims alike, still stuck with each other, the victims to their last breath remaining under the murderers’ orders? Still in prison uniforms and bound together, they marched towards the city. At first, they stumbled continuously on the ropes because their guards tried to make them move at too fast a tempo. Of that part of the march, Adrian only remembers the furious shouted commands, and that some of the boys ahead of him fell and were dragged along by the others or were brought to their feet with kicks and blows, still with their arms and legs hopelessly tangled in the ropes. They followed the canal in the direction of the generating station and the gasometers in Simmering, then carried on under the Ostbahn viaduct where he once (how long ago it seemed) had run coal for the Silver Knife. He stared fixedly at the ground to avoid having to watch Jockerl tug at the ropes. Not even the wind that swelled and flapped above them like the sail of an abandoned boat could carry away the sickly sweet stench of rotting cadavers. There were dead cows and calves everywhere, in the fields and the muddy ditches. And in the canal, too, where dead bodies that had been stopped by rubbish or tree roots now floated in the water by the banks with their legs helplessly sticking up above bellies distended like fat balloons. The closer they got to the centre of the city, the more terrible the devastation. Near the slaughterhouses in St Marx, whole city blocks had been flattened to the ground with only the odd gable or chimney stack still standing upright, pointing stupidly towards the sky. A burning stench of fire, diesel and decay filled the air. They passed a few horse-drawn carriages that must have received direct hits from shrapnel bombs because the entire vehicle had burnt, including the animals. Some of the carbonised horse cadavers had no heads, others had spilt their innards on the street. Live animals, sheep, calves and pigs, were wandering among the torched ruins, paradoxically liberated by raids aimed at killing the lot of them. At St Marx, the column suddenly stopped and was then ordered to carry on over the Stadionbrücke. The wind was so strong at the centre of the bridge that those up in front found it hard to keep up the quick-march tempo or even to keep upright at all. The wildly impatient officers walked up and down, shouting, swearing and hitting prisoners with their rifle butts. As they crossed the Prater, along the full length of Meiereistrasse they had to move at a jogging pace and weren’t allowed to stop once. They came to a sudden, involuntary halt on Handelskai, causing the rope to tighten so abruptly that Adrian almost fell. When he turned to look he saw that one of them, perhaps five or ten boys back along the line, had managed somehow to wriggle out of the loops of rope. His clogs were left on the quayside, looking sad and pointless. One of the guards pulled at the slack ropes. Then, very quickly, shots rang out: three sharp cracks in succession. Over by some harbour sheds, he saw the runaway, whose leg had been injured, struggle to sit up and drag himself behind the sheds. His naked, hopeless face was raised in desperation as two of the policemen ran towards him. One of them stopped just about a metre away, raised his rifle and shot once. The boy jerked and sank into a heap. Whispers flew between the prisoners in the column, giving the runaway’s name, Adrian thought it was Alois Riedler, but before the name reached him properly, the officer in charge of the column started to shout at them. He was a large bulldog of a man with chins like car tyres stacked on his broad shoulders. Adrian, who was too exhausted to raise his head, didn’t bother to look at him. They set off again, keeping closer together and moving with tired, shuffling, resigned steps. A tugboat was at anchor by a jetty just below the Reichsbrücke. It had two long barges attached, one at each side. The wind was blowing hard, making all three boats seem to fight to stay pointing in the same direction. At the far end of the jetty, a tall, thin man in a light overcoat was waiting for them. The man would later introduce himself as Mr Rache, a schoolteacher. If that was true information or not, and how this man had come to take on the responsibility of three hund
red and sixty-nine inmates from Kaiserebersdorf, Adrian would never find out. Mr Rache had a list with their names inside a folder, and proceeded to call them out in a loud voice while the pages fluttered in the wind. One by one, the boys stepped out onto the jetty. Adrian’s name was called and Rache looked up from the rustling pages and glanced at him with empty, utterly indifferent eyes. Then he said a number to the guard, who pointed with his rifle at one of the barges. Near the barge, a young woman wearing a pale blue dress and white sandals was handing out a blanket and a small flask of water to everyone in turn. Adrian would later call this woman Miss Santer, though he was as vague about why as about using the name Rache for the man. With her white sandals and her long, tousled hair flying in the wind, Miss Santer looked as if she came from another world: maybe an actress, maybe somebody’s secretary, but definitely not a prison guard. The cargo hold was unbearably hot and stank of stale bilge water, rotting ropes and diesel fuel. Mr Rache let down a large bucket at the end of a rope and shouted to the boys to secure it and use it as a latrine. The tugboat engines were thudding and pulsating below the waterline. He heard shouts from on deck and for a brief moment, the hatch framed the young woman’s face, wreathed in her flying blonde hair. The barge was turning through a semi-circle and he had time to glimpse the Reichsbrücke under a swiftly sliding sky. So, they were going upstream. The woman’s face vanished from the hatch as if the wind had carried her off. Heavy boots trod the deck above them and the hatch cover was shut and screwed down. The hold became pitch black. There were three loading hatches but while the barge was on the move, only one of them was propped open enough to admit a tiny strip of light and it wasn’t the same hatch each time: first, aft and, later on, either at amidships or stern. Each time they stopped and the position of the ventilation slit changed, a wild tumult broke out because the strongest and most ruthless fought with hands and feet and whatever they could use as weapons (things like rope stumps, bailing-out buckets and old oil cans) to get themselves close to the only air gap. A fight to the death, if necessary, to gain a little fresh air and brief glimpses of the open sky. Adrian took one look, gave up the idea of fighting and withdrew to what he reckoned was a reasonably safe place by one of the bulkhead walls. A bucket fell over, it might even have been Mr Rache’s latrine bucket; someone screamed loudly for a long time and a new fight started to shut the screamer up. Then for a while, the hold became completely quiet. Adrian could sense the bodies around him, the warmth of backs and thighs pressing against him. The original sickening smell of mouldy wood and rotting water was thickened by the bitter stench of urine and shit from the presumably overturned latrine bucket. He remembered Uncle Ferenc’s stories about people who had been pulled along by river currents and drowned. Would he be one more of them? If that young soldier at Albern was to be believed, the river was mined, probably all the way up to Nussbaum. Or higher still. And if the mines were carried by river currents, they would be meeting them any time now. To distract himself from the mines, he tried to calculate where their barge was in the convoy by listening to the monotonous beat of the tugboat engine and the blunt waves slapping against the hull. He guessed that they were in the first barge. Sometimes, all the boats moved out into the main channel, which could be felt from the gentler, more rhythmical wave movement and heard from the steadier rumble of the engine. Now and then, the engine sound became slower and more uneven, then cut out and restarted on an odd, almost quivering note as the noise level sank until all that was heard above the coughing motor was the anxious splashing of water against the hull. He had a vision of the tugboat veering off mid-river and slowly making its way towards the bank. It was the first time they had stopped. No one in the hold had a clue why they were going towards land or what they might expect. Adrian fell to thinking about young Miss Santer, she of the blonde hair and white sandals and long, lovely legs. Then he thought of the bodies of the terrified boys crowded down there, where the air already stank of their waste and the hatch lids were screwed down like coffin lids. And suddenly, his whole body started to shake. To control the shakes, he pressed his hands flat against the bulwark just above his head. The surface of the steel plate was interrupted by two nuts. He touched them, then used his nails to scrape the paint off them while the barge carried on rocking on its own small waves. A ceaseless but faint buzzing sound was coming from somewhere far away. It rose and fell, as if reluctant to approach them. On deck, people were running. Suddenly, it felt as if a giant hand had grabbed the barge from below: it reared and there was a detonation powerful enough to drown the screaming in the hold. Was this a mine? He looked around but could see nothing except eyes and mouths gaping with terror. Viktor Zobel crouched as if in spasms at Adrian’s feet. He bent down to try to help his old cellmate and then the barge rose again. Zobel was now no longer below but above him and vomit sprayed from his mouth like a fountain. Blinded and footloose, Adrian fumbled for something to hold on to but the bulkhead plate with the two nuts slipped away from his hands. There was a burst of firing from a machine-gun position somewhere close by. So they hadn’t struck a mine, then? Adrian bent over to try to find out if they were taking in water and glimpsed, he thought, Jockerl’s shiny porcelain teeth scattered over the filthy hull. Another powerful detonation tore at the barge and nearly upended it again. He had time to hear the swooshing sound, as massive volumes of water were pushed aside, and then the entire ship tilted until it pointed straight down towards the riverbed and he crashed against the bulkhead wall. The pain hit him at the same time as the icy certainty that he would die. It was not so much a conscious thought as his body’s intuitive grasp of a reality that couldn’t be perceived by his sight and other senses: this cold, stinking place was the final boundary and on the other side was death and beyond death there was nothing. It was as if the dreams about the Mountain that had filled his head all the years in Spiegelgrund had come true. This cargo hold was inside the Mountain. This was what they had been travelling towards all the time. Or, perhaps, towards the torrents of water that whirled past underneath the most remote cavity in the Mountain, which would be cracked open by the bombs falling on them or the mines lying in wait near the banks. And then they would actually have to do what they had already practised thousands of times in the dreams: help each other to sink into the dark, deep, swift-moving water that flowed so powerfully below. They had to push each other’s heads below the surface, just as he had pushed Jockerl’s head under in the dream, until they had all drowned. When they were all disposed of and the barge’s hold empty, the journey could finally continue as planned. While waiting for this, there is only one thing to do: stay as still as possible. Try to stop his runaway thoughts. Concentrate on objects in the ceiling. A rope. A metal eye. Two nuts in the bulkhead, covered in thick white paint. The scratches in the paint made by his nails. Ahead of him, the back of a boy’s neck, its tendons tense like a terrified animal’s. Viktor Zobel’s flame-red face, vomit dribbling down his neck. Someone gets up, slowly and cautiously. In that instant, the distant tugboat engines start thudding and the light slapping of water against the side tells them that they are once more on their way to the main channel. But now, it will never be the same again. Fear of death is lodged in the very walls and every bump against the side of the barge awakens it as if the hull were covered with living skin and the regular beating of the engine were the sound of their own pulse, slowing down and speeding up and slowing again as they make their way through the swift waters. When the hatch was opened again, twenty-four hours had passed and the convoy had pulled up at Stein. All he grasped was the place name that was passed on in whispers from one boy’s parched lips to the next. The engine noise died down and Miss Santer’s windswept hair could be glimpsed through the hatch against a fragment of clear blue sky. They were allowed out of the hold for the first time in two days and nights. All three boats had pulled up along the quayside and he was able to confirm, with eyes that stung and ached in bright sunlight, that his guess had been right and that his barge was the f
irst of the two. The tugboat swayed on its anchor just ahead of them, swinging to and fro in the silvery, glittering light reflected off the waves. In the dancing light, he saw Mr Rache talking to a sturdily built, shortish man who was probably the tugboat captain. Along the quayside, special police in field-grey uniforms stood at the ready, their rifles pointing towards the barges. They weren’t taking risks even though none of the prisoners could reasonably be in any shape to resist. They stood clustered together on deck in their stinking clothes. Mr Rache exchanged a few words with one of the guards and then picked half a dozen boys to help with carrying water and provisions from the prison. Around Adrian, several of the boys said they’d soon be joined by more prisoners. Stein was one of the largest prisons in the country and where would the inmates go from there? But when Rache returned a few hours later, he was still escorted by the policemen, who didn’t bring any more prisoners with them. The boys who served as porters were hauling a cart loaded with large drums of water. Food was handed out: sausages smelling strongly of acetic acid preservative, and Schwarzbrot, the black rye bread. Everyone had to queue to fill the water flasks they had been given in Wien. For a while he stood close to Mr Rache, looked into his face and could have asked him where they were going and how long it might take, but their ferryman’s face was reduced to a mask of contracted muscles and blank eyes. Then, the dull thud of the tugboat engines started up, the exhaust fumes drifted across the water and they were ordered to go below. At least for a while, it seemed possible to travel in mid-stream. Despite the oven-like heat, the crowded, unwashed bodies and the increasingly evil stench from the latrine bucket, he managed to sleep a little, with his head pressed against the familiar bulkhead plate. Soon, though, he woke to the sound of running feet on deck (like blows with a club just above his head) and shouting voices that seemed to be answered from somewhere on land. They pulled in to the bank again. The hatch was opened. Outside, night had come. Miss Santer’s face flitted past but there was already a fight brewing at the open hatch. People were struggling blindly to get up on deck and at least steal a quick look at what was going on. He managed to get out by supporting himself on the shoulders of some boys who were squashed too tightly together to move and saw, as if in a nightmare, the fortress-like building of the hospital at Ybbs come drifting towards him out of the dark. The past, in this majestic shape, had returned to attack him. A heated discussion was going on between Mr Rache and the solid little captain, who absolutely wanted the prisoners to stay in the hold. They compromised in the end. The prisoners were allowed on deck, but only so long as they stayed completely still. The cold up there felt biting and almost unreal in contrast to the hot, repulsive air below. He sat with his arms around his pulled-up knees, watching the long hospital buildings with their sheds and walls emerge through the hazy dark. Not a single light was visible in the main block, as if the whole place had been evacuated. But the hospital staff must have come from somewhere because here they were, their small torches gleaming like fireflies in the dark. In that ghostly, wavering light, he saw two boys carried off the other barge and stretchered up towards the huge, dead-looking hospital. Some of the prisoners were handed torches as well, but then the guards turned up and waved with their rifles to make them go back below. The hatches were screwed on again and, as the boats chugged back out into the river channel, something inside his belly turned over like a large animal and he had to shout out that he needed the latrine. A light flickered between the bodies and, from the uncertain shadows, a hand reached out to support him and usher him to the bucket. It was upright but had fallen over so many times it was surrounded by a grim pool of urine and faeces. The wavering torchlight picked out a boy squatting with his naked feet in the filth, his hands gripping his stomach with an expression of unfathomable suffering on his face. Adrian pulled his pants down, straddled the bucket and emptied his entire gut in one massive, disgusting rush. There was of course nothing you could wipe yourself with. Exhausted and still nauseous, he made his way back to his place by the bulkhead and lay there, probing the nuts in the plate, scratching the paint with his nails and trying to calculate the distance between Ybbs and Linz. So, if their speed was fifteen knots, how long before they arrived? If one included a factor for the speed of the current going the other way? He tried to hold the numbers in his head but couldn’t even visualise the outlines of the figures. He fell asleep. Or thought he slept. But he was woken over and over by the same noise, a fearful coughing of the engines that then went back to quiet regularity. Twice, it was a false alarm. The third time, it was for real and panic had already broken out in the hold. He heard one boy screaming exactly like an animal, in long, stuttering howls. At the same time, someone tugged at his arm and a voice very close by was saying please, please, help me. The torchlight searched and then picked out the boy he had seen squatting by the latrine. A length of gut dangled between his legs. He stood and held that thing in his hand, trying to push it back in but fell over when the barge suddenly jumped against the waves. When the light found the boy again, he was lying on his side, curled up and with the loop of gut still hanging out. His face was a pale mask. Someone shouted from further along, help help! and hammered with what looked like a broom handle against the middle hatch cover. The hatches stayed shut. They heard the engines cough, then fall silent. The only sound was the splashing of water against the hull. The convoy had moved to the bank again. Fast footsteps passed above them. Open up! Open up! It was the same voice as before and the boy thumped at the hatch cover again. There was a violent crash and the entire barge made the same heart-stopping dive as before. It was followed by a long series of massive explosions that made the barge pitch this way and that, up and down in an insane dipping movement that slowed and then quickened again after the next wave of bombs. Across the racket he still heard the stubborn plead please, help me, but it was becoming fainter and more monotonous. Everyone hung on to what was closest at hand, a piece of rope, an iron stanchion. In the dark, Adrian could hardly distinguish his own body from all the others that were lying near or partly on top of him. He felt others slipping or crawling on him, their feet or sharp elbows pushing into him as they tried to get up. Everything was becoming less distinct now, as if all the bodies in the hold were fusing into a single being. He was sinking deeper into foggy togetherness, ever more deeply as the shouting and movements died down and when he next opened his eyes, everything around him was quiet. At first, he thought he was dreaming. Not a sound from anywhere. No slow, empty engine sounds, no creaking plates below him, no trickling of the wake flowing along the hull. When he raised his head to look out over the dark sea of bodies around him, no one was moving. Then the hatch just above him opened. A shadow fell into the hold, sharply outlined by the light from above. Someone called something. He turned. In the slanting light he saw a hand lying, palm upwards, with its fingers lightly curled. The hand seemed to be cut off at first but then he realised that it was attached to an arm which was a single, large, bleeding wound. The blood had flowed and clotted in the pool that reached all the way to a head. It was Jockerl’s head, the same mask-like bloodied face, the same staring, rolled-up whites of his eyes, the same pale porcelain teeth. Seems there are some dead’uns down there, he heard one guard say to another in a sober, almost indifferent voice. Booted footsteps. Someone fetched a ladder. The two guards clambered down, guns rattling against their belts. Mr Rache followed their heavy uniformed bodies, pressing a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Above it, his eyes looked around, as pale and expressionless as before. Adrian sat stock-still next to the ladder, suddenly frightened that they would drag him away even though he wasn’t dead yet. The guards tramped about and turned bodies over with their rifle butts. Some boys crawled away like crabs, one (perhaps the same one) screamed in pain, some cried for help. The dead bodies were pulled along to the hatch and then up on deck. Because he was so close to the ladder he saw that one of the corpses had his guts hanging out. The boy’s body was stiff and lifeless but his naked feet with
small splayed toes seemed almost touchingly alive. The corpse was hauled up the ladder and he heard it being dragged across the deck to the railing and tipped overboard, making a dull splash followed by a short but intense wave motion that caused the barge to rock like a cradle. Then, another splash. And another. He counted four, then five bodies. Immediately afterwards, the tugboat engine started up again as if it had been waiting only for the barges to be rid of some of the ballast. The journey continued. He had no idea of how long it took or how far they travelled but when he emerged from his semi-comatose state, the engine had stopped, the hatch had been opened and the ladder was in place. This time there were doctors among the guards patrolling the hold. Real doctors in real white coats. Somehow, the hold seemed more spacious around them. Their voices resounded more strongly. Or perhaps he just imagined it. He heard one of the medics, an older man with a white moustache, ask Mr Rache where these youths were meant to be taken. Someone else raised his voice and said that they should be hospitalised, the lot of them. Simply not transportfähig, the first one said, or maybe it was the second one. To the remarks, Rache replied (his voice was sharper, more piercing than Adrian had expected): that’s none of your business. I’m just obeying orders. Anyway, they were all taken up on deck. The nurses helped those who couldn’t climb out on their own. They had reached Linz. The quayside was packed with Red Cross staff manning tables and primitive sickbays. They lined up for food, a bowl each of rice soup and a piece of bread. He wolfed it down without being aware that he ate. They stayed there for a little more than a day and a night. Adrian watched as the crew loaded water and provisions. When they set out again, all the hatches were left open and groups of them were allowed on deck. Miss Santer was standing aft, watching the swilling water as the tugboat ploughed along. She was wearing the same dress and sandals as before but had put her hair up. The sky was overcast. They seemed to be pushing on into some alien, threatening part of the world, and the landscape reinforced the feeling of menace as it rose taller and closed in on them. By the end of that day, the mountain ridges were obscuring the sunlight and they travelled among darkening rock faces. The only sounds came from the engine, strangely harsh and choppy inside its own echo, from the water that splashed and rushed along the hull, and from the birds that rose above the racket and swept past under the dark grey sky in a lacework of white wings suddenly flung out into the gathering night. This is all he remembers. The next day, they chug past Passau and arrive in Germany. Here, or perhaps at some other stop, the medical people must have come on board again, because the ladders are back, lifeless bodies are hauled up, dragged across the deck and heaved overboard. By this stage, he is long past caring. Exhaustion has invaded his body and his mind feels as clear as water and utterly empty. Thinking is no longer possible. All he does is sit and finger the two nuts, following the crack that his nails have worked into the layer of paint. Except, by now, the crack has deepened into a cut. Then, one day (the seventh day? Or the ninth? Or the eleventh? He lost count long ago) they arrive at Regensburg. An officer materialises in front of him and yells at him to stand up. He smiles stupidly and leans against the bulkhead to steady himself. But however hard he tries, his feet seem to slip and his knees fold under him as if made of rubber. The man grabs him under the armpits and, with the help of someone on deck, he is dragged up through the hatch. On the quayside, Mr Rache stands around puffing on a cigarette as if totally unconcerned about the macabre load that is hauled or led out of the barges. Miss Santer is perched on a bollard further along, busy fixing her make-up. The reflexes from her pocket mirror dance on the oily harbour water. When she has put her mirror away and clicked her handbag shut, her lips are as red as his mother’s once were. They are taken to the local state prison, though that was something he learnt much later. From that morning, all he remembers is a large, white-limed building with several wings, which towered over the railway station opposite. Inside it, he struggled to get up the steps in the large, dim stairwells. He remembers iron doors that opened and then closed behind them, the echoes of yelling voices through seemingly endless corridors and the large cells they were shoved into, twenty or thirty at a time. While he slept that night, he seemed still to be travelling on the river, as if the hard floor beneath him was rocking and swinging up and down. But it actually had. When he woke up next time, it was still night. Now, the floor shook and trembled, and his mouth was full of grit. Someone (he didn’t know who) tried to pull him closer to the wall but it was shaking, too. Then, finally he realised that they were in the middle of an Allied bombing raid. Getting out was not worth thinking about. He looked out through the barred window and saw that station building on the other side of the square was burning. The freight train pulled up on the tracks further away was on fire, too, and inside the tall flames one could make out the dark outlines of the trucks. Black smoke was rising towards a spookily rust-coloured sky. His first thought was that the prison was on fire as well and they would burn to death locked up in it. But the cell door stood open. In the corridor outside, a cloud of stone dust welled forward like a gigantic, grey tongue. Soon, their cell was also filled to bursting point with dust that hurt your eyes and scorched your lungs. In the end, the air became unbreathable and they all sat with their heads between their legs, waiting for the floor to open under them like a trapdoor. Finally, the building stopped shaking. But the terrible clamour did not cease: the air-raid sirens were howling and from somewhere they heard a noise as if a large bulldozer were hard at work. It was only afterwards that he realised the demolition noise came from buildings that collapsed and burnt. The prison itself seemed not to be hit. Where the suffocating dust was coming from was a mystery. Viktor Zobel was the first to move. He took off the dirty bandage that he kept wrapped around the sore on his leg, the bad one that he used to rub with margarine, and tore the strip of cloth into pieces that he wetted under the tap and handed out to as many of them as possible. With the filthy, wet cloths pressed against their noses and mouths, they made it down the stairs and out into the street. The dawn was more unreal than any he had ever seen: inflamed and red behind a plume of black smoke still rising from the ruins of the station building. Further away, in the marshalling yard, freight trucks were also burning and giving off more black plumes. Sirens howled all the time, by now from fire engines and ambulances that kept arriving and spewing out firemen, nurses and soldiers. No one took much notice of them at first. It took several hours before a police officer ordered them to go back to their cells but he obviously couldn’t be bothered with the gang of dirty, poorly clothed young men watching from outside the cordon. They were a distraction, no more. From then on, the guards stopped locking the cell doors. The assumption seemed to be that they might as well stay there for their own safety. One morning, the tray with bread and water that used to be placed outside the cell door was not there. The prisoners conferred for a while and then decided to send one of them off to reconnoitre. After a quarter of an hour or so, the scout returned, shouting and waving and very agitated. The Negroes are here, he shouted, the Negroes! The others followed him nervously. The prison seemed abandoned and there was not a guard in sight. Outside the main entrance, a jeep stood parked, and inside it sat four men in unidentifiable uniforms. Only one of the four, a man sitting next to the driver, was actually black. The two in the back of the jeep were talking all the time but the black man in the front seat smiled and waved and handed out cigarettes. Adrian took one and the Negro lit it for him, protecting the flame with his cupped hand, which was white on the inside as if the blackness had been painted on. What’s your name? he asked but Adrian didn’t know, or perhaps he didn’t understand the question.
The Chosen Ones Page 35