Black Camp 21 Read online

  ‘Exactly, Max. Exactly. We’ve been listening to you. We’ve been listening to all of you. From the sad deluded fantasies of your comrades to the moving saga of your very own love life.’

  ‘Fuck you all.’ Hartmann rested his forehead on the cool surface of the desk. He could hear the Strauss again, a faraway lifeline sinking deeper.

  ‘The technology is primitive but it just about works, and what we don’t hear, we glean from those who are sensible enough to talk to us.’

  ‘Stool pigeons.’

  ‘I think of them as modern and progressive intellects.’ Scotland snapped upright. He reached his arm forward and touched Hartmann’s back. ‘Much as you are, I think.’ Without waiting for a reply, the colonel pushed his chair back abruptly and stood. ‘Perhaps you just need a little time on your own to reflect.’

  As he passed behind the woman, she stretched up for a whispered instruction.

  ‘Or a little civilised persuasion, perhaps?’

  Hartmann didn’t move.

  ‘Either way we’d like your help. And in return maybe we can find out where this woman of yours is hiding.’

  The door slammed. He was gone. Beneath its greasy sheen, Hartmann’s tea quivered. Neither he, nor Helen, appeared to be breathing.

  ‘They’re not traitors,’ she said, finally. ‘The traitors are the ones who do nothing.’ She nudged the writing paper closer to Hartmann. ‘If she’s alive, we can get a letter to her.’

  ‘Only if you give me a pen.’

  ‘Things are rather different in the Cage, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a little talk.’

  12

  How long had she been gone?

  There was no clock, and no window, and his grasp of time had been slowly eaten away by the war. Life was what mattered, not its mundane calibration. At a guess, he’d have said five hours. But his stomach told him more. Since the eggs, there’d been nothing; just the one rancid brew he’d drunk cold through a skin which had stuck to his tongue.

  The chipped enamel mug was there in front of him now. Its stain-streaked insides were the colour of wet peat, and for want of anything better, he drained out the last bitter drops and slammed it down.

  ‘I need some food. What’s happening?’

  Then again, louder.

  The sound of his own noise rang off the clammy plaster; an echo which yielded no reaction. Behind him, the reinforced door remained resolutely still. He looked up. A large moth was banging against the blaze of the room’s single filament. In the room’s emptiness, he could share the panic of its wings.

  An ancient sediment of dust was falling through the beam and a stray zag of light branded itself painfully inside his right eye. Hartmann blinked sharply, stood up, and walked to the door.

  ‘You can’t do this. You cannot do this to me.’

  He placed both palms against the steel. It was solid, cold, and beaded with condensation. Since whenever he’d been brought there, the cell had become stifling. With his temple resting against the damp metal, he could trick the droplets on to his face. It was like a game. If he twisted his head at the right moment, they ran into his mouth. If he got it wrong, they ran off his chin.

  Bored, he turned round and weighed up his new universe. It was a rectangular box formed by four brick-lined walls little more than a few strides wide, longer one way than the other. Ten foot by fifteen, with a wooden floor and a ceiling designed for short men. Men like Scotland, he thought. There were little Hitlers on both sides.

  On the table, beneath the buzzing lightbulb, the three blank pages looked back at him. He could fill three hundred telling her what was in his head, but three would do for a start. He just needed that pen.

  He sat down. And then he paced again, hugging the walls and dragging his hand along the chill surface of the tiles. Twenty rotations one way, then twenty more the other. Somehow – and probably not by accident – the room was getting unmanageably steamy. Standing with his back against the door helped, but his uniform had grown heavy with sweat and the heat was making him weak.

  ‘Please. I need some fucking air.’

  Six hours, seven hours, twelve hours. All his bearings were in pieces. Maybe the entire day had gone. Maybe he was into the next one. Outside there would be bats, bearing down on dreaming flies. Unless he’d been shipped out, Koenig would be back on his bunk wondering what had happened.

  If he was jealous, why was he jealous? What did he want? What did he feel?

  Somewhere, the questions lost their way and he sat down yet again, pushing the paper to one side, and dropping his head down across folded arms. Above him he could sense the insect, still magnetised by the yellow light of the tungsten. Both of them were trapped, but sleep was coming and there would surely be food in his dreams.

  At first, Hartmann didn’t hear the boots in the corridor outside, or the door open, or the furious order to wake up. For a happy moment he’d been gone – a few seconds, no more – but the hand across his face spun him round into the spitting breath of a guard. He could smell stale smoke, feel nails tearing at his skin. Behind him, he sensed another voice: instructions. The hand retreated across his forehead, and yanked him fiercely back by the hair.

  ‘You don’t eat. And you certainly don’t sleep.’

  Hartmann’s nose slammed down on to the hard wood. Through a watery eye, he could see spots of blood on the paper. As his vision cleared, he heard the door clunk heavily behind him. In front of him, standing to attention against the far wall, a lone guard was looking straight back across the table. Outside the bulb’s bleak cone of light, it was difficult to make out his face. To the German, he was no more than a dark blur, bereft of telling detail.

  ‘I don’t suppose you speak.’

  The large shape by the wall didn’t move.

  ‘No, I didn’t think you would.’

  In the weeks ahead, Hartmann would remember little of what followed, only the vague and never-ending sense of vacuum devoid of those distinctive things around which memory normally coalesced.

  From time to time, water would appear in his filthy metal cup, but he had no certain recollection of how it got there. Since there was no dignity in begging, he had soon stopped asking for food. All he truly craved was sleep, but as the forgotten hours accumulated, it was clear that this simple blessing would never be countenanced. Whenever his eyelids shuttered down, the silhouette stepped forward menacingly. Whenever his head drooped, he was woken. At the beginning, a warning shout was enough. But as the hours stacked up, and his body screamed louder to be shut down, only a boot or a slap would pull him back.

  ‘I can’t stay awake in this heat. I can’t.’

  On the single occasion he tried curling up on the floor, the experiment ended abruptly with a kicking. In desperation, he toured his mind for information, certain that he knew nothing that would be of any value.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ he wept. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  As he entered the second day, the hallucinations began.

  From beneath his feet, pink steam seemed to be seeping between the floorboards and the bloodied face of Heinz Wirz could be seen howling inside the lightbulb. After that he lost all command over his mind, and surrendered to its meanderings.

  There was a black GI ringing the hour on a town-hall clock, looking out across a square full of blazing tanks. From inside every bonfire came the screams of burning women. There was a British officer offering him a cigarette from a silver case full of yellow butterflies. When he opened it, and turned towards Hartmann, the man’s face turned into a young girl’s and was blown away like sand.

  Sometimes, amid the madness, there was clarity: Alize on her belly in a dusty attic; Alize asleep at dawn and the smell of baking bread on a spring morning. But on the rare occasions his mute ravings made sense, he cried uncontrollably. And the only thing that would release him from his despair was sleep.

  Almost two days had elapsed when the woman – Helen, was it? – returned.

  A
t first, to Hartmann, she felt like another phantom. In his madness, the silhouette against the wall appeared to have softened, and when it stepped forward it did so in a different shape. This time he wasn’t required to flinch. Finally, he felt safe enough to close his eyes.

  When he opened them again, she was still there, and on the table between them, alongside the blood-spotted paper, was a pen.

  ‘It’s Helen, right?’

  ‘You can sleep now,’ she said quietly. ‘After that we will talk.’

  ‘And if I still have nothing to say?’

  Gently, she picked up the pen and turned it in her fingers. ‘Then we will start all over again.’

  13

  Hartmann’s disconnection from his own world was complete. There were no clocks, no watches; only the now remained.

  For a few solitary hours, he’d been taken to a narrow cell containing a single mattress where the dreamless slumber that followed was so profound he might have been dead. When he was woken it was like being winched painfully into the light from a deep, black well.

  Every neuron of his body felt damaged. For the first time in days, the throb in his ribs had returned, and the ache behind his eyes made him gasp. At his bedside, he found a bowl of porridge and a cup of something sour and black. With his blackened fingers and then his tongue he tore at the sticky oats until nothing remained. The lukewarm coffee he sipped like wine, feeling the lift from its caffeine and the relief from his thirst.

  When he was taken back, she was still there. This time the room seemed lighter, cooler, and Hartmann could smell her perfume as he walked unsteadily towards the table. As he took his chair, their eyes engaged. She was wearing a caramel-coloured blouse and a Celtic cross nestled in the hollow of her neck. Just before she spoke, her head tilted to the left, and the cross slid across her white skin until it was hanging free.

  ‘May I say something?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not really in a position to stop you, am I?’

  ‘You look like shit.’

  They had laughed, and then, finally, they had talked.

  To Hartmann, every morsel he disclosed felt vapid and inconsequential. Whatever she asked, he answered truthfully, and when it was over she gave him the pen.

  He told her about his father and his recruitment through Hitler Youth. He told her about Russia and morale and he told her about their tanks. When he became tired, or emotional, he was allowed back to his cell. When he returned, she was always there waiting, immaculate and calm. On occasions, there were questions he couldn’t answer.

  ‘Why are you in the SS?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because it seemed exciting. Because my father wanted it. Because it was too terrifying not to be,’ he had replied. ‘Look. It was simply what you did. And the uniforms were amazing. Admit it.’

  Sometimes there were questions which made him weep.

  ‘Which do you hope it is? Boy or a girl?’

  And because it was a conversation, the German had questions of his own.

  ‘Do we mystify you?’

  ‘You don’t,’ she had told him. ‘But the rest of them do.’

  ‘Do you torture all your prisoners?’

  ‘You haven’t been tortured. We stopped you sleeping for a few days. That’s all. I imagine I’d have been treated worse in Berlin.’

  Gradually, he’d fathomed what she was hunting for, and that behind every one of her thrusts lay fear.

  To the Allies – embodied by this girl – it seemed incomprehensible that Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht would crumple so easily; somewhere there must be another army, poised like a rat trap. Why else would she ask so many questions about numbers? What other reason for her fascination with the quantities of living men? Only when they’d put a number on their foe, and subtracted the dead and the captured, would the British know the scale of the threat.

  And when Hartmann flagged, she probed elsewhere, seeming haunted by the thought of secret technologies that would turn the war back round.

  ‘Are you aware of any special building projects?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any unusual transportations or railway movements, or no-go areas?’

  For a moment Hartmann thought again about Rosterg’s mysterious Zyklon B and the camp he’d seen from the train outside Munich. But it was guns and planes she wanted, not politics. And if Hitler had a miracle up his sleeve, he’d honestly never seen it.

  ‘I saw German soldiers trying to get home in stolen Citroëns. I saw officers pushing prams full of loot. Unless those things count as secret weapons, you should be all right.’

  When their conversation lost its way, Hartmann studied the girl’s shining maze of hair, sucked hard at the sweet air which surrounded it. In those rare silences it felt as though they were the last two people alive. No noise penetrated their private space from the outside; the fairground steam organ had stayed quiet. To Hartmann, it was as if they alone represented the entirety of war; as if five years of insanity had simply come down to this: two civilised young adults jousting wearily for supremacy with no clear understanding of how or when it might end.

  ‘It’s strange, but I’ve probably spent more time talking to you than to my wife.’

  Helen straightened her back and looked up. Her skin was paper-white with exhaustion.

  How many other monsters was she interrogating? He pictured Goltz and Mertens and the endless lorryloads of venomous lunatics who would follow. Any one of them would wear down a saint.

  Even now, she was scrutinising him through bloodshot eyes. It wasn’t a job for a woman. It shouldn’t be a job for anyone, he thought, and shame flooded his soul.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t cry again,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry. I think you still owe me some sleep.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m allowed to say this – it’s probably a hanging offence – but I’ve enjoyed your company.’

  Hartmann wiped his eyes. A week-long beard burned the back of his hand.

  ‘You’re in a mess but you’re a good man too. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.’ She had closed her file, and was standing up. Under the light, Hartmann saw the shadowed curve of her breasts, and turned away.

  ‘Is that it then, Helen Waters?’ he said, his eyes locked to the floor. ‘Do we shake hands? Do I get paid a fee? Can I go home now?’

  He was aware then of her aura at his side; an offered right hand, tiny, with nails like shining fish scales.

  ‘We shake hands.’ Her face had been transformed by a huge smile. ‘But you don’t get to go home just yet. Sorry.’

  Clumsily, Hartmann rose to fold her fingers in his. ‘A little kiss maybe? Oh, don’t panic. I’m only joking.’

  He sagged when she was gone. On the table were the three pieces of writing paper and her pen. Hours later, when they came to take him away, they found two crumpled balls rolled into the shadows and one short message across the top of the single blood-spotted sheet that remained. September 6th. London. My dear Alize. I am a good man. Don’t let anyone tell you different. All my love for ever. Max.

  Much later, when they led him back, Koenig was asleep, a glowing cigarette still dangling from his left hand. Hartmann carefully detached it and put it to his own mouth. As he dragged deeply, he studied the face on the mattress. It looked guilt-free like a young boy’s – a lifetime younger than Hartmann’s – unmarked and fringed with wild blond hair. Gently, he rolled a few loose strands between his fingers.

  Hartmann envied the fathomless depth of Koenig’s slumber, the precisely syncopated rise and fall of his chest. Lacking faith, Hartmann’s nights had become a series of jagged reefs, with dreams like rocks around which it was often impossible to navigate. When he was a child, all his night-time worries had dissolved with the dawn. Here, the onset of daylight simply made them worse.

  He sat down quietly by the small steel table, twisting the dead stub under his boot. A few feet away, Koenig had started to snore. It was good that he was sleeping. Hartmann needed a little time
. Something odd had happened back in that room.

  However hard they tried, Koenig would have told these people nothing. Now, Hartmann needed his friend to believe that he’d been equally resolute. Not that he’d known anything of value, or given them any information they didn’t already know. It was all just a game, as Mertens had predicted.

  From the crumpled pack on the table, he rattled a fresh tab loose and turned hopefully towards the door. If he was lucky, there’d be a friendly guard with a light.

  As he stood up, the cell was shaken by a thunderous bang, followed less than a second later by another matching detonation of sound. In the same moment, up over the rooftops, there was an immense rush of solid air, followed by one sustained note of glorious silence, and then the distant clatter of panic.

  Back at the front, he’d lain beneath his tank during countless bombing raids, feeling the soil quiver along his spine. He’d watched the fields and flaming forests turn themselves inside out. But this was different. Two deafening cracks, but no explosion, no alarm bells or sirens.

  Through the walls he could hear men running. There’d be little chance of that light now. He turned back towards the beds. Koenig was still sleeping.

  For the rest of that night, Hartmann waited.

  With his fingers, to pass the time, he traced out the graffiti etched into the ceiling. Girls’ names and anonymous heresies; the crude outline of a cock pissing over a passable likeness of Hitler. Clearly, he wasn’t alone. Not everyone slept so easily with their secrets as the child below him.

  On the wall by his head, several pairs of large breasts had been rendered in stunning detail. It was tough for all of them to live without that. Even back there with Helen Waters he’d felt himself harden. In the military hospital he’d seen it too. Everyone masturbated and not always in secret; one last filthy memory before who knew what. But not here, though. Not right now. Outside, beyond their cage, something had changed. Even in the darkness, Hartmann could sense it.

  As the hours passed, he tried to picture sunrise over London, seeing a pale light on an oily river sliding through a city exhilarated by war. All night he’d heard keys in locks and stifled protests, heavy footfall and furious Bavarian oaths. Prisoners were being moved. Apart from Koenig, no one in the entire complex appeared to be sleeping. When their own door finally slammed open, the faces of the guards were grey.