Bitter Eden: A Novel (14 page)

Not all of us behave like ‘gentlemen and winners in war’. Some take bunks and bedding from the huts and set them alight and dance around the flames till exhaustion and drunkenness drag them down. Others wander aimlessly through the flickering dark, grinning with the vacuous delight of the insane and uttering meaningless cries, and some few have to be cast off from their slobbering latching onto every passing neck, huge eyes begging proof that they do not dream. The Ite guards join in, stripping off their badges of unit and rank, handing them out as souvenirs, sometimes brandishing flagons of wine in excess of the canteen’s, passing these around, themselves drinking till they reel in a bizarre delirium of love for the once loathed. Churned up by the milling feet, dust clouds the camp in a pale, peppery mist through which we blunder or prowl, mutter or howl, appear, disappear, like guilt-ridden ghosts, and sometimes fight, settling old scores in a bloodying with fists that turns the festivities into nightmare and victory into defeat.

Some hours before dawn, the camp at last stills, many sleeping where they dropped, and Danny and I, tipsy as any and meeting again after having been parted by the crowd, help each other up onto my bunk where we lie together, grinning into each other’s faces like lobotomized fools. Then the grins fade as we succumb to what we have all the time suppressed – the knowledge that our freedom is synonymous with our separation, that, within days, maybe even in the morning, we will be parted to be flown, or shipped, back to where we belong, the oceans endlessly between. ‘So the bitter Eden ends,’ I think. ‘So
fucking
soon,’ and I feel my mouth twist and he touches it with as grieving a hand. Then we turn into each other, breath to breath, and sleep, entwined.

Sun high, we wake, go out, come quickly back in. The Jerries have moved in from the north, are ringing the camp, are lining up the commandant and the guards, and the first shots ring out even as we huddle down onto the interloper’s bunk, he nowhere to be found. ‘Christ,’ says Danny and we stare at each other as though it’s the first time. Then he remembers something, and feels in the two baggy pockets of the old tunic he is wearing, and takes out two Ite service pistols and hands me one.

‘A souvenir,’ he says and actually grins.

‘Where did you get these?’ Astonished, I gape as though he had put a snake in my hand.

‘When we got split up last night, I went over to the barracks to see if you were there, and these two Ite brass were getting out of their gear and into civvies, but
fast
, meaning to make for the hills and home. So they toss me these two guns because they don’t want to maybe be caught with them and be found out for what they were.’

‘So why give
me
one? You wanting us to take on the Jerry army on our own?’

‘No, mate, I was going to give you one, anyway. To take home, like I said, for a souvenir. But now I’m mostly giving it because it will be easier for me to get one past the Jerries than two. Which goes for you as well.’

‘
No way
will we get them through! Not even with one.’

‘I think we can. There’s a lot of blokes that’s got to go through those gates and I can see the Krauts maybe searching our balls, but I can’t see them going through our
kit.
Not with our guys already on their tail. So we stuff them deep and have a go.’

I consider that while he watches me, then he says with an earnestness that compels, stirs the primal roots of my hairs, ‘Look, Tom, these are not the desert blokes that were not so bad. These are the spit-and-polish boys from home base and the story goes that they are
prime
turds. So we don’t know how many kinds of hell may be waiting for us out there and we may be glad someday that we stashed a bullet that can end it for us like you end it for a dog that’s been run over in the road.’

‘Proper little ray of sunshine,
you
are!’ I try to mock, but I am still hearing those shots outside and my flesh crawls.

‘Don’t, mate,’ he warns and his voice is quiet, yet it tears through me like a yell. ‘I don’t know how much
real
action you’ve seen and I don’t
want
to know. But don’t forget I was with the tanks and we didn’t sit around polishing our guns. I’ve seen dead men and I have seen men dying with their guts hanging out and begging for a bullet in the brain. So try and get your gun through and don’t waste the bullet it’s loaded with now because there are no more where it came from, and you never know.’

He sits quietly, then, his eyes neutral and calm, waiting for me to decide, and at last I get up and stash the gun at the bottom of the hulk’s bag.

‘Tell me,’ I say when he has also hidden his and we are back on the bottom bunk, ‘what would you do if I
did
put a bullet in my brain?’ and I am regretting the question even as I ask it because it is a cheap shot aimed at starting a sloppy exchange, but he considers it carefully and with that dispassion that I have come to realize is the other side of the coin.

‘I would follow you,’ he says, his voice matter-of-fact as though he is saying he will join me on a walk, which is perhaps exactly what he
does
mean, he adding, ‘Death is no big deal when it’s a bullet in the brain. Now you’re here, now you are flesh and blood. Boom-bang and you’re on the other side, and, though I’m no choirboy, I think there
is
an other side because too many blokes were going out as though they were seeing things.’

‘But what about your mum? Your wife? Would you not be thinking about them?’

‘Sure, I’d be thinking about them, but in my own way, and if there wasn’t that own way, I wouldn’t be sitting alongside of
you
now. Take my missus. Sure, I love her and if we had had a kid, I might not be giving you the answer I’m giving you now. I don’t know. But I
do
know that she’s got a better graft than me and she would get herself another man if I died, like I would get myself another wife if
she
died. But a mate, who’s been through a war or the camps with you, is the
only
one of his kind, like a mum is the only one of
her
kind. But
me
mum’ – is the ‘me’ instead of ‘my’ a slip of the tongue or a surfacing of a deeper he? – ‘is old and could be gone before I ever get out of here, but meantime she has her pension and her house and she is the one who would
best
understand. My mum has been a great mum and my missus has been a great missus, so they’ll be OK when they get on that other side, but my poor mate who’s shot himself,
he
will be wandering about on his own, all shaken up and reaching out for his other half that’s still back here. Which other half is
me.
’

I stare at him, stunned by the wild, relentless splendour of his world, longing to be of it, yet cravenly afraid.

As relentlessly as his world, he probes, ‘You would do the same for me?’

Automaton, though still fiercely
wanting
, I nod and he seizes my hand.

‘Swear?’ he insists, and again I nod, feeling
his
wanting flood into me through his hand, and his face opens and I walk into his world.

Then the Krauts, as distinct from the Jerries, are screaming, ‘Raus! Raus!’ and by nightfall we are down at the little station beyond the hill and are being crammed into the waiting cattle-trucks like sausage meat into its skin, and, sometime in the far night, Danny beside me and the guns still undetected in our gear, I feel the trucks shudder and sway as they labour over the mountains into Krautland, the ice and snow on the towering peaks singing like devils as they thread through our bones.

*   *   *

We have lost
all sense of space and time, the significance of what we pass, only peripherally observe. Pines, stark as pikes, approach, recede, as though it is
they
that move, tell us that there is a perspective to the white paper of the snow, but we, too, are paper,
stay
paper, two-dimensionally and blessedly unaware. Each day we slosh through the snow that is not snow, each night lie down in it, the flakes covering us like the bugs in that land, now two years dead, where I cannot remember it ever having rained, though, of course, it did, the unchanging sun shining in my mind alone.

How slowly, prissily, we move, putting each foot down as though its bones are broken or a priceless glass, but the guards don’t seem to mind, seem to understand that we are barely this side of sense, that no amount of shouting, or belabouring with rifle-butts, will quicken flesh already busied with its death. The two loaves of bread, dozen boiled potatoes and a Red Cross food parcel each with which we started out have long since been desperately, sparingly, eaten and returned to the earth in the shape of our minute, difficult turds, and all that is left to us are the occasional, seemingly abandoned turnip fields that the guards permit us to rifle, phlegmatically watching as we claw out the turning-woody turnips and gnaw at them with teeth that, each day, seem less rooted in our gums.

We ask the guards how much further and they shrug. We ask them what
is
the purpose of the march and, mostly, they again shrug, but some say we
are
going to a better camp down south, but don’t look at us while they are saying this, a tightness to their mouths that disturbs. We pass through a city which we are dimly aware has fallen in upon itself like a pack of cards, only a cathedral’s steeple still standing as though it witnessed to the indestructibility of truth – or is it myth? – and people are scuttling in and out of the ruins and going about their business with the imperviousness of ants, and we ask the guards what city is this, but now they do not shrug
or
answer, just look at us with a loathing that rears its head with the swiftness and deadliness of a snake.

Each night, bodies thick as slugs with all the clothing we still possess, Danny and I bed down together, grappling each other for warmth with the awkwardness of mating snails, and sometimes we fumble back through the two years since we rocked down the last gradient into a countryside of lawns that were virgin grass, and storybook houses for pixies and elves, and we rank and sodden from lying, interlaced as packaged fish, in the shit and piss that anxious anuses and bladders were no longer able to restrain. It is then that we realize that the past can be as truly past as it is truly present, so much of it already fading from the immediate memory like a writing in water or sand, but that which remains as vividly terrible or pleasant as though yesterday and today were forever one, and Danny tells me that his mum says that, now that she is growing old, she is remembering yesterday more wholly and frighteningly than today.

There is no consistency or predictability, though, in what we recall. I will mention something that I think, laughingly – or as close to a laugh as I can still get – is trivial and he will think it meaningful, or he will mention something that he thinks is meaningful and I will think it’s trivial, and so it goes. All, though, from a tapestry of the past that, whether agonizing or satisfying, is preferable to the intolerable present, not to speak of a future which seems to hold in it more of death than life, and there is a time in which I whisper – hardly daring to speak even that softly of it – that maybe we should use the bullets to end it now. But Danny does not answer and we go on plucking bits and pieces from nostalgia’s shrivelling flesh, trying to find in them a sequentiality less final than the now forebodes – trying, impossibly, to forget.

So we are back in the cattle-trucks, lolloping to the camp on a remote eastern border that we left Christ knows how many aeons ago now, but halfway we stop, the night stretched thin, are shunted off onto a sidetrack, the sounds of a city widely around, but the truck itself, after the clash of couplings, screeching of wheels, seeming to hold in a sweet power of silence that overrides all outer noise. Heaving up out of the sleeping crush of bodies on the floor, Danny and I stay where we stand, knowing that if we don’t we will never be able to lie down again, and peer through the truck’s air vents at leaves scuttling across streetlights and know from that that our planes are here still but a rumouring of the wind. Further off is an intense wash of blue-white light under a roof’s iron overhang, and there is a ceaseless clangour as of a thousand tinsmiths banging on their anvils, and a harsh Kraut voice, magnified to that of a god or demon, is exhorting the workers to greater efforts in the cause of the Reich that will last a thousand years.

‘Shit!’ I whisper to Danny. ‘A thousand years in a cattle-truck!’ and laugh, but there is hysteria in the laugh, but he whispers back that there is still the bullet for the brain and there is no hysteria in
him.
Then, suddenly, a sheet-white face is looking up from a clot of darkness that could be a hat or scarf, and a hand is reaching up, proffering, urging that we take what it holds, and I do and face and hand are gone, soundlessly as they came. Carefully, I feel, smell, touch my tongue to what the hand gave and my starving stomach – the commandant never having had the chance to distribute the promised parcels before they shot him dead – knows it for what it is. ‘Eat!’ it yells and I whisper-shout to Danny,
‘Bacon!’
and we take turns lingeringly nibbling at the rich, raw fat and lean meat, then halve the six by two inches of rind and chew on it till no taste is left, then wolf it down whole.

The eastern border turns out to be, as Danny pungently puts it, the unwiped arsehole of the world. Flat, dispiriting plains stretch to as dispiriting skylines, the monotony broken, although hardly inspiringly so, by occasional plantations of regimented pines, or frowsty huddles of indigenous woods so small that one leaves as one enters, and, worst of all, stacks of sudden factories from which billow endless streamers of oily and contaminating smoke. ‘They boil the corpses there,’ quips one wag, humour not yet quite dead, and we laugh, but with a shudder down the spine.

The camp, though, is not all that bad, is in fact better than the Ites’, though some of the elements are the same. Long barracks-like buildings of sooty but decently-laid brick house many hundreds of men, but there is an ablution and laundering room in the centre of each and the several outside toilets, though still open-pit with multiple seats, are roofed and durable structures that invite the illusion that one is crapping in a slightly less barbarous style. Bunks are again three-tiered, but somewhat wider with wider aisles between, and Danny and I push, then shove, until he gets the bottom and I the middle bunk in the same tier.