Bitter Eden: A Novel (19 page)

‘Shit!’ I think. ‘What more can I do? How many more half-truths, whole lies, must I tell?’ and I turn to knock on the door so that Tony can let me out of this small lair that reeks of sweat, cosmetics, hatred, pain.

But then the grinding teeth still and, though the head still does not turn, the mouth opens and he asks, his voice hoarse and labouring as from a terminal dissoluteness or disease, ‘What do you want? Why are you snuffing round me like a dog?’ For a moment I do not get it, then I do and revulsion rears in me with the bitterness of bile, and I make to break in but the oddly disembodied voice cuts me short, ‘I am not deaf. I hear you even though you are so far away. I’m listening even though it’s still the same old lies. All that time you were sleeping with him, you lied. And they say you are still sleeping with him. That the bunk shakes all night the way he is fucking you or you are fucking him. What difference does it make which way round?’ Again I scrabble for something to say, but I am slow, shocked at how obscene ‘fucking’ can sound when it comes from a tongue as prissy as Douglas’ used to be, and he carries on, ‘So what are you doing here? Shoving your nose up my arse like you’re not the same whore as me?’ Frighteningly, his head at last jerks round, thrusts at me with a lizard-like speed, but the eyes are still seeing only the wall. ‘He’s chucked you away like the dirty washing you made
me
be?’

It is then that I find my tongue, frantically yell that which I do not believe, ‘Cut the crap, Douglas! Save your play-acting for Tony and his goons! This is
me
!’

With an abruptness that overturns the chair, he is on his feet and coming to me, his steps gliding and sure, and I back up against the door, meaning to shout to Tony to let me out, then remember that the hands are tied. Irrelevantly – or is only relevancy possible in a progression that has gained a momentum of its own? – I notice that his feet are bare and the scarlet polish on the toes’ nails is cracking and dulled.

‘Keep away from me!’ I whisper, my disgust nakedly plain, but he does not seem to hear – or, hearing, understand – only suddenly is seeing me with a slyness in his eyes.

‘Untie me,’ he says, turning round, and now I see that the fingernails are surfacing through the same cracking polish and the left wrist of the pathetically thin arms is strapped by as pathetic a bandage stained with drying blood.

‘No!’ I say, remembering the cunning in his eyes. ‘Why do you want to be untied?’ and think, with a bizarre hilarity bordering on hysteria, that that must be the most idiotic question ever asked.

But he sees it in quite another way. ‘How can I play with you if my hands are tied?’

‘What do you mean – play with me?’

‘Like women play when there are no men,’ and his shoulders shake with what could be a snigger or a sob, but it does not take me long to decide it’s no sob.

‘Get away from me, you filthy perv!’ I yell, not even
trying
to be placatory now that I have seen how thin he’s grown – which is a very grave mistake, he at once whirling round, butting me with his head till I reel against the door, then pushing his face into mine as for a kiss, and I again yell, as nauseated as I am enraged, and then the rage gives way to a pissing-in-the-pants little kid’s fright as his teeth sink into the soft flesh of my cheek, worrying at it as would a dog’s and the pain of it a flame in my brain. Then the teeth are nuzzling into my neck, seeking its throat, and my body is heaving and thrashing against the door with the mindlessness of a just slaughtered fowl, and Tony at last jerks open the door and I roll, babbling and bloodied, out and away, not once looking back, the torn loose flesh of my cheek flapping on a last shred of retaining skin.

‘Fucking
bastards
!’ Danny roars, rushing me off to the medical hut, hovering over me as a wisecracking orderly stitches up my cheek. ‘There for life,’ says the stitcher. ‘Unless you shell out the bucks for a graft. But why worry? You can always tell your kids that’s where they shot daddy in the war!’ Then, to Danny, having fun, ‘
You
bite him like that?’ But Danny is in no mood for fun, particularly not
that
brand of fun. ‘You wanting to eat your teeth?’ he retorts and is still in that mood when he later marches down to the theatre, invisible six-guns slapping his thighs, and comes back, telling me nothing, but his mood grimly quite gone.

Late that night, lights are flashing down at the theatre, Krauts are screaming orders as only Krauts chillingly can, and I do not need anyone from the rest of the darkened and tensely watching camp to tell me that they are taking Douglas away. I do not leave my bunk, my cheek beginning to throb to the beat that is peculiarly pain’s, but I can hear Douglas screaming as, towards dawn, I hear myself screaming, Danny holding me down, his eyes torturedly close to mine.

*   *   *

It is some
way into the latter half of winter when we begin to hear nocturnal rumblings and clankings as of heavy metal being dragged across as heavy a glass. Sometimes we hear these sounds on several consecutive nights, sometimes on erratically spaced nights, and sometimes they draw tantalizingly near or remain disappointingly far, but always they come from the other side of the pines and stay in our minds for long after they have gone. Occasionally we ask the friendlier among the guards about these sounds and they then either shrug their shoulders and say it could be their tanks out on manoeuvres or they look at us with inscrutable eyes and say we are dreaming empty dreams.

Our only Russian prisoner, who looks like a mad poet with his snapping black eyes and lank scrambled hair and spends most of his time chatting to Camel who, for some reason even he seems unable to explain, is the sole ‘scholar’ learning Russian in the camp ‘schools’, says the Krauts are talking balls – or the Russian equivalent of ‘balls’, Camel importantly explains – these are no more their tanks than the Martians’, but are, in fact,
Russian
tanks and very soon now they will be crumpling down the fences and their crews will be cutting the throats of every fucking Kraut bastard – Russian equivalents, that is – on which they can lay their hands.

All of which is, of course, very comforting, but we have as many doubts about the Russian as about the Krauts, he having told us hair-raising tales of how
he
cut Krauts’ throats with naked razor-blades – where from and how? – and then expertly dribbled his way through the Kraut lines en route from his camp to ours because the food in ours was better than in his. Some of us think he may not be a Russian at all but a German spy who is feeding damaging griff back to the Kraut brass and even Camel, for once, curbs his urge to go one better in the telling of tall tales.

But, apart from lending us hope – however baseless and doomed it may be – he also tells a
pretty
as well as tall tale, describing, with so much of the imaginativeness of the poet that he seems, how these monolithic Russian tanks – ‘bigger than anything we have ever dreamed’ – lumber and wheel on the ice-clogged lake that is further from here than we think and is ‘round and shining with a yellow-green light like it’s the moon dropped down’. Whether we will one day find out the truth, is anybody’s guess and, eventually, the ghostly commotion stops and does not recur and we, in turn, no longer listen, straining out through the night to the mystical – mythical? – lake and only dimly sometimes wondering if this was not, after all, the
first
of the Signs?

There are miracle days in which only those who have been in them can believe – days when the low, feathery clouds are suddenly waddling away as though some downy-arsed goose had got up from its squat, and you are seeing that the blue sky has been there all this while, only the blue has never been so near to being not and the brittleness of the air is such that you think to push your finger through it, and the sun is not really a sun, but more a burnished brass that does not even begin to soften up the snow.

It is such a day and my hands are deeply in my pockets, warming my balls, and my breath is a speech bubble with nothing in it, and I am staring through the fence with the intense vacuity that only prisoners achieve, when this Kraut comes up close on the other side and says in a struggling English that, soon now, it will be spring. I start, then grunt, in German, that the cold in my bones is telling me that nothing’s changed, and he asks, surprised, where I learnt German, and I say, ‘Here,’ and then he asks, ‘Why?’ and I shrug, not daring too heavy a foray into a still only half-mastered tongue.

But my shrug does not put him off. As plainly pleased as he is surprised, he flatters me by dropping the English, and I battle to understand as he tells me with a clear longing of his wife and child, and where he comes from and where he hopes to soon again be. But then somebody shouts from a sentry box and he readjusts his rifle strap as he repeats that soon now it will be spring – ‘already its heart beats under the snow’ – then leaves, only looking back once to whisperingly add, his eyes strangely and entreatingly sad, ‘For
you
– this spring.’

For a long while I stare at where a corner of the fence axed him from my view, toying with a hesitant hopefulness, not daring to fully engage it, wondering if I have been shown a Sign less fanciful than the tanks on a lake that is like a ‘moon dropped down?’

There is nothing ambiguous about what happens next. It brooks no denigration or denial, is, like the Apocalypse, overwhelmingly what it is. It is not as explosive, though, as the Apocalypse, nor as brutally seminal as the Big Bang. On the contrary, the first intimations of it are subliminal – a droning on the far perimeters of sense that is as irritating and inescapable as an insect circling a high light in a windowless room. Slowly, relentlessly, the droning swells, narrows in, is eventually no longer a resonance more of the mind than in the ear, but a troubling of the air itself, a vibration that sets a single yet clinching speck of dust to a settling on the back of my hand.

We go out then, stand in our thousands, looking round, seeing only the usual monotonousness that we see even when we close our eyes. But the droning does not let up, grows louder, is at last so loud that we start shouting in order to be heard. ‘What
is
it?’ we ask each other, at first a little foolishly, expecting the rational explanation that will send us, laughing, away. But only bafflement answers bafflement and we begin to feel estranged and afraid, to shiver a little in another of the rare clear winter days.

Then someone screams, ‘There! There!’, swinging an arm up at the sky directly over our heads, his eyes huge and exalted as though he witnessed the heavens opening and childhood’s angels descending in a swirl of robes and wings. ‘Christ Almighty!’ I whisper with more of reverence than rote, my head flung back till my neck cricks as I watch the vast armada of planes passing seemingly slowly on their way to whatever culmination they seek. Dropsical with death, the bombers forge with a blind obduracy through the thin, yielding tides of the air, and the fighters flit about them with the silver glitter of gnats and someone is shrieking, voice a eunuch’s with delight, ‘Watch those babies
go
!’ But one of the Krauts sneers that these are
their
planes, not ours, but we have already seen that the machine guns in the sentry boxes have swivelled skywards even though the planes are out of range, and when a lone battery somewhere out on the plains opens up, its guns sounding like popping corks in the overriding roar of the planes and the shells exploding humiliatingly far short, we whoop some more and the guard turns away and shambles off, ageing as he goes. Only then do I realize that Danny is gripping my arm as tightly as any tourniquet, and I turn around, but my arm could be a wooden post for all he knows and tears are streaming down his face with the shamelessness of water gushing from a stone.

Inevitably reaction sets in, but, like an old love, the original euphoria never quite goes away. We are still soldier enough to know the meaning of mastery of the skies and the Kraut colossus, that straddled us with so casual a contempt, is at a stroke the tumbled idol and the sunken fables of our own bloods and soils are rising up again as from an enchanted sea. Put less elegantly, we are the stabled horses, still fetlock-deep in straw and our own dung, but knowing now that soon the doors will open and we be let out to gallop, tails up and knotted and arses farting at the wind.

All too soon comes the testing of this new spiritedness, a testing that we know but too well and that is all the more agonizing for its being known. The Red Cross parcels that, under the Krauts, had been so unfailingly distributed that we had come to regard them as a right rather than a gift – sometimes even (after the fashion of the Israelites and the manna from God) criticizing what they held – summarily stop. As summarily are the despised Kraut rations then reduced – sometimes even halved – and the last and the surest Sign of a second tottering of our haven of cards is prowling the barracks with slavering jaws, staring over a bunk’s edge with luminous eyes.

But, this time, we hold firm, particularly when the still lingering vision of the heavenly armada is reinforced by rumours too strong to be only rumours that our tottering is the
Krauts’
tottering and the very shuddering of our Eden is a reason for hope. Fired by a bonhomie born of an incipient nostalgia for what will one day be what
was
, we renew our contact with the no longer dour staff (does his bête noire of Douglas briefly haunt me there?), and, incredibly, Camel comes to visit us, clearly throttling back his more irreverent self and proffering Danny his hand as though the hand he is seeking never socked him in the teeth. I tense when I see that, but Danny takes his hand, albeit a little stiffly, and Camel and I carry the conversation until Danny, even more astonishingly, asks Camel if he still paints, and Camel nods and Danny says he would like to have a painting of himself to give his wife when he gets home, and Camel gapes, clearly at a loss for words, then, unable to any longer repress his truer self, asks, ‘With or without clothes?’ and I close my eyes in anticipation of that ever eager fist, but Danny says, in a tone as neutral as the Kraut soup, ‘With clothes,’ and I open my eyes to see that Camel is grinning and Danny is grinning back, leaving me the odd man out, but who cares?