Famous Last Words (3 page)

Suddenly there was a raucous hullabaloo of brakes an’l

wheels and thudding cars, and all the men and women s ting opposite came hurtling across—all in slow motion—;. i with the sharpest bang that Mauberley had ever heard.

Something or someone pushed down hard against the back

of his neck and he fell under everything down on top of his attache case and the cardboard valise.

A dreadful stillness followed. And a pause—like the i take of a breath.

The next thing he heard was the sound of steam and tl

clanging of a very distant bell and even more distant voices.

Then a burst of gunfire.

Slowly—far too slowly—the people on top of him began

to rise. Someone stepped on his hand.

“Don’t cry out…” they said in German, whispering. “Don’t cry out.”

Mauberley desperately tried to do as he was told and was silent—but the pain was terrible.

Everyone rose.

At first, they only got to their knees.

The gunfire continued somewhere further down towards

the head of the train.

“What is happening?” a woman asked, sitting with her

hip against the floor and her back against the seat. “Did we hit another train?”

A man, quite young, a civilian and perhaps a minor official from one of the consulates, let down the window, allowing a blast of cold air.

“Yes,” he said. “There is another train. But there’s a barrier of some kind, too.”

Gunfire.

It was getting dark.

Mauberley checked the locks on his valise and attache

case and put on his gloves.

“Why are they firing? Don’t they know we’re Germans?”

“Maybe it’s the Partisans.”

“No,” said the man at the window. “There are soldiers

coming down over the barrier. And there are trucks all along the road. Army trucks. Ours.”

Suddenly a searchlight was thrown on, sweeping the train from end to end, and all the people covered their faces as if afraid of recognition.

“Why are they doing that?” said the woman. “What if

there were a bombing raid? We should all be seen and killed.

Are you sure they’re Germans?”

“Absolutely, meine Frau, 1 promise you. I can see the

helmets. I can hear them talking.”

“Then who are they firing at?”

“Us.”

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“Why?” the woman asked. She was outraged. “Germans

firing on Germans? Why?”

“Don’t be a fool,” said another man, who had not said a word till then. “We have all deserted our posts. We are traitors.”

“But all we’re doing is going home,” the woman said.

“Yes. Against orders.”

“I’m afraid,” said the man at the window, “he’s right.

They are coming, many, many soldiers now, along the road.

I can see them very clearly. Units of the S.S.”

“Dear God—they have been sent to stop us; sent to cut us off.”

“Well, they won’t cut me off,” the outraged woman said.

“I am a German citizen. I am on a German train and I have a German destination.” She got to her feet and stood in the glare of the light. She brushed her clothing and poked around in the scattered luggage for her suitcase and her handbag.

“If I’m going to die, I mean to die in Munich with my husband and my children.” She was brisk, and not the least hysterical.

“I shall go outside and speak to their Commandant. And

when I get home I shall write a great many letters of complaint.”

On the very tail of the word “complaint”, she pushed

aside the man at the window, threw the door of the carriage open and stepped down onto the cinders.

Maybe she took the step and maybe she did not. She did

raise her arm and call out: “Please be good enough to advise your officers that…” And Mauberley thought it was the most “English” thing he had ever heard a German say. But she failed to complete it. She was cut in half by a burst of automatic rifle fire from about twelve feet away. She fell without a sound except a rather startling sigh which emerged from her wounds.

The young man reached out carefully and swung the door

back in towards the train.

They waited.

All the soldiers who were travelling out in the open on the tops of the cars were told to dismount and stand in single file along the rows of coaches and wagons-lit. The civilians

on the rQ,o{s were told to lie down flat and cover their heads.

The s^ggrchlight, now augmented with one or two others

as darkness fell completely, played along the length of track.

The soul—ids of little bursts of steam from the air brakes mingled wit^ the sounds of shuffling feet on the cinders and the muted vťoices of the soldiers climbing down.

Maub^rlgy and his compartment companions huddled as

far.away from the door and windows as they could get—but they coi^_ild not move out into the corridor, since it was blocked -with scores of other passengers crouching below the glassy partitions.

They ^ould see, quite distinctly, the tops of the soldiers’

heads beyond the windows, some of the soldiers pulling off their wo^oUgn caps, others unwinding their scarves, throwing down tl-^gir helmets; none of them turning away from the lights. It; v/as clear that all of them were waiting to be shot.

“Why must we sit here and let this happen?” someone

asked.

But n<^o one answered.

“Why must we sit here…?”

Rising^ the voice was suddenly drowned in burst after

burst of rnachine-gun fire.

All tl-^g bare, blond heads beyond the windows banged

against ^(he glass and fell away from sight.

Smeaxťs^rozen instantaneously—took their place.

Now ^the cantankerous man who had said they were all

traitors ^gaid in the same cantankerous way; “they are going to kill u^s all.” As if it was merely an act of insolence.

“Ever^yone out! Everyone out!” a voice began to call from the darl^ “Down! Down! All you people on top get down!

Everyone out of the carriages! Out!”

The d loglike voices and the deadly words had been heard for year,-s by every passenger aboard the train. But only in their dr^ganns of Jews and their nightmares of the future. The S.S. alv^ays came in the dark for others. Now, they were splitting open the dark, reaching in through the dreams for the dreamers. Down. Out. Down. Out. It was terrible.

No on^e could tell how many machineguns might be waiting in tt-flie night beyond the searchlights. No one could tell

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how many S.S. troops were there or whether, as rumour was always saying, someone insane was in charge of them. No one could tell if the children amongst the passengers would be killed, or the women, or the men in civilian dress or just the soldiers. One old woman lay outside the car already, underneath the bodies of the first contingent to die.

In the corridor the man whose shovel had made so many

marks against the glass spoke up and said, “I am armed.

There must be others who are armed. Why don’t we open

fire…?”

“No. Don’t,” a woman said. “Please. If you do…” her

voice trailed off. “Please.”

“EVERYONE OUT!” (Bang, bang, bang on the doors.)

“EVERYONE OUT AND EVERYONE DOWN!”

No one could look at anyone else. Some looked away.

Some closed their eyes. Some did the most extraordinary things. One woman, rising, straightened her skirts and dusted her knees. A man took out his watch and held it up to his ear. Another blew his nose and said; “excuse me.” Mauberiey also heard, distinctly; “well—have you got everything?”

and turned to see two women sorting baggage.

Someone opened the door.

The bodies of all the blond soldiers lay directly in their path, like stepping stones, but a man got down and helped the women out and over the corpses—everyone lost and

having to shield their eyes from the sweeping lights. Even the children were silent.

Mauberley stepped back.

He had a vague awareness he was in the way—or something.

Not letting go of the attache case or the cardboard

valise was causing a problem for the others, and instead of moving forward through the door, he was crowding back

into the corner, holding his luggage over the seat and letting the others pass like a man whose floor has not yet been called on an elevator ride.

Meanwhile, there were hundreds lining up in the floodlights.

People were scurrying overhead on the top of the car

and still there were the cries, outside, of “OUT! OUT! OUT!

DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!” In the waters of the dark, the

sharks of the S.S. had begun to swim in Requiem packs.

In about ten minutes—maybe less—the carriages were

almost empty.

Mauberley stepped around the glass and into the corridor.

He was not alone. Ten, maybe fifteen, others were crouching down below the lights. Mauberley got down with them.

Nobody spoke.

Mauberley kept the valise and the attache case between

his knees.

Beyond the train, there was firing. Someone had tried to escape.

Then silence.

Mauberley looked along the corridor—left, then right. Others were doing the same, though still without a word. The one small chance for freedom lay at either end of the car where doors led out onto a brakeman’s platform from which a

person might leap down into the darkness on the northern side of the train.

All of the ten or fifteen people crouching in the corridor must have been thinking, just as Mauberley was: iet someone else go .first—and then we’ll know if it’s safe; for no one moved a muscle. Mauberley’s knees and thighs, spread wide to protect his luggage, were killing him.

“Senor Mauberley…?”

He turned towards his name.

The searchlight flashed along the coach and threw down

bright reflections from the glass, which lit both Mauberley and the woman—now alarmingly close to him. Striking distance.

Less.

He could see the black, black hair; the moleskin coat; the undersea complexion and the eyes. And then the light had passed and there was nothing but a shadow, crouching at his elbow. Senor Mauberley…Spanish… .And then he knew precisely who she was and why she had come for him.

Mauberley rose and ran—or began to run—the valise and attache case almost at once preventing him by banging with a sickening reverberation into the face of the soldier with the spade.

And then, in a spate of confusions, there was a bright new

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light directly in his eyes; a rifle butting through the glass; a banging of doors and shots. One and then another body fell beneath his feet. A great, grey soldier with a submachinegun raised his arms above his head and shouted. Something

struck—a knife?—at Mauberley’s neck and there were hands around his ankles, trying to pull him down amongst the

arms and legs and faces jerking and kicking underneath him.

All that Mauberley knew was that he ran through all of

this, while his wrists were battered back and forth against the walls of glass by the weight of his attache case and the valise. And the adrenalin shot so sharply through him that it burned and make him sick. But, at last, there was air and space and darkness through which he ran until the only

thing he heard was his breathing and the train was a quarter mile—a half mile behind him, shining in the searchlights like a toy.

He was in a place with trees.

He vomited.

The taste of onions filled his mouth.

He washed his face and mouth with snow. Even though

he had no memory of falling down, he realized now that his knees and the palms of his hands were pitted with cinders and he could feel the cold, clean chill of the wound on his neck—the sort of wound a razor makes, a pair of parted lips from which the blood has withdrawn in shock. Mauberley

packed it with ice in order to kill the pain.

Looking back, the scene from which he had fled seemed

strangely distant: a miniature diorama, the figures barely visible. Just as the young civilian had said, there was a second train. It was four coaches long and the locomotive, bulky and armour-plated, sat behind a barrier of logs and rails with two great flags streaming in the rush of steam and light. Nothing could be seen of the markings or the colours—

just the bright, pale cloth against the dark. But the ten cars of the train on which he had made his escape from Mantua were lit so brightly by the searchlights they were almost silver.

Along the road, which ran about a hundred yards or less from the track, he could see a neatly laid-out convoy of trucks from which the searchlights shone, and each of the trucks was reeling in a pale grey line of people. All that he saw seemed part of a clockwork display.

His “place with trees” was in fact a wood of some dimension.

Not that he could tell this in the dark, but he could

sense there was no habitation near him. Nothing that gave off warmth or welcome, though the shelter of the trees was welcome enough.

It began to snow.

Mauberley ached all over. Ached and was hungry.

Maybe it would snow enough to hide his tracks. At any

rate, he had to stop and rest. He stumbled to the nearest congregation of pines and a few minutes-later drew their branches down around a scooped-out sleeping place.

Once, he was wakened in the night—his body made of

boards—and heard the sound of what appeared to be a battle over by the trains, and later still, his sleep unregained for an hour or more, he saw the sky light up with the aura of exploding engines. Last thing of all, the sound of one lone truck escaping up the road that ran past the trees, and then the deep and muffled silence of the snow that fell like a dream of snow—with flakes the size of coins straight down out of clouds so low they tangled with the pines.

In the morning there were shrouds of mist, like remnants hung from the branches. Mauberley had come to the foothills of the mountains and surely, now, he was safe. Unless the trees were enemies.

Ezra Pound, in one of his regular broadcasts over the Fascist network, had taken special aim at President Roosevelt as one of those “who think you can get through hell in a hurry.”