Tom McCarthy - C

One day, during the second spring of his captivity, American prisoners arrive in the camp. They receive much better parcels than the others: salami from New York, ground beef from Chicago, endless medical supplies. Serge sets about befriending their dispensing medical officer, and trades several jars of honey and crab-apple jelly sent to him from Versoie against phials of diacetylmorphine.

“You like your sister, huh?” the dispensing officer, a Barney from Queens, New York, joshes him the third time he negotiates a trade-off.

“Sorry?” The question takes Serge aback.

“It’s what the Negroes call it up in Harlem.”

“Call what?”

“This,” Barney answers, pointing at the phials. “Sister, dope, Big H: heroin. You don’t call it that here? I mean in England?”

“No,” Serge answers him after a pause. “I don’t think we do.”

The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once both perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gorse curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy…

The tennis courts, or at least one of them, have some basis in reality: there’s one down in the village. Officers less lethargic than him play games on it regularly, while others look on, mingling with villagers whose resentment of the enemy’s been pushed to one side by their need for food. This suits the prisoners just fine: they trade some of their tins (useless for tunnelling in this rocky terrain) against civilian clothes, which they then smuggle back into the camp and mix and match in covert fashion shows conducted with a view to finding what the French officers call “un look” that will enable them to sneak past the gate wordlessly and uncontracted. Serge, happy to spend whole afternoons watching the ball arcing back and forth across the gridded net and bouncing among painted lines, gets charged one day with slipping some of these clothes on under his own, but, too lazy to take his shirt off, pulls them on over it instead, an oversight that results in him getting caught out at the gate and sent, sisterless, to solitary for two weeks.

The first few days are dreadful, full of fits and fever. By the fifth these have subsided, leaving him wakeful and alert. He notices that two veins on his forearm have collapsed, like shallow tunnels. By the second week he feels quite good: resilient, self-sufficient-and besides, there are advantages to being alone. He spends the last three days of his confinement masturbating. There’s a smell that seeps from the cell’s walls, floor and ceiling when he does this, and only when he does: it’s musty, earthy, old but somehow fresh at the same time. Although he always starts out trying to picture Cécile-her back, the blind, the brass knobs of her bedstead, wobbling shadows on her wall and broken eggshells-these images soon give way to new ones of tunnels viewed from the interior, of fruit and vegetables being returned to earth, of tins with strings attached…

By the time autumn’s come round again, the Lage’s guards have become lax. They start going around without their uniforms, in civvies. They don’t bother checking prisoners’ parole cards, instructing them instead to collect them from and slot them back into a set of pigeonholes outside their cabin. “Punching the parole clock,” the Americans call it. As the men sally out around the village, its inhabitants come up to them and, speaking in whispers even when there’s no one there to overhear them, say:

“Kaiser kaput…”

The officers start wearing civvies too. They appear in camp less and less frequently, then withdraw from it completely, leaving a dwindling number of guards behind. In late October it’s decided by someone or other, and communicated down to all the men, that the escape plan will be put into action. Two prisoners, dressed as local tradesmen, collars turned up to cover their faces, walk out of the gate. Not only does their exit go unchallenged, but their absence isn’t even noticed in the following days. Two more men leave, disguised as cooks; then three more, hauling rubbish bins; then four, got up as nothing in particular. Then there’s an exodus: men leave at will, realising that the remaining guards simply don’t care enough to stop them.

Serge travels through the countryside with one other prisoner, a pilot from the 55th Squadron named Hodge. They stick to small paths and open fields, sleeping in ditches, pilfering from farmsteads clinging to the edge of hills: eggs, chickens, even dried maize. On the roads below them, they sometimes see troops marching away from the front. One day, they’re sitting on a wooded slope watching a battalion of infantry cross a river, waiting until they’ve disappeared so that they can cross it in the other direction, when a British aeroplane, an SE5, appears overhead and starts strafing the soldiers. They all run for cover: some of them duck beneath the bridge’s columns where these join the land; others throw their packs and rifles to the ground and plunge into the water; the majority of them, however, crawl up the very slope on which Serge and Hodge are sitting.

“English Offiz-ee-er!” Hodge says, a tad unwisely given what’s just happened on the bridge, to the soldiers who surround them with bemused looks. No longer having guns to point at them, the soldiers just stand facing them, motionless. The sound of the SE5’s engine dwindles as it goes in search of other prey. A sergeant, one arm streaked with blood, shows up.

“Wer sind die?” he barks at his men.

The men repeat what Hodge has told them. The sergeant steps right up to Hodge and, with the arm that’s not hurt, pulls Hodge’s coat back. He lifts his jersey up, then tugs the shirt loose from his trousers.

“Das ist keine Englische Uniform!” he growls.

“What’s he saying?” Hodge asks Serge.

“You’re not in uniform,” Serge translates for him.

The injured sergeant looks at Serge, then yanks at his clothes too. He’s civvy-clad as well, cap-à-pied.

“Deshalb sind sie Spione!” shouts the sergeant.

“What’s he saying now?” Hodge asks.

“He says we’re spies,” Serge tells him. “Technically, he’s right.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I imagine we’ll be shot.”

He’s spot on. The next morning, after being held in the same woods (the battalion camps there while it licks its wounds), Hodge and he are marched towards an area where the trees clear and the hillside flattens off.

“A pleasant location,” Serge comments. They didn’t pass it on the way through the woods yesterday, despite coming from the direction in which it lies.

Hodge doesn’t answer. He’s gone white. The sergeant who captured them presides over the ceremony. Still holding his bad arm in his good one, he orders his soldiers into line and, standing to the side of them, barks commands. As these mix with the click and shuffle of the rifles’ pins being pulled back, Serge experiences a familiar buzzing in his groin. He looks up. The trees’ trunks seem to incline slightly inwards as they rise. The sun’s out: blocked by the trunks in places, it casts shadows on the ground. Among the mesh of twigs and moss an insect’s moving, traversing the huge geometric patchwork of triangles and semi-circles formed by the alternating light and shade. At one point it pauses briefly, as though remembering something, and then trundles on. Finding its path barred a moment later at an obtuse angle by a twig that, to it, must seem as monumental as a fallen oak, the Käfer mounts this, then slips off again, then mounts once more. Watching it rise several times its own height, Serge gets a sense of elevation too: without leaving his body, he can look down on the whole scene. The arrangement of the soldiers, their position in relation to the clearing’s edge, the shapes formed by their planted feet, the angle of the guns against their shoulders: somehow it all makes sense. Seeing it this way, as though from above, appreciating all its lines and vectors, its vertical and horizontal axes, and at the same time from the only place from which he can see it, the spot to which he’s rooted, affords him, hand in hand with the feeling of rising, the vertiginous and pleasant sense of falling. It’s not just him; everything seems to be falling back into this moment, even the sky: a breeze is touching down now, making the trees rustle. From among the sound’s static there forms, like a clear signal, a familiar phrase: