A House in Order (9 page)

The agronomist never came next day. All that happened was that my old guard was taken away and two other men, in different uniforms, put in their places. On the day after, they let the prisoners out of the camp as usual, but with cars that had never been there before patrolling the roads round the fields. Everything at our house and garden had seemed like an island before, with its own powers, but in the next days all that was
changed – I never saw one of our officers appear, but cars stopped on the gravel road and officers and NCOs I had never seen before came up the path and disappeared into the house. I was even amazed to see what I had never thought possible – an elderly man in civilian clothes carrying a despatch case walking up the verandah with two uniformed women behind him carrying each a file: I felt I had never seen a civilian or woman before, and it was all a bad omen. But the worst was that with such a change in the days I lost count of them – which seemed an incredible thing to do, knowing by now how punctual
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would be and what I must expect on the tenth night. But the loss of my counting was just the last straw, because when that went I lost the last of my strength and went into a daze where I hardly cared any more what might happen. All the things I knew and recognized had changed into strange things that made no sense to me – the house, the verandah, the guards, the arriving and departing strangers, the routine of the camp, the movements of the prisoners and the patrolling cars – they were all beyond my understanding and exhausted me even to think of them. The only steady things I had were my own plants, which kept on growing just the same no matter how much the rest of the world changed and how many strangers appeared from nowhere. As nobody paid the slightest attention to me any more, not even thinking of letting me out, I only walked up and down my strip all day, counting the steps for health’s sake, shrugging my shoulders, or sitting in my chair staring at my pots – I knew every one of them, but not myself when I saw myself sometimes in the glass, as thin as a rail with a beard and a dreadful face.

But outside they went on with all their preparations, which reached me at last. An NCO with three men, total strangers to me, stood on the path looking at the garden, which was still very bare, and at last turned to the greenhouse. The NCO came in and after giving me a nod ran his eyes over the pots and gave orders to his three men. While they were gone, he leant humming on the staging, addressing one or two words to me and smiling vaguely when he saw I didn’t understand. Then his men came back with a variety of trays and boxes, and in five minutes they had cleared the staging of every living thing and carried it all carefully up the verandah steps. When the last plant had gone – except for the cuttings, which I had stood in the shade on the floor – the NCO shut the door behind him and, with a last nod to me through the glass, went on to his next business. I nodded back to him, because it was automatic with me now to make no trouble if I could help it; but in a numb way, because I was past feeling anything deeply. I imagined a man like
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picking up a sliver of glass and cutting the NCO’s throat, and it comforted me most of that day, as I sat looking at the empty lines of slats, to think for once of another person, rather than myself, being beaten half to death and led away at last by a squad of riflemen. But for some reason, I thought mostly of how unnatural and painful it had always been in peacetime when I myself took out plants to show somewhere – how pointless and ugly the house looked without them, as if one was a beast to rob one’s works for the sake of prizes, and being known to everyone as the greatest of one’s kind.

So many cars lined up on the gravel road next morning, and so many people in different uniforms and civvies
came up the path that there was not a trace left of the old peace and quiet. I was damping down and adjusting the ventilators like a zombie – there being no plants to do it for – when a corporal came with two men and led me up the steps into the house.

They took me through the rooms I knew into a lecture hall I had never seen before and which had been very carefully arranged, with all my plants disposed and a uniformed fool with a watering-can pretending to put the final touches to their health. There was a sort of chairman’s or president’s table and chair on the lecture dais, and below it tables covered with files and books – and so many people making such a din and giving so many orders that it hurt my ears to hear them. The men were laughing constantly, as Swedes do, guffawing loudly and suddenly whenever they spoke to each other, as if laughing was as natural to them as shooting someone, and they kept treading on the toes of the silent women who were doing the fetching and carrying of documents in neat uniforms and moving very quickly. My escort took me through all this, across the well of the hall, and then up to the rows of benches on the president’s right, where I saw everyone I had known but had not seen for so long seated in a row – the adjutant, my interpreter, the young officer looking very tense, my old guards, the squad of men who had shot the soldier who took me prisoner, and, making my heart jump, the agronomist, talking in his quiet way to the next man, but not noticing me. I was put to sit with all these people, but with one of my escort on each side of me, and on the other side of the hall, like witnesses in a different camp, were men in the uniform I recognized as the Prison Commissioners’. But there were so many distinct uniforms, as well as civilians, that I couldn’t
imagine what was happening: it was as if every Bureau that exists in an army and a nation had all come together to fight a cause.

The chairman or president was making as much noise as the others in the well of the hall and being constantly approached and questioned, etc., etc., but sharp at nine by the clock he raised his voice and held up one hand, at which there was no more laughing and every man in his seat like a statue. Then a door opened and the Colonel himself came in and walked slowly to a chair that stood by itself. Before sitting down, he nodded with dignity, first to the chairman, who returned his nod, then to the gang of personalities in the well, and finally, with a friendly smile, to all of us in our row, so that it was hard not to feel that I was part of this house and all the others apart from our row sudden strangers who had turned our life upside down.

The chairman then nodded to a sort of clerk, who put on glasses and read aloud from a long paper, interesting nobody. When he had finished, the chairman said a few words and gestured to one of the men below him to start things really going. This man was a civilian and in no hurry, but when he finished at last, an opposite number got up and did the same performance, and after him a third. Then, a fourth, in uniform, who seemed to be speaking for the Colonel, rose very slowly and spoke very shortly indeed with disdain, as if saying that it was all poppycock and the sooner it was over, the better for everyone. By then, they had wasted the whole morning and all had to go out for their lunch, except for me and my two guards, who were led to the W C and straight back, to eat alone in the hall and wait for everyone’s return.

After the same laughter and noise as before, there was
dead silence again and the first spokesman got up to ask the Colonel questions. They must have been harmless enough – only the sort of legal questions that are put to a man whom everyone knows as if in fear that he is not that person after all: the colonel answered them plainly and easily. Once, he added an extra word or so after a pause, in a lazy way, and all the witnesses in our row broke into a grin, as if to say: ‘Yes, that’s the man we know!’, and even the young officer lost his tense look and seemed happy to admire his chief. But for me, it was all a dumb-show, understanding nothing, so that no matter how much they talked I had only their faces to judge by until my own turn came.

This happened first when the clock showed three. Because the whole story began with me, I suppose, I was the first proper witness – and everybody looking at me with a lot of attention, as well they might, because but for me they could all have stayed at home. My guards stood me up and all four spokesmen took turns to have a shy at me – every single question that I had answered over and over again ever since the day I arrived in autumn – who I was, how I had spent my life, whether I was famous as a grower, etc., etc. It was all news to most of them – and every word I said scribbled down in earnest by all parties as if vital. But it was the first spokesman, who stood for the Prison Commissioners, who kept me longest about my history, trying to make it sound secret and me a dangerous person:

(This had to be written down, with the full address.)

At this, the Colonel’s spokesman rose and spoke sharply and I was forbidden to answer. It being then exactly five o’clock, they adjourned until the next day, but not until after the President had addressed me through the interpreter as follows:

At nine sharp next morning, they started in again and I was the first to be called. This time it was the second spokesman, who was only interested in undoing today what his colleagues had done up the day before:

He then waved his hand rather airily and smiled, like a man who has pushed over an elephant with one hand, and we both sat down. The chairman or president then gave an order and four soldiers left the hall, returning at once with a broad stretcher on which were the remains of the poor beast who had taken me prisoner. After some uncertainty where to put it, they brought in trestles and laid it across them, just below the thick bank of my flower pots that had been arranged under the president or chairman. I may say, though it is needless to say, that the buffoon who had robbed my greenhouse, or one of the brainless arrangers among the uniformed females, had made a point of putting all the plants that were most forward and breaking out of bud
in the well of the hall, where they were most noticed and got the least light, while all the plants that could have managed in the well had been massed in the bow-windows – what could be more characteristic? Anyway, the stretcher with its miserable remains was laid alongside the best I could offer, as in a memorial chapel.

An abominably fat and dirty woman, perpetually in tears, was brought in from outside, I suppose the corpse’s mother, because she was the first to identify it. Everyone put on a show of patience and let her stream on and babble, but when, after she had nodded her head a number of times, staring everywhere but in the direction of the rotten remains, she was thanked shortly and taken away, everyone got back to business with relief. Various soldiers stepped forward to confirm the identification, and the order in which it was done was the order of the corpse’s life. I did my turn, being led down to the stretcher, though all I recognized was the shirt pocket where he had put my glasses, the only part of his uniform that was as it had been. Then came almost all our row, one by one, every officer, the Colonel himself, the firing-squad, until after one hour everyone was content with who the corpse had been and able to wrangle for an hour more about points I never discovered. It then being lunchtime, all filed out except me and my guards, and the four men came in again and took the stretcher off.

All four spokesmen questioned me in the afternoon, all managing to make a fool of me and to prove that everything I declared was an invention. One gets tired for some reason of always answering a question in the same words when it is put four times, so I no longer remember my different answers though I do remember many of the questions:

When they were finished with me – at least, finished with the part about how I got to the greenhouse at all – they had run through another day and got me in the condition where nothing I said was of any use and
seemed so even to me. And it was all like double nonsense in the end, what with every question and every answer needing to be said twice over, in their own language and in translation for me. Like everyone who finds himself in that kind of mess, I suppose, I began to lose hope that anyone at all was believing me and to be afraid that three of them were determined, for various reasons, to turn me into a sort of
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, who had the heart of a lion and would serve my country to the death. It was the aim of two of the spokesmen, I saw, to show how justified the Colonel had been in shooting the brute who was somehow in the pay or under the influence of a bold, clever spy like me, while the third spokesman was out to show how culpable the Colonel was for confining a terror like me only in a house with glass walls and pots of flowers to hide my secrets.