John Boyne - The Absolutist

He looks at me and bites his lip as if he regrets that for a moment but then his expression reverts to one of coldness.

“Look, why can’t you just stay away from me?” he asks. “Why must you always be around? Why must you be always in my ear? To hear you say what you’ve just said, well, it turns my stomach, that’s all. I don’t love you, Tristan. I don’t even like you very much any more. You were there, that’s all it was. You were there. I feel nothing for you, except contempt. Why are you even in here? Did you orchestrate this? Did you fall over Marshall so that you would be dragged in here with me?”

He steps forward and slaps me on the face; not a punch, as he might deliver to another man, but a slap. My head turns with the force of it but I’m stunned into silence and inaction.

“Are you expecting something from me, Tristan? Is that what it is?” he continues. “Because you’re not going to get it. Understand that, can’t you?”

And now he slaps me again and I let him.

“Do you think I would have anything to do with a man like you?”

Right in front of me now, he slaps me for a third time; my right cheek is inflamed with pain but still I cannot hit him back.

“My God! When I think of what we’ve done together it makes me sick. Do you realize that? It makes me want to retch.”

A fourth slap and now I rush at him, seeing red, ready to pounce, ready to punch him in my anger, but he misinterprets my actions and pushes me away and I fall again on my bruised shoulder and this time it hurts like hell.

“Get off me!” he shouts. “Jesus Christ, Tristan, I’m about to die and you want one last go at me for old times’ sake, is that it? What kind of man are you, anyway?”

“That’s not what I—” I begin, stumbling back to my feet.

“Fucking hell!” he snaps, leaning over me. “I’m about to die! Can’t you just leave me alone for five fucking minutes to get my thoughts together?”

“Please, Will,” I say, tears of anger spilling down my cheeks as I reach for him. “I’m sorry, all right? We’re friends—”

“We’re not fucking friends!” he shouts. “We were never friends! Can’t you understand that, you fool?” He marches to the door and bangs on it repeatedly, shouting through the bars. “Get him out of here!” he yells, pushing me against the door. “I want a few minutes’ peace before I die.”

“Will,” I say, but he shakes his head; still, he pulls me to him one last time.

“Listen to me,” he says, whispering in my ear. “And remember what I tell you: I am not like you. I wish to fuck I had never met you. Wolf told me all about you, told me what you were, and I stayed your friend out of pity. Because I knew that no one else would be your friend. I despise you, Tristan.”

I feel dizzy. I never would have believed that he could be so cruel but he seems to mean every word that he is saying. I feel tears coming to my eyes. I open my mouth but find I have no words for him. I want to lie on my bunk, my face to the wall, pretending that he doesn’t exist, but at that moment I hear footsteps running down towards our door, a key in the lock. It opens. And two men step inside and stare at us both.

I stand in the courtyard for what seems an age, feeling as if my head will explode. There’s a fireball of fury within me. I hate him. All he made me do, all he said to me. The way he led me on. I feel a searing pain in my shoulder from where he knocked me off my feet twice, and my face is tender from his slaps. I look back towards where he remains locked up, with Corporal Harding and the chaplain. I want to go back down there, grab him by the neck and bang his head on the stone floor until his brains have spilled out. I want him to fucking die. I love him but I want him to fucking die. I can’t live in a world where he exists.

“I need one more!” shouts Sergeant Clayton to Wells.

But Wells shakes his head. “Not me,” he says.

I look in front of me at the firing squad already assembled—the sun has risen, it’s six o’clock—five men in a row, a gap for the sixth.

“You know I can’t, sir,” says Wells. “It has to be an enlisted man.”

“Then I’ll do it myself!” roars Clayton.

“You can’t, sir,” insists Wells. “It’s against regulations. Just wait. I’ll go back to the trench and find someone. One of the new boys, someone who doesn’t know him.”

I don’t recognize the five boys lined up to shoot Will. They look terrified. They look clean. Two of them are visibly shaking.

I march over to them and Clayton looks at me in surprise. “You need a sixth man?” I ask.

“No, Sadler,” says Wells, staring at me in astonishment. “Not you. Go back to the trenches. Find Morton. Send him to me, all right?”

“You need a sixth man?” I repeat.

“I said not you, Sadler.”

“And I said I’ll do it,” I say, picking up the sixth rifle as the hatred courses through my veins. I twist my jaw to relieve some of the pain in my cheek but it feels like he’s slapping me again every time I do so.

“There we are, then,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, giving the signal to the guardsman to open the door. “Bring him up. It’s time.”

“Sadler, think about this, for God’s sake,” hisses Wells, grabbing me by the arm, but I brush him off and take my place in line. I want his fucking head on a plate. I check the round, lock it in place. I stand between two boys, ignoring them both.

“Corporal Wells, get out of the way,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, and then I see him, I see Will being led up the steps by the guardsman, a black mask placed over his eyes, a piece of red cloth pinned above his heart. He walks hesitantly until he is standing at the stoop. I stare at him, I remember everything, I hear his words in my ears and it is all I can do not to rush at him and tear him limb from limb.

Sergeant Clayton gives the order for us to stand to attention, and we do, six men side by side, rifles raised.

What are you doing? I think, a voice of reason in my head, a voice pleading with me to think about what I’m doing. A voice I choose to ignore.

“Take aim!” cries Clayton, and in that moment, Will, brave to the last, whips his blindfold away, wanting to face his killers as they gun him down. His expression is one of fear but strength, too, resilience. And then he notices me standing in line and his expression changes. He is shocked. He stares. His face collapses.

“Tristan,” he says, his last word.

And the command comes, and the index finger of my right hand presses on the trigger and, in a heartbeat, six guns have discharged, mine as quickly as anyone’s, and my friend lies on the ground, unmoving, his war over.

Mine about to begin.

ISAW HER ONCE AGAIN.

It was almost sixty years later, the autumn of 1979. Mrs. Thatcher had come to power a few months earlier and there was a sense that civilization as we knew it was about to come to an end. My eighty-first birthday had been reported in the newspapers and I received a letter from a literary society, informing me that I was to be presented with a misshapen piece of bronze cast inside a block of wood with a silver pen emerging from its crown but it was mine only if I was willing to don a tuxedo, attend a dinner, deliver a short speech and an even shorter reading, and generally make myself available for a day or two to the press.

“But why can’t I say no?” I asked Leavitt, my publisher, thirty-two years old, all braces and Brylcreemed hair, who was insisting that I accept the invitation; he had inherited me two books earlier when Davies, my long-term editor and friend, passed away.