Bitter Eden: A Novel (15 page)

Outside, cobbled paths crisscross between the blocks with the mathematical exactness that the Krauts so love, and we are each issued, amazingly, with a pair of wooden clogs, which we at once put on so as to prolong the life of our already worse for wear, once forever army boots, then clack around on the cobbles uneasily and gigglingly as little kids trying out their roller skates for the first time. Beyond one of the two longer fences, with their mandatory barbs and searchlights on heron-like towers, is a plantation of pines that, should the wind be right, aromatically brood on their precisely-spaced shadows and out of which a woodcutter, or whatever, will sometimes suddenly emerge, look startled and flee.

The food is partly better, partly horrendously worse than the Ites’, but there is more of it and there are two feeding periods a day. In the morning, we get a hunk each of coarse black bread and a half a dixie of saccharin-sweetened coffee which those in the know say is brewed from acorns – or is it chestnuts? – but, whichever, has certainly never known a coffee-bean; and, at any time after noon, we get a dixie of turnip swill – which is as execrable as it sounds and goes to ground under a yellow scum if you let it stand too long – plus a handful of potatoes boiled in their skins, a medallion of ‘cheese’ which smells like rotting fish or feet, a pat of ‘butter’ which again the know-alls say is made from coal and evaporates as summarily as water should you melt it for a fry, and a tablespoon of jam that really
is
made from sugar beet and is the closest to being OK. But why not all this together with the
bread
?

The mysterious ‘cheese’, however, is what intrigues us the most and Danny and I who, like many others, have managed to bring our blower-stove with us, take it, a dixie, a lick of margarine from the Red Cross parcels – which seem to be more regular here – and a round of the ‘cheese’ which we then try to ‘toast’ in the margarine, and end up with a gummy mess that surely can only be molten animal horn? Worst of all, it takes forever to get the dixie clean again and it is the one ‘food’ that, eventually,
no one
– not even the ex-magistrate, which says it all – any longer wants to have, and Danny’s bunk is shaking with his whooping it up when I suggest that, in the toilet’s noisome depths, there must by this time surely be a
mountain
of discarded ‘cheese’ that, horror-movie-wise, is slyly mutating into the monster that yet, like the rats in Iteland, will have us by our balls.

Children of colonizers, we, too, are colonizers to the manner born, bringing with us not only our blower-stoves, but all the rest of the infrastructure which we need to found a new and, hopefully, less bitter Eden in which we can live, or, unbiblically, die. So, almost from touchdown, the old systems are again being put in place: the gambling kings, bleary-eyed and bitter-lipped, slapping down their cards till late, the mini-traders, ebullient and eloquent, touting their wares, the laundrymen licking arses for work, Tony negotiating with the Krauts for a theatre and getting it, and Camel chancing his arm with an ‘exhibition’ of drawings of nude groins – ‘Pay your cigarette before you look,’ says the notice tacked to his bunk – but no one heeds, there being enough naked cocks around for free.

One thing that
cannot
be revived, however, is the camp band, our last sighting of the instruments being when – shortly before our leaving for the cattle-trucks the other side of the hill – they were being loaded onto a Kraut truck and destined for anywhere save here. But a revival that gladdens me most is when Danny starts slowly but steadily running again, the relatively generous quantities of solid if often unpalatable food putting a little flesh back on his bones.

Then there is also the wholly new activity of classes, which the several civvy street teachers in our midst offer to give for a variety of reasons ranging from nostalgia to keeping their hand in to simply slaughtering time. I opt for the German language classes, partly because it might be useful, although in what
way
– philosophical discussions with the Kommandant? – I am not at all sure, and partly because German sounds like Afrikaans and should be the easy way to go, and somehow I stick to it even when I find out that
a fork
is female and
a spoon
is male. ‘For Chrissakes,’ I say to Danny, ‘surely that should be the other way around?’ Danny, however, astonishes me by choosing botany and goes around mumbling Latin names for shrubs and flowers he has never seen – or perhaps has but didn’t know – and when I ask him, ‘Why
botany
?’ stressing the word as though it is a slug on my tongue, he explains, silencing me, that there is a field behind their house that’s full of flowers in spring and learning about ‘flowers and stuff’ will remind him of home.

On a more practical level, a Spam-and-potato potency sparking in me as in Danny, I decide to go back into the laundry business and wheedle Danny into siding with me in this, although I will not allow myself to be persuaded to run. He makes it clear, though, that he is only going along with the idea because, even if he said ‘No,’ he would still be sharing in the material benefits accruing from my sweat and that would make him feel like – as he puts it – a kept man. So I find myself working with the human equivalent of a racehorse hitched to a plough – or, to put it less poetically, an incurably embarrassed grumbler who moans all the time that washing is for women, not men, and, in the end, I give up on him and solve the problem of the kept man by telling him that he can be the manager – hanging up the washing for drying, taking it down again, folding it, delivering it, extorting payment like extracting teeth, negotiating new business, and any number of other duties that will be a sop to his pride and still have us together in our increasing clinging to each other like two castaways in a tricky sea.

‘Well, if only one of us is to be the woman in this deal, then it looks like it’s got to be me,’ I pretend to, in my turn, complain, and his eyes flick down, and as slyly up, as he hits back, ‘Pity it’s the wrong waterworks or we could have us a ball.’

For a moment, I don’t get it, then do and an original me rears, outraged, then as quickly is felled and I am laughing without strain.

‘So!’ I taunt, a triumphalism in me that I do not quite understand, cannot control. ‘How now your story about the right hole?’

‘Blokes and bints don’t feel the same,’ he grunts. ‘A bloke can take what’s on the plate and nothing’s changed,’ and again he glances down as though at balls not seen, then turns, sharply, away. ‘What
is
this?’ the far-off me again exclaims, not so much because of what it has heard, but because of a sudden gush of warmth where no warmth should be.

Five minutes later, he is back, the flaming shape I had sensed in him quite gone. Or has it never been there, my mind alone the flaming giveaway? ‘I found the old staff that gave me his bunk,’ he says, his voice glad. ‘Same old sod he always was. Says to come over sometime so’s he can grab your hand.’

That pleases me as much as it pleases Danny because the once
bête noire
had become the almost-friend that he would
allow
anyone to become, but we never saw him again after the Krauts took over and feared him dead as the poor Ite guards the Krauts left lying where they fell. That, I am thinking, completes a circle, chinks a missing link in place, and I am still feeling good about it when, washing on alone and Danny gone to fetch the chow, I have this feeling that I am being watched – not incuriously so, but with the intensity of a sorrowing or a rage – and I turn, quickly, to the grimy window close beside me and Douglas is walking away in the direction of the theatre with the stiffness of back and quickness of step of one who nearly waited too long.

*   *   *

Autumn eases into
winter and the first snow, then come the heavier and boringly endless falls that burden the branches of the pines till, sometimes in the crystal nights, they snap with the loudness of shots and their loads come whooshing down in a feathery roar. The cobbled paths turn smooth and slippery as glass and there are serious tumbles as we grapple with the clogs, and Danny soon learns that if he leaves the washing out to dry after the sun has reached a certain low, he will have to wrestle it into the barracks and stack it like boards to the accompaniment of furious cries. He also learns that when the temperature shafts us with a particular spite, the only solution is to clamber up into my bunk without a by-my-leave, shove me aside and wrap me round as though he would be my second skin, but I am not complaining, am in my secret self even now knowing that I will be missing this when summer comes.

Winter also brings letters – shoals of them – as though all of autumn’s dammed-up leaves have suddenly broken free. Some of them are so old, tell of emotions, deeds, events, so long past, that they are more histories written by dead hands than the voices of the living reaching out to the still alive. But they are still read, smelt, carefully folded, as carefully again unfolded to be again read, then at last laid aside with the reverence due to icons, or the dead.

Danny gets nine letters – five from his mother, four from his wife. They are his first letters since the Krauts hauled him, virtually unhurt, from his mangled tank. He stares at them, holding them, fanned, in both his hands, his eyes bemused with disbelief – then he very quietly gets up and goes away to some far corner of the camp, his letters tightly clasped as though they might take wing, and stays away for so long that I grow restless with a loneliness that is the other face of dread.

Then he is back, incandescent with the need to share, and begins to read me passages from his letters, and goes on and on, but I am staring at my empty hands, empty because – because of what? – my never having given enough of myself to anyone for them to want to give me anything back? I shy away from the question and he reads on, and I’m thinking I will get up and walk out of here, but then understanding comes to him and he puts his letters away and does me a dozen small favours to
show
me that he understands, but I hold out for nearly too long, guiltily but unyieldingly aware that what I am
now
feeling is the sullen jealousy of the brat I have never outgrown.

Some days later, Tony sends me a message that he would like to see me – the first such message to come from him since we arrived – and, curious, I lose no time in getting down to the theatre to which I have but infrequently been, and then only when there is a show, I not wanting to risk running into Douglas again. It is about the size of the one the Ites gave us, only longer and narrower, being half of a barracks with the backing ablution and laundry room serving as a storeroom for costumes, sets and general theatre bric-à-brac. The stage – contrived with the usual cunning from packing cases supplied by the Krauts and with a worn but authentic stage curtain also supplied by the Krauts who seem to be as weirdly culture-conscious as the Ites – is sited in front of the storeroom, which then also doubles as a dressing room for the more brash than bashful performers and provides them with an easy entrance to the stage. In the other half of the barracks, Tony has ensconced himself in a private space behind a stack of sheets of cardboard that were supposed to have been converted into sets, while the considerable rest of the room has been turned into a dormitory of individual beds for stagehands, set designers, make-up artistes and an assortment of hangers-on who snuff the corruption-tainted air with the challenging brazenness of their kind.

Arrived, I find Tony sitting reading on a chair he has taken from those stacked against the ‘auditorium’ walls, and he at once gets up, closing his book with the brisk snap that is his way and seizing my hand with an almost-unctuousness that is
not
his way. Then he leads me over the stage, arousing in me – purposely? – surprisingly sharp memories of the one and only show in which I have ever been, and on into his ‘space’ which contains no more than a bed that is no more than a cot, a crude bar stool and as crude a something like a whatnot that he has stuffed with books, papers, clothes.

‘Sit down,’ he says, hooking the stool forward with his foot, and I do and he goes out and comes back with two mugs of tea with sugar
and
milk, and hands me one before he sits down on the bed.

‘How do you like my pad?’

‘No frills,’ I say and cannot keep the surprise from my voice.

‘Typical of you straights!’ he snorts, then adds, ‘That is if you
are
still straight,’ and chuckles contentedly when I frown. ‘Always expecting fruits to be lolling on silk doodahs and indulging in orgies they wouldn’t mind trying out themselves.’ Then he looks at me, measuredly, as though seeing me for the first time, and, in his turn, frowns. ‘Happy,’ he says, addressing himself rather than me, ‘but going to seed,’ and I know that he is referring to my hair and beard which, although reasonably under control, are not as neatly trimmed as in that other time and place, the barbering business being the one activity that has only minimally survived as a result of the Krauts’ refusing to help out with equipment as did the Ites and the few barbers who managed to smuggle out their scissors having to use only these to lop off what they can.

‘But I can soon fix that. For Danny too, if he wants,’ and he looks at me expectantly, but I don’t answer him, knowing that I wouldn’t get Danny here even if I
dragged
him by his too long hair, and try to conceal my uneasiness as I sip my tea and listen to the chatter of voices and bustle of bodies the other side of the cardboard wall.

But the owlish eyes behind the glittering pince-nez miss nothing, as I should have known. ‘He’s not here,’ he says, simply, almost sympathetically. ‘I sent him out on an errand, knowing how you would feel.’

I should feel gratitude, but don’t, only say, my voice harsh with the shyness of being exposed, ‘OK, Tony. Cut the offers and the tea. What is it that you want to wheedle out of me?’

Again he chuckles, this time appreciatively, but does not at once answer, looking past me as though I am not there, his face its usual glum façade. ‘I’m going to try something new,’ he at last explains. ‘So far, the shows we have put on – like the one you were in back there – were either serious plays with all-male casts or they were farces where the guys playing the parts of the women were clearly still guys doing it for the audience to laugh at and have fun. Now I want to put on a serious play with men playing the parts of women as though they
were
women and not men.’