William Boyd - The New Confessions

I heard a strange noise, like pam pam pamperipam pam . I looked round. A small airplane was flying towards me through a cloud of black dust smudges. What happened next is hard to reconstruct. I retain certain distinct images. First, the airplane seemed to be flying so slowly. A puff of black dust would from time to time knock it comically off course. I felt a tug as the winch began to haul the balloon down. Then I remember an almost human gasp coming from the balloon itself. The field telephone started buzzing, and as I reached automatically, chunks of wicker basket seemed to explode in the air around me. Then a great lurch, a tumbling in the pit of my stomach as the balloon and its basket soared up and away suddenly free. I hung on tenaciously as we swayed wildly to and fro. I caught a mad glimpse of Ypres turned on its side and then I was in the clouds — gray, damp, enfolding.

The clouds saved me, I suppose, and the fact that the wire cable had been fortuitously severed by a bullet or bullets from the airplane’s guns. I floated in those clouds for three or four minutes, I would guess. When I descended from them I was above placid green countryside. Then I remembered the keen west wind and, with a jolting heart, looked about me. Behind, retreating, was the brown stripe of the Western Front. Below was occupied Belgium.

VILLA LUXE, June 10, 1972

Emilia brings me my salad. How old is she? I wonder. She’s worked for me for two years now. Her predecessor was an ancient crone who was eventually done for by sheer decrepitude. Emilia has five children and eleven grandchildren. Her youngest child is twenty-four, and yet she doesn’t look much more than fifty. It’s quite possible; girls often are married and bearing children at sixteen on this island.…

Emilia has thick, curly chestnut hair shot with gray. She has a dark, strong and well-proportioned face and a lot of gold in her teeth. She exudes a mild but freshly acidic body odor. She is broad-hipped and agile. Drives her little motorbike with élan. Covertly, as she places the salad before me, I examine the loose pale green folds of her faded green dress and try to estimate the size of her breasts.…

Why am I doing this? What’s happening to me? For two years we have been fixed in an ideal, polite, respectful employer-employee relationship. I ruminate on a lettuce leaf. It was my spying on Ulrike that did it. And my dormant vanity was flattered by the obvious way the twins sought me out in the bar.

I watch Emilia saunter back to the kitchen. Heaven help me but I have a sudden powerful desire to spank her naked buttocks. Not hard, just in fun.… I have an image of Emilia across my lap. Those big pale buttocks, that deep dark cleft. Lots of joyous laughter.

This is quite bizarre! I have never had this fantasy before. What’s going on? But, I remember. That isn’t true. I have had these desires. In 1929, with … I can’t believe it. Good God, these things never leave you. After all these years, who would have thought it?

I get up and wander round, a palpable old man’s erection beneath my trousers. How am I ever going to see her naked?

Off the kitchen there is a room where Emilia keeps the ironing board, brushes and the various tools and cleaning materials she requires for the housework. There is also a small WC for her personal use.

When she leaves, I go and investigate. There is a window, bolted and shuttered. If I drilled a tiny hole through the frame at the precise angle, I might just be able to see her as she raises her skirts to sit on the pan.

Five minutes’ search of the villa’s cupboards reveals a perfectly servicible hand-powered drill.

* Note for film historians: I want to record this as the first use of a hand-held camera for deliberate dramatic effect.

I seemed fated to get tunes stuck in my head for days, weeks even. For five days I heard nothing but “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” On and on, on and on. I tried to forget it, but that lilting melody would not leave me. It made my solitary confinement worse — perhaps this is one of the secret punishments of solitary? It was a sign too of just how impoverished my world was. I had heard a guard whistling it — a new guard, I suppose; none of the old ones made a sound — and since then it had played on in my echoing skull, an interminable Gramophone record.

I turned to my only distraction. I pulled the chair over to the window, stood on it and looked out. The top two lights were plain glass, not frosted like the others. The view: a patch of longish grass leading to a steep ravine at whose bottom the river Lahn flowed. Beyond the ravine were the beech- and elm-wooded hills of the Taunus Forest. To the right, the palisaded square of the exercise yard where the “solitary” prisoners were permitted to exercise, and beyond that the dull square buildings of the veterinary science college where 150 Russian, 20 French and 4 Belgian officers were held prisoner. The four Belgians were all retired generals who had been captured when the Germans took Brussels. They had had no time to change after their arrest and had never been issued with uniforms; consequently they still wore their civilian clothes — three in tweed suits, one in gray worsted.

The solitary cells were above the college’s gymnasium. The gym was not used by the prisoners but sometimes the guards played volleyball there, and I would hear the thumps of the ball and the shouts of encouragement rise up through the floorboards of my bare room. I had been kept here in the solitary cells for over two months. I was the only prisoner.

As far as cells went, my room was not too uncomfortable. A pine table, a crude wooden chair that looked as though it belonged in a van Gogh painting, a bed with a thin straw-and-woodshaving mattress, two gray blankets and a white enamel chamber pot with an unmatching powder-blue lid. There were bare floorboards and whitewashed walls. It was cold.

My routine was invariable. I slept, if I could, until eight, when I was roused by a guard with my breakfast of watery coffee and two slices of hard brown bread. At nine I was taken to a small washroom where I shaved and emptied my slops. From ten to eleven o’clock I was outside in the palisaded yard, weather permitting, where I could do whatever exercise I saw fit. Midday was lunch — soup and a plate of vegetables. Three P.M. — more coffee and bread. Four to five — exercise yard. Six o’clock — slop emptying. Eight o’clock — dinner: soup and a plate of vegetables, sometimes augmented by salted fish or sauerkraut. Every two weeks I was given a brown paper cone of sugar.

I was not especially hungry and my day was one of constant interruption. I was not denied human company. The guards in the gymnasium were possibly as bored as their single prisoner. I spoke no German and we exchanged sign language or hopeful monosyllables. I am happy with my own company and the first week passed without undue strain. Into the second month, though, and the regime was proving more onerous. Nothing changed, and it was precisely this that began to worry me. Perhaps if conditions had worsened or improved I might not have begun to question them, but after forty days I became convinced that I had been forgotten. And this new worry suddenly made my reduced condition intolerable. I needed a sense of my incarceration being finite. (I think we all need the finite — limits of some kind; it is locked into our human natures. We need to know that things will end.) Two months of this bland solitary confinement gave me an unwelcome hint of what eternity was like. Soon the only way I could distinguish one day from the other was by the kind of soup I was served. At least it always changed. Barley soup, cabbage soup, peawater soup, something called mango soup, oil cake soup, fish soup, rice soup, macaroni soup, turnip soup … I began to think of the passage of time in terms of cabbage or peawater days. Had I not suffered a morning twinge of toothache last fish soup day? The weather on rice soup day had been unusually mild. Two turnip days ago I had had diarrhea … and so on. As I shaved each morning I looked at my face and saw chronological time reckoned by the rate of my hair growth. On capture I had been showered and deloused, my clothes fumigated — quite unnecessary — and had had my head shaved. In those days my hair grew at a rate of two inches a month. After eight weeks I was tucking it behind my ears like an artist. As a matter of personal record, my hair has never ever been as long as it was in those months of captivity in 1917–18. I shaved off my moustache too.