Acid Bubbles (14 page)

They, the nurses at the hospital, were supposed to be saving my life by killing the cancer that had spread beyond the initial tumour. They fought back with the toxic nausea of chemotherapy, burning its way through my veins, destroying the cancer cells, destroying my immunity, and destroying pretty much everything, even the will to live at times. The desire to live, however, is far stronger than most of us suppose. In the bar discussion at the pub over a few drinks, people always say, “I don't know if I could go on!” Such platitudes are good for the pub, but when push comes to shove it just comes down to only two questions!

Do I want to fight on? Do I want to give up? The decision made after you've addressed those questions a lot of people believe can make a big difference to your recovery. I'm not so sure. However being positive seems to work even if you're kidding yourself.

For me, I think I turned the corner when I started to remind myself of Rachel's horrific stories, all given to me in those days after Bob's funeral. I wasn't only fighting with chemicals. I was using toxic thought against cancer‘s darkness, against what was trying to possess me. I was going to assist the chemotherapy and fight blackness with even blacker thoughts!

Rachel had so many dreadful stories to tell that midnight crept upon us. I had to sleep in the spare room. She had me awake at first light with a cup of tea. Half an hour later the brandy bottle was open and the stories continued until the dramatic climax.

I was listening to Rachel's harsh history for something like thirty hours. I understood any suffering I had had in this life was not suffering in the real sense. My suffering was beginning to look like a minor irritation compared to her teenage years of terror and death. In our modern society no one was going to put a bullet in the back of my head after terrifying me for several hours, or after killing all my family in front of me, or beating grandparents to death in front of their grandchildren. Political dogma was not going to degrade people with nakedness in the bleak cold, not in my part of the modern world at least.

So I focused on the horror of other people's lives, which made mine seem lightweight, and these thoughts kept me in the here and now, and not drifting off into a parallel universe I craved like a drug addict. Given the opportunity I'd overdose and I'd never come back.

I was living in a conundrum where on the one hand I was trying to avoid slipping back into incredible sensual beauty, and one short breath later was begging for it to enrapture me. Such conflict, I wanted to be in the world full of sheer joyful sensation, and at the same time I wanted to be in the world of the living, the world where I could go down the pub, come out to find it raining, this real world, wonderful despite its minor irritations.

*

Mr Wilson is where I'll start. He didn't know Rachel before the war and he never met Rachel in the camps. The meeting was under the eyes of an American doctor, in a field hospital, somewhere in southern Poland towards the end of the Holocaust. World War II was drawing to its final battle in Berlin, and they'd found each other.

Abraham Wysklowsi had been married for a short while. His wife had been expecting his child, and in the first hour after they'd arrived into terrible cold squalor of the camp both disappeared, snatched away by the forces of evil, never to be seen again. They'd survive so long, and this was late in the war with the Nazis in full retreat. This was the heartbreaking, bleak, cold January 1945 start to his battle for survival in that terror camp.

Abraham had survived, even against his own feelings of guilt after his wife had perished. At times his survival instinct was weak in the face of his inevitable doom. Dying a quick death could be a bonus. He was an academic and accountant. He was put to work counting gold, jewels, glasses, belongings, making accounts, grim accounts for the Third Reich who loved order, their order. He was surviving day-to-day with constant hunger. His luck was much stronger than others. They wanted him alive and working, so he was fed a little food to keep him alive at his desk. Deeply depressed, with suicide a constant in his mind, the days dragged by.

Sometimes he wanted to run from the office and be shot in the back. Other times he wanted to run to the electrified wire and find some warmth in that bleak winter as he cooked himself to death. Despite this he forced himself through the days like a man walking very slowly through a thick eternal fog. Abraham never thought about the end, but he didn't want it to end in death, and to compound his terror he could see no other outcome. There'd been a large reduction in the number of people coming to the camps because of the retreat, and soon his department would be surplus, ready to be thrown away. Abraham was a cheap tool, a disposable instrument.

One day, for some unknown reason, he became the focus of interest for SS officer Oberfuhrer Haussler. Badly injured at the Russian front he was now newly promoted to deputy commander at the camp. He was a man who took particular pleasure in any perverse act that could bring suffering and deprivation to others. Killing in all manners and forms had become an interest for Haussler, but he was growing tired of the easy slaughter. His new favourite experimental method to witness death was to subject his guinea pigs to his own perverted psychological methods.

For his amusement he set up an experiment with three of the Jewish academics, men from different countries, from different parts of the camp, men who didn't know each other. Even if they did it wouldn't have mattered. He put them in a small room. They were all issued with blunt knives, short 2 inch blades, and told to wait for something to eat. A day passed with nothing appearing. A second day passed slowly with no food, but water was given, horrible brackish water that one man feared was the experiment. This man believed it was carrying some form of the disease and refused to drink it. He was starting to suffer delirium. Sometime in the middle of the third day a sergeant unlocked the door and stepped into the centre of the room placing a tin of very poor quality meat, similar to modern dog food, in the middle of the floor. They were all told they couldn't share under any circumstance, and only one man could eat it, and only the man who took the food would leave the room.

These men were academics, not men of violence, men of reason, men who could debate world problems for hours, possibly debate for years. They had started their debate in the 1930s and carried on until the violent world they debated caught up and captured them. The state-sponsored violence was against men like them, and the thugs only believed in one credo, never regarding other beliefs or methods with anything other than scorn.

These cerebral men could not, would not, fight over food. They would share it. Haussler had a different agenda for his experiment. He enlisted the help of two more Jewish academics to take his experiment one step further. One academic was French and I do not know his name. The other guinea pig was Mr Abraham Wilson, but in those days he was just another Jew from Poland who's job was counting the profits of genocide.

They were taken to a small room running alongside the cell where the three men were sitting looking at a tin in the middle of the floor. Mr Wilson and the Frenchman could see the scene in the other room through a small grille. All the occupants were locked in the deadliest of deadlocks. All were desperate to taste the aromatic meat but could not come to an agreement on how to end the deadlock. No agreements could be made under the rules. They'd been crafted by an insane mind and the rules were final. This cruel system allowed for no agreement. It was one man and one man only to eat from the small tin of poor meat. Haussler instructed them to watch explaining the rules of the game and what had happened over the last three days, the discussion, followed by deadlock. He explained how these wretched academics would not fight to stay alive, would not fight for the chance of food.

Mr Wilson and the Frenchman had both been in custody without food for more than three days. They were so hungry their whole beings focused on one thing alone, the thing that would keep them alive and stave off the biting hunger pains. In the camp all-consuming hunger dominated every waking thought. The smell from the pitiful small tin of meat was intoxicating as it drifted into the cramped observation room. This was all part of Haussler's experiment. An SS sergeant entered the room and asked if the men would fight for the food. Two men agreed they'd come to a decision. Their decision was to be civilised and not to fight. One man, however, didn't say he wouldn't fight. He just remained silent staring at the tin, that intoxicating opened tin of food in the middle of the floor.

The Frenchman was poked violently in the ribs and pushed back hard against the wall by Haussler who asked him what he thought was going to happen if the men shared the food. He was unable to speak such was his terror cramped in the small observation room with this crazed German officer leaning on him with his stick. Haussler didn't want to touch such filth with his hands. The Frenchman was finally forced to respond, “I think they'll share the food.”

This is when Haussler told them, his words emphatic, “No they won't. Only one man will eat the food. He will be the man who is prepared to leave his academic life behind, and become a killer.” Two of the men, he noted, did not want to fight, but to his joy the other was focusing entirely on the pitiful tin.

Under Haussler's orders the sergeant in the room drew his pistol and shot dead both men who didn't want to fight. The bodies were not moved. Mr Wilson and the Frenchman were shepherded into the room with blows from Haussler stick. Now they knew the truth. If they did not fight they would be shot! They had witnessed the demonstration. They could not share the meat, so there would be only one survivor.

“All academics ready to discuss, but there is nothing to discuss. One of you will eat and the others will die, then I will have a candidate for my further experiments,” Haussler said. All the time his perfect smile tormented them.

Seven hours later, Mr Wilson was led back to the long shed where he survived day by day. The cold tin shed was lined with bunks four high, with hundreds, possibly thousands of the diseased, the dying and the doomed. Abraham had drying blood on his hands, spatters of other people's life on his clothes and food in his stomach. He worried the others might be able to smell the meat, the taste of which was still a potent force in his mouth. If they could smell it there would be questions asked by those strong enough to be angry, but they could not overwhelmed by the all-pervading stench.

He knew in his mind only one of them would have survived. This would torture his living days for many years, never fading far into the background. At times he relived how strong he'd been in his moment of extreme violence, how his savagery had ripped the life from two other men so he could fill his stomach. As he replayed it time and again the truth of his savage actions haunting him. He'd cowered in the corner begging for mercy as the other two had fought each other to a bloody standstill. Abraham decided he wanted to live and became a savage, or was it a callous calculation, killing the weakened men?

Rachel explained during our long conversation about the few occasions Abraham Wilson had mentioned this, and how when the subject came up it lasted for days until he exhausted himself with the personal probing, and had become so tired he had no more mental weapons to whip himself with. Only then would he seem to forget this incident. However it returned from time to time to haunt him, to question his humanity. I was starting to understand Abraham. I now knew so much more about his personal fights both in the physical world of the camp, and his mental world in the aftermath.

I was still running this through my head when I started to choke, starting to run out of breath, beginning to slip under. Was I choking on my own vomit? Was this the moment when I was to be plunged into eternal dark? No, I was drinking beer! I was sitting at a table in a beautiful pub garden out in the country. I knew the inn quite well, though for the life of me I could swear I'd never been there. It was as if I'd been there many times, but each time I've forgotten the previous visit so it was familiar in every sense of the word but not remembered. Does that make sense? The beer was delicious and the company across the table was even more delicious. This time she was drinking a pint.

It was even better that she wasn't wearing her school uniform. It was a hot day allowing Jennifer to wear a sleeveless T-shirt, tiny shorts, and flip-flops. Nothing school girlish about her now. Just the two of us chatting across a warm wooden table covered in empty crisp packets and other people's empty bottles. All this was cast in cool shade and dappled sunshine. This was a perfect moment together. We were in the middle of a discussion about leisure activities and what made athletic leisure of any kind, leisure at all, and when was it not a pleasure to be doing something you liked even if it hurt a little. I think this conversation was fuelled by the fact that we were not looking at other people's empty bottles. We were a little bit drunk.

Her foot was not in one of the flip-flops and not resting on the grass. It was engaged in a game of footsie under the table rubbing my leg, and I was enjoying this with immense pleasure. It was a surprise manifestation in itself. I was beginning to believe we were getting closer, much closer than I expected, and the more physical the better was my verdict. I was starting to feel more than the joy the first molecular wind had pushed through my body on that station platform. This was something much more, not just a sensation of something joyous approaching. I was falling in love, and her open sexuality suggested she was falling in love with me. With this realisation I was revelling in profound delight.

In this glorious world of total sensuality and colour nothing could spoil this moment apart from “the briefcase”, which to my horror was under the table. It was intriguing. The case was speaking to us in a manner that seemed quietly musical with a strange hidden depth of sound. Though quiet it was insistent. I had this feeling in a few moments I'd be travelling down into it again, or because I didn't know how things worked I was pondering if this time it would be different. Would the pixie whose name I still can't pronounce come out to meet me? No, of course she wouldn't, I'd be back down in the bowels of the brown leather case once again.