Georg Letham (15 page)

Most of my companions are equals, comrades in misfortune. For life. But how long is a life on the other side?

Suppose a prisoner had a lighter sentence, though, let us say five years. The barbarous regulations would still require him to spend another five years there on probation. This may not seem like much of a difference, but in fact it is immense. For what is the poor fellow who is “released” over there going to do? Without work, without family, without money? How terribly unlikely it is that he will ever return! No wonder the prisoners too are now erupting in moans and wails. The fatigue, the stupor, the general acquiescence are gone. The mindless facial expression produced by suffering greater than a certain magnitude when prolonged beyond a certain point has vanished. These emaciated,
desperate faces are full of suffering, full of feeling. Everything but surrender to the inevitable. Some of the men shove the guards gently from behind, which earns them a rain of blows to the chest with rifle butts. They collapse and fall over their worldly goods (if the word “goods” is not too much for articles so meager). Others stand on the tips of their toes and ask their neighbors to lift them up. They promise a similar favor in return, but then forget or plead physical weakness.

Most rely on their own strength. But they are like white laboratory mice inoculated with tetanus and put in tall, straight-sided glass vessels so that their spasmodic leaps and finally their death throes can be observed. They jump, but never high enough to escape.

No use waving with both hands, shouting with voices hoarse from the heat and the dust, it only adds to the din. No one can make out a word. The wailing and raging of the handcuffed convicts even drown out the military music from the nearby post. No rattling of chains. The manacles cut too deeply into the flesh, the links are stretched too tight.

There are many dialects and a wide range of oriental languages. So many voices on the sweet evening air (with orchestral accompaniment)–if I could understand them all, I'd be able to write a detailed natural history of the sickly human heart. All these hearts speak the same language, they all sound the same. The palatals and nasals, the trills and sibilants, the vowels and consonants are beginning to run together: they are no longer the articulate expression of human yearning, human suffering, human pain, regret and outrage, despair and resignation. The sound made by this mass of men is the inarticulate, instinctual screeching and howling of penned-in, terrified animals.

My neighbor says nothing. He has almost recovered. His lips are
somewhat fuller, his color is better: He seems a little delicate, perhaps, but he looks good. He buckles his coat on his own.

A cool breeze has come up. The waves on the harbor have whitish crests. The last fishing boats, sails taut, are heading out to sea, while the first are already far out on the horizon, their sails at the perpendicular and mirrored on the water, like butterflies hovering over a still pond with wings gently vibrating.

The fresh air seems to have awakened the appetites of many. If they seem so agitated, it may be because their bellies are as hungry as their hearts.

Yes, my friend, it must be hard to see your mother waving with good things to eat while hunger is gnawing at you. Reality is the only thing standing between mother and son.

So trust in luck! Packages are going airmail now, sailing through the air but not usually falling into the right hands. The shoes arrive, the flannel vest swoops in. Wild fights break out. Frenzied, clumsy brawling. Two partners in crime climb up on the medicine crates. They frantically shout and wave, stamp furiously, signal to their relatives with their long thieves' arms as though sending messages in code. One with his right arm, the other with his left. No good: an object that looks like a ham whizzes past them off to the right, something that might be a bottle of brandy off to the left. Finally they catch a package, open it, and find–a family bible. An especially jaunty fox-trot is heard, played with brio by the military band, and the two idiots, tired of all the excitement for nothing, link elbows and begin dancing like lunatics.

The first transport leaves, about sixty men. The barrage of going-away presents continues.

My companion lifts his beautifully shaped head, turns his gray-blue
eyes in all directions. He has as little interest as I do in chasing after food parcels. So what is he looking for? Is he waiting for someone (the “cadet,” perhaps?), to exchange last farewells with? Or is he so filled with trepidation about this radical change in his life? It's good-bye to home! One's native soil. Some shady corner in a courtyard of a city apartment building, or a meager autumn flower garden in a lonely mountain farmstead, or some other room or hearth or landscape or memory. A memory of being drafted and going to war, to a bedlam comparable to the current moment, and yet so very different. Country, family, a future to look forward to, the hope of continuous and blissful self-betterment, a hope that rich and poor alike willingly drug themselves with.

Now the desire for distraction and excitement can be seen in everyone. Bets are made, deals struck, currencies exchanged, this last quietly and stealthily, since money is forbidden. The brighter ones cheat, give bad money and not much of it in exchange for gold, and use their fists to stop the mouths of the ones they have cheated, who have no right to complain, because possession of the money of which they have been defrauded is against regulations. Barter, that primitive form of business, is conducted more honorably: wedding rings for smoked sausage, keepsakes for schnapps, beautiful objects for edible ones. People know what they have and are happy. Of course there is acrimony here, too. One man has illegitimately appropriated a food parcel and is strong and fierce enough to hold on to it. The legitimate owner would like to buy it back, but has no money and offers the brute his heavy wedding ring with the date of the ceremony engraved on it. Done. But just the food. He retains right of ownership in case there is also money or something of value in the package, and now the rightful owner, poor wretch, has to watch the thief rummage through his parcel, take out one thing and
another and magnanimously hand back whatever is left. Where are the guards, the defenders of the commonweal allegedly based on law and order? Instruments of the state. They are no more than that.

The motor launch has landed again. The guests have disembarked, and now the steel gray boat seems to leap away, darting like an insect on a pond over the now fairly open harbor, northward toward the hydroplane hangar, a gigantic shed covered with sheet metal on whose roof the evening sun is being refracted into shades of bronze.

The ocean is turning a deep blue with an uncertain, changeable violet tinge. Our ship, the
Mimosa
, stands far from shore like a house. A brownish cloud of smoke rises straight up from the short funnel, spreading like a tree, transparent toward the top. The slanting evening sun is still bright, covering everything like a glaze: us and our possessions, the filth and refuse around us, the gleaming bayonets and bandoliers of the guards, the façades of the buildings, the church tower, the dusty treetops, the wet steps of the breakwater, and the rippling, peaceful, seaweedy-smelling sea. Everything seems to have a kind of unnatural reality, lurid, unlike itself, dreamily close, and too clear; dull surfaces glow like velvet, smooth ones glitter like rhinestones.

My neighbor is preparing to take his leave of dry land. Not without a kind of pride, he again unpacks and repacks his things. Clothes–nicely washed, perhaps even a little perfumed, but tattered–a few bars of soap, a bottle of hair tonic, a tube of nail polish (!), and strangest of all: a small, scarred box with a crank on the side–a child's gramophone; also, tucked between the articles of clothing, a few small, cheap records of the kind that go with a miniature gramophone like this one. One
of them is smashed, to his great sorrow. How touching when the big, strong youth first tries to put the pieces together and then hesitates, with a plainly heavy heart, wondering if he should toss them among the other debris and rubbish or take them to safety in the new life. No, he can't part with the useless junk. He wraps the fragments in some tissue paper that was used for the nourishing delicacies in the food parcels. I help him. Whether I want to or not. For we are a couple. It would not be believed how much someone accustomed to freedom is hampered in even the slightest movement when he has another person attached to him, when he can do nothing on his own. Already it frightens me to think how the two of us are going to climb onto the ship together without the free use of our arms.

It is becoming cool after the cloudless heat of the long day. Toward the west some coppery clouds ablaze at the edges are rising around the setting sun. The chalk white, cube-shaped little houses of the town are now especially brilliant where earlier they were in shadow. Or perhaps we simply paid no attention to them before.

Down on the beachfront, far in the distance, the huge door of the hangar opens like a stable door ahead of the farm wagon. A large, double-winged hydroplane slowly moves forward. It rocks on its pillow-shaped, slate-colored floats, the flat wings dip into the opalescent sea, first one, then the other. Now the sharp throbbing of the airplane engines starting up can be heard, even drowning out the military band, like the rattle of machine guns only not so percussive, and the hydroplane shoots into the open harbor, driving before it sizzling milk white water in broad billows; it rises into the air, its long dark blue shadow below it, climbs toward the evening clouds with its airfoils tilted upward, rocks again, sways drunkenly from one side to the other–and slopes down
in a steep curve to splash clumsily into the water. Why did it go up? What a pointless maneuver! But a good distraction from the monotony of waiting.

No one is chattering now in our little group, no one is shouting.

It is becoming uncomfortably cool. My neighbor, exhausted from the strenuous day, is again squatting silently on the ground. Once more making a jumble of his possessions, he hauls from the depths of his bag a knit scarf and furiously wraps it around his neck as though trying to strangle himself. But he is not weary of life, he is only chilled. His teeth chatter like a child's after a bath that was too long and too cold, and he looks at me intently, devouring me with his blue-gray eyes. But he says nothing. His gaze goes right through me. If he touched me, I could discourage him. Against this look I have no defenses. I feel myself blushing. His gaze is unwavering. The hydroplane has taken off again, evidently a night flight. He ignores it. The band is playing a medley from
La Bohème
. He is not listening. He says nothing and looks at me. Has he taken a fancy to me? No, and let's not hear any more of that. I only turn my head as though my neck itches. Such a prosaic response to his “loving heart.” Not that, anything but that! He understands me, though I have said nothing. Finally his look of silent solicitation releases me. He smiles and shows his fine, pearly, short teeth.

That's the way. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. I turn my head away. Good.

I want to think about something else. The past is on my mind. Methinks I see my father.

My father, that smart old bastard (smart of him not to come here!),
made jokes sometimes. He had a sense of humor–detachment, in other words. From a distance he could take great pleasure (he knew how to enjoy life!) in watching the ghastly comedy of puny human beings in all their misery and baseness. But that detachment was not easily won, for anyone. You had to force yourself, and that was what he taught me to do. But when I suffered everything, literally suffered, without a whimper, then he was proud of me, a man and a tolerable companion at the age of thirteen. And when he had elicited that from me, achieved it, his way of thanking me was to bring out the jokes, and I was supposed to laugh.

Once, for example, during the period when I was going through the familiar pubescent struggles over the meaning of the world, expressed in my case in religious and social doubts, he feigned an eye condition and asked me to read to him from the newspaper. He had a sudden case of conjunctivitis, and I got an eye-opener.

I might have come straight from church that day. Could be. The religion teacher at our grammar school, a still-young man by the name of La Forest, the brother of one of the officials under my father at the Ministry, was not unintelligent, he had tried to understand me, to solace me, had commended my character (my “spiritual humility and fear of God”) and my conduct toward others (my “helpful, self-sacrificing, energetic Christian love”). He traced the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world back to the original sin, from which anyone could free himself through the Savior's atoning sacrifice and his own strength of will.

How much I would have liked to keep these consolations from my father. But all he had to do was give me a cursory glance, eye trouble or not, or sniff my jacket–and he knew I had come from church, or from the schoolroom of an “illegitimate, pervertedly optimistic” humanitarian.

And what did he do? No hairsplitting discussions. No withering scorn. Quite the contrary! He still gave me nothing but encouragement–to attend Mass regularly, to go to confession, to pray. So what was so terrible about what he did that I apply the adjective “diabolical” to him? He only rubbed his eyes until they watered wonderfully, turned the pages of the evening papers with a helpless look on his face (he had always been a passionate reader of newspapers), called me in a fond voice (it never trembled, his deep, mellifluous, gentle, and extraordinarily clear voice), and asked me if I had time to read him the news. Curious that I still remember every word. At night, roused from a deep sleep, I can recite it all verbatim.