Free Fall (13 page)

Then where? I am wise in some ways, can see unusually far through a brick wall and therefore I ought to be able to answer my own question. At least I can tell when I acquired or was given the capacity to see. Dr. Halde attended to that. In freedom I should never have acquired any capacity. Then was loss of freedom the price exacted, a necessary preliminary to a new mode of knowing? But the result of my helplessness out of which came the new mode was also the desperate misery of Beatrice and the good joys of Taffy. I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started. Yet the capacity to see through the brick wall rose directly and inevitably at Halde’s hands out of my sow’s ear. I have an over-clear  picture of the room in which he started the process. The Gestapo whipped the coverings off yesterday and unveiled the grey faces.

The room was real and matter of fact and sordid.

The main bit of furniture was an enormous table that occupied one-third of the floor area. The table was old, polished and had legs like the bulbous legs of a grand piano. There were papers piled at each end, leaving the centre for the commandant’s blotting-pad. We faced him across the pad, man to man, except that he sat and we stood. There were filing cabinets behind him and the card slips on each drawer were lettered in careful gothic script.  Behind and above the commandant’s chair was a large
photograph of the Fuehrer. It was a harmless room, dull and comfortless. Some of the piles of paper had been on the table for a long time because you could see what the dust was doing to them.

March in, right turn, salute.

“Captain Mountjoy, sir.”

But the commandant was not sitting in his chair neither was his fat little deputy. This man was a civilian. He wore a dark lounge suit and he sat back in the swivel chair, elbow on each arm, finger-tips together. Left and behind him was the commandant’s deputy and three soldiers. There were also two anonymous figures in the uniform of the Gestapo. We were a full house; but I could look nowhere but straight at the man in front of me. Is it hindsight to say that already I liked him, was drawn to him, could have spent as much time with him as with Ralph and Nobby? I was fearful, too, my heart was beginning to run away with me. We did not know for certain in those days how bad the Gestapo were, but we heard rumours and made guesses. And he was a civilian—too high up to wear uniform unless he felt like it.

“Good morning, Captain Mountjoy. Shall we say mister or even Samuel or Sammy? Would you like a chair?”

He turned and spoke rapidly in German to a soldier on my left who placed a metal chair with a fabric seat for me. The man leaned forward.

“My name is Halde. Dr. Halde. Let us get to know each other.”

He could smile, too, not a wintry smile but a genuine one of joy and friendliness, so that the blue eyes danced and the flesh lifted to his cheek-bones. And now I heard
how perfect his English was. The commandant spoke to us mostly through an interpreter or briefly in throaty German-English. But Dr. Halde spoke better English than I did. Mine was the raw, inaccurate stuff of common use, but his had the same ascetic perfection as his face. His enunciation had the purity that goes with a clear and logical mind. My enunciation was slurred and hurried, voice of a man who had never stilled his brain, never thought, never been certain of anything. Yet still his was the foreign voice, nationless, voice of the divorced idea, a voice that might be conveyed better by the symbols of mathematics than printed words. And though his P’s and B’s were clearly differentiated they were a little too sharp, just a fraction too sharp as though his nose were pinched inside.

“Better?”

Doctor of what? The whole shape of his head was exquisitely delicate. At first it looked roundish, because your eye was caught by the polished bald top where the black hair streaked across; but then as you came down from there you saw that round was the wrong word because the whole face and head were included in an oval, wide at the top, pointed at the chin. He had a great deal of forehead, the widest part of the oval, and his hair had receded. His nose was long and the hollows of his eye shallow. The eyes themselves were an astonishing cornflower blue.

Philosophy?

But what was most striking about his face was not the fineness of the bone structure but the firmness of the flesh over it. There are many things that can be learned from the general condition of such tissue. If it is wasted away solely by disease the general effects of suffering cannot be
concealed. The eyes are dull and the flesh bags under them. But this flesh was healthy, was pale and the least amount compatible with decent human covering of the front of the head. Any less and the skull would start through. The lines were not necessarily the lines of suffering but of thought and good-humour. Taken with the fine hands, the almost translucent fingers and the answer was asceticism. The man had the body of a saint.

Psychology?

Psychology!

Suddenly I remembered that I should have refused the chair. Thank you, I prefer to stand. That was what a Buchan hero would do. But I had this engrossing face before me, this assured and superior English. I had sat down already in a chair that rocked slightly on an uneven floor. All at once I was vulnerable, a man trapped in a mountain of flesh, a man wielding a club against a foil fencer. The chair tipped again and I heard my voice, high and absurdly social.

“Thanks.”

“Cigarette?”

This ought to be refused, should be waved away—but then I caught sight of my fingers, stained to the second knuckle.

“Thanks.”

Dr. Halde reached behind the right-hand pile of papers, produced a silver cigarette-box and flicked it open. I leaned forward, groping in the box and saw what was behind the pile of papers. Nobby and Ralph had been at great pains to find out how to avoid the archaic smile of the seventh century; but those papier mâché heads of hair with the clownish ill-made faces would not have deceived a
child. They would have done better after all to let me help, or relied on hair and the blankets pulled right up.

Dr. Halde was holding out a silver cigarette lighter with a quiet flame. I put half an inch of cigarette in the flame and drew back, puffing out smoke.

Nonchalant.

Dr. Halde began to laugh so that the flesh of his cheeks rolled up into a neat sausage under either eye. He remained pale mostly; but there was the faintest suggestion of rose under each sausage. His eyes danced, his teeth shone. A little V of wrinkles creased the skin outside each eye. He turned and included the deputy in his delighted laughter. He came back to me, put his fingers together and composed himself. He was an inch or two higher than I. He looked down at me therefore, friendly and amused.

“We are neither of us ordinary men, Mr. Mountjoy. There is already a certain indefinable sympathy between us.”

He spread his hands out.

“I should be in my university. You should be in that studio to which it is my sincere wish you may return.”

The nationless words had in them an awful quality of maturity as though the next sentence might well be all the answers. He was looking me in the eye, inviting me to lift this affair above the vulgar brawl into an atmosphere where civilized men might come to some arrangement. All at once I dreaded that he should find me uncivilized, dreaded so many indefinable things.

Suddenly I was fumbling with my cigarette.

“Did you burn yourself, Mr. Mountjoy? No? Good.”

He was holding out a china ashtray with a Rhineland
river scene on it. I took the ashtray carefully and set it near me on the table.

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t know how they got away or where they were going.”

He watched me for a moment in silence. He nodded gravely.

“That may well be.”

I scraped back my chair and put a hand on either side of the seat to get up. I began to play unbelievingly with the fiction that the interview was over.

“Well, then——”

I was rising; but a heavy hand fell on my left shoulder and clamped me down. I recognized the colour of the fabric at the wrist, and the physical touch of what ought to be feared made me angry instead so that I could feel the blood in my neck. But Dr. Halde was frowning past my shoulder and making quietening gestures with both hands, palms down. The heaviness left my shoulder. Dr. Halde took out a white cloud of lawn and blew his nose precisely. So he was suffering from catarrh then, his nose really was pinched and his English really perfect.

He folded away the lawn and smiled at me.

“That may well be. But we must make certain.”

My hands were too big and clumsy. I shoved them into the pockets of my tunic where they felt unnatural. I took them out and worked them into my trouser pockets instead. I said the phrases in one mechanical movement as I had learnt them. Even as I spoke I knew they were nothing but a nervous reflex.

“I am a commissioned officer and a prisoner-of-war. I demand to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention.”

Dr. Halde made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sigh. His smile was sad and expostulatory as if I were a child again, making a mistake in my classwork.

“Of course you are. Yes indeed.”

The deputy commandant spoke to him and there was a sudden quick exchange. The deputy was looking at me and back at Halde and arguing fiercely. But Halde had the best of it. The deputy clicked his heels, shouted an order and left the room with the soldiers. I was alone with Halde and the Gestapo.

Dr. Halde turned back to me.

“We know all about you.”

I answered him instantly.

“That’s a lie.”

He laughed genuinely and ruefully.

“I see that our conversation will always jump from level to level. Of course we can’t know all about you, can’t know all about anybody. We can’t know all about ourselves. Wasn’t that what you meant?”

I said nothing.

“But then you see, Mr. Mountjoy, what I meant was something on a much lower level, a level at which certain powers are operative, at which certain deductions may be made. We know, for example, that you would find asceticism, particularly when it was forced on you, very difficult. I, on the other hand—you see? And so on.”

“Well?”

“You were a communist. So was I, once. It is a generous fault in the young.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I shall be honest with you though I cannot say whether
you will be honest with me. War is fundamentally immoral. Do you agree?”

“Perhaps it is.”

“One must be for or against. I made my choice with much difficulty but I have made it. Perhaps it was the last choice I shall ever make. Accept such international immorality, Mr. Mountjoy, and all unpleasantnesses are possible to man. You and I, we know what wartime morality amounts to. We have been communists after all. The end justifies the means.”

I ground the cigarette out in the ashtray.

“What’s all that got to do with me?”

He made a circling gesture with the cigarette-box before holding it out again.

“For you and me, reality is this room. We have given ourselves over to a kind of social machine. I am in the power of my machine; and you are in my power absolutely. We are both degraded by this, Mr. Mountjoy, but there it is.”

“Why pick on me? I tell you I know nothing!”

I had the cigarette in my fingers and was fumbling for a match. He exclaimed and reached out the lighter.

“Oh, please!”

I got the cigarette into the flame with both hands and sucked at the white teat. There were the shapes of two men standing at ease, but I had not seen their faces, could not see any face but the worried, donnish face behind the lighter. He put the lighter down, set his hands on the blotter and leaned towards me.

“If only you could see the situation as I see it! You would be willing, so willing, I might say anxious”—the hands gripped—“Mr. Mountjoy, believe me, I—Mr.
Mountjoy. Four days ago over fifty officers escaped from another camp.”

“And you want me to—you want me——”

“Wait. They are—well, they are still at liberty, at large, they are not back in the camp.”

“Good for them, then!”

“At any moment a similar escape may be made from this camp. Two officers, your friends, Mr. Mountjoy, have done that already. Our information is that morale makes a large-scale escape from this camp unlikely, but not impossible. It must not happen—if you only knew how much it must not happen!”

“I can’t help you. Escape is the prisoner’s business.”

“Sammy—I beg your pardon, Mr. Mountjoy—how well you have responded to your conditioning! Am I wrong after all? Are you really nothing but a loyal, chuckle-headed British soldier of the king?”

He sighed, leant back.

“Why did you call me Sammy?”

He smiled with me and at me and the winter of his face turned to spring.

“I’ve been studying you. Putting myself in your place. An unpardonable liberty of course, but war is war.”

“I didn’t know I was all that important.”

He stopped smiling, reached down and fumbled papers out of a briefcase.

“This is how important you are, Mr. Mountjoy.”

He threw two small folders across the blotter. They were drab and worn. I opened them and examined the paragraphs of incomprehensible gothic print, the scribbled initials and names, the circular stamps. Nobby looked up at me from the photograph in one and Ralph
from the other—Ralph posing for the photograph, being deliberately half-witted and deadpan.

“You got them then.”

Dr. Halde did not reply; and something about the silence, some tension perhaps, made me look up quickly and turn my statement into a question.

“You caught them?”

Dr. Halde still said nothing. Then he took out the cloud of white lawn and blew his nose on it again.

“I’m sorry to tell you that your friends are dead. They were shot while trying to escape.”

For a long time I looked at the dim photographs; but they meant nothing. I tried to stir myself, said silently and experimentally in my mind: their chests have been beaten in by a handful of lead, they have come to the end both of them, those indefatigable cricketers, have seen and recognized the end of the game. They were my friends and their familiar bodies are rotting away.