Len Deighton - The Harry Palmer Quartet

With this boy it went over like a lead balloon.

‘Make on the feet, mack,’ he said, changing his approach.

He spoke with a heavy accent liberally sprinkled with idiom. The idiom was to convince you he was the all-American boy, and gave him respite during which to translate the next sentence.

‘No spik Inglese,’ I said, giving a characteristic shrug and presenting the palms of both hands upwards.

‘Op, or I kick you some!’

‘Just as long as you don’t damage my watch,’ I said.

He opened the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and unfolded a white paper about 10 in by 8 in.

‘This is your deportation order, signed by the Secretary of State.’ He said it like he was going to paste it into the back of his vest pocket edition of Thomas Paine. ‘You can think yourself stinking lucky that we are exchanging you for two fly boys that know senators, or you’d be for a slow tcheeeek.’ He made a revolting noise as he ran his finger across his windpipe.

‘I don’t dig you, Uncle Tom,’ I said. ‘Why is England exchanging me for two fliers?’

‘England ho ho ho!’ he said; it was a merriment symbol. ‘England! You’re not going to stinking England, you pig, you going back to stinking Hungary. They’ll like you there for fouling up the detail. Ho ho! They’ll tcheeeek ho ho!’

‘Ho ho to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll save you some black pudding.’ I didn’t take the idea of being sent to Hungary very seriously at first.

There was little I could do. Neither Dalby nor Jean had had a chance to speak to me. I could reckon on little or no help from any other source. Now there was this Hungarian stuff.

I worried about it for two hours then a medic came with a long trolley and an enamel tray containing ether, cotton wool and a hypodermic. He fluffed up the clean white pillow on the trolley and smoothed out the red medical department blanket. He took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and listened to my chest with a stethoscope. ‘Would you lie on the table, please. Relax completely.’

‘What’s the time?’ I asked.

‘Two-twenty, roll up your sleeve.’ He rubbed a little ether on the skin and eased the sharp shiny needle into the unfeeling flesh with a professional flourish.

‘What time?’ my voice boomed out.

‘Two-twenty,’ he said, again.

‘What, what, what. Time, time, time.’ It wasn’t me talking; it was a curiously metallic echo, ‘Time, time, time.’ I looked up at the white-coated boy and he grew smaller and smaller and smaller. He was standing far away near the door now, but still he was gripping my arm. Was it possible? Time, time, time. Still gripping my arm, arms, I mean, both of them. Both those men, both my arms. So far away; such little men near that tiny door.

I rubbed my forehead because I was slowly going round and round on a turn-table and sinking down. But how did I get up again because I kept going around and down but I was always high enough to go sinking down and around again. I rubbed my forehead with my huge heavy hand. It was as big as a barrage balloon, my hand; you’d expect it to envelop my head, but my forehead was so wide. Wide. Wide as a barn. I was being wheeled along. Towards the door. They’ll never get huge me through that little door. Not me, never. Ha ha. Never, never, never. Thud, thud, thud, thud.

Into my subconscious the drumming of engines brought me almost to the threshold of awakening. But each time there came a body bending low over me. The sharp pointed pain in the arm brought the noisy throbbing nausea breaking over me in feverish waves of heat and intense cold. I was moved on stretchers and trolleys over rough ground and polished wooden corridors, handled like a dust particle and like a dustbin, dropped into trains, helped into planes; but never far away was a blurred moon bending over me, and that sharp pain that pulled the blanket of unconsciousness over my face.

I came up to the surface very, very slowly; from the dark deeps I floated freely towards the dimblue rippling surface of undrugged life.

I hurt, therefore I am.

I hugged close against the damp soil. By the light of a small window I was able to closely inspect the broken wristwatch upon which I was gently vomiting. It said 4.22. I shivered. From somewhere nearby I heard voices. No one was talking, merely groaning.

I gradually became sentient. I became aware of the heavy hot humid air. My eyes focused only with difficulty. I closed them. I slept. Sometimes the nights seemed as long as a week. Rough bowls of porridge-like stuff were put before me, and if uneaten, removed. It was always the same man who came with the food. He had short blond hair. His features were flat with high cheek-bones. He wore a light-grey two-piece track suit. One day I was sitting in the corner on the earth floor – there was no furniture – when I heard the bolts being drawn back. Kublai Khan entered, but without food. I’d never heard his voice before. His voice was hard and unattractive. He said ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’ I looked at him for a minute or so. He said it again, ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’

‘So what?’ I said.

He walked towards me and hit me with his open hand. It didn’t need much to hurt me at that stage of my education. K.K. left the room and the bolts were closed and I was hungry. It took me two days to discover that I had to repeat the things K.K. said after him. It was simple enough. By the time I made that discovery I was weak from hunger and licked my food bowl avidly. The gruel was delicious and I never missed the spoon. Sometimes K.K. said, ‘Fire is red; cloud is white,’ or perhaps, ‘Sand is yellow; silk is soft.’ Sometimes his accent was so thick that it would be hours later when I had repeated the words over and over that I’d finally understand what we’d both been talking about. One day I said to him, ‘Suppose I buy you a Linguaphone course; do I get out of here?’ For that I not only remained unfed by day, but that night he didn’t bother to bring the paper-thin dirty blanket either. I learnt what colour the sky was by the ninth day. By then K.K. merely pointed and I reeled off all the junk I could remember. But I’d done it wrong. Somehow ‘Sky is red; silk is blue.’ K.K. shouted and hit me softly against the face. I had no food or blanket and shivered with the intense cold of the night-time. From then on sometimes I got things right, sometimes wrong, according to the colour K.K. had decided everything was that day. Even with gruel every day I would have become weaker and weaker. I passed the ‘wisecrack stage’, the ‘asking questions’ stage, the ‘do you understand English?’ stage. I was weak and exhausted and on the day I got everything so correct that K.K. brought me a piece of cold cooked meat, I sobbed for an hour without feeling sad – with pleasure perhaps it was.

Every morning the door was opened and I handed out my slop pail; every night it came back again. I began to count the days. With my fingernails I incised a crude calendar in the soft wood of the door, behind it I was out of sight of the peep-hole. Some of the days were marked by means of a double stroke; those were the ones I heard the noises. They were generally loud enough to wake me, the noises, when they happened. They were human noises but difficult to describe as either groans or screams. They were somewhere between the two. Some days K.K. gave me a small slip of paper; typewritten on them there were orders such as ‘The prisoner will sleep with arms above the blankets.’ ‘The prisoner will not sleep in the daytime.’

One day K.K. gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. As I sat back to puff at it he said, ‘Why do you smoke?’ I said I didn’t know and he went away; but the next day Grass was Sepia, and I got beat about the head again.