Bitter Eden: A Novel (24 page)

The shot rings out as he is about to round the barn and slams him against its wall, but he does not fall. Then there is a second shot and he begins to slide, one hand fumbling for a purchase on the wall, and I am running, and Danny is running, and we reach him as he hits the ground and rolls over, face to the sky. Blood is already pooling under him and spilling from his mouth, and I kneel beside him and take one of the peasant hands with its broken nails into mine, and he grips it with a frenzied strength and struggles to speak, the words bubbling up through the blood, as Danny raises, then cradles, his head. ‘What is he saying?’ Danny asks, his voice stolid with the helplessness of having watched many die. ‘Something about his mother,’ I say, striving for a similar submissiveness in the presence of death, and lean closer to the tortured mouth to hear, but the bubbling stops and, even as I watch, the desperate eyes still into their final, alienating glass.

Gently, Danny lays the head down and we pace, together, to where the rest are standing, rooted as though the bullets had struck them all. ‘Why did you do it?’ I ask of the runt, my voice oddly everyday’s, the actor in me, even now, sincerely prompting that this is the way it should be done.

‘For practice,’ he says, his eyes insolently alive, and he casts around for his men’s dutiful titter, but they are stonily silent, looking only at the ground, and, for the first time, something of an uneasiness seizes him and he turns back to us and begins to make like he doesn’t understand, ‘So why all the fuss? He was only a cock-sucking Kraut.
All
Krauts suck cocks. Didn’t you know that? Jesus, after all this time in camp, surely you are not
that
fucking dumb!’

‘That cocksucker saved my life,’ I say, still levelly. ‘It’s
you
that’s a cocksucker, you goddam Yankee shit!’

His eyes tell me that I have gone too far as he has gone too far, but
he
is thinking that he sees a way out. ‘Well, now,’ he says, stretching it slow and long, again looking round at his men, ‘why would a Kraut want to do that? What did you do for him that he would want to do that? Maybe here it’s the other way around. Maybe here it’s
you
that’s the one. Yeah! You been sucking his cock, siphoning it when he’s got the hots?’

Again I am too slow, as
he
is too slow. His head is still swinging round from its circling of his men, when Danny has tripped him onto his back, seized the rifle by the barrel, smashed its butt into the again rising face – smashed the face again and again till teeth are spilling from it like corn from a cob, and the jaw is crushed, and the cheekbones, and it is beginning to look like another Camel down there on another sure spot for a spook. But then the runt’s men at last move in, wrench the rifle from Danny’s hands, wrench him away from the blinded, heaving mess on the ground, let him go again when his own blindness heals and he sits down and stares at the nothing between his knees. Then they pick up the runt and cart him off like he’s meat, and one looks back and yells, ‘Never saw a thing!’

For the first time since we came, we knock on the farmhouse door and the farmer, a gnarled root of a man with eyes clear as the nearby streams, nods with no hatred in him and says, to me – did the dead man tell him I understand German and why is it no longer so easy for me to say ‘Kraut’ or ‘guard’? – that he saw it all and here is a blanket, and he goes with us and we roll the body onto the blanket, and he hoses away the blood and receives the blanket into his home with careful and slow hands, closing the door and saying that they will trace the mother and everything will be arranged.

Then we wait for them to fetch us, not knowing which way to go, not any longer really
wanting
to go, our roots – incorrigible parasites that they have become – already seeking anchorage in a transience of spring, its no longer snow-fed streams’ ebbing flow, a wandering stag that fortuitously stood, an inn with a radio that sang of a ghost of the mind, a dead body behind a locked door that will not open to us again. Mercifully, the waiting is not long. Even as dusk comes, they are here – four trucks with another batch of Yanks who barely give us time to grab our kits, give us no time at all for looking back, thunder us for two hours through a landscape we will never see.

The airfield is not what it used to be. The signs – one tellingly askew – still speak of ‘Flugplatz’, but it is Yanks and poms that are rushing round, loudhailers in their hands, and the runways bounce the planes, the craters still but rawly filled, and the terminal’s window, smashed, haggardly gapes like that mouth I am struggling to not recall. The trucks offload us alongside the runway nearest the terminal and a pommy staff, well over the hill, droopy moustache as mournful as his hangdog eyes, comes to us with a clipboard and sorts out our nationalities, units, names. ‘Sleep here tonight,’ he drones. ‘Right here. Nice night, so there’s no problem there. Tomorrow, sparrowfart, all onto the planes. Brits on planes to Blighty and straight to your homes. Rest’ – what, I suddenly wonder, happened to the
Russian
? – dead in a forest, bones stripped clean, or did he again swap camps before the axe fell? – ‘rest on separate planes to Blighty and into camps and wait there till your own chaps take you home.’

Suddenly it is here again, crashing down between us like a sawn-through tree – the separation that had faced us once before, but had been thwarted by a vagary of war. Had we, like children living only for today, really thought that there would be no second reckoning, that, then, the tree would
still
not fall? I look at him and he looks back, our eyes the eyes of creatures that, spines crushed, reach out to each other across a widening gulf, and I raise my hand. ‘How long,’ I ask, my voice struggling to be my age, ‘will we be in those camps?’

‘You a South African?’ I nod. ‘One month, three months, who can say?’ Then – sensing my pain? – ‘“Camps” doesn’t mean
prison
camps! You will be able to get around, get to know Blighty while you can.’ At once, we are what we were, our months expanding into years, our todays our blind sole unit for the measuring of time, and when, leaving, he indicates a monolith of food parcels beside the runway and, with a first glimmering of humour, adds, ‘All yours,’ we cry out as at our murder or rape and rush to cart parcels away to where each of us has decided to sleep, and are then no longer a hundred funny men in yesterday’s funny clothes, but a hundred desperately sick and messily amoral deviates and servitors of greed making whoopee under as sick and gibbous a moon.

Leaning against our twenty parcels each, knowing well that we can never take them with us, but, as in the case of our pending parting of the ways, not admitting it – vowing, rather, to defend to the last man out of two this so useless a hoard – we slowly eat our way through a parcel from our stock and take the measure of each other with the ancient serpent-eyes of the replete. ‘Hey,’ Danny says, solemnly as though I would not be knowing this, ‘we are free,’ and again we size each other up, but now there is more than our being free to our sniffing of each other’s sides, and we have been achingly aware of this ever since the turmoil at the barn. There is an explosiveness in us as in a cat’s fur before a storm, a primal, reactive energy that bloodshed and death breed, that seeks now to out as every cumulative force must, whether it be a lava or merely a pus, and I shift uncomfortably as one holding back an embarrassing wind.

‘I say we are free!’ Danny now yells. ‘Free to do as we fucking well want! So wrestle, you!’ and he’s all over me like the big kid he sometimes was at camp, teeth nuzzling into my neck, making as if to sever its veins, throat roaring like a ravening wolf’s, lissome, cunning body twisting round me like it has no bones, one pinioning switching to another with unpredictable shufflings of technique, but never any grabbing of the balls, breaking of the skin, drawing of blood. We laugh and pant, roll around like angry cats, though we are never that, lie for long moments, rigidly entwined, eyes staring into eyes, breath meshing into breath, then start again, knocking over our parcels’ stack, not caring about that, not letting the tumbling parcels interrupt the intricate subterfuges of our limbs.

Then, suddenly, I want out, am inwardly crying for him to stop, not even thinking, though, to cry out aloud, for that would be to expose my state. Is he feeling the same? Why do we both no longer laugh or shout, mutter picturesque and meaningless threats? Does he, too, realize that this is no longer a childish game, that, stealthily, it has become the oldest game of all? Silently we wrestle on, seriously now as though we sought a death, eyes unseeing, fixed, as eyes painted on a mask – or those that watch a sky beyond a sky, a self within a self? Convulsed, he stops first, face to my face, permitting that I overpower him, knowing that I cannot, then flings himself off me, lies, face down, alone.

In the morning, dawn not yet showing in the east, he is up and at a nearby tap, and I see that he is wiping the stain off the front of his pants with a wet palm. When he is finished, I get up and ostentatiously do the same, but he does not react, just stands there, moodily staring at the busyness of the planes. So I say to him, straight, carefully censoring any pleading out of my voice, ‘You still wanting me to visit you because, if so, how must I get to a place when I don’t even know where the fuck it is?’ He does not answer me, just takes one of his mother’s letters out of his kit and tears off the portion of it that carries his home address, then passes that to me and goes on staring at the planes. ‘Well, puh-lease,’ I say, sneering louder than any clown, ‘don’t do me any favours if it’s going to bust your gut!’ But then I notice that his hands are trembling and that his moodiness is something quite else, so I turn him round to face me, which he quite willingly does, and now I do plead, almost hearing time running out, ‘Look we wrestled and we were randy, so we came. That is
all.
I didn’t bugger you and you didn’t bugger me like so many of the guys in the camps were doing all the time. We were free and we were happy fit to bust. So we bust and now you’re wanting me to slash my wrists? For
that
? Get lost!’

It is a good try, but, deep down, a niggling doubt as to the
truth
of it is fluttering like a raven trapped in a well, and the staff is coming with his clipboard and shouting, ‘Brits form up!’ and Danny is hurrying to obey, his hand hardly having touched mine, the lights going out one by one as I watch the distance between us lengthening, when he suddenly turns round, yells, ‘You don’t visit me, I’ll bash you! You hear?’

‘Up you!’ I yell back and I’m not sure, but I think he grins.

*   *   *

From the beginning,
it is as though some exotic flower has been uprooted from its habitat and transplanted to an alien climate and soil. Without Danny, I am like a man from whom an essential part has been hacked, but, as the days, then weeks, pass, it becomes clear that an almost ritual nostalgia is deadening the first, intolerable pain. Why ‘days and weeks’? Why don’t I just up and
go
to that small village with the slip of paper with his address on it inquiringly in my hand? The answer is as simple as it is frustrating and sad: there is just no way that I
can.

The ‘camp’ of which the staff spoke is not that in the usual sense of the word, but a street of vacated cottages in a seaside town where the sea is more often grey than blue, the rain coming down without warning and frequently, though it is supposed to be spring. It
is
true that I can go where I want, provided that I report to the repatriation office each morning to find out if I have not perhaps been allocated a seat on a plane. Then there are the sessions with a psychiatrist and dietician who mostly tell me what I already know, namely, that I am a little crazy and I must take up to an hour to eat a plate of food because my stomach is as shrunken as a punctured balloon.

So I take to walking beside the sea on the bright days, envying the gregarious gulls, but inwardly emulating their contradictorily solitary cries, and sometimes I sit on the edge of the nearby downs, watching the white woolly sheep latch onto as woolly a green sward. I also take the train to London now and then, it being but a whisker away, and pay the mandatory visits to the Tower and Tussaud’s, but spend most of my daily stipend from the repatriation office on tickets for plays which
do
take me out of myself to the degree that I need.

Once I even accept the invitation of a whore who could have been my mother, but only manage to get it fully up when it is already in. ‘You been a prisoner of war?’ she asks, not unkindly, when I have paid her and am buttoning up my pants, and I nod and she adds, ‘Cunt is still too rich for you, lad. Get your boyfriend out of your system and try me again,’ and I don’t even expostulate at that, just slink out of there with my sullenly slack tail literally between my legs.

Then I have been there a month and I go into the office to check on the planes and the guy there, who knows me by now, asks, ‘Would there be some who are calling you just plain “Tom Smith” instead of these fancy names I’m looking at here?’ I say, ‘Could be,’ and stiffen up, somehow sensing what’s coming next. ‘Would this be for you?’ and he hands me one of those message slips that these red tape types leave next to their phones, and I can see it is dated the day before and it reads, ‘From Danny to Tom Smith – where are you, mate? Is one kick in the arse not enough?’

‘It is for me,’ I say, trying for calm.

‘And you understand what he’s saying there?’ and I see that this guy is looking at me like I’m bad news that will liven up his day.

‘I understand. What I don’t understand is how he managed to get through to me
here.
’

‘No problem. If he knows you are waiting to be repatriated, he’ll know where to look in the book for a number that’ll put him through. You want to answer him?’ and I see there are figures on the slip which I had thought were just bureaucratic crap. ‘You can use this phone if you want.’