by Stephen Fry
What was I hoping to see? An animated model of the birth of the Universe perhaps. Revolving DNA. Fractal geometry. Secret UN files on the spread of a new and horrible disease. Scrolling numbers. Satellite spy pictures. Teri Hatcher naked. President Clinton’s personal email files. The design for a new weapon of destruction. Tight close-up of a Cardassian warlord announcing the invasion of Earth.
What did I see? I saw the screen filled with clouds. Not meteorological clouds, but colored clouds, as of a gas. Yet not gaseous clouds. If I looked further into them they were perhaps more like air currents as seen from a thermal camera. Inside these rolling currents shifted areas of purer color, edged with iridescent coronas that swirled and fizzed, cycling through the spectrum as they moved. Hypnotic. Beautiful too, quite radiantly beautiful. There were, however, screen savers on most PCs that were no less easy on the eye.
“What do you think, Michael?” Leo is staring at the screen. The colored masses are reflected on the lenses of his spectacles. On his face I see the haunted, hungry look that puzzled me before. Obsession. Not by Calvin Klein, but Obsession by Thomas Mann or Vladimir Nabokov. The pained need, anger and despair of a guilty old pervert burning young beauty with a stare. Or so I think at the time. By now I should be used to getting things wrong.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathe, as if afraid that my voice might burst the soft loveliness of colors. Yes, burst, for that is what they are like, these shapes, I now realize. They are like filmy bubbles of soap. The softly rotating membranes of oiled rainbow soothe the eye and float down deep into the soul.
“Beautiful?” Leo’s eyes never leave the screen. His right hand is on the mouse and the shapes move. As the scene shifts, the screen reminds me of the cinemas of my childhood. I would sit alone in the dark with twenty minutes to wait before the Benson and Hedges and Bacardi commercials. To beguile the time the Odeon management offered music and a light show of psychedelic pinks and greens and oranges writhing in liquid on the screen. I would watch with a sagging mouth into which Raisin Poppets would be dumbly pushed one by one as the colors changed and the bubbles of air suspended in the liquid worked their way across the screen like jerking amoebas.
“Yes, beautiful,” I repeat. “Don’t you think so?”
“What do you imagine you are looking at?”
“I’m not sure.” My voice does not rise above its reverent whisper. “Gas of some kind?”
Now Leo looks at me for the first time. “Gas?” He smiles a joyless smile. “Gas, he says!” Shaking his head, he turns back to the screen.
“What then?”
“And yet it might be gas,” he says, more to himself than to me. “What a horrible joke. Yes, it might be gas.” I notice that he is gnawing his lower lip with the insistent speed of a rodent. He has torn the skin and blood is seeping but he does not seem to notice. “I tell you what you are looking at, Michael. You won’t believe me, but I tell you all the same.”
“Yes?”
He jabs a finger at the screen and says, “Behold! Anus mundi! Das Arschloch der Welt!” My puzzlement and shock amuse him and he nods his head vigorously. “You are looking,” he says, pointing his chin to the screen, “at Auschwitz.”
I look from Leo to the screen and back again. “I’m sorry?”
“Auschwitz. You must have heard of it. A place in Poland. Very famous. The asshole of the world.”
“But what do you mean exactly? A photograph? Infrared, thermal imaging, something like that?”
“Not thermal imaging. Temporal imaging one might call it. Yes, that would do.”
“I’m still not with you.”
“You are looking,” says Leo pointing at the screen, “at Auschwitz Concentration Camp on the ninth of October, 1942.”
I frown in puzzlement. So slow. I am so slow.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean how I mean. This is Auschwitz on October ninth. Three o’clock in the afternoon. You are looking at that day.”
I stare again at the lovely billowing shapes in their sweet rippling colors.
“You mean . . . a film?”
“Still you ask what I mean and still I mean what I mean and still you do not grasp what I mean. I mean that you are looking at both a place and a time.”
I stare at him.
“If this laboratory had a window,” says Leo, “and you looked out of it, you would see Cambridge on the fifth of June, 1996, yes?”
I nod.
“When you look into this screen, it is the same, a window. All these shapes, these motions, they are the movements of men and women in Auschwitz, Poland, October ninth, 1942. You could call them energy signatures. Particular traces.”
“You mean . . . that is, are you saying that this machine is looking back in time?”
“One of these shapes,” Leo continues as if I have not spoken, his eyes darting back and forth across the screen, “one of these colors,” his hand nudges the mouse, “one of these. Any one of them, it could be any one of them.”
“What could be any one of them?”
He turns to me for a second. “Somewhere in here is my father.”
I watch as he works the mouse savagely in his search. It seems to behave like a TV camera handle, allowing him to pan, tilt and zoom around his world of colored forms. He rolls the mouse hard to the left: the whole scene revolves clockwise.
“My father arrived at Auschwitz on October eighth. That much I know. There! Do you think this is him?” Leo stabs a finger at a low shape whose feathery outer sheath oscillates with a delicate mauve. “Perhaps that is him. Maybe it is a dog, or a horse. Or just a tree. A corpse. Most likely a corpse.”
There are tears in Leo’s angry eyes, tears that run down his face to mingle with the blood that still oozes from his chewed lip. “I will never know,” he says, bending below the desk to thump the power switches. “Never ever will I know.”
With a singing prickle of static the screen is emptied. The LED digits vanish. The quiet hum of the fan is stilled with a whoomp. I stare at the blank screen, silent.
“There now, Michael Young.” Leo absorbs a tear elegantly with the sharp edge of the shirt cuff that protrudes from his lab coat sleeve. “You have seen Auschwitz. Congratulations.”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite serious.” Leo’s anger and intensity have disappeared and he is a calm Uncle Smurf once more. He closes up the machine and strokes the mouse with gentle affection.
“We really were looking back in time?”
“Every time you look into the night sky you are looking back in time. It’s no big deal.”
“But you were focusing on a single day.”
“It is a different kind of telescope for sure. Unfortunately it is also quite useless. Just a light show, is all. An artificial quantum singularity of no more use than an electric pencil sharpener. Less.”
“You can’t translate all those colored swirls into recognizable forms?”
“I cannot.”
“But one day?”
“When I’m dead and gone perhaps. Yes. It is possible. Anything is possible.”
“What else have you looked at? Any battles or earthquakes? You know, Hiroshima, anything like that?”
“I have watched Hiroshima. I have looked too at the Western Front in the Great War. Many times and places. Always, I’m afraid, I return to Auschwitz. The answer, by the way, is Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“Er . . . you’ve lost me there. The answer to what is Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“The purple triangle? You remember, you couldn’t guess who had to wear it? It was the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t really find much to say to that. “And you always return to Auschwitz, on that date?”
“Always that same day.”
“And you can’t do anything about it
, you can’t . . . interact?”
“No. It is . . . how can I best describe? It is like a radio. You tune in, you listen, you cannot broadcast.”
“And you don’t know what you’re looking at? I mean, you can’t interpret it?”
“The colors have a relation to elements. Oxygen is blue, hydrogen red, nitrogen green and so on. But that tells me nothing.”
“Who else have you shown this to?”
“What is this, Twenty Questions? You are the first person to see the device.”
“Why me?”
He looks at me. “A feeling,” he says.
MAKING WAR
Adi and Rudi
Dark enough at six in the morning, and with this fog, impenetrable. Yet Stöwer, the platoon commander, must choose such a moment for one of his speeches.
“Men! The British front line runs between Gheluvelt and Becelaere with Ypres only five miles to the east. The Sixteenth has been given the task of smashing Tommy through the heart of his lines. We will not fail. Colonel von List relies upon us. Germany relies upon us.”
Private soldiers Westenkirchner and Schmidt peered through the gloom in the direction of Stöwer’s voice.
“Germany hasn’t the faintest idea that we exist,” Ignaz Westenkirchner said cheerfully.
“Don’t talk like that,” growled a voice between them.
Ignaz looked in surprise at the yellow-faced private to his right. At five foot nine, Adi—they all called him Adi—was slightly above the average height, but his frailty, sallow complexion and the slender set of his shoulders made him seem slighter and smaller than the others.
“Your pardon, sir.” Ignaz bowed his head in mock Junker style.
Forty-five minutes to go. Random fire had begun from the British lines, the fat, slapping noise sounding more comical than dangerous, like the farts of a grass-swollen bull.
Ernst Schmidt silently offered cigarettes around. Adi looked down at the carton and said nothing, so Ignaz took two.
“Not even now?” he said, in amazement. “With action so close?”
Adi shook his head and cradled his rifle closer to him. Ignaz remembered watching him on their second day of training, how Adi had fondled that rifle in just that way the moment it had been issued. Gazed at it with wonder and delight, as a woman stares at new silk underwear from Paris.
“Never smoked at all then?”
“Once,” said Adi. “Occasionally. For social reasons.”
Ignaz met Ernst’s eyes and raised an eyebrow. It was hard to associate Adi with anything more social than the mess line or the communal showers. Ernst, as usual, said and did nothing in reply to this offer of a shared joke.
That’s all I need with me, thought Ignaz, one puritan and one humorless lump of wood.
As if on cue, there came a low whistle from the west side of the trench and Gloder was upon them. Rudi Gloder at nineteen seemed fuller of life and richer in years than Adi and Ernst, who were already halfway through their twenties. Cheerful, handsome and blond, Rudi’s sparkling blue eyes and generous wit charmed and delighted all the men of the company. He had already been given the rank of Gefreiter and no one resented his promotion. Those who heard tell of him, his prowess with the rifle, his way of making up witty songs, his concern for others, often decided to dislike him. “Musical, athletic, intelligent, funny, brave, modest and impossibly good looking, you say? I hate him already.” The moment they met him of course, they succumbed to his charm with joy like everyone else.
“I move among you,” said Rudi squatting opposite Adi, Ignaz and Ernst, “with figgy coffee. Ask not how this miracle was wrought, only enjoy.”
Ignaz took the proffered flask with delight. The rich sweet liquor slid down his throat and, free of alcohol as it might have been, it intoxicated his senses as though it had been cognac. He lowered the flask and met Rudi’s dancing eyes.
“Nothing is too good for my men,” said Rudi, in perfect imitation of von List. “For you, my dear sir?”
Gloder took the flask from Ignaz and held it toward Adi. For a second their eyes met. The deep kitten blue of Rudi’s, the pale flashing cobalt of Adi’s.
“Thank you,” said Adi. The “thank you” that means “no.”
Rudi shrugged and passed the coffee to Ernst.
“Adi doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear, doesn’t go with women,” said Ignaz. “There’s a rumor going round that says he doesn’t shit.”
Rudi put a hand on Adi’s shoulder. “But I’ll bet he fights. You fight, don’t you, Adi, my friend?”
Adi’s eyes lit up at that word. Kamerad. He nodded vigorously and pulled at his big mustache. “Certainly I fight,” he said. “Tommy will know I was here.”
Rudi kept his hand to Adi’s shoulder a moment longer before releasing it.
“I must move along,” he said. “I have to tell you though, that a thought has struck me.” He pointed to his head. “Our caps.”
“What about them?” said Ernst, speaking for the first time that morning.
“It doesn’t strike you?” said Rudi with surprise. “Well then, perhaps it’s just me.”
After he had gone, they waited half an hour more.
At seven, Stöwer blew on his whistle and the advance began. Too loud, too hurried, too chaotic to allow for fear or hesitation. A scramble of shouting and cursing and clambering and they were stumbling towards the British lines.
The Tommy machine guns opened fire at once. Somehow, in the early moments, Ernst and Adi had managed to lose sight of Ignaz. They struggled on, the two of them, towards what they knew was the origin of gunfire, the heart of the British trenches.
“Stöwer’s dead!” someone shouted ahead of them.
Suddenly, behind them, to the left and the right, new guns clattered and men either side fell, hit in the back.
“Schmidt! Follow me,” cried Adi.
Ernst Schmidt was bewildered. Utterly bewildered. This was an attack, this was supposed to be an attack. An attack forward. On the British. Was it a trap? Were they now surrounded? Or had they, in this fog, walked round a hundred and eighty degrees, so that now the British were behind them? Ernst fell down under a hedge beside Adi and the pair of them wedged themselves into its meager cover panting fiercely.
“What’s going on?” said Ernst.
“Quiet!” said Adi.
They lay there for what might have been, in Ernst’s confused mind, seconds, minutes or hours until, suddenly, compounding the unreality and taking the breath from him entirely, a man fell on them shouting. Ernst’s spectacles were squashed and cracked by the weight of him on his face. He screamed into the man’s stomach at the pain of buttons and brass clips that ripped into the flesh of his nose and cheeks.
I am to be smothered by a dying man, he thought. “Frau Schmidt, it is with sorrow that we report the loss of your son, suffocated by a corpse. He died as he had lived, in utter confusion.”
This then is war, the dead killing the dead.
Ernst had time for all these thoughts. Time to giggle at the inanity of it all. Time to picture his mother and father reading the telegram in Munich. Time to envy his brother’s choice of the navy. Time to feel fury at headquarters for their failure to come to his rescue. Surely they must have known this would happen. The war will not be over by Christmas, Ernst would inform his senior officers gravely, if this kind of thing is allowed to happen.
The next moment he was gulping for air, clawing at his collar and feeling for the ruins of his spectacles.
The man above him was not dead. He was an officer from a Saxon Regiment and fully alive. He had rolled over and was covering Adi and Ernst aggressively with a Luger. He stared at them and then gasped in astonishment, lowering his pistol.
“Christ!” he said. “You’re German!”
“Sixteenth Bavarian Infantr
y Reserve, sir,” said Adi.
“List’s Regiment? Shit, I thought you were British!”
Adi’s response was to snatch the cap from his head and fling it from him. Then he grabbed Ernst’s cap and did the same. “Rudi was right,” he said.
“Rudi?” said the officer.
“A Gefreiter in our platoon, sir. It’s our caps. They’re almost exactly the same as Tommy’s.”
The officer stared for a second and then burst out laughing. “Fuck the devil! Welcome to His Majesty’s Imperial Army, boys.”
Adi and Ernst gaped as the officer, a man of nearly forty years, a regular they had supposed by his rough manner and language, beat his things and howled with laughter.
Adi shook him by the shoulder. “Sir, sir! What is it? What is going on? Are we surrounded?”
“Oh you’re surrounded all right! Tommies ahead of you, Saxons to the left and Württembergers to the right! Jesus, we saw you ahead of us and thought it was a British counterattack. We’ve been pounding you into hell for the past ten minutes.”
Adi and Ernst stared at each other in horror. Ernst saw the beginnings of tears form in Adi’s china eyes.
“Listen”—the officer had calmed down now—“I have to stay with my men. I’ll try and pass the word, but there’s no damned communication here. Will you both volunteer to go back down to headquarters? Someone’s got to stop this madness.”
“Of course we volunteer,” said Adi.
The officer watched them go. “Good luck,” he called after them and then added, in a whisper, “put in a good word for me with Saint Peter.”
MAKING MUSIC
Hangover
I sit in the passenger seat of the Clio while Jane drives us towards Magdalene for a garden party. The Siegfried Idyll is playing on Classic FM and I whistle the little oboe tune that leaps like an imp from the strings.