The Human Pool (33 page)

TURKEY

HOOVER WAS DRUNK AND DEPRESSED
. Viessmann was uncrackable, he said. He was angry with me for going off. ‘You could have said no,' he said.

But my trip had given me a chance to question the two young women who had gone along with me. In fact, they told me nothing. They were unencumbered and cheerful. They got to look after children and drive around in four-wheel vehicles. Greta was Danish, and Astrid was German. They were bland and middle-class, polite and without curiosity, trusting and uncritical. We had driven a hundred miles to a food depot, loaded up, and come back. After forty miles we had exhausted our conversation. The girls were hazy on the nature of the local conflict. They had trouble grasping the statelessness of the Kurds and their consequent persecution by their host governments in Iraq and Turkey. ‘They are like cuckoos!' Most of the helpers stayed only about two months, on account of the remoteness. Nearly all of them had ended up there through word-of-mouth while travelling.

Dora they knew of. Dora had worked in the office. I had expected to find mention of her name reassuring, but it had sounded quite alien. For the first time I understood Hoover's real dilemma. He was hanging on to something that wasn't there, something that Willi Schmidt, dead or alive, had relinquished long ago. Either way, Willi was gone.

For a long time Hoover lay staring at the ceiling, saying nothing. He seemed obscurely afraid, in some deep way he could not articulate, and was beyond consolation, afraid both of the conscious world and of his unconscious mind.

I had to wait till very late before he drifted into sleep. On leaving I checked out of the window. All the lights in the camp were off. The generator was switched off. There was a deep silence. The stars outside were the brightest I had ever seen.

Children slept peacefully. Toys lay stacked neatly in the toy room. There was a games room for the adults, with table tennis. Beyond the games room, the kitchen. Everything was in order and made perfect sense, yet on another level none at all. Why weren't the kids being looked after by their own people? Why were no Kurdish adults present?

In Viessmann's sitting room I found a few esoteric paperbacks and books on business analysis. Two glasses and a bottle of Scotch were on a table. In the corner stood an old cabinet, with doors and a lid, which turned out to be an ancient record player, an old wind-up gramophone, the likes of which I had not seen in years. I idly wound the handle and watched the dusty turntable turning, hearing the old music. Count Basie. Billie Holiday. Duke Ellington.

Jazz records from the 1940s. Willi Schmidt's jazz.

I felt that old skin scrawl on the back of the neck which accompanies any unpleasant discovery, until recently associated entirely with Dora.

There in the cabinet cupboard I found what remained of Willi Schmidt.

Willi's records. Old 78s that had somehow survived breakage. Konrad Viessmann had shed everything of Willi except his records. Willi's records in Konrad's cupboard.

I wanted to wake Hoover, but another clue, registered subconsciously, lurked just out of reach; not a conversation or a remark. I went back to the office. Everything was still. I drank a Scotch and stared at the photographs of the children on the wall and wondered about them. They were all the same age, for a start. Why not eight- or ten-year-olds? Why not girls?

A light went on. It was Viessmann, on the case, looking as if his being there was the most normal thing in the world. He was dressed and alert. I asked what time it was. He said it would be dawn soon. I told him I hadn't been able to sleep. He regarded me with an intense and hostile irony. We both ignored the pistol he was holding.

I looked again at Viessmann and asked myself: What if they were all mad? What if Viessmann was as mad as Himmler and Karl-Heinz, not mad in the usual everyday way, but deeply, historically mad?

I turned to the photographs on the wall. Childhood memories of early Bible stories flickered in my mind's eye. The flight to Egypt and the massacre of the innocents, in which King Herod killed all children under the age of two years in the certainty that one of them had to be the son of God. Viessmann stared at me. He looked expectant. I knew I shouldn't say anything, knew I should keep my mouth shut and look after Hoover and make sure we got out alive, walking if we had to.

I said it anyway, knowing what it meant. I turned and pointed at the wall of photographs and said, ‘You're looking for the Chosen One.'

TURKEY

THEY BURIED ME IN
a black box. With enough room to lie down. The only sound was the hoarse noise of my own panic. Terror rolled in, unstoppable. The first dull moments of consciousness giving way to a body rush of panic.

Pushing upwards with both hands I could make the briefest chink of light appear. Buried alive: you drool and howl and cry for any form of human company, even the worst would be better than such stark isolation. You cramp. You make up stories: you are in a bunk in a dark room; you can get up and move around any time, it's just you choose not to. Before Viessmann coshed me with his pistol butt, I had asked him not to hurt the old man, because he was dying, and felt ashamed calling Hoover an old man. I remembered Viessmann's grunt as he swung his arm.

Like a surfacing dream, the images hold only a moment before you are back in fucked time. This dark box is it. Even if they let you out, you will carry the box in your head as long as you live.

They are inventive in their cruelty. I was allowed out at night. The rattle of unlocking, followed by the longest silence. I pushed the lid up. No one around. A dusty circle and darkness. A bowl of food and water some yards off. Stones uncomfortable on bare feet. The only warning, a soft scuffle before the dogs flew out of the night, savage-fanged beasts with crazed eyes.

Fear multiplies. The heart hammers. The dogs leap. Two beasts big enough to rip a man apart.

But the dogs halt, as if frozen. They are tethered. They attack relentlessly, stopping you reaching the food, a margin of inches. Their frustration mounts the more they strain. The box would be better than this, you think as you stand there, a basilisk of fear.

The first time, the dogs withdrew when someone started taking pot shots into the night, a signal that time outside was over. I grabbed the food and scurried back. The second time I crawled back into the box voluntarily. The third time I didn't come out.

 

Fear is not linear. It is a state that is both constant and in waiting. Fear is not articulate. It is the antithesis of words, beyond proper description. Language can only approximate fear. Language is the start of countering fear. Fear is easily taught. It is infectious. Carswell's wish: to create a virus out of fear. He told me.

Terror is not quantifiable. There is nothing to distinguish one person's terror from another's. Terror is invasive and all-consuming. Terror and fear are individual to the sufferer, while negating that person's individuality. The rest, to paraphrase Hoover, is just talk shows and ambulance chasing.

 

They slowly let me join their world. We were in a detention camp. More prefab huts, barbed wire, and signs clear in any language:
Beware, mines.
The camp had the rough economy of a child's drawing. See, it said, this is all we need to break you: makeshift buildings and large, cruel open spaces, designed for a primitive malevolence. The scale of the place was not immediately apparent. The vast emptiness all around was more so—a brutal landscape under a cloudless sky, both stripped of any softening features.

I was let out of the box by two men with machine pistols, who took me into the rocky wilderness outside the camp, gave me a shovel, and made me dig. The inference was obvious. I dug slowly, hoping they might grow bored or change their minds.

In a situation like this, you fail to create a distance between yourself and what is happening. You hope you will not be as afraid as you know you will be. You try and think of nothing, a blank for the blankness to come. Other times your brain struggles with a ferocious energy that reminds you of the leaping dogs.

It turns out you are there only as a punchline for their joke. They make you kneel down before the open hole and shoot you. Except they miss. Put the bullet past your head. Then they see if you are still capable of standing up and walking away.

Sometimes they did that two or three times a day. My job was not without purpose. The graves got used anyway.

 

Then one day the guards took me instead to another part of the camp. I tried to equate this change with hope, as much as my precarious self-control would permit. We passed into another fenced-off compound where a large building of several storeys was being hastily constructed. This rapid building programme was a combination of rickety wooden scaffolds, low-tech construction, high-tech equipment, and brutalised forced labour. Any clumsiness resulted in a pistol whipping. The beaten prisoner would lie where he had fallen, an obvious object of contempt to everyone for having been too stupid to avoid punishment.

Our destination was an area beyond the site sectioned off by heavy security, including a network of surveillance cameras, which twisted and rotated on top of their perches like mechanical crows. Compared with the chaos of the site, there appeared to be nothing going on here. The cameras supervised order and emptiness. The area consisted of a dozen or so of the ubiquitous prefabricated huts arranged in a neat grid, with paths in between. I glimpsed the occasional discreet professional presence. Two young men wearing white medical coats escorted two children by the hand. In a refuse section I saw a Chinese woman emptying slops and thought of Frankfurt.

After the degradation I had been subjected to, the warmth and order of the hut into which I was shown was almost too much. I experienced a flashback to Sol describing being escorted to see Karl-Heinz and Willi for the first time. Two men were waiting. They were in their thirties, professionals dressed in civilian clothes. I stood there, deferential, with bowed head, not daring to look up; how quickly you learned. One wore Timberlands. The boots looked like something from a lost world.

The Timberlands man spoke a little English. They needed an opinion, he said. They had been told I was English. In the background a woman worked at a console. I felt shamed in her presence, not that it mattered as she did not even look up.

The Timberlands man showed me some technical drawings which had been supplied by an English contractor. They appeared to be the wrong drawings. At the bottom the company address was Bury St Edmunds. I stared dumbly at the three words, which no longer made any sense, on their own or together.

Extraordinarily, they told me to speak to the supplier. I even dialled the number myself, and there followed a disconcerting two-minute conversation where I spoke first to a nasal-voiced receptionist, then to an undermotivated executive named Tibbit. Here was Middle England at its most resentful; a cure for any homesickness.

The muddle over the drawings was ungraciously admitted. The ones that had been sent were meant for a heating system and two industrial boilers somewhere in Russia. No translation had been sent, either.

The Timberlands man fretted in the background. He looked afraid that someone would reprimand him for the mistake.

I was told the correct drawings would be faxed straight away for reference, with the originals forwarded by courier. As I tried to take in these mundane details I wondered if they had any idea in Bury St Edmunds where their product ended up. I asked Tibbit what the proper drawings were for.

Crematoria.

I put the phone down very slowly. A guard was summoned to take me back.

I was being led down a path between the huts when a man hurried out of a door just up ahead. At first I thought he was another of the white-coated doctors, but his uniform was different. The top was tight fitting and waisted.

Then the brief freeze-frame of the double-take: the familiar figure, for a moment out of place and time, but so recognisable and somehow inevitable.

I ran and grabbed his elbow, blathering, wanting his explanation, hoping only for some pity.

He reacted as if he was being attacked, with a reflex backhand, without even a glance. As I fell, I consoled myself with the fact that I had seen Carswell's fear. More than that, when he recognised me, he committed what was probably the only cardinal sin in his book and lost his cool. He shrieked and kicked at me and called me a stupid meddling fucker who should have gone home when he was told.

Carswell's hysterics were followed by an exaggerated iciness. In any other circumstances he could have been dismissed as shrill and camp, but in those surroundings his histrionics could lead only to an authorised sadism.

He spoke Turkish to the guard, and I was taken away to a windowless hut where Carswell's uniform was explained. In a gymlike room several men in fencing kit practised thrust and parry. While forced-labour gangs sweated through their shifts, and children were escorted God knows where, it seemed that Carswell indulged himself by training Turkish soldiers in the art of swordplay.

When Carswell returned he said to me, ‘If you stand perfectly still you will not get hurt. We are going to conduct an experiment in reflex action.'

Someone held a bladed sword against the back of my neck, while Carswell lunged again and again at my face. The unblunted point of his épée always ended up within millimetres of my eye. His self-control, in contrast to his outburst, was fully in command again. I believed in the precision of his skills, believed in his need to indulge in his grown-up games, trusted him not to hurt me, yet let myself down by flinching each time the point of the sword jabbed the back of my neck, however hard I willed myself not to move. Carswell was toying with me, a man who understood the dynamics of intimacy and violence.

Carswell sardonic, Carswell superior, taunting, ‘Can't you do better than that?' I stared him down. I no longer flinched. His blade stopped short, and this time I did not feel the jab of the sword in my neck. In that moment I knew what the real point of Carswell's exercise was. To tell me that he had killed Bob Ballard.

I also saw for the first time his profound dislike of me and realised how tearfully hard it was—after the depersonalising regime of the camp—to be faced by someone who saw and hated me for myself. But my acceptance of his predatory nature was immediate and unquestioning. It was the absence of this knowledge that had previously made Carswell seem incomplete.

‘You just missed Dora,' he said.

‘Did you send her to Viessmann?'

‘She needed to clear out her head. Do something—what was the word she used?—unselfish. Now she has gone back, which is what you should have done while you had the chance.'

 

That night I was taken out of the box, marched back to the secure area and left alone in a soundproofed room with a mirror that was almost certainly an observation window.

They fed me white noise. It was like having someone scratch your brains with a wire brush. I failed to smash the mirror with my hands. A console had been set up in the room with instructions that I transcribe the contents of a tape from a mini-recorder with headphones. I refused. They restored to simple cause and effect. They turned up the volume in the room to ear-splitting level. Once I put the headphones on the noise went away.

It shamed me to transcribe the tape, but I lacked the will to refuse. The keyboard arrangement was different from English ones, and I kept making mistakes. In the end, I just concentrated on typing the correct letter as a way of trying to distance myself from the spew of words being pulled out of van der Valden.

The tape was van der Valden's interrogation by Carswell, who sounded arrogant but concentrated. He was accused of selling information to Karl-Heinz. He was accused of ‘negotiating with third parties'. He was told he was the victim of a sting by Vesco's security. Van der Valden denied and denied, then broke and agreed to everything, confessing to make them stop, any pretence at truth forgotten. By what mental process does someone decide to write:
Subject screams. Statement incomprehensible?

As I typed I knew that I too was being turned into someone's dossier, clean words on a page, documenting my regression from arrival to capitulation. I ceased to think of myself as an entity, only as a receptacle. I thought about the wire. I wondered if breaking me would take less time than calculated. In rare moments of lucidity, I understood that I was now so far undercover I was lost to myself. I no longer recognised the person looking back at me in the observation mirror. Somewhere in all of this I understood the secret of Viessmann's looks, a combination of surgery and whatever anti-ageing products his company was testing. Viessmann using his own body as an experiment site, in the vanguard of a new science, using tomorrow's high-street product on himself today. I told all of this to the mirror. I spoke to it as though it were a person, which in some ways it was, because I knew people were on the other side taking it all down. I felt my mind shutting down, the wiring starting to short.

 

I was kicked awake by two men who dragged me outside. It was still dark. Floodlights were on. Prisoners were being loaded onto two big container trucks like you see on every highway.

The scene was ghost quiet. There was no shouting or yelling orders. The dogs were out, but they were silent, too. Everything seemed inevitable. Everyone was docile as they were herded on board.

The insides of the containers had been adapted so we sat sideways in long rows in separate stalls. It was another kind of box, this time with a steel rod across, to which one wrist was chained. Several head counts were taken, and there were delays to check that everyone was properly locked in. I noticed the Chinese woman I had seen round the back of the kitchens.