Bitter Eden: A Novel (23 page)

Do I not pity him? Christ, am I a stone? Of course I pity him! What is more, I feel
pain
– a pain that is aggravated by the guilt of my knowing that I am causing
him
pain – which arguably could make my pain the fiercer of the two. But what can I do? Were I to struggle free of him and be shot, that would cause him an
ultimate
pain and reduce my dying to the petty and selfish act of a perverted will, particularly now that I find that my impulse towards death is waning with every step we take. So I go on riding him like some hideous succubus – an image, this, which I prefer to that of the child – and the trees click past in a slow computation of our going and the shots, and sometimes screams, continue to ring out above the funereal shuffle of our feet, and we begin to wonder with a renewal of immediate terror if the plan is to keep us moving till we have
all
fallen out and been shot and that was their goal all along.

But then, suddenly, the forest opens out onto a vast sweep of cold but clear sky, and the stars are so bright, so close – and so
unexpected
– that I involuntarily duck my head as before a still overhanging branch, and there is a grass underfoot that is largely free of snow and I can tell from the way Danny’s body slants and his feet take a firmer purchase of the earth, that we are moving quite sharply downhill as into a valley, and the prisoners are breaking up into groups and heading for various clusters of lights seemingly haphazardly scattered over the darkness below.

The guard that helped me onto Danny’s back leads about a hundred of us to one of the nearer groups of lights and it turns out to be a farmhouse and cottage with – judging by the sounds – a pigsty and chicken-run and, above all, a barn piled high with straw where the guard says we will sleep and the already bedded-down cows regard us with the unflappability of beasts used to sharing their universe with men. Danny lets me slip then from his back into the straw, then straightens up with a howl of anguish that at last turns the heads of the cows and crashes down beside me even as I pass out for that night’s final time.

When I again wake, the cows are gone and pigeons are fluttering and huffing on the roof-beams and trafficking in and out of the open door. I am lying in a swathe of sunlight as white and warming as a spread sheet and a fine straw-dust is whirling and weaving in the sun’s long reaching through the barn. Outside, there is an uproar of cluckings and grunts and the more leisurely lowing of a cow, but there is no trace of a human voice, as there is no trace of a startled farmer querying our invasion of his farm. I am the only one awake, the straw bristling with flung-wide, inanimate legs and arms, and I become aware that my kit has been slipped from my shoulders and is now pillowing my head, an insistent hardness in the curve of my neck at first puzzling me, then, at once as an apparition, declaring itself to be my one of our two guns. At that, I turn my head, sharply and afraid, the previous night back with me with the wholeness and clarity of a dream just dreamed, but his breathing beside me is even and deep and his face cleared of strain as a child’s. Cautiously, I reach out and touch his cheek, his body again moving against mine in an act of fortitude beyond belief, but he does not stir and I trace his lips with a finger, possessing him, then sink back into sleep as into a coma, my hand still inarticulately outstretched.

Then he is straddling me, cuffing me under the chin, the shadows grown long, the cows, back from pasture and their milking, ambling through the door into the barn. ‘Hey, you dead?’ he shouts. ‘I been hauling a corpse?’ and he gets off me and I sit up and he says, ‘Look what I’ve brought,’ and he holds up six eggs and I stare at them, battling to comprehend.

‘You been robbing the fowls?’

‘Nah. Guard there,’ and he gestures and I see our guard is kipping just a few feet from us and grinning like he’s forgotten he’s a Kraut, ‘said we must go round to all the farms for food if we don’t want to starve, so we all split up and knock, one at a time, at a door and, each time, a hand comes out and puts an egg in your hand like the missus in there is paying you to go away. So I eat one and save one and here’s your share. But eat them
slowly
, mate, because this is rich stuff that the old gut’s forgotten about and some of the blokes are knowing their mistake.’

‘I must eat them
raw
? You know we don’t have the stove any more.’

He laughs. ‘Nah, man! They’re already
boiled.
Salt in the water too. Guard says they all know the war is as good as over, so the missus behind the hand is one frightened Frau that’s not going to make you eat the eggs raw!’

So I throttle back my belly and nibble at the eggs like some twitchy-nosed mouse, and ask the guard what the fuck is going on and when do we march again, and he says there will be no more marching, that the chain of command is all but smashed, and then he looks at me and adds, his ingrown taciturnity of the peasant at last opening out into the full horror of what he knows, that we were to have been marched even further south into the mountains and then shot, but the route to there has now been cut.

‘But can’t they still massacre us
here
?’ and a fresh terror is up and clawing at me at the thought.

‘No. These are good people. They would not be permitting that.’

‘So? Where
do
we go from here?’

‘Be patient. Soon they will be coming to take you home.’

‘And you?’

‘I, too, will be going home. To my mother, who is alone. And,’ and he pauses, looking at me with the desolateness of the condemned, ‘a priest. I need absolution – for these,’ and he holds out his working man’s hands, then turns his back to me and, later, pretends to be asleep, and I finish off the eggs, my stomach absorbing them with the sensuousness of a snail a leaf, and it is only then that I remember what my mother always told me about eggs.

‘Hey,’ I say to Danny, ‘you know that eggs can stop you shitting for a week?’

‘Who the fuck cares?’ he grins and, as if on cue, two hands – like the hands that held the eggs – are setting down two buckets of milk just outside the door, and we whoop and apportion it, each of the hundred mouths getting little more than a few sips but savouring them all the same, and I realize that I am not sneezing any more and that the hot dry eyes are moist with what, shamingly, just might be tears.

In the morning, we try out my legs and, at first, I am walking as if they are two sticks, but, later, they loosen up and I take my place in the egg-scrounge, which means that, in the case of Danny and myself, the harvest is doubled and we land up with more eggs than we can comfortably – or wisely – consume in one day. So we hold half over till the following day and I suggest to Danny that we take that day off, but he says, ‘No way! We must grab what we can.
Now
! Jesus, they can’t go
on
giving us eggs! It would take a million hens for that!’ And that very next day he is proved right, but very pleasingly so, the eggs beginning to be replaced by a duo of sometimes a slice of wurst and sometimes a slice of black, home-baked bread. ‘This is the life!’ he exults. ‘Goodies from heaven, like the Bible says! Or are we back at the start and I am a he and you – what are you, mate?’ and he makes a pass at my crotch which I slap aside, and I marvel at the difference that a few eggs and a sip of milk can make, although the difference is mainly in the mind and the body still so sad an also-ran.

The valley round us plays its part in our rejuvenation, it being now clearly spring – the snow only holding out in the more sheltered places and along the banks of the several streams – and the grass, green as a baize and even as though scythed, is as spangled with flowers as a young girl’s dress spread for a picnic or a love, and, once, Danny grips my arm and says, ‘Look!’ and there it stands – a stag – massive antlers flaring, nose snuffing the wind, and the whole as out of place – and beautiful – as some mythical beast magically raised.

We pass through a village once – that is if it can be called that, it consisting of not much more than a post office and an inn – but the inn is alive with light and talk and the beery smell attracts Danny like a lamppost a dog. ‘A pub!’ he exclaims. ‘Let’s go in!’ and I say he’s crazy, that they will throw us out on our arses, and he says that they have already done much worse to us than that, and we go in.

The silence is only momentary as we come through the door, but still long enough to assure us that we have been seen. Then there is a concerted and studied effort to convince us that we are no longer seen, and we sit down at a table in a corner, our knees touching under its minuscule round, and look up to find that the proprietor, ensconced behind his stubby bar, is not at all averse to our knowing that he is seeing us, is, in fact, studying us with an intentness that is as speculative as it is unashamed. Then, nodding to himself as though arriving at a decision, he heaves himself out from behind the bar and heads for us across the hardly bigger than a bedroom’s floor, his paunch flopping like a half-filled sack, his eyes steely in a face that is otherwise all cherry-red cheeks and snow-white fuzz fit for a Santa Claus.

‘You are English,’ he says, rather than asks, one gnarled hand resting on the table with a heaviness that makes me wince, and Danny says, ‘Yes,’ unabashed, and I, nervy as all hell, nod though I’m not. ‘Wait here,’ and the hand that was on the table is swinging back to the bar, and I look at Danny and he looks at me and I say, ‘This is it. Let’s duck,’ but he laughs, ‘Don’t fuss, mate! You’re forgetting. We won the war, we call the shots,’ and I say, ‘OK,
you
tell him that when he gets back,’ and then the old guy
is
coming back, but now holding a tray from which he unloads two tankards of draught beer, two small glasses of schnapps and a plate of liverwurst, thickly sliced.

I stare at him, bemused, Danny now hardly less taken aback. ‘Please,’ I say in my best Kraut, ‘there must be some mistake. We have no money to pay for this.’

‘I am not asking for money,’ he retorts, his English excellent, a smile transforming him. ‘Now eat, drink,’ and, to me, ‘Money is not feminine,’ and goes.

We look at the food, the drink, the schmaltz on the walls, listen to the schmaltz spewing from the bar’s ancient radio, and I pick up one of the glasses of schnapps and say, showing off, ‘You are supposed to drink this first,’ and Danny picks up the other glass and we chink them and he says, ‘Our first night out,’ and I crack back, ‘I thought you were never going to ask,’ and he kicks me in the shins as we hit back the schnapps with a gasp, and someone at last glances round and slyly grins. Then we steadily eat our way through the wurst, down the beer, and, when we leave, the radio is belting out that sloppy song about the bint that is forever standing under a lamppost beside a barrack’s gate, and, outside, we, too, bellow out the words till long after the music can no longer be heard, and hook an arm around each other’s neck, we staggering, then, over a radiant, grown turbulent earth.

Almost I begin to insanely accept that Danny was right – that this
is
the sweetest Eden of them all – but, the next day, we are standing outside the barn before the start of the scrounge-around and the guard grabs my arm and whispers, ‘Look!’ jerking his head towards where the forest ends, and there is no mistaking them – the black caps, black boots, black gloves – the whole that of stick-figures dipped in the blackness of a drying blood, of toys fashioned by a malevolent hand, but the menace still there and, incredibly, something of the tawdry sadness, the dusty standing on an abandoned stage, of the woman in the song.

‘We in danger?’ I whisper back, the old terror immediately aroused.

‘No, it is too near the end now. Also, it is not the first time I am seeing them there.’ Then drily, ‘Maybe they are wishing they were me.’

So it is not they that are the threat. But omens, they fade back into the forest, though not so readily back into my mind.

It is four days later when they arrive. Danny and I are dawdling back from a scrounge, the sun low in the west, when we see them coming down the slope to the barn, disappearing behind its blind side, maybe ten of them, walking single file like guinea fowl back home. When we get to the barn, they have already hassled the guys out – the guard, too, he standing to one side, shivering like snow’s on the ground again and he with nothing on.

Their whatever he is – he is not flashing any rank – swanks over to us, hardware truculently in his hands. ‘You prisoners?’ he asks, voice high and thin like they’ve hacked off his balls, squat nose flaring like a bull scenting cow. We nod and he snaps, ‘Get over there,’ gesturing with the gun to where the other guys are standing, bowed legs for a runt already wheeling him round.

‘Who says?’ Danny growls, giving him the eye, and he whirls back, moistly petulant mouth tightening into a snarl, startlingly white eyelashes exclamatory as a girl’s. ‘The US of A, soldier!’ he shrills, the bowed legs trying to straighten into a tighter squeezing of their oval of air, and now all of us get to laughing till we’re feeling we’ll fall down, as much of hysteria in our laughter as the black baying of our rage, and he waits, entrapped and knowing it, and we stop and he says, sulkily, letting us stand where we are, ‘OK. Show’s over. This guy’ – gun’s barrel levelled now at the guard – ‘What do you want us to do? Shoot him and let him lay, or kick him in the ass and let him go?’

Ashamedly, we face the guard, ashamed that we should have been asked to be his judge, ashamed that any man should so tremblingly try to hide his fear while the eyes so mercilessly betray the last tatters of his pride. ‘Remember,’ the eyes implore of me, fawning as any about-to-beaten dog’s, and I do – death again but a vagary of his will away, the night, with its shots and screams, the sudden antechamber of my own oblivion beyond recall.

Danny beats me to it, though, ‘Neither,’ he says, his tone thrusting at the runt like a blade. ‘We don’t shoot him and we don’t kick him in the arse or anywhere else when we let him go. Right?’ and he glances round at the rest of us and we say, ‘Right!’ as one, and the runt looks at us as though we are no better than the guard, then shouts, ‘Vamoose!’ flapping his gun as though he is shooing a fowl, and the guard stares at him, not understanding the word, and I, at last, say, ‘Go, friend,’ and our eyes meet over the barriers of blood and tribe for a moment that is endlessly prolonged. Then he flees, shamblingly, not even taking up what is his.