A House in Order (5 page)

They paid no attention to the puddles on the parquet all round me, and just went on sharing the pleasure they were getting from their joke. I knew that they were not laughing at me, because none of them even looked at me or seemed to know that I had come in. But after a while, the Colonel changed his tone and put on a serious face,
which the others all copied at once. They then all fixed their eyes on me, but not with any real interest, and the interpreter began as usual:

Do you agree that that is correct?

Apparently, this was their joke, directed against the Commandant, because they all shook with laughter at it, only the Colonel keeping a very straight face.

Even the Colonel couldn't refrain from laughing at this point.

This was their last burst of amusement, and the Colonel rose from the table, without waiting for me to answer.

When the guard shut my greenhouse door behind me, I stood in the dark like someone in a frozen cave and could hardly tell where I was. My eyes were filled with flashes of the electric lights in the officers’ room, and the darkness I was in now seemed to be a sheer impossibility. As for the coldness of everything, it was beyond imagining, though I could feel the ice under my boots well enough and feel the water in my clothes stop running and freeze my uniform into the old armour of stiff ice. I felt that if I had never been taken out, I might hope to live, but as it was, I was knowing my prison properly for the first time, and seeing that no person could stay alive in it. But at the same moment I found myself jumping up and down and slapping myself, in my old routine against freezing to death, while tears ran down my face because it broke my heart to think that if the Commandant had kept his patience for only a few more days, I should be in the warmth of the common prison. For an hour or two it seemed to me that to have taken me out of my frozen hole, warmed me, and then put me back to die, was the cruellest suffering I had had so far, and I couldn’t imagine accustoming myself again to a life that I had had so much time to get used to before. But like nearly all the things I fancied or believed, this turned out to be nonsense too. When I got between my blankets,
full of icy food, with my junk bundle piled on my feet and my other bundles in my arms, everything was back to where it had been before – the same teeth chattering incessantly, the same roar of heart-beats in my ears, the same struggle to hug my bundles tighter to my body and work my toes in my boots. But I did remember one thing about the past day, and that was the date which had been put on the document. It signified that the days were growing longer. I heard myself repeat that word all night through the rattling of my teeth – ‘Longer’ – though I soon said it like a parrot without feeling that it meant anything.

Next morning, I remembered it, and it meant nothing at all. The sky was low and grey with gales of snow whirling out of it in bursts and the country was like the tundra (approx. – 10). When I saw the prisoners march out and meet the blizzard in their stiff columns, I began to cry again and hate them for their cosy life: it drove me to rage to think that they would go home one day with tales of their sufferings in a winter prison, and sit by the fire describing proudly the discipline they had kept under awful trials … I went berserk that morning with tears and hatred, shaking my fist, laughing and sneering: I called them every degraded name I could think of, and when some of them, all in unison, began to sing – all about whores and beloved mothers – I let out a cat-call and burst into howls, so that my guard, very much annoyed, came to the door and drew a finger across his throat. The very next morning brought the first white sun of February – most magical of months to the greenhouse grower – but I was past recognizing it for what it was and only felt the miserableness of its pale and disturbing light. By next day, it was gone, and everything was black again, with the horrible, dirty ice solid
as ever under my feet and me skipping on it like a deformed creature, my hands buried under my arms and my chin hugged to my chest. At some point in one of these dances, I lost my glasses, and the whole landscape beyond the garden disappeared: however much I stared, I could see nothing of the prison camp at all, which set my mind working at once trying to picture it in my mind’s eye, with absurd results. I didn’t stop at inventing blankets inches thick of fluffy wool and numberless radiators and stoves that filled the air with a sirocco: all the oafs inside whom I had hated so lately as cattle and despised all my life as vulgarians, turned into saints, and even the things that were most disgusting about them – their stupid, repetitive jokes and their odious forms of chummy behaviour – got changed in my mind to the habits of angels. I pictured myself with them over and over again, with a bench pulled up to the stove and room being made for me at the warmest end: they gave me warm, stolen socks and oiled boots and fed me with mugs of hot coffee: in their brainless language they tried to tell me how much they shared my sufferings, and swore with their usual obscenities that I’d ‘be OK now, cocky’ and ‘snug as a cat’s arse’ and God knows how many other bits of nonsense of that sort, all so maudlin that I spent half my time in tears, loving the plain goodness of simple idiots. Some of the absurdities I imagined were beyond belief – everyone died for me, everyone loved me, everyone was a soul bringing me bowls of hot food, and everyone wondered how I could have survived such horrors and swore to do his piece in comforting and rewarding me.

It was about the fourth day without my glasses, and me in the middle of one of these ravings, when I found one hand all wet and saw that drops of rusty water were
coming from the brass tap. Next minute, the dirty drops turned into a trickle and the ice-block on the tap-head fell off. Two feet away, right under my nose on the staging, appeared my glasses, and no sooner did I put them on my nose than I was covered with sunshine. I was too amazed to know what was happening: outside, there was only snow as far as I could see and the whole prison camp lay in such humps of snow that it looked like squares of white mountains. But here in my greenhouse, icicles were running and falling from the roof and even the black ice under my feet was melting into filthy trickles. I couldn’t understand what was happening: it must have been about St Valentine’s Day, when words like ‘thaw’ and ‘springtime’ are impossible. But still the water ran from the tap, faster and clearer, and the sun shone brilliantly and clouds of vapour steamed up all round me. I was staring at the guard, plodding up the path on his beat in his snowy great-coat and furry hat, when suddenly I found myself thinking: ‘Are you crazy? Aren’t you in a greenhouse? Of course, it’s spring for
you
– that’s what a greenhouse
is
–
where spring comes sooner.’ I was so astonished by this revelation that I dropped onto my chair and watched the tap-water running in streams all over the floor, though how I, of all people, who have known a greenhouse all my life, could find ‘revelation’ in something I had always known, must sound incredible. But very slowly, hopes that I had forgotten the existence of began to rise inside me – the ice might go, my clothes might dry, I might get my boots off. Finally, after an hour of this amazement, the most impossible thing of all happened: my body began to feel warm, and though I howled with pain and felt sure I could never stand coming back to life, I knew that the thaw was real and would go on, and that though I would be frozen again every night for weeks to come the ice would never work back into my bones again. I had the sense to turn the tap off and even to open my bundles on the staging to steam themselves dry before the sun went, but I was so hurt by the sharpness of the light and the speed at which the change had come that I spent the whole day fuddled in my chair and hardly moved until the light went and the steaming glass turned into sheets of ice again. I talk of the suddenness of it all, but it is possible that it had all begun to happen some days before and that I only woke up to it at this moment. It may have been the cause of all my beautiful dreams about the prisoners in the camp, which I think I would not have had if I had been freezing, because one doesn’t dream when one only wants to die.

I counted seven whole days of this sunshine after the day the tap started running. They were not happy days, because I nearly collapsed under them, but they were a string of extraordinary surprises and discoveries, such as a baby might make on starting to recognize things. Not that I looked much like a baby: my hands were purple with blood and swollen up like meat, and my face in the glass was a horrible sight, with the flesh all broken and the veins showing and hair growing out in a tangle like a bristle broom or a thorn hedge. When I got my shirt off at high noon one day and the newspaper paddings underneath came off, my skin came away with the rest, so that I couldn’t tell it from newsprint at the deepest layer and saw broken sentences in my old skin. I didn’t dare to try and wash the shirt, in case the sun went before it dried, but I spread it on the staging most of one day and had a job putting it on again at night because it had dried as hard as cardboard. As for my boots, my
fingers hurt so much that I couldn’t untie the knots for days, and when I did at last I hadn’t the strength to pull them off. I think I was terrified, too, by what my feet might look like – and sure enough, when I got the leather off at last, I thought I would die of the bursting pain and the poison: my hands were healthy compared with these stewed bags of plums. Reviving seemed as bad as dying, and just as likely to kill me, and my blood gave me no peace at all, playing up every nerve in my body and making every hair stand up with a tickling that was as bad as the pain. I was sure I would go blind if I didn’t get out of the sun, but there were so many other pains and chills in the darkness of the shed that I settled for swelling all day and contracting all night. Anyway, by the end of those seven blessed days, when torrents of a cold rain began, I could recognize bits of my old self – thumbnails creeping out from my flesh and spreading into their usual shape, skin staying in place, numberless pains changing into frantic tickles, and so on. I must have been better, because I slept through two days of rain, eating food that was mostly rain-water. After which the snow and sunshine came back, and I saw that my hands and feet were going down from purple to crimson with even an occasional streak of dirty, whitish red. I must have been getting better, because I remember thinking it unjust that where other men would be able to show wounds from their war, I, largely thanks to having lived a decent life before the war, might come home as healthy as when I left.

Another old habit, orderliness, began again too, though only concerning keeping myself as warm as possible. I laid my two blankets out on the staging every day to warm and opened my bundles onto them, so that I went to my freezing bed dry and even slept an hour or
two before the cold woke me up. I was doing this business with my bundles one morning when I pushed aside one of the absurd paper pots in which I had taken such pride in the autumn. One of the wild storksbills I had dug up had been put in it and was now showing, like a tiny folded fan, the beginnings of a green leaf. Knowing that this was impossible, I picked up the pot in my sore fingers to look closely, and dropped it. Out fell the plant and the dry sand and there, before my eyes, were the roots. ‘So you have survived too, have you?’ I said to it.

It took me a good hour to get it back into its burst pot, my fingers hurt so much. I repeated: ‘Impossible!’ all the time, feeling that though nobody can be sure how much a human being can survive, one has a pretty good notion with a plant. However, there it was, so after shrugging my shoulders I gave it some water from the tap and put it in a shady place. I had no heart to look at the other plants and no wish to find out how utterly dead they were, nor did I care particularly, because they only reminded me of my idiot self in the autumn and the childish way I had imagined being looked after in winter: it hurt my dignity to think that I had been brutally punished for the worst stupidness of my whole life. But the staging ran all day as the soggy pots dried in the heat and toppled over when their icy bottoms thawed, and at last I began to pick them up and look at them contemptuously before I chucked them in a corner: I had not reached the stage where I wanted to kill anything alive, out of revenge. After chucking away a dozen of the dead, I hit on a second freak that had stayed alive, a storksbill of another sort, and eventually a number of others appeared, three in a row on one occasion, for some extraordinary reason. I saw all the first survivors as just crazy sports of nature – creatures that
had done something impossible by chance – but after a while I began to remember that it was my hands that had made the thick pots and filled them with the right sand, and my skill that had directed things, so I began to feel proud and instead of greeting them as natural freaks or self-survivals found myself saying: ‘So my paper kept you warm, did it?’ and ‘So sand suits you, eh? I thought it would.’ Before the sun went, I had lined up three dozen survivors out of two hundred, including the house-leek of all things, which was black and rotten except at the core, where I found a green streak under my nail. So instead of looking back on my autumn self as an unspeakable fool, I started thinking of him as more skilled and clever than people would imagine, and I said to myself at last: ‘I would certainly like to meet the gardener who could do such miracles as I have done.’ That night I was warm enough to sleep for about three hours and in the morning was almost shocked to find that my mug of coffee was just warm to my lips instead of frozen and made them smart as if acid had run into the cracks.

Strewn about in the shed and tramped by me into the earth, I found scores of the plants I had dug up so wildly when I had been given the spade. I put the best of them into the dead one’s pots, which was a long business because though my hands were half the size they’d been, my fingers were either dead to feeling or too painful to use. Then, it rained for a solid week and the whole greenhouse, well warmed by now, turned green and putrid, with water rising up the holes I had dug for gravel, so that a number of the plants that had stood up to the frost died disgustingly of grey mould. But now I slept for whole nights at a time and had no wild fantasies to drive me mad, except the fear that once the rain had driven out the ice, I would get up one morning to find that my toes or feet had thawed and dropped off. Instead when the sun and frost came back, I found that most of my pains were gone and that I dared even to pull the stuffing out of two of the squares of glass and encourage my icy enemy to come in and change the stinking air. I was even fool enough to take a bar of yellow soap and wash my shirt on the staging, as a result of which most of it turned into mouldy slivers of stagnant wool or just fell to pieces leaving me with the arms and some of the front but no back and shoulders at all. There was soap enough by now to scrub out a palace but scrubbing was more than my hands could manage and I used the soap for the leaves of the plants and the disinfectant powder for their soil. My inborn hatred of all little parasites that creep into greenhouses kept me steadily at this job, which turned out to be a real triumph: not a single member of the whole disgusting breed of sucking pests lived longer than overnight with me. And almost every morning, the temperature of my coffee rose, until one day I drank it almost hot.