William Boyd - The New Confessions

After two months of this unrelenting routine I was beginning to fall apart. My mind was occupied by four things. One: “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Two: the near-hysterical fear that my “case” had been forgotten. Three: a frenzied craving for a cigarette. And four: an overwhelming desire for mental diversion — anything, something to occupy me other than those three obsessions listed above. All my thoughts were quite overused by now — limp, soft and transparent like an overlaundered shirt. I wanted new thoughts, new stimulation. I wanted something to read . I suppose pencil and paper, a source of music, lively conversation would have been equally welcome, but in my desperation I saw my salvation in a book. Any book. I wanted to be entertained, beguiled, but above all to commune with another mind, another imagination, than my own. I had stopped dreaming; I had stopped masturbating. I was empty, a husk. I required a little fertilization. A drop of fuel to start the machine running again.

My first flight, across the front and on into Belgium, had been oddly entrancing despite the danger of my predicament. My slowly deflating gray sausage balloon appeared to possess the entire Belgian sky. The wind drove me silently eastwards, the only noises being the creaking of wicker and the occasionally audible hiss of escaping hydrogen from the balloon. I was descending very gradually and — so it seemed — quite safely. At about two hundred feet I passed over a small market town and caused consternation in the streets. Traffic halted, houses and shops emptied as people ran out to stare and point at me. I waved. The children waved back.

But of course as the air escaped the rate of descent increased. Soon I was palpably aware of a dropping sensation. Fortunately, the wind had increased and my lateral movement compensated for the vertical fall. At under a hundred feet, or thereabouts, I was wondering how best to brace myself for my eventual landing. I threw out the tripod of my Aeroscope and lashed the camera to the basket side.

We cleared — just — a ghostly coppice of silver birch, the base of the basket being scratched by the topmost twigs, and looked set to land square in the middle of a plowed field. As I perched on the edge of the basket, waiting, I saw over to my right a man on a bicycle, pedaling violently along a mud lane, trying to keep up with me. The balloon moved across the field, a tantalizing ten or fifteen feet above the ground. I contemplated jumping. Up ahead was a drainage ditch with tall patchy hawthorn hedges on both banks and six or seven young poplars. The trees loomed as the wind gusted. I jumped at five feet and turned my ankle on the hard uneven furrows. Winded, I watched the soft collision of my wrinkled flying machine with the trees. Twigs and a few dead leaves fell to the ground. I got up and limped over to the basket, well snagged by the jaggy hawthorns, and with some difficulty retrieved the Aeroscope. I looked about me. Dismal, flat, wintry Belgian fields. The mad cyclist had abandoned his bicycle at the edge of the field and was now endeavoring to sprint across it. As he approached I saw he was wearing a uniform — navy-blue with red piping — and a tall cap with three brass buttons on it. We faced each other. I did not know what to say and was in any event astonished by the man’s face, a hot pink flowing with perspiration, wordless mouth gasping for air. I assumed I was under arrest.

I should have taken the opportunity to hide or bury the Aeroscope, because with it I was immediately taken to be an agent in some sort of fiendish espionage exercise. My uniform, devoid of rank badges, was further cause for suspicion. In the series of patient interrogations I underwent as I was transported back towards Germany, my story was universally and wearily regarded as the most blatant fabrication. For me the initial and most painful loss was the confiscation of my wonderful film of the two front lines. My strident demands that the film be kept safe were naturally ignored. Equally, the universal skepticism that greeted my account did not encourage people to check out the few details I gave them. I was playing for time, they told me; well, they were patient men. Gradually I began to find myself in a kind of administrative limbo: I was regarded as a spy, but spies do not wear uniform. I was dressed as an officer but wore no rank badges and was attached to no regiment. My pass and my documents were sitting in the briefcase I left in my Humber. The interrogations were protracted, tedious and civilized but could get no further because I was telling them the truth. They chose not to believe me and somewhere, somebody decided to let me stew. I claimed to be an officer so I was not to be sent to an “other ranks” camp. But at the same time my suspicious circumstances (and, to be fair, I could see their point of view) dictated some more heedful form of confinement. I was to be kept apart from my own countrymen and held incommunicado until either I told the truth or the facts of my story were authenticated, or so the genial major interrogating me said.

And so, one damp early morning in February, with long tracts of mist hanging still in the Taunus Forest, I was marched off the train at Weilburg Station and met by four guards from Offizier-Kriegenstagenlager 18, escorted through the near-deserted town and down the hill past terraced fields to the gray walls of the veterinary science college and my joyless cell above the gymnasium.

One morning before breakfast I lay beneath my blankets fretting about how I could get to see someone in authority. The guards — all middle-aged men — seemed to understand my repeated requests, nodded and grunted in acquiescence to my urgent demands that action be taken about me, but nothing ultimately happened. I was beginning to wonder if an act of disobedience would be necessary to attract some attention — an assault on a guard, an escape attempt, perhaps — when I heard quick footsteps in the corridor and somebody, a man, singing. The footsteps passed my door in an instant, but I heard enough to make out:

When I beheld my darling ,

She looked so sweet and charming ,

She looked so sweet and charming

In every high degree—

As the tune dwindled I inevitably took it up in my head (it effectively banished “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”), but it was not until some seconds later that I realized it had been sung in English . So when a guard (a dull fellow with a purple pickled nose) came with my breakfast, I sang a snatch of the tune at him—“Dashing away with a smoothing iron, she stole my heart away”—and said, “ Engländer? ”

He looked puzzled, then gave a weak smile and said, “ Schön, ” and applauded.

Two days later, none the wiser, I paced slowly round the exercise yard. It was a generous size for one prisoner, about thirty yards square, surrounded by a palisade about twelve feet high. On the other side of the wall was a raised boardwalk to allow a guard to supervise me. This practice was soon abandoned. Today, however, there was a guard watching. I glanced at him momentarily, then carried on with my exercise. All I did was walk, but I tried to walk randomly round the enclosed square. The thought of beating out a path obscurely depressed me. I moved hither and thither, turned on my heel, with no system except to establish no system.

I had plucked a dandelion leaf absentmindedly from the ground and as I walked, still going through my futile options, I tore bits of it off. As one trajectory carried me beneath the guard on the boardwalk, he spoke to me.

“She loves me, she loves me not … ahhh.”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t be unquiet, old fellow. She’ll be waiting, I promise you, a fire burning in the window.”