The Lily Hand and Other Stories (18 page)

The Rector closed the door of the attic behind him very softly, almost stealthily, and went down the stairs.

‘Mrs Iwasckiewicz—'

She looked up sharply from her pastry. He had only to raise his voice a note, and she was instantly on the defensive, ready to excuse and placate, she who cared for every detail of his household with a starved proprietorial affection even Cousin Sybil had never been able to match. He saw how like the large dark eyes were to the child's eyes. He remembered, and for some reason at that moment he felt pride in the thought, that he was the only person in the parish who had taken the trouble to learn how to spell and pronounce her name correctly. That courtesy at least he could offer her.

‘You haven't been tidying up the attic this afternoon?' he asked mildly.

‘No, sir!' She drew breath carefully, so as not to betray her anxiety. ‘There's nothing wrong there? I hope there's nothing wrong!'

‘No, no!' he said quickly, ‘It's only that some of the things there have been moved, I merely wondered.'

Her lips were trembling. ‘Katrena was looking for some things, she said you told her she might take what she wanted for the crib. I hope it was not wrong? She meant no harm, she wanted only to make her Bethlehem fine for you.'

‘She did no harm,' he said reassuringly, ‘no harm at all. I did tell her to take whatever she wished. That's perfectly all right. I must go and look at this crib of hers.'

In the darkness of the garden, with the thin wet film of snow whispering dismally under his feet, he walked like a man in a waking dream. She had taken him at his word, then. She had understood him by some blessed intuition which had penetrated him more deeply than thought. If he had tried to express to her the needs of his spirit she would not have known what he meant.

The Victorian Gothic windows of the church shone across the snow, dimly lighted, their heavy colours scattered in his path like fallen flowers. He heard the voices of the children, busy and animated, as he entered the porch. Their exchanges always began in hoarse whispers, because they were in church, but ended shrill and excited, because they were engaged in a work of creation, and could not contain their delight in it.

‘No, not like that!' Katrena had come with treasures in her hands, and Katrena was calling the tune. ‘The lamb goes
here.
The donkey
here.
There, now they can all see Him.'

‘I'n't it lovely!' breathed the verger's freckled daughter. ‘It's got real rockers – look! It dun't even creak.'

‘Look at the lace on His frock,' whispered the little girl from the nursery gardener's, and the Rector knew by the awe in her voice that she was fingering the yellowed hem of his son's christening gown.

They fell silent and drew off a little when he came in. In the candle-lit alcove of the Children's Corner, ringed round with its garish little pictures, they had made a bower of holly and ivy round a wooden box propped on its side for the stable. Dolls had provided the Virgin and the shepherds, somebody's golliwog was the black King, Saint Joseph and the others they had cut out from coloured religious pictures and gummed untidily on to cardboard. Toy animals clustered round the crib; the wooden horse had regained his brightness in the candlelight, the incongruous red saddle shone bravely. In the centre the beloved doll in its robe of lawn and lace was just being tucked into the limewood cradle, between the arched wings of the cherub. Katrena's arms were thrust maternally to the elbows in the foam of lace, settling her child to sleep. She looked up at him over the cradle without doubt or fear, and waited to be praised; she knew she had done well.

Death, birth and resurrection are all linked, he thought. I relinquish my dead, and I recover them; there is no other way. Love can be kept only by letting it go free, as life is incomplete without the unreluctant acceptance of death. The cradle is filled now, with life, not death; even with everlasting life, far beyond my design or my desert.

‘It had to be better,' said Katrena, using another of her literal translations, and leaning across importantly to smooth the horse's mane, ‘but we had no boy dolls except black ones. Do you like it?'

Ask the prisoner still pale from his dungeon if he likes the light of the sun.

‘It's very nice, children,' said the Rector lamely, ‘very nice indeed.' And he watched the small, none too clean hand tenderly rocking, and thought how precious a thing it must be to her to have a secure place to sleep. There were things he could give her, after all, some tangible, some intangible; he was not empty-handed any longer, he understood the gifts that would be to her mind. Cousin Sybil's return from America should not send them away.

‘Shall we sing you a carol?' offered Katrena, sensing her advantage. And she marshalled her motley choir with much nudging and pushing into line, and, standing before them pale with solemnity, launched her little, croaking voice into something remotely resembling ‘Away in a Manger'. Uncertainly she led, and valiantly they followed; the brave, brazen noise matched in potency the trumpets at the walls of Jericho. Like courses of masonry, the years of silence within him shivered and fell away.

He led her home afterwards by the hand, though whether he had taken it or she had given it he did not know. In the chilly darkness of the garden, the lighted window of the house glittering before them with the silvery cargo of the tree, he said suddenly, in a hesitant voice: ‘My dear—'

It was strange, but he no longer felt that stab of shame at employing this mode of address. Not mine, he thought; but dear – yes, very dear.

‘My dear,' he said, aware of her large eyes raised to him patiently and hopefully in the darkness. ‘I shan't be able to put your present under the tree for you this evening. If you'd like it – it's just the right size for your doll – I'd like to give you the cradle.'

My Friend the Enemy

I have asked for this second interview, General, because it has come to my notice that in spite of your very fair and accurate reporting of the conversation we had ten days ago, my actions are being widely misinterpreted and misunderstood in the European press. It is no more than I had expected; they are using the only language they know. They are saying that I have changed sides, that my morale has been sapped during captivity, that I have done things here which make me afraid to go back to England, that I have succumbed to political indoctrination, and have gone over to the enemy. These, they assert, are the reasons for my declining repatriation, declining even passage to a neutral country, and electing to be turned loose here, here where I am, as a – civilian is a word which has no longer any meaning for me, though no doubt it would be their word. Let us say simply, as a man.

It was the same at the end of the Korean business, you'll remember – yes, you, of all people, will remember, for some of your countrymen had the same task to complete then as now, and carried themselves as incorruptibly and mercifully to the same unsatisfactory end. That was when the process came into use in the first place. Already it seems as if it had always been with us, this problem of the uprooted armies who do not want to go home. Already we begin to know the ropes, and even our answers are expected to fall into a certain pattern. Those which do not conform are always suspect.

That is why I have asked for this interview. I do not want you to think that I am concerned with the world's misinterpretation; their good opinion is nothing to me. But the truth is that my real situation is one of which they ought to take notice, before it is too late, and because I know they will not listen to explanations from me, I ask you to be my prophet. Also, for my own happiness, I should like you, of all men in the world, and your country of all countries, to understand what has happened, and think of me in a way which bears some relationship to the truth of what I am, and the circumstances in which I find myself.

What happened to me happened in the winter of 1959, before my captivity, and I must tell you about it in order to establish what kind of captivity mine was, and how little it contributed to the metamorphosis which befell me.

We were in the foothills of the mountains then, fighting our way back and forth over a few miles of shattered country, in a cold you must have learned to know well by this time. The period was already past when the United Nations Command were trying to put an end to the trouble economically, and we were already using all the methods we had, short of atomic bombs. They were too precious to be used on such a comparatively small affair; our forbearance was a matter of meanness rather than scruples. As usual, it turned out to be an affair by no means so small as we had hoped, and we felt deeply aggrieved at the enemy's tenacity, and his refusal to realize that he could not win. By the time of which I'm speaking we were using napalm again, and our bomber force was heavier than anything we'd used in Korea. We had before us a stretch of country as vacant and pitted as the craters of the moon, and we lived in the fringes of this devastation as moles live. No doubt you've seen such country since your mission here began.

It was in a night attack that this thing happened to me. We had taken two days to shove forward a few hundred yards, burrowing from hole to hole, and on the second night we launched a full-scale attack, after a barrage that seemed to me wasted on such a dead world. It went much as it always went: we reached the place where they should no longer have been, and they were still there, and they gave back before us only as they died. And we died, too, in considerable numbers, but that was all in the estimates. We were calculated losses, we could be envisaged. At the end of it both sides fell back and settled down into much the same positions as before, and began to plaster the ground in between with a double barrage. From the tales my father used to tell me, it became more and more, not less and less, like 1915.

As for me, I never made the journey back – not then. I was under a few scattered hundredweights of earth and stones, in a ready-dug grave under one of the hills. I had no broken bones, but was badly bruised from waist to heels, and crazed with concussion, and had very little left in the way of wits or memory for the first day. When I came round it was evening, and by the time I'd dragged myself clear the night was dropping again, the way it drops here, like a hawk, like a driven pile, like a stone.

It was deathly quiet. They must all have been tumbling back and licking their wounds still. The gunners might have been dead. I clawed my way out of the crater, and tried to get on my legs, and couldn't for numbness and pain; and I lay there listening, with my head up, trying to see as far as I could in the blazing darkness, from which all the smoke had cleared away, leaving that night glitter of the frost, like black diamonds scintillating with the refractions of ebony light, that's different here from anywhere else in the world. I could see the frozen undulations of the land, crusted into waves and troughs like an angry sea, and an occasional crouching thing that might once have been a tree. I couldn't hear a sound, a movement, a breath except my own. They were all gone. The night was on me, the cold was eating my chest as I breathed, and I knew that before morning I should die unless I could get to shelter.

I couldn't walk at first, I could only crawl, and I didn't know where I was facing, and had no more reason for going in one direction than in another. I was too dazed to think of using the stars. But it was better to move than to be still, and after a while some of the use came back into my legs, and I got on to them and went on like that, reeling about between the craters, falling into them and struggling out, like a drunk coming home through a ploughed field. It makes a lot of difference to a man to be erect, even when he can barely maintain it, and would be better off crawling.

I stumbled round and over a lot of dead men. It never occurred to me that any of them might still have retained a crumb, a glimmer of life, I was so used by then to the idea that I was the only living creature in those parts. When I fell over the low parapet of frozen earth into the foxhole, and half-stunned myself again upon rock, I looked round me with that crazy want of surprise that marks concussion, and took in the deep rock hollow behind, the embers of the fire, and the man crouched by it, as though they were no more to be reckoned with than the dead men outside.

That was probably why I didn't shoot him then, because he was wearing the kind of clothes I'd been taught to fire on at sight, and my reactions were fairly quick, even for a sergeant and a Regular. But he wasn't real, so real bullets had nothing to say to him. I just lay on the earth floor of his dugout, gathering myself slowly and staring at him, wondering why he moved when none of the others moved.

He could have killed me then without any trouble. He did put his hand out to his rifle which lay along the rock beside him and then, as if he'd realized that guns were only good in another dimension from this, he took his hand away, and sat staring back at me with his mouth a little open, and his eyes half-closed.

What is there special to tell you about him? You know how they look, he was one like all the rest. Middle-aged, shaggy, a bit bulkier, perhaps, than most of them, his face a shade broader, and curiously good-humoured and agreeable, as though he had some Tibetan blood somewhere in him. He had bad teeth, but good eyes, bright as buttons. There was a dirty, bloody rag round his neck, and the padded uniform was gone colourless, or dirt-coloured, with mud and filth and blood. All told, he looked much the same as I looked. And there we sat, studying each other until we knew every line, as though we were man and mirror, and had only one personality between us.

It was a real fire, though there wasn't much of it. I couldn't think of anything else, and I forgot the necessity for being afraid. You've been here on January nights, you'll understand. You find a fire, or you die. I began to inch myself towards it, and he looked at me, and then he moved round from between me and the miserable little gleam, and made room for me to come close to it.