Bitter Eden: A Novel (20 page)

The current about the camp, as within the camp itself, is running too swiftly now for that painting ever to be done, but a breach is healed and, on one of his increasingly frequent visits, Camel suggests that we go with him to visit Tony, and I instinctively touch the scar on my cheek and, as instinctively, glance at Danny, neither of us having even mentioned Tony’s name since the mauling of me in that unforgettably foetid little room. But Danny says, ‘OK. Tony’s all right,’ which is the first indication that he has ever given me that the confrontation between him and Tony on that climactic day must have been more complex than I supposed.

There is a silence, but more of surprise than hostility, as we pass through to Tony’s ‘space’. He greets us as though we have never been away, his eyes only briefly fleeing as we first come in, but he does not offer us tea, it being not to be
had
any more and all stalls (as with every other ‘business’, including ours) closed down in a repeat of the ‘crash’ of two years before. But there is no repeat of his apathy of then and an emotion close to true affection seizes me as I watch the now almost savagely emaciated face glow with an ardour worthy of a less ephemeral cause than shunting actors around on a stage.

‘It will be our swan song,’ he enthuses, ‘the most difficult thing I have ever done! You have this bloke who’s going to the dogs with booze and women and what have you in a bungalow somewhere in Africa where there’s lots of greenery coiling round the walls and leopards coughing in the wings. He deals in diamonds and slaves which means – naturally – that he is a white bounder whose rich Brit dad has kicked him out of the house with enough of a remittance a month to shut his mouth and keep him a continent away. Now that sounds like a load of corn and it
is
, but there’s also this young native girl who’s shacked up with him and
she’s
the one that makes this play the one I want to do before our deliverers come to drag me out of here!’

‘Who’s going to play the part of the girl?’ I dare to ask, curiosity overcoming caution as I realize the magnitude of the task Tony is setting not only for the actor but himself.

‘
Present
tense, Tom, not future. Not knowing how much time we have left, I have speeded up rehearsals to the point where I lie awake at night picturing the balls-up there is going to be on opening night.’

‘Which is –?’ Camel prompts.

‘In a week’s time,’ and Camel says, ‘Christ!’ and Tony turns to me again and says, ‘You don’t know him, Tom. Not your sort. Nor, for that matter, mine. But, when it comes to plays, I’m looking for
actors
, not friends, and he is
good.
’

‘What does this creep do to the girl?’ Danny cuts in and, although his tone seems normal enough, I’m wishing we were somewhere else, the conversation veering now towards perilous ground.

‘Give him one guess,’ Camel says, making it worse, and I making it worse still as Camel’s usual dry lasciviousness jerks a laugh out of me that is more nerves than mirth.

‘Shut up, Camel!’ and Tony seems genuinely annoyed, then turns and lays his hand on Danny’s knee, which does not flinch. ‘I will send you each a ticket for opening night. Use it or throw it away. It is your choice. But be sure of one thing and that is that I would never have offered this part to Tom, not only because he would have turned it down, but because it would have offended you who are his mate and whom I too respect, as I am sure you are knowing by now.’

Back at the barracks, I look at Danny with real concern. ‘You getting to
like
gays?’

‘Nah. Why do you ask?’

‘Well, you and Tony seem to be doing just fine, and you are not exactly kicking Camel in the face, and you did not say you are
not
going to see this play which is going to be a pretty rough man-loves-man affair, if you are asking me.’

‘You getting jealous?’ Danny taunts, having fun, and though I
know
he is having fun, the bizarreness of such banter fazes me and I stare at him, at a loss for a reply. He relents, then, punching my arm. ‘Hey! I’m just bulling you, man! But Tony
is
all right. He’s got savvy and a heart and he’s not all the time thinking about that one thing. If they were all like him, I reckon I could learn to live and let live.
Camel
I’m not so sure about, but he hasn’t bothered me yet and I’m thinking he won’t after what I gave him back there. About the play? Well, you heard what Tony said. “Use it or tear it up.” I’ll see how I feel when the time comes.’

Tony sends us our tickets the next day, the bearer being a youth who looks like one of Tony’s ‘straights’, but they say you never can tell. I hand Danny one of the tickets and he looks at it, then hands it back to me, saying, ‘Keep it with yours,’ he having no patience when it comes to matters such as this, and I stash the tickets in the hulk’s now getting very tattered kitbag. ‘Did the poor bastard ever get buried?’ I belatedly wonder, rolling the bag back under Danny’s bunk, a small sadness skittering through me like a dead leaf in a wind.

Danny clams up that following week, aping our shrunken – and still shrinking – stomachs which I have come to picture as sly, voracious louts that snap up every least scrap of food, then shovel it into our systems with nothing left over for a turd. Occasionally and uncontrollably, though, they
do
let off vast farts that reek of the turnip soup we so loathe but dare not any longer refuse. At times, masochistically driven, I stare into our fragment of mirror and flinch at the cadaver that stares back at me, or I feel my hipbones and shudder at their jutting and am almost grateful that it is too cold to strip down and the Krauts are to be thanked that their frequent herding us into the delousing chamber is preserving us from the peculiarly Ite pestilence of lice.

Danny is not, however,
sullen
as are our stomachs – is, I sense, merely worrying with his usual tenacity at a problem which concerns only himself, but which he will eventually resolve and then share, and I am only surprised at what the problem was when, on the morning of the show, he looks at me with faintly challenging eyes and says, ‘We can go,’ and I know that he is knowing that I will not be asking, ‘Where?’ What I am asking
myself
is why did he seemingly so agonize over a matter which he originally dismissed with the words, ‘I’ll see how I feel when the time comes’? But I am none the less selfishly pleased by his decision because, from the start, I have
wanted
to go to the show, partly because I have come to love the stage and partly because it will take my mind off my stomach for an hour or two. However, I am still – and hardly less selfishly so – concerned that the
nature
of the play will revive Danny’s old intolerance of gays and disrupt the present pleasant
status quo.

I could, of course, have gone on my own, but would
not
have, which – considering the moodiness that would have ensued – is also not as selfless as it sounds, and I am being at my
most
selfish when I say, ‘OK, but remember I warned you that you might not like the play.’

‘Maybe I’m going because it
is
what it is,’ and my astonishment shows and he grins a little grimly as he adds, ‘No, it’s not quite
that
simple, mate.
Nothing
is that simple. I thought this place would have taught
you
that before it taught it to me,’ but he does not explain further, instead turns his back to me as though signalling that the subject is closed, then stretches his arms up straight and yawns, but I’m thinking that the yawn has a stagy sound. Then he drops his arms again and, his back still to me, asks, his tone carefully offhand, ‘You wanking much these days?’

It is as though he has fisted me in the gut, we – despite our otherwise closeness – never having discussed anything
this
personal before, but I try not to rock the boat too hard, ‘Who says I’m wanking at all?’ and I’m hating the coyness of the question even as it slips out of me beyond recall.

His shoulders shake, but with as much discomfort as mirth, ‘Come off it, mate! You a girl? I thought we were mates enough to talk about
anything
between ourselves. And, anyway, I’m not fishing around just for fun. I’ve got something big on my mind.’

‘Well, no,’ I confess, embarrassment still moving in me like a mess of ants. ‘Not for a long time, if you must know. I suppose it’s the shit food.’

‘Same with me,’ he grunts. ‘Don’t know when last.’

‘So what’s the problem? Why are you pitching me this crap?’

For answer, he gropes under his palliasse, takes out a sheaf of letters, selects one and passes it to me, his eyes still not meeting mine. ‘Read,’ he says and goes to stand in the barracks door, staring out into the inexhaustibly falling snow.

The letter is from his wife, the handwriting girlishly fine, the date four months earlier than the camp censor’s date of barely a fortnight ago. It teems with crudely sloppy sentiment, is concerned only with herself, is awakening in me a dark resentment that has a truer name that I flee. The concluding words leap out at me from the page, ‘Pray to Jesus, dear, that this war will soon be over. I am only human, you know. I am a woman and I’m needing my man!’

Decisively, I refold the letter, return it to its envelope, toss it onto Danny’s bunk, and he comes over and I say, trying for humour, but the tightness in me still plainly to be heard, ‘Ja, looks like you got to work overtime when you get home!’

He does not at first reply to that. Looking at me levelly, seriously, he instead says, ‘I understand how you feel. I would feel the same if – ’ and he nods at the letter, then lets the sentence hang. ‘Nah, that’s shit. I
am
feeling the same. Right or wrong, it will be hard when the time comes.’ Then he narrows in to land, ‘Why am I showing you that letter? Don’t you see? It’s like you said. Like
she’s
saying,’ again he indicates the letter. ‘These women of ours – there must be
some
bint waiting for you too, man! – if they are not having it off with somebody else – and I can’t see
my
missus doing a thing like that, not with my
mum
there, that’s for sure! – they will be so hungry for it when we get back that they will be wanting us to give it to them before we even close the door, and here you are saying – and
I
am saying – that we can’t even get it up any more, haven’t even been
wanting
to wank for we don’t know how long! Jesus! Every time I read that letter and feel this dead meat between my legs, I’m wanting to go anywhere except home!’ He stops, breathing hard, rubs a small moisture from his hands, his eyes wider than I have ever seen them and more than a little mad. Then, almost pleadingly, ‘Do you think they will understand what it was
like
here, that we have been only halfway men most of the time? Do you think they will be
patient
, will believe us when we tell them we have grown to be just plain
scared
?’

I stare at him, at a loss what to say. What can I
possibly
say? What inane advice can I proffer when – give or take a year or so – we are the same age and
he
the
married
man? Feebly I repeat what I said about the food, assuring him that we will be fine again when we are fed, but, deep down, fearing that that, too, is a load of crap, that we are not likely to be in any very much better shape when they again dump us on doorsteps we hardly any longer know. Then I remember my mother – clairvoyant and ferocious, raging at my father for what she had caught him doing to me, but then standing by him, trying to understand him, to help him, even though they never again shared the same bed – and I say, a little more authority in me now, ‘Women are not like us. We can’t judge them by what
we
are. They are also
mothers
, you know, and sometimes we are less their men than their kids whom they cannot bring themselves to kick in the teeth even though we deserve to have our cocks cut off with a blunt knife. So steady up, mate. You are married to a nice Brit girl, not to a –’ and for a moment I hesitate, and then it comes to me and I say it right – ‘Lady Macbeth’, and he begins a slow grin, then touches my arm and stashes the letter back under the palliasse and says he’s going out for a piss.

So we go to the show, shivering under a briefly cleared sky, an over-the-snow wind smashing into our faces like shattering glass. Rumours of the show’s eroticism have been deliberately floated and hungrily heard and it is plain that every first-night ticket has been presented at the door. Only the Kraut brass are conspicuously not there and there is an immediate new rash of rumours that peace is about to be/has been/has long since been declared and the Kommandant has been summoned to hand over whatever Kommandants hand over at the changing of the guard.

The play itself is even worse than Tony had warned and I find myself unable to beat back the yawns, but Danny sits staring at the stage with a massive remoteness that makes him seem twice his size. The actors are indeed, as Tony had feared, under-rehearsed and I find myself waiting in mounting tension for the prompt’s next too loud intervention from the wings. The actors
are
doing their best, though, their mouths bleeding from their wrestling with the playwright’s barbed wire lines, and the ‘native girl’ is all that Tony enthused ‘she’ was – sensuous yet rawly innocent and the whole stunningly believable under a miracle of make-up that has the whistles shrilling each time an entrance is made. Our seats are near the stage and I study this illusion of a woman from every angle, but – from the sinuousness of the hands to the pouting of the mouth and the lilting of the tidy buttocks – there is no flaw. Indeed, there is
more
– a
personality
that is so wholly feminine, so little put on, that I realize it must be the actor’s own covert personality now orgasmically set free.