Birdsong (58 page)

"No one can win. Leave me alone now. Where's Tyson?"

"I'll tell you a story, Jack. I came to this country eight years ago. I went to a big house in a broad street in a town not far from here. I was a young man. I was rash and curious and selfish. I was alive to dangerous currents, things in later life you look at, then pass by--because they're too risky. At that age you have no fear. You think you can understand things, that it will all make sense to you in time. Do you understand what I mean? No one had ever loved me. That's the truth of it, though I wasn't aware of it then. I wasn't like you with your mother. No one cared where I was or whether I should live or die. That's why I made my own reasons for living, that's why I will escape from here, somehow, because no one else has ever cared. If I have to I will chew my way out like a rat."

Jack was delirious. "I won't have beer yet. Not yet. Where's Turner? Get me off this cross."

"I met a woman. She was the wife of the man who owned the big house. I fell in love with her and I believed she loved me too. I found something with her that I didn't know existed. Maybe I was just relieved, overwhelmed by the feeling that someone could love me. But I don't think it was only that. I had visions, I had dreams. No, that's not right. There were no visions, that was the strange thing about it. There was only the flesh, the physical thing. The visions came later."

"They got the compressor in now. Ask Shaw. Get me off."

"It isn't that I love her, though I do, I will always love her. It isn't that I miss her, or that I'm jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They're impossible to understand, but since I've heard them I can't deny them. Even here."

It sounded to Stephen as though Jack were choking. He wasn't sure if he was trying to stifle laughter or whether he was sobbing.

"Lift me up," said Jack when he could breathe properly.

Stephen lifted him up in his arms and held him across his lap. His inert legs dangled to one side, and his head fell back on his shoulders.

"I could have loved you." Jack's voice had become clear. He made the choking sound again, and with his head now so close to his own, Stephen could hear that he was laughing, a thin, mocking sound in the cramped darkness.

As it became fainter, Stephen began to knock rhythmically with the end of his knife against the wall of chalk by his head to give the rescue party guidance. Lamm's controlled explosion had made a hole in the fallen debris large enough for the three of them to go through.

Levi followed the other two with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. They found the line of the main German tunnel but could see from the shattered timbering that there was further damage.

Kroger stopped the other two and pointed ahead. The base of the tunnel seemed to disappear into a hole. When they were as close to it as they dared to go, Lamm took a rope from his pack and secured one end around one of the timbers that was still upright.

"I'll go down and have a look," he said. "You two keep hold of the end of the rope in case the timber snaps."

They watched him tread carefully into the abyss. Lamm called up to them every two or three steps he took. Eventually he found another level where he could stand. He tied the rope firmly round him and shouted up to the top for them to keep a tight hold. He held his lamp up and peered about him. A metal gleam came back from the murk. He bent down to look. It was a helmet. On all fours, he searched the earth with his hands. He touched something that was solid and bore no resemblance to chalk. It left a sticky feeling on his hand. It was a shoulder, wrapped in feldgrau, the grey of the German uniform. The rest of the body was attached to it, though from the waist down it was buried under debris. The head was also more or less whole, and Lamm could see from the features that this was the body of Levi's brother.

He inhaled and blew out again through puffed cheeks. He did not want to shout the news up to the others, but it seemed unfair to Levi to withhold it from him. He lifted his lantern and looked round the chamber again. He could see no further evidence of bodies or activity. He felt the hands of the dead man to see if he had a ring; he took the identity tag from his neck but wanted something less bleak by which his brother could identify him. The fingers were bare, though he found a watch, which he put in his pocket.

He tugged twice at the rope and shouted that he was coming up. He felt the line go taut as Kroger and Levi added their counterweight to his ascent. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it took them several minutes to bring him up as his boots scrabbled against the loose sides in an effort to find a proper grip.

"Well?" said Levi, when they had all regained their breath. Something about Lamm's handsome face troubled him; it was unwilling to meet his gaze.

"I found a body. One of our men. He must have been killed instantly."

"Have you got his disc?" said Kroger. Levi had gone very still.

"I have this." Lamm held out the watch to Levi, who took it reluctantly. He looked down. It was Joseph's. It was a present that had been given to him on some family occasion by their father: his bar mitzvah, he thought, or as a reward for winning his place at university.

Levi nodded. "Silly boy," he said. "So near the end." He walked a little way up the tunnel, away from the others, so he could be alone.

Lamm and Kroger sat on the tunnel floor and ate some more of the food they had brought.

An hour later Levi returned from his prayers. His religion would not permit him to take the food Lamm offered him.

He shook his head. "I have to fast," he said. "Meanwhile, we should continue our search."

Kroger cleared his throat. He spoke gently. "I wonder if this is wise. Lamm and I have been talking. We've seen the size of the blast and Lamm tells me there is almost no chance that anyone further into the tunnel than your brother could have survived it. We've discharged our duty as a search party. We've established what happened and we can take your brother back to the surface and give him a proper burial. If we continue underground I think we would jeopardize our own lives for no real purpose. We don't know what may have happened above us. Honour has been satisfied here. I think we should go back."

Levi rubbed his hand along his jawline where the beard was starting to grow. A period of mourning would mean that it would cover his face by the time he was next allowed to shave.

He said, "I sympathize with you, but I don't agree. Two of our fellowcountrymen are somewhere here beneath the earth. If they are dead we must find them so we can give them a proper burial. If they are alive, we must rescue them."

"The chances are--"

"It doesn't matter what the chances are. We must complete the task." Kroger shrugged.

Lamm saw the practical problems of delay. "It's hot down here," he said. "His body--"

"The flesh is weak. What remains of him is something that won't rot. I will carry him myself when the time comes."

Lamm looked down.

"Don't be afraid," said Levi. "The men down here are from our own country. They don't want to be left beneath this foreign field. They must go back to the places they loved and died for. Don't you love your country?"

"Of course," said Lamm. He had taken his orders. He saw no further need for discussion. He stood up and began to gather up the rope to carry on.

"I love the fatherland," said Levi. "At a time like this, a death in my family, it binds me more than ever to it." He looked challengingly at Kroger, who nodded unhappily, as though he thought Levi's fervour came from some temporary storm. Levi took his shoulder. "All right, Kroger?" He looked into Kroger's clever, doubtful face. He saw no real agreement, but at least there was acquiescence. Kroger went to help Lamm prepare to go down again.

Levi went with him, leaving Kroger at the top to rest. Twenty feet below the floor of their main tunnel they began to hack with their picks at the debris from the blast. They did not know what they were searching for, but by clearing the earth that had been most recently displaced they hoped to see more clearly what had happened.

They took off their shirts as they warmed to the work. Their picks made hard reverberations where they struck the solid chalk.

Stephen took the glass from his watch so that he could feel the time in the darkness. It was ten to four when he heard the sounds of digging once more, though whether it was morning or afternoon he did not know. He estimated that he and Jack had been underground five or possibly six days.

He pulled Jack once more up to the tiny draught of air so he could take his turn. He lay with his fingers on his watch, timing the half hour he would spend in the stifling end of the coffin. He made no movement in case it should increase his need for oxygen.

The fear of being enclosed still ran through him. He reasoned with himself that since the worst had happened, and he was now buried alive with no room to turn round, then he should no longer be afraid. Fear was in expectation, not in the reality. Yet still the panic was with him. Sometimes he had to hold his body rigid to prevent himself from screaming. He wanted desperately to strike a match. Even if it only showed the limits of his prison it would be something.

Then would come minutes of diminished life. His imagination and his senses seemed to close down, like lights being turned off one by one in a big house. Eventually only a dim blur persisted as some trace of will kept burning. Through the hours he lay there he did not cease to protest in his mind against what was happening to him. He fought it with a bitter resentment. Although the strength of it came and went as his body flagged with thirst and fatigue, the bitterness of his anger meant that some light, however faint, stayed alive. When his half hour was up he crawled back and lay down alongside Jack.

"Are you still with me, Jack?"

There was a groan, then Jack's voice came up through layers of consciousness and found a lucidity it had not had for days.

"Been glad of these socks to rest my head on. I've had a new pair from home each week of the war."

Stephen felt the knitted wool beneath Jack's cheek as he lifted him up.

"I've never had a parcel," he said.

Jack began to laugh again. "You're a joker, no mistake. Not one parcel in three years? We got two a week at least. Everyone did. And as for letters--"

"Quiet. Can you hear that? It's the rescue party. Can you hear them digging? Listen."

Stephen manoeuvred Jack so that his ear was close to the chalk.

"They're coming," said Stephen. He could tell from the sound of the echo how far away they were, but he made out to Jack that they were almost on them.

"Any minute, I should think. We'll be out of here."

"You've worn army socks all the way through? You poor bugger. Not even the poorest private in the section had--"

"Listen. You're going to be free. We're getting out."

Jack was still laughing. "I don't want that. Don't want that... " His laughter turned into a cough, and then into a spasm that lifted up his chest in Stephen's arms. The hacking, rattling sound filled the narrow space, then stopped. Jack let out a long final exhalation as all the breath left him and his body fell back in the end he had wanted.

For a moment Stephen held the body in his arms, out of respect for him, then moved it back to the airless end of the hole. He put his mouth close to where the draft of air had been and breathed in deeply.

He stretched out his legs and pushed the body a little further from him. He felt bitterly alone.

There was only the sound of digging, which, he could now no longer deny to himself, was hopelessly distant, and the weight of the earth to keep him company. He found matches in his pocket. There was no one to forbid him his craving for light. Somehow he desisted.

He cursed Jack for dying, for not believing in the possibility of rescue. Then his anger faded and his mind narrowed its efforts to the distant rhythmic sound of pick on chalk. While the sound was there it was like the beat of his own pulse. He took his knife from his pocket again and began to knock the end as strongly as he could against the wall by his head.

After four hours of digging Levi and Lamm had made little impact. Levi called up to Kroger that he should come down and replace Lamm.

While he was waiting for Kroger to arrive, Levi sat down and rested. It had become a matter of honour for him to find his brother's companions. Joseph would not have wanted him to be the kind of man who allowed personal grief to deflect him. It was not so much his own honour as Joseph's that was at stake. His actions could restore some dignity to the broken body.

Above the rasp of his breathing, very faintly, he heard a tapping sound. He pressed his head against the wall and listened. It could have been a rat, he thought at first, but it was too rhythmic and too far underground. There was something about the quality of the sound that made it clear it was coming from a considerable distance: only a human being could have had the strength to make the noise carry. Kroger jumped off the end of the rope and Levi called him over. Kroger listened.

He nodded. "There's definitely someone there. Slightly up from here, I think, but roughly parallel. It doesn't sound strong enough to be a pick or a spade. I think it's someone trapped."

Levi smiled. "I told you we should carry on."

Kroger looked doubtful. "The question is, how are we going to get through? There's a lot of chalk between us."

"We'll start by blowing it. Just a controlled explosion. I'll go up and send Lamm down in my place. He can lay a charge."

Levi's face was set in determined enthusiasm. Kroger said, "Suppose this noise is being made not by our men but by one of the enemy who's still trapped?" Levi's eyes widened. "I don't believe anyone could be alive after all this time. And supposing it was, then... " He spread his hands wide and shrugged.

"Then what?" said Kroger briefly.