A Possible Life (7 page)

He was told to join a motor lorry and to expect orders at the other end. He stood on a metal plate above the rear bumper, holding on to the tailgate as the truck trundled over an unmade road towards a white house beyond an orchard. Here there was a makeshift holding area, a sort of stockade, in which Special Unit prisoners, screamed at by SS guards, were struggling to deal with the multitude of people.

‘
Schnell, schnell!
’ the guards kept shouting.

In German, an officer who seemed calmer than the others told Geoffrey what to say. ‘Tell them they must remove their clothes and leave them in piles here. Then they must go through that door. They will then be allowed to take a shower in this building. After that they will be given clean clothes and something to eat.’

But the words would not come to Geoffrey. He seemed dumb. He had lost all recollection of the French language. He cast his mind back to school, to home, Limoges, his mother … French, French. God, he was bilingual, but where were the words?
Ôtez les vêtements … Déshabillez vous
…
Demain, tout sera bien
… He cleared his throat and called, ‘
Attention!
’

There was the sound of a pistol being fired. A Special Unit prisoner lay dead beside him, shot by a guard impatient at his slowness. Women were beginning to cry, children to howl. No one knew what was going on or what to do. The guards began
to
scream louder, sensing the uprise of hysteria. Geoffrey felt a rifle stuck into his back. ‘
Schnell! Heraus mit der Sprache! Schnell!
’ Speak up! Geoffrey’s throat was swollen. He ground his clogged foot into the ground. It was speak or die.

‘
Messieurs dames, attention, s’il vous plaît!
’

None of the Germans could understand French; that was why he was here. He could say anything. ‘
Je ne sais pas ce qui vous attend
.’ I don’t know what awaits you. He felt a hundred eyes on him. At last the French had in him what they had wanted: an insider who could explain.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I’ve heard rumours … Why are you here and not in the camp? Are you old? Are you young? Are you dying? This place is not like any other. I have heard screaming …’ Geoffrey found the words were coming in English. He didn’t know if they passed his lips or whether they formed only in his mind.

But somewhere in the dark a French voice was speaking. It was telling them that there were clean clothes and, on the other side, hot food for them. Don’t let that voice be mine, Geoffrey thought; dear God, don’t let me lead them on.

They were starting to undress; some were going into the building. The tide of hysteria was beginning to ebb. The SS officer nodded at him and told him to keep talking. Through a gate in the perimeter wire he saw a flatbed lorry piled with pine trees driving towards a sawmill. He thought he heard the screech of metal teeth on sappy wood, too young to burn well, and saw another lorry leaving from the back of the mill with its load of pine logs cut to length, heading towards a building with a tall chimney that was pouring black smoke into the night.

The prisoners of the Special Unit were told to turn their backs on the white cottage, to avert their gaze, and, as dawn was seeping through the forests, Geoffrey was ordered back to D block. He clambered into his bunk alongside Trembath, too tired and
ashamed
to speak. He had lost his bearings, didn’t know in any case what he might say.

‘Listen,’ said Trembath. ‘Listen.’

There were wails and screeches coming from a building nearby.

‘What the hell …’

‘Oh God. It’s the Frenchwomen.’

‘Did you see?’

‘No, once they were inside, we were sent away. The SS took over.’

‘What happens?’

‘They lock them in a shower room. An SS man puts in pellets through the roof. I saw a guard in a gas mask. We’re not meant to see what they do. For fear that one day, when the war’s over …’

Headlights of the trucks swept over the walls of the bunkhouse; they could hear the individual cries of children, men and women. Normally a lorry would have revved its engine loudly to drown the noises. All through the night was the sound of screaming and, closer to home, of men in the bunkhouse who had lost control. In the morning it was impossible to get into the ablutions room for the number of them hanging from the pipes in the ceiling.

It was a relief to march to the work site the following day, to dig with head lowered. Geoffrey wore the uniform of the Special Unit and feared that it made him conspicuous and liable for further ‘special’ duties. He did his best to keep his eyes on the frozen ground.

That night, he tried to understand what he had seen. He tried to place it, without feeling crushed by it. He had no idea what reserves he had, how great his desire to live at any price. The French people, he heard, were all Jews, some refugees from Eastern Europe, but most of them French nationals from Poitiers, Paris or Limoges.

Geoffrey was not sure he had met anyone Jewish in England. There had been a mathematician called Isaacs in the college next to his and, when he came to think of it, a physicist in his own college called Levi. Perhaps old Samuels, the psychologist who had given such a good report on him to Mr Green in London, was Jewish. These were names he recognised from the Bible, which furnished almost his entire idea of Jews, their history and beliefs. ‘Heroic’ was the word he would have used to describe them – frequently enslaved or exiled, yet able to draw on a limitless supply of soldiers, prophets and commanders: Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Moses, Daniel, Joshua, Gideon … Their stories had been repeated to him in Scripture lessons at his Hampshire school a hundred times; he had thrilled to the lions’ den, the fiery furnace, the fall of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea. What on earth was the point of taking a French seamstress from a backstreet in Lyons and transporting her across Europe to be murdered, on the grounds that some distant ancestor might once have plied his trade from Dan to Beersheba?

He turned on his side. The bunk now had a paper mattress that Trembath had bartered from an old Slovak. Geoffrey fixed his thoughts on England, certainties, and the life he had led as a child. He remembered his excitement on the September day he went to the village school and first encountered other children. His time at home was pleasant enough, but his parents didn’t understand what a boy’s world was like. Yet as soon as he met the children of the surrounding villages he found they all had the same enthusiasm for anarchy. There was no need to explain; once the bell rang and they roared into the yard, they all knew what to do. He was a pack animal who had found his place. Some of them won form prizes, some were good at football, others at art or adding up, but among themselves they made so few distinctions that they were surprised when life later seemed to push them into different channels. Geoffrey did not notice his own
distinction
in lessons or on the playing fields until his last year, when on seven occasions he went past fifty for the First XI and found himself steered once more toward the exam room, this time for university entrance.

Trembath was a bit of an ass in many ways, Geoffrey admitted to himself, but while he was still there, with his attachment to the proper way of doing things, it was possible to believe that the life he had known while growing up was not a mirage but a substantial and continuing thing; that it was the camp that was the chimera.

Working his way to the edge of the wooden bunk, his face away from Trembath’s feet, Geoffrey began to hope that some divine intervention might come to their assistance. A Pole called Tomasz, who spoke a little English, told him that most of the prisoners candidly prayed for a miracle and that many of them had come to believe that one day the pine forests would part and that a shining chariot would sweep through, pluck them up and bear them all to safety in a place above the clouds.

The God of the Church of England was a vague and biddable person in Geoffrey’s mind, not one that he had ever been encouraged to imagine closely. If Jesus was his son and Jesus was a Jew did that mean that God was also Jewish? He knew this speculation was childish, but his idea of religion was based entirely on the exemplary lives of Jews, including Christ, and it was difficult to think of God and religion in the framework of any other people. The questions of divinity and incarnation or of a life beyond this one were all posed in Hebrew; the odd meeting of universal and particular had found a pure expression in the black smoke from the chimney.

‘For God’s sake, Talbot. Are you afraid of something?’ said Trembath. ‘I’m not going to put up with much more of this. It’s my duty as a British—’

‘I know. But this is not a prisoner-of-war camp. The guidelines for officers don’t apply here. I want to escape, too, but we need help. We need organisation.’

‘You’re like that bloody Roman general we had to read about at school. The Delayer. Cunctator. The chap who was always putting off the action. What was his name?’

‘Can’t remember. I think he was victorious in the end, though,’ said Geoffrey.

‘I don’t want to stay any longer in this place.’ Trembath had raised his voice and Geoffrey placed a restraining hand on his arm. ‘I tell you, Talbot, I’d rather be killed outright than murdered on the quiet. Stuffed into a gas room with the Jews and the “nancy boys”.’

Trembath’s face was so close to Geoffrey’s that he could feel his breath on his cheek.

‘Even though I am one,’ said Trembath.

Geoffrey was not sure that, despite their proximity, he had heard properly. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Even though I am one.” A nancy boy, I mean. Not a Jew. A queer.’

There was a silence while Geoffrey tried to digest what he had heard. He thought at first that Trembath must be joking, but soon saw there could be no reason for such an odd jest. Eventually he said, ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t tell. It’s not something you go round shouting about. I wasn’t always sure myself. Then something happened. There was a young corporal at Colchester. He seemed to have got my number. He was a very knowing young man. I used to sneak out and meet him every night. He made me see I’d always been like that, really.’

‘God.’

‘I won’t tell you any more. I can tell you’re embarrassed. But I couldn’t see much point in keeping it to myself.’

‘None at all. I’m … glad you told me.’

They were sitting in their bunk while many of the other prisoners had gathered round to hear Tomasz tell them a story. He could keep a hundred of them entertained with folk stories, legends or the entire plots of books his memory had stored. Geoffrey began to wonder if he ought to contribute something from his own education; he could pass it on to Tomasz to translate. His night-time discipline of forcing his mind into a better world now took the shape of trying to remember the various novels he had read. It was shocking how little had stayed with him.
Moby-Dick
, for instance: a sailor bent on killing a white whale that had bitten off his leg. Little else came back to him. Or
Jane Eyre
. A poor and ill-treated governess who eventually marries the man she wants, Mr Rochester; there was also someone called St John Rivers. The Poles with their taste for woodland spirits, angels and magical transformations were hardly going to be uplifted by that. So it would be
Great Expectations
, and he would do it serially, as Dickens had published it. He was pretty sure he had the plot by heart, until the end at least, when some of the revelations that ought to have been unforgettable had proved the opposite. Had he dreamt it, or did Estella actually turn out to be the daughter of Magwitch? He went over the story again and again in his mind, dividing it up into chunks that might take an hour to tell.

Somehow he fell asleep.

The next day at roll call, a senior guard told Geoffrey to step forward and asked why, if he was in Special Unit uniform, he was not on a special detail. Geoffrey replied that he was a French interpreter, on special duties only when required. The guard pointed him towards the administrative building and told him to go at once.

‘
Nein
,’ said Geoffrey. ‘
Ich bin Dolmetscher französisch. Interprète français
.’

There was the sound of a safety catch coming off a revolver. The process of trial and justice had reached its usual rapid conclusion and Geoffrey did as he was told.

For a day he helped sort belongings taken from those who had arrived by train from the west. There were baskets for currency or jewellery and great piles of clothes that were sent on to clothe German citizens at home. Some of the men’s woollen items were destined, he was told, for infantry at the Eastern Front, and he wondered what the men would think if they knew they were wearing Jewish socks. Better that, perhaps, than the Jewish blood that was transported to Stalingrad for transfusions, taken by syringe from prisoners kept in cages for the purpose, so the superior soldiers of the Reich survived on the borrowed vigour of the Underpeople. Many of the other workers were women who had volunteered for a task that was at least indoors, away from the freezing ground and the Alsatian dogs. Glances were exchanged between some of the women and the SS guards; they were looks that made Geoffrey think there was a black market in sex, as in so much else inside the camp. What might go through the mind of a man who made love to a woman he viewed as less than human, of a lower species, Geoffrey wondered. Did it alter his opinion of himself, did it make him in his own eyes a bestialist?

The work lasted only a couple of days until a senior guard, noticing his still robust physical condition, sent him to join the Special Unit in the crematorium. A row of eight furnaces at knee height had to be kept roaring day and night with logs cut from the pine forests. Men shuttled to and from the doors where the trucks from the sawmill delivered the wood, unloading them on to wheeled wagons that were then pushed up to the ovens.

The corpses came in on trucks with chutes at the back that could be tipped on to slides that joined the mouth of the oven. Some of the stokers were given metal poles and detailed to prod
the
corpses down into the fire in groups of six or eight at a time, urged on by the screaming SS officers. Then the slide would be switched to the next oven. Geoffrey imagined the life of a crematorium worker at home, in Winchester or Andover; it might not be so very different, though of course there would be no more than a dozen corpses a day.