Free Fall Page 13

  “I tell you I know nothing.”

  “And then when I am given, or if it comes to that, take the task of preventing a recurrence of this—where else should I look? Of all the men in this camp, who has a record so accessible, who has talked about painting and pigments, about lithography? And besides”—he was peering at me closely with those enormous cornflower eyes—“who among all these men is so likely to be reasonable? Should I choose as my lever Major Witlow-Brownrigg, that stiff gentleman and bend him till he breaks, or shall I choose material more pliable?”

  “I tell you——”

  “It is essential that I should be able to raid the camp swiftly and suddenly and with absolute certainty of what I am going to find, and where. Please, please listen to me. I must break up the printing press, confiscate the tools, the uniform, the civilian clothes, I must smash the radio, I must go straight to the tunnel and fill it in——”

  “But I——”

  “Please listen. I choose you not only because you must be part of the organization but because you are an artist and therefore objective and set apart from your fellows; a man who would know when betrayal was not betrayal and when one must break a rule, an oath, to serve a higher truth——”

  “For the last time, I know nothing!”

  He spread his hands palm uppermost on the table.

  “Does that seem reasonable, Mr. Mountjoy? Consider all the indications that could point to the opposite conclusion—your various skills, your friendship with the two officers—even your past membership of a party famous for underground activities—oh, believe me, I have a great respect for you and a great distaste for my own work. I also understand you as far as one man may understand another——”

  “You can’t. I don’t understand myself.”

  “But I am objective because although I can get inside your skin I can leave it at will, can get out before the pain starts——”

  “Pain?”

  “And so I know, objectively, surely, serenely, that at one level or other of our alas, unfortunate association you will, how shall I put it——?”

  “I won’t talk. I know nothing.”

  “Talk. Yes, that is the word. At some point, Mr. Mountjoy, you will talk.”

  “I know nothing. Nothing!”

  “Wait. Let us begin by giving you something of great value. I shall explain you to yourself. No one, not a lover, a father, a schoolmaster, could do that for you. They are all inhibited by conventions and human kindness. It is only in such conditions as these, electric furnace conditions, in which the molten, blinding truth may be uttered from one human face to another.”

  “Well?”

  “What embryo if it could choose, would go through the sufferings of birth to achieve your daily consciousness? There is no health in you, Mr. Mountjoy. You do not believe in anything enough to suffer for it or be glad. There is no point at which something has knocked on your door and taken possession of you. You possess yourself. Intellectual ideas, even the idea of loyalty to your country sit on you loosely. You wait in a dusty waiting-room on no particular line for no particular train. And between the poles of belief, I mean the belief in material things and the belief in a world made and supported by a supreme being, you oscillate jerkily from day to day, from hour to hour. Only the things you cannot avoid, the sear of sex or pain, avoidance of the one suffering repetition and prolongation of the other, this constitutes what your daily consciousness would not admit, but experiences as life. Oh, yes, you are capable of a certain degree of friendship and a certain degree of love, but nothing to mark you out from the ants or the sparrows.”

  “Then you’d better have nothing to do with me.”

  “Have you not yet appreciated the tragicomedy of our situation? If what I have described were all, Mr. Mountjoy, I should point a gun at your head and give you ten seconds to start talking. But there is a mystery in you which is opaque to both of us. Therefore, even when I am almost certain that you would speak if you had anything to tell I must go on to the next step, the infliction of more suffering because of the gap between ‘almost’ and ‘certain’. Oh, yes! I shall loathe myself, but how will that help you?”

  “Can’t you see I couldn’t stand a threat?”

  “And therefore I must go through the motions as though I knew nothing about you at all. I will pretend you can neither be bribed nor swayed by fear. I offer you nothing, then, but a chance to save lives. Tell me everything you know about the escape organization and you shall be what you were before, neither more nor less. You shall be taken from this camp to another camp neither more nor less comfortable. The source of our information shall be concealed.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the senior officer?”

  Blue cornflowers.

  “Who would confide in a senior officer?”

  “Why won’t you believe me?”

  “Who would believe you, Mr. Mountjoy, if he had any sense?”

  “What’s the good of asking me for the truth then?”

  A sad, wry, reasonable face. Hands spread.

  “Even if that is true, Mr. Mountjoy, I must go on. Surely you realize that? Oh, I agree, we’re in the sewer together—both of us up to the neck.”

  “Well, then!”

  “What do you want most in the world? To go home? That could be arranged—a mental breakdown—just a month or two in a pleasant sanatorium, a few papers signed and there you are—home, Mr. Mountjoy. I implore you.”

  “I’m feeling a bit dizzy.”

  The inside of my hands slipped on my face. I could feel the oily stuff running.

  “Or if home does not seem so immediately attractive—how about an interim period of entertainment? I try to phrase this as delicately as one not born to the use of your ample language can manage; but do you not sometimes feel the deprivation of the companionship of either sex? The resources of Europe are at your disposal, I am told they are, are——”

  His voice went right away into the distance. I opened my eyes and saw that I was holding on to the edge of the table, saw that where my fingers had slipped they left wet marks. Just the tiniest little prick. A kind of sobbing rage swelled up in my throat.

  “You bloody fool! Do you think I wouldn’t tell you if I knew? I tell you I know nothing—nothing!”

  His face was white, shining with perspiration and compassionate.

  “Poor boy. How beastly the whole thing is, Sammy. I may call you Sammy? Of course, you care nothing for the resources of Europe. Forgive me. Money? No. I think not. Well there. I have taken you up to a pinnacle of the temple and shown you the whole earth. And you have refused it.”

  “I haven’t refused it. Can’t you see, you, you—I don’t know anything——”

  “You have bidden me get behind you. Or perhaps you are right and you really know nothing. Are you a hero or not, Sammy?”

  “I’m no hero. Let me go.”

  “Believe me, I wish I could. But if anyone else escapes they will be shot. I can’t take any risks at all. No stone unturned, Sammy, no avenue unexplored.”

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  He fell silent. I swayed back in the dentist’s chair which unbalanced incongruously as though it were metal and fabric on an uneven floor. The Fuehrer in his awful power slid apart and then closed like the hands of a hypnotist.

  “Let me go. Can’t you see? They wouldn’t trust me. Nobby and Ralph—they tossed up perhaps, but even if they had not, nothing would have induced them to put me in the picture—I know now what they wanted with me; but all the time they must have had a reservation. Can’t trust him. He’d squeal. Curious contorted chap​—​something missing in the middle——”

  “Sammy. Sammy! Can you hear me? Wake up, Sammy!’

  I came back out of chaos, was collected together mercilessly from those unnameable places. For the first time I had a pause in which I could have willingly remained for ever. Not to look, not to know or anticipate, not to feel, but only to be conscious of identity is the next
best thing to complete unconsciousness. Inside me I neither stood nor sat or lay down, I was suspended in the void.

  “Well, Sammy?”

  Memory of the cornflowers tugged at me. I opened my eyes and he was still there opposite. I spoke to his understanding out of our naked souls.

  “Can’t you be merciful?”

  “It is the karma of our two nations that we should torture each other.”

  With my hands on the edge of the table I spoke to him carefully.

  “Isn’t it obvious to you? You know me. Be reasonable. Do you think I’m the kind of man who can keep anything back when I am threatened?”

  He did not answer immediately and as the silence stretched out I began to know what was inevitable. I even looked away from him, unable now to influence the event. The Fuehrer was there, both transparent pictures now slid exactly into one. The plaster round the photograph was institutional buff and needed redecorating. One of the Gestapo was standing easy and as my eyes swung to his face I saw him put one hand to his mouth and hide a yawn. The interminable argument in a foreign language was keeping him from his grey coffee and sticky bun. Dr. Halde waited till my eye came back to his face.

  “And you can see, Sammy, that I have to make certain.”

  “I told you I know nothing!”

  “Think.”

  “I won’t think. I can’t think.”

  “Think.”

  “What’s the good? Please!”

  “Think.”

  And the generalized sense of position, of a war on, of prison, of men shut in——

  “I can’t——”

  —men who lay in their bunks, rotting away, men with bright faces who went in and out of chapel, incomprehensible as bees weaving their passes before a grassy bank——

  “I tell you I can’t!”

  —the men going round the bend, wire-happy, running wildly as the guns tucked them in——

  “I tell you——”

  The men.

  For, of course, I knew something. I had known something for more than a year. It was the standard of knowledge required that I did not know. But I could have said at any time that out of the hundreds of us there were perhaps twenty-five who might actually try to escape. Only the information had not been required. What we know is not what we see or learn but what we realize. Day after day a complex of tiny indications had added up and now presented me with a picture. I was an expert. Who else had lived as visually and professionally with these faces and taken knowledge of them in through his pores? Who else had that puzzled curiosity about man, that photographic apprehension, that worried faith in the kings of Egypt?

  “I tell you——”

  I could say to him quite simply; I do not know when or where the escape organization operates or how—but take these twenty men into your trawl and there will be no escapes.

  “Well, Sammy? You tell me what?”

  And he was right of course. I was not an ordinary man. I was at once more than most and less. I could see this war as the ghastly and ferocious play of children who having made a wrong choice or a whole series of them were now helplessly tormenting each other because a wrong use of freedom had lost them their freedom. Everything was relative, nothing absolute. Then who was most likely to know best what is best to do? I, abashed before the kingship of the human face, or Halde behind the master’s desk, in the judge’s throne, Halde, at once human and superior?

  He was still there; but I had to focus again to bring my eyes back from the map of Europe and the locked armies. His eyes were not dancing but intent. I saw he was holding his breath because he let it out with a little gasp before he spoke:

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve just told you!”

  “Sammy. Are you being an exceptional man or are you tying yourself to the little code? Are you not displaying nothing more creditable than a schoolboy’s sense of honour when he refuses to tell on his naughty comrades? The organization will steal sweets, Sammy; but the sweets they steal are poisoned——”

  “I’ve had enough of this. I demand that you send for the senior officer——”

  As the hands fell on either shoulder Halde made his placatory gesture again.

  “Now I shall be plain with you. I will even give you some trumps. I dislike hurting people, I loathe my job and everything that goes with it. But what rights have you? Rights still apply to your prisoners en masse, but they bend and break before necessity. You are too intelligent not to know that. We can transfer you from this room to another camp. Why should you not be killed by your own R.A.F. on the way? But to kill you now would benefit nobody. We want information, Sammy, not corpses. You saw the door to your left because you came through it. There is another one to your right. Don’t look round. Choose, Sammy. Which door is going to be your exit?”

  And, of course, I might be deceiving myself, might be building up a whole façade of knowledge which would collapse when tested by fact—I could feel something stinging in my eyes.

  “I don’t know anything!”

  “You know, Sammy, history will be quite unable to unravel the tangle of circumstances between you and me. Which of us is right? Either of us, neither? The problem is insoluble, even if they could understand our reservations, our snatched judgments, our sense of truth being nothing but an infinite regression, a shifting island in the middle of chaos——”

  I must have cried out because I heard my voice rise against the palate.

  “But look. You want the truth. All right I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know whether I know anything or not!”

  I could see the moulding of his face more clearly now for the top of every fold shone with perspiration.

  “Are you telling the truth, Sammy, or must I admire you, foolishly and jealously? Yes, Sammy. I admire you because I dare not believe you. Your exit is a better one than mine.”

  “You can’t do anything to me. I’m a prisoner of war!”

  His face shone. His eyes were like bright blue stones. The general light on his forehead increased as it ran together. It became a star that moved down the long line of his nose and fell on the blotter with an audible tap.

  “I loathe myself, Sammy, and I admire you. If necessary I will kill you.”

  There is a heard beating of the heart when each beat is like the blow of a stick on concrete. There is also the soggy beat, in the indulged life of the chain smoker, a confusion in the breathing that struggles with phlegm and that centre in there—in here—dumping sacks of wet vegetables on a wooden floor and shaking the building to pieces. There was heat, too, that rose to the ears so that the chin lifted and the mouth opened, swallowing on hard nothing.

  Halde swam.

  “Go!”

  There was a strange obedience about my two hands that grasped the sides of the seat and helped to lift me. I did not like to see the new door for the first time so I turned back to Halde, but he would not meet my eye and he was swallowing on nothing as I had done. So at last in this awful trance of obedience I turned away towards the ordinary wooden door and beyond it there was a corridor of concrete with a strip of coconut matting down the centre. My mind was reeling along, trying to say inside; now this is happening, this is the moment! But my mind could not take it. Therefore the feet trod obediently one in front of the other, there was no rebellion from the body, only astonishment and doom in the mind. And the flesh that quivered and jumped had a sense of occasion. My eyes went on with their own life, presented to me as precious trophies, the stains on the floor—one in the likeness of a brain. And there was another one, a long mark on the scrubbed concrete that might have been the crack in the bedroom ceiling, the raw material out of which imagination had constructed so many faces.

  Tie. Belt. Shoelaces.

  I stood there with neither belt nor braces and my one conscious thought was that I needed both hands to hold my trousers up. Some soft, opaque material was folded over my eyes from behind an
d this seemed a matter for expostulation because without light how can a man see and be ready for the approaching feet of the last terror? He may be ambushed, cannot assess the future, cannot tell when to give up his precious scrap of information if he indeed has a scrap and it is indeed precious——

  But I was walking, propelled not ungently from behind. Another door was opened, for I heard the handle scrape. Hands pushed me and pressed down. I fell on my knees, head down, hands out protectively. I was kneeling on cold concrete and a door was shut roughly behind me. The key turned and feet went away.

  8

  How did I come to be so frightened of the dark?

  Once there was a way of seeing which was a part of innocence. Far back on the very edge of memory—or further perhaps, because the episode is outside time—I saw a creature four inches high, paper-white, changing shape and strutting along a top edge of the open window like a cock. Then later, when I saw her first there was perhaps still time; but no one told me, no one knew what we might see and how easily we might lose the faculty.

  The verger stepped in, opened me up with one blow of his hand. Now for the first time I was awash in a sea where I might drown, was defenceless against attack from any quarter. I wore vest and pants, grey shirt and tie, socks up to the knee, gartered and turned down. I wore half-shoes and a jacket; and presently I wore a bright blue cap. Father Watts-Watt fitted me out and threw me into a new life. He directed his housekeeper to see to me; and I was seen to. I was taken from the ward to the vast rectory and Mrs. Pascoe made me bath at once as though all those weeks in the ward had not cleansed me of Rotten Row. But though the ward had accustomed me to baths, this bathroom was very different. Mrs. Pascoe went with me along a corridor then up two steps to the door. Inside the bathroom she showed me the new things I had to do. There was a box of matches tied to—but what was it tied to? What did I think that structure was? A man in copper armour? That would have gone with the whole structure of the room; for it was taller than long, with one high, glazed window, that looked at nothing; and a single naked bulb. But the copper, brass-bound idol dominated everything, even dominated the huge bath on its four splayed tiger feet, dominated me, with a blank look over my head from two dark caverns and an intimidation of pipes. Mrs. Pascoe turned on the water, struck a match and the idol roared and flamed. Later, when I read about Talus, the man of brass, in my mind’s eye he had just such a voice, such flames, just such a copper, brass-bound body. But that first time I was so plainly terrified that Mrs. Pascoe stayed with me while the bath filled and the electric light was haloed in steam that bulged down from the ceiling and the yellow walls looked as though they were sweating in the heat. Then, when there was water enough in the bath—less than I would have liked—for in the womb we are immersed completely—she turned off the gas and the water, showed me the bolt on the door and left me. I bolted the door, put my new clothes on the chair and hurried to the bath with one eye on Talus. I squatted over the water, running cold and inspecting the long yellow smear on the white enamel so far away from me.