C (22 page)

iv

He’s sent away from the frontier: eastwards, to the interior. Having ascertained that he’s an officer, his captors group him with his peers and transport them initially in first-class carriages, then second-class, then third, downgrading their conveyance every hundred miles or so. Eventually they find themselves in cattle trucks. A German corporal and three privates stand guard above them, jerking and swaying in front of neat fields, canals, factories and towns that follow one another with a progression whose logic seems both perfect and impenetrable. Occasionally, they pause at stations; while they’re handed bread and coffee, women stare at them malevolently from the platforms; as the train pulls off again, sliding past houses whose doors wear wreaths and crosses and whose windows, covered by black blinds, transmit in Venetian Morse the same message each time, Serge understands why. On every road, in every town and village, columns of soldiers pass by marching in the opposite direction, the neat stamp-and-click of their swift footfall drawing briefly into line with the rhythm of the steam and pistons’ chug and hissing before disengaging, fading and dying away …

He gets passed through a series of processing stations and transit camps. At each one they ask his name and rank. His answer to the former question never fails to elicit a humorous comment:

“Chafer?
You are
Insekt
, beetle?”

“Carrefax,” Serge answers, stretching the
x
out into a long, steam-like release of breath.

“Käfers?
Then you are more than one: many
Insekts!
”

After running through the fourth or fifth variation on this exchange, he finds himself inducted into an
Offizierslage
in Hammelburg. Hammelburg is a barracks town: the prison’s just a section of the town that’s been wired off from the surrounding streets. The dormitories in which the prisoners sleep eight or ten to a room line a cobbled square that’s hemmed in by sharp-angled red- and brown-slate roofs rising above the yellow and red houses, tradesmen’s premises and municipal buildings that jostle and collide with one another with Germanic closeness and compression. The guards who police the penned-in sector of the town are old, shoddily dressed, confused. Several of them limp; one of them’s missing an eye. On the far side of the wire, in the same square, new recruits are drill-marched up and down all day long. Often, when the prisoners are lined up in the open during roll call, the recruits cast anxious glances their way, as though trying to catch a glimpse of what awaits them. Serge tries to smile back each time one of their eyes meets his, as though to reassure them that it’s not that bad—until it strikes him that what’s putting the fear into their faces might not be the enemy but rather their own veterans: the thought that they’ll end up like
that …

Roll-call is taken round the clock: in the square, in the dormitories, routinely first thing every morning, without warning in the middle of the night. When they’re not standing to attention, prisoners mooch around, play bridge, attend (or deliver) lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from history and medicine to religion, or study French, German or Latin. Serge inscribes himself in Moreton’s course on Problems in Philosophy.

“The history of our thinking on free will hinges around the question of determinism: are events pre-scripted, as it were—by God, our cells or an invisible engine driving history’s course? And even if they are, are we still free to
choose
to do what we were destined to do anyway—standing face-to-face with its implications, in full awareness of its consequences? Hume thought so, and allowed this liberty to, as he put it, ‘everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.’ ”

“Our current situation kind of pisses over that one, doesn’t it?” Serge asks.

“Not necessarily,” Moreton answers, pushing his glasses up his nose’s bridge, “not necessarily. To find our way round that we’d have to look to our captors’ philosophical tradition. Rudolf Steiner has recently argued, after Schopenhauer, that we’re free when we’re able to bridge the gap between our sensory impressions of the outer world, on the one hand, and, on the other, our own thoughts.”

“So if I think of barbed wire fences, then I’m free?”

The nose wrinkles as the glasses slide down them again. “Well, I suppose, if you put it that way: yes.”

The men in the
Offizierslage
are definitely free to queue—for food, mail, laundry, medical supplies or almost anything else. Queues form around the camp at the slightest provocation. One day, bored, Serge persuades two pilots to line up with him in front of the door to a coal cellar just for the hell of it: within five minutes twenty other men have fallen into line behind them without even asking what it is they’re queuing for. The food queues break down into two types: those for the camp food with which all prisoners are provided, and those for the food sent in Red Cross parcels to individuals and distributed among recipients’ compatriots. The French eat the best: their tables are adorned with marinated mackerel, cold chicken, foie gras, peas and ham, all sent in tins. The Russians eat the worst: sustained by nothing but dried fish, they spend their time and energy building a chapel with ad-hoc interior decorations. Serge visits it one day to find they’ve fashioned icons out of wood splinters and strips of cloth, using dirt, resin, wax and blood to paint emaciated saints with sorrowful faces: eyes turned ever upwards, importuning the skies for delivery, or at least for an explanation of their circumstances. The English are somewhere in between: they get sent tins of tongue, pork shoulder, broad beans, brawn, the odd plum pudding. All of them eat better than the guards, though, who are restricted to the very slop they serve out to the prisoners: turnip stew, broth with horse-meat in it, liquid cheese and nine-tenths of a loaf of black bread every week. They’re visibly hungry. They make the prisoners kick back a little of their Red Cross supplies, but know better than to demand too high a cut: the parcels would stop coming if they did …

It’s not just the guards who are hungry: townspeople habitually gather beneath a third-floor dormitory window overlooking Hammelburg’s “free” sector to beg food from the prisoners, who toss hunks of their regulation black bread to them. Sometimes they’ll throw in a chunk of meat, wrapping it in paper after removing it from its tin. The tins themselves they never throw: these are precious.

“Why?” asks Serge as a lieutenant holds his wrist back when he makes to chuck one from the window on his first day in the camp.

“Tunnelling,” the lieutenant nods back at him.

“You do that here too?”

“All the time, young fellow, all the time: what keeps us sane.”

He’s not overstating the amount of time spent tunnelling—although whether it keeps them sane or not is another question. On Serge’s very first evening, and all subsequent ones, as soon as roll-call has been taken and the lights turned out, the men, moving with balletic deftness, cover the window with a blanket, light several candles, remove a bed from the room’s corner, lift up two of the floorboards beneath it and, tying a long cord around the designated tunneller’s feet, send him head-first into the hole armed with two empty tins to dig with. As the roll-call’s fall and cadence is repeated in the dorms along the corridor one after the other, fainter and fainter every time, they watch the cord worming its way into the ground—two cords: a second, smaller string held in the burrower’s hand is attached, Ting-a-Ling-style, to a third tin that’s perched on a shelf back in the room. If the tunnel collapses or the tunneller begins to faint, he pulls on this, the tin falls and his comrades yank him back, feet first. That’s the idea, at least. Yet more tins, bases all removed, have been laced together to form a loose tube: this is shoved down the hole as far as it will go, to provide air in the manner of a snorkel. It amuses Serge to see the vegetables on the tins’ labels heading into the ground, in a long column, one after the other—as though, having shed the grit and lowness of their origins, become refined to the point of weightless, bulkless images, they’d now come full circle and were sinking back down to rejoin their dirty, material roots. The sound of hacking, scraping and panting spills from the tube’s opening into the room’s air; some tunnellers sing quietly to themselves, or strike up strange, subterranean monologues whose sense, if they had any in the first place, is distorted beyond any comprehension by the hollowed-out reaches along which they travel.

“Where does this tunnel go?” Serge asks one night as a man they all, despite his shortness, call “Lofty” toils away beneath them.

“Go?” the dormitory captain, a colonel named Craddock, counters.

“Where will it come out?”

“That’s proscribed knowledge. Escapee Committee take care of all that. They dispense info on a firm need-to-know basis.”

“Shouldn’t it be ‘Escaper Committee’?” Serge asks. “I mean, strictly speaking, the prison is the escap
ee
, the thing escaped from. We’re escap
er
s—and in fact not even that, not having yet escaped. More like escaper-aspirants. Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”

“That’s proscribed knowledge too.”

“You mean you’ve never met them?”

“I’ll have passed them in the square, chatted with them, played cards and so on. Perhaps we even share this dormitory with one or more of them. But their identity qua Escapee Committee members is at all times and in every circumstance withheld.”

“Then how do you know which direction to dig in?”

“It’s communicated to us via intermediaries, on a need-to-know basis, as I intimated. The committee have it all worked out: I’ve heard they’ve got a chart of all the gas-pipes, sewers and what have you, and are using those as guidelines—following them, crossing them, whatever. There’s a logic to it all …”

The man listening at the door hisses and signals to them to restore the room to its original state. No sooner has the corner bed been slid back, candles snuffed out and men reinserted beneath sheets than a guard shuffles into the dorm and moves up and down the rows, counting heads. As he passes the bunk on whose top half Lofty should be lying, the man in the lower half pulls a string to make the dummy that’s been placed above him roll over in its sleep.

“Did you see the way his hand flopped?” Craddock asks as soon as they’re all up and at it again. “Wasn’t realistic enough. We should stitch it to his face: that’s how people sleep.”

“Or have another string to control the whole arm,” another man says.

A third, spurred by talk of strings, retrieves the alarm-tin from its hiding spot beneath the bed and returns it to its shelf.

“You okay down there, Lofty?” Craddock stage-whispers down the tube. He lowers his ear to it, then decides: “We’d better haul him up.”

Lofty throws up across the floor when he emerges. Someone else goes down to bring up his loose earth, which they add to the mass stuffed in draws and cupboards, behind wall-panels, beneath other loose floorboards. As the weeks and months go by, it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves
in
, not out. Men throw up often when they emerge from the hole; several of them, over time, become too scared to tunnel. Not Serge: he likes being down there, for one reason more than any other: it’s the only place in camp where he can masturbate. There’s nowhere else you get the requisite solitude. He wonders if the others do that too: wonders if that’s what lies behind the panting, or if the murmurs unravelling along the breathing tube are fragments of dialogues held in the dark with soft, imaginary mistresses …

He never gets brought face-to-face in full awareness with an Escapee (“Escape,” he realises as spring runs into summer, would have avoided the inaccuracies of that term) Committee member, and by autumn has started harbouring doubts about their existence. Their logic, if there is one, is skewed: tunnels frequently run headlong into impassable sunken metal joists, or into one another, or surface in other dormitories, or even, on more than one occasion, cause small sections of the cobbled square to collapse while prisoners and guards are standing on it. One tunnel still in progress in November, not originating in his room, is rumoured among the inmates of several dormitories to have breached the camp’s wire fence, although nobody will say which dorm it leads out of, where and when it will eventually surface or who will exit the camp through it—facts that lead Serge to suspect that it, too, might be no more than a collective daydream. He never finds out whether or not he’s right: in February, by which time not a single prisoner has managed to escape, he’s transferred to another camp.

This new one’s several hundred miles away, in Berchtesgaden. He’s moved around by rail again, one train after the other. The landscape changes: lowlands criss-crossed by canals give over to ravines along which brooks sparkle and fall. Sheep and cows become lopsided, grazing on sharp inclines; the shuffle and click of soldier columns is replaced by solitary figures weaving their way down hillside paths towards small stations, heading back from leave. The train starts groaning as it strains against the gradient; its puffs grow shorter and more frequent, as though it were running out of breath, which it could well be: the air does seem thinner. More refined too: Serge misses the smell of smoke, of oil and tar …

The
Offizierslage
in Berchtesgaden turns out to be just beyond it, separated by a stretch of rocky scrubland from the village above which it perches: used to be a monastery, one of the guards tells him. The guards here are more on-the-ball than their Trier counterparts. The officers are sharper too, but not unfriendly. The
Feldwebel
runs a bridge club composed mainly of his prisoners, jovially telling them they’d better not escape as it would break the fours up. He even lets them leave the camp—but only on parole. The parole system’s so absurd and contradictory it could have been devised by one of Moreton’s philosophers: prisoners are handed their freedom on condition they won’t use it, and must pledge to this condition with their word—whence the convention’s name. They trade this word against a pass that’s issued to them at the front gate as they leave; on returning an hour or so later, they hand the pass back, and their word becomes their own again. For Serge, the whole practice belongs to the same order as the sleeping dummy: it’s as though, each time he takes the word-card out, he duplicates himself and leaves a double behind as a marker. Or perhaps the other way round:
he
’s the double, his sensations and encounters as he wanders round the village and the fields no more than dummy ones, hallucinations given the air of veracity by contractual and linguistic strings. He even dreams once that he’s strolling around an airfield nestled in the monastery’s shadow (in reality there is none), climbing into a machine, taxiing across the grass—all perfectly legitimately, sanctioned by parole—then, as he takes off, trying to explain to some vague, airborne invigilator that the word,
the
word, has altered, and now lies back in the camp with his stuffed simulacrum, leaving him at liberty to fly back to the front. The invigilator, still faceless, asks what the new word (password? keyword? call sign? it’s not clear) is, posing the question by quietly whispering:
“Kennscht mi noch?”