Christopher Priest - The Separation

Three hours later, with the early dawn breaking ahead of us, we were travelling eastwards away from Calais, along the French coast, heading for the border with Belgium.

Joe was driving. I curled up as comfortably as I could in the passenger seat beside him, closed my eyes and tried to snatch some sleep, but I was too excited. The strange French farmland was drifting magically past our windows, flat fields cultivated in exact, rectangular shapes, tall trees planted alongside the road. Ahead was the prospect of hundreds of miles more of sweet foreignness, Belgium and Holland and Germany.

The next day I was driving the van when we reached the border crossing between Holland and Germany.

It was a moment we had been looking forward to with mixed feelings. We were undoubtedly nervous of the Nazis, but at the same time, because our mother had been born in Germany, we had been brought up believing that Germany was a good and beautiful place, with a great civilization and culture. Frankly, we had no idea what to expect.

We had driven through the Dutch town of Eindhoven an hour or two before reaching the German border. The road was straight but perilously narrow, built up on embankments that ran between wide and uninteresting fields. Beyond Venlo we entered an area of woodland. After crossing the River Maas on a long bridge built of girders, we drove into the border zone, hidden where the road ran through a dense thicket of trees.

The officers on the Dutch side dealt with us quickly. After a perfunctory examination of our passports one of the officials raised the barrier and I drove across into the narrow strip of no man’s land. We could see the German border post about a hundred yards ahead, where another long pole straddled the road. This one was painted with a triple spiral of red, black and white.

We drew up behind two other vehicles that were already waiting to cross, inching the van forward as each passed through the border ahead. When it was our turn, the officer, a rotund man wearing a uniform of green jacket, black trousers and highly polished black boots, saluted us with his arm raised at a smart angle.

‘Heil Hitler!’

‘Heil Hitler!’ Joe responded.

Before leaving home we had received a letter sent by the Foreign Office to Games competitors, warning us of the behaviour and courtesies that would be expected of us in Germany. The Hitler salute was the first item on the list. To neglect or refuse to make it could lead swiftly to trouble, including imprisonment and deportation. Like most people in Britain we had seen newsreel film of the Nazis. To us, there was something unmistakably ridiculous and histrionic about it. Back in our rooms in college, Joe and I had Heil-Hitlered each other and our friends, goose-stepping about, laughing and laughing.

The guard lowered his arm stiffly. He leaned down by the passenger window and stared in at us. He was a youngish man, with pale blue eyes and a fair moustache, neatly cropped. He glanced suspiciously into the compartment of our van, where our luggage was stowed, leaned back with his hands on his hips while he regarded our shells strapped to the roof, then held out his plump fingers. Joe gave him our passports.

He looked through both documents slowly, turning the pages with precise motions of his fingers. The sun was beating down on me through the window. I began to feel anxious.

‘[These passports are for the same man,]’ he said, not looking up. ‘[J. L. Sawyer twice.]’

‘[We have the same initials,]’ I replied, beginning what was for us the familiar explanation. Joe was always Joe. I was sometimes called Jack, but usually JL. ‘[But our names - ]’

‘[No, I think not.]’

‘[We are brothers.]’

‘[You are both initialled J. L., I see! Some coincidence. Joseph, Jacob! That is how they name twins in England?]’

Neither Joe nor I said anything. The officer closed the second of our passports, but he did not hand them back.

‘[You are going to the Olympic Games in Berlin,]’ he said to me, looking across. I was in the driver’s seat, but from his point of view the right-hand drive must have put me on the wrong side of the vehicle.

‘[Yes, sir,]’ I replied.

‘[In which event do you propose to compete?]’

‘[We are in the coxwainless pairs.]’

‘[You have two boats. Only one is necessary]’

‘[One is for practice, sir. And as a reserve, in case of accident.]’

He opened our passports again, closely scrutinizing the photographs.

‘[You are twins, you say. Brothers.]’

‘[Yes, sir.]’

He turned away from us and walked to his office, a solid-looking wooden hut built beside the barrier. Several large red flags with the swastika emblazoned on a white circle hung from poles standing out at an angle from the wall. There was no wind in this sheltered spot surrounded by trees and the flags barely moved.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘It’s going to be all right, Jack. Relax ... we haven’t broken any rules.’

We could see the guard through the wide window at the front. He was before a high desk, turning the pages of a large, ledgerlike book. Two other guards were also in there with him, standing back and watching. Behind us and beside us other vehicles were arriving at the border post, but they were being waved through by more guards after only short delays.

Presently our guard returned. He glanced briefly at the trucks grinding slowly past us.

‘[English,]’ he said. ‘[You speak German remarkably well. Have you visited the Reich before?]’ He handed back our passports, directing his question deliberately at Joe. After the first salute, Joe had not spoken during the exchange. He continued to stare ahead, past the barrier pole, along the road that led into Germany. ‘[Do you speak German as well as your identical brother?]’ the guard said loudly, banging his fingers on the window ledge.

‘[Yes, sir,]’Joe said, smiling with sudden charm. ‘[No, we have not visited Germany before.]’

‘[They teach German in your English schools?]’ ‘[Yes. But we also have a mother who was born in Germany]’ ‘[Ah! That explains everything! Your mother is a Saxoner, I think! I knew I was right about your accent! Well, you will know that we are proud of our sportsmen in the Reich. You will find it difficult trying to beat them.]’ ‘[We are pleased to be here, sir.]’ ‘[Good. You may enter the Reich.] Heil Hitler!’ He stepped back. As we passed over a white line painted across the surface of the road, Joe made a perfunctory return raising of his arm, then wound up the window on his side. He said, with quiet bitterness, ‘Heil bloody Hitler.’

‘He was just doing his job.’

‘He enjoys his work too much,’ Joe said.

But soon after that we relapsed into silence, each of us absorbed by the unfamiliar scenery of northern Germany.

The sights we saw have since blended into a few memorable images. A lot of the landscape we passed through was forested, a conspicuous change from the vistas of flat farmland we had seen in Belgium and Holland. Although we went through several industrial towns - Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, all of them shrouded in a thin, bitter-smelling haze that made our eyes sting - there was not enough variety to provide detailed memories. I was keeping a journal as we went along but of that journey I recorded only a couple of short paragraphs. Most of what I remember was a general sense of being in Germany, the place that was always being talked about in those days, and with it the vague sense of dread that the name gave rise to. The feeling was reinforced by the hundreds and thousands of swastika flags that were flying from almost every building or wall, a glare of red and white and black. Many long banners were strung across the autobahns and from building to building across the streets of the towns and villages. They bore inspiring messages, perhaps spontaneously created, but because of the insistent tone more likely to be the product of the party. There were slogans about the Saar, about the Rhineland, about the Versailles Treaty, about Ausland Germans - one banner which we saw many times in different places declared: ‘[WE ARE PLEDGED TO BLIND OBEDIENCE!].’ There were few commercial advertisements on display anywhere and certainly there were no messages about the Olympic Games.