Tom McCarthy - C

“You’re alive?” Serge asks him as he passes.

The man halts in his lurching for a moment. His head turns in Serge’s direction and bobs unsteadily above its shoulders while the eyes take in the spark set and still-bulging groin, before turning away again. His neck has a big hole in its side that Serge can see right through. After a while his legs jerk back into action and carry him flat-footedly along his trajectory.

“Where are you going?” Serge asks as he walks away.

The man doesn’t answer. He’s not listening to him: he, too, is tuned in to the high-pitched noise; he’s drawn by it, is following it to its source. Serge watches his thin, feminine form slink away behind more tree trunks. Just before it disappears, it passes something soft and white. Another parachute? Serge starts walking in the same direction. The noise is growing stronger: louder, more precise. As he steps forwards, he starts murmuring zone-call sequences: ones he’s sent in the past, or might have sent, or might be sending even now, somehow, to someone waiting at the far end of this air that seems to have become all noise and signal:

“BY.NF. BADSAC7 SC-CS 1911; BY.VER. BUC2 SC-CS 1913…”

He murmurs whole strings of them, one after the other, repeating and mutating as they travel from his lips into the woods. He does this for no reason other than that it makes him feel good: at one with the blasted trees, the electricity, the tar and deformation. It produces an effect, though: after a long, repetitive stretch in which he might or might not retrace his own steps at least once (the sequences of trees seem to repeat as well, but never quite in the same way; the soft, white thing among the trees glides half-into, then out of, view again), men in German uniforms appear from among the trunks and branches. These ones are definitely alive. Their weapons point at him; their undeformed mouths move; they eye the spark set with suspicion.

“What?” Serge asks. He can’t hear them.

Their guns jerk upwards; their mouths move again.

“Was?” he switches to German.

“… Feng ennerf,” one of their voices weaves its way into the high-pitched noise’s mesh.

“Was?” Serge asks again. It sounded like “Thing enough,” “Fending off,” something along those lines. He points to his ear. “Schwer zu fassen.”

“… Enner,” the man says, mouthing the word slowly.

“Enna?” Serge asks.

“… Engnis,” the man tells him, not unkindly.

Serge smiles back apologetically. It was somewhere like “End this”-or perhaps, conversely, “Endless”… A new soldier appears and the others turn to him and talk. This one is more smartly dressed, an officer. He steps over to Serge and takes the spark set from him; as he does, the high-pitched noise stops suddenly and Serge can clearly hear the man say:

“Zu Gefängnis. Prison. You are prisoner.”

He’s sent away from the frontier: eastwards, to the interior. Having ascertained that he’s an officer, his captors group him with his peers and transport them initially in first-class carriages, then second-class, then third, downgrading their conveyance every hundred miles or so. Eventually they find themselves in cattle trucks. A German corporal and three privates stand guard above them, jerking and swaying in front of neat fields, canals, factories and towns that follow one another with a progression whose logic seems both perfect and impenetrable. Occasionally, they pause at stations; while they’re handed bread and coffee, women stare at them malevolently from the platforms; as the train pulls off again, sliding past houses whose doors wear wreaths and crosses and whose windows, covered by black blinds, transmit in Venetian Morse the same message each time, Serge understands why. On every road, in every town and village, columns of soldiers pass by marching in the opposite direction, the neat stamp-and-click of their swift footfall drawing briefly into line with the rhythm of the steam and pistons’ chug and hissing before disengaging, fading and dying away…

He gets passed through a series of processing stations and transit camps. At each one they ask his name and rank. His answer to the former question never fails to elicit a humorous comment:

“Chafer? You are Insekt, beetle?”

“Carrefax,” Serge answers, stretching the x out into a long, steam-like release of breath.

“Käfers? Then you are more than one: many Insekts!”

After running through the fourth or fifth variation on this exchange, he finds himself inducted into an Offizierslage in Hammelburg. Hammelburg is a barracks town: the prison’s just a section of the town that’s been wired off from the surrounding streets. The dormitories in which the prisoners sleep eight or ten to a room line a cobbled square that’s hemmed in by sharp-angled red- and brown-slate roofs rising above the yellow and red houses, tradesmen’s premises and municipal buildings that jostle and collide with one another with Germanic closeness and compression. The guards who police the penned-in sector of the town are old, shoddily dressed, confused. Several of them limp; one of them’s missing an eye. On the far side of the wire, in the same square, new recruits are drill-marched up and down all day long. Often, when the prisoners are lined up in the open during roll call, the recruits cast anxious glances their way, as though trying to catch a glimpse of what awaits them. Serge tries to smile back each time one of their eyes meets his, as though to reassure them that it’s not that bad-until it strikes him that what’s putting the fear into their faces might not be the enemy but rather their own veterans: the thought that they’ll end up like that…

Roll-call is taken round the clock: in the square, in the dormitories, routinely first thing every morning, without warning in the middle of the night. When they’re not standing to attention, prisoners mooch around, play bridge, attend (or deliver) lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from history and medicine to religion, or study French, German or Latin. Serge inscribes himself in Moreton’s course on Problems in Philosophy.

“The history of our thinking on free will hinges around the question of determinism: are events pre-scripted, as it were-by God, our cells or an invisible engine driving history’s course? And even if they are, are we still free to choose to do what we were destined to do anyway-standing face-to-face with its implications, in full awareness of its consequences? Hume thought so, and allowed this liberty to, as he put it, ‘everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.’ ”

“Our current situation kind of pisses over that one, doesn’t it?” Serge asks.

“Not necessarily,” Moreton answers, pushing his glasses up his nose’s bridge, “not necessarily. To find our way round that we’d have to look to our captors’ philosophical tradition. Rudolf Steiner has recently argued, after Schopenhauer, that we’re free when we’re able to bridge the gap between our sensory impressions of the outer world, on the one hand, and, on the other, our own thoughts.”

“So if I think of barbed wire fences, then I’m free?”

The nose wrinkles as the glasses slide down them again. “Well, I suppose, if you put it that way: yes.”

The men in the Offizierslage are definitely free to queue-for food, mail, laundry, medical supplies or almost anything else. Queues form around the camp at the slightest provocation. One day, bored, Serge persuades two pilots to line up with him in front of the door to a coal cellar just for the hell of it: within five minutes twenty other men have fallen into line behind them without even asking what it is they’re queuing for. The food queues break down into two types: those for the camp food with which all prisoners are provided, and those for the food sent in Red Cross parcels to individuals and distributed among recipients’ compatriots. The French eat the best: their tables are adorned with marinated mackerel, cold chicken, foie gras, peas and ham, all sent in tins. The Russians eat the worst: sustained by nothing but dried fish, they spend their time and energy building a chapel with ad-hoc interior decorations. Serge visits it one day to find they’ve fashioned icons out of wood splinters and strips of cloth, using dirt, resin, wax and blood to paint emaciated saints with sorrowful faces: eyes turned ever upwards, importuning the skies for delivery, or at least for an explanation of their circumstances. The English are somewhere in between: they get sent tins of tongue, pork shoulder, broad beans, brawn, the odd plum pudding. All of them eat better than the guards, though, who are restricted to the very slop they serve out to the prisoners: turnip stew, broth with horse-meat in it, liquid cheese and nine-tenths of a loaf of black bread every week. They’re visibly hungry. They make the prisoners kick back a little of their Red Cross supplies, but know better than to demand too high a cut: the parcels would stop coming if they did…