Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘When we lived in the country, my father would bring me toys. Almost every week, in a brown leather suitcase with gold catches, and I’d throw myself on them before I threw myself on him. From far away I’d recognise his silhouette, his stiff-legged gait when he was in uniform, the suitcase bumping against his left leg under the weight: I learned to guess how full it was by the way it bobbed up and down as my father walked down the gravel drive, past each of the identical houses and their flowerbeds before he’d reach ours. I was especially happy in summer because Mutter would let me wait for him in the garden, and we’d open it on the green grass and its contents would spill out everywhere when he popped open the suitcase lid: teddy bears with thick, silky fur, glass eyes and happy smiles, and with them, all the animals of the woods and jungles for a child to populate his world with: pink elephants and light-blue giraffes; squirrels with eyes like drops of pitch and real walnuts in their hands; rubber ducks that paddled on the pond with legs that really worked; lions and tigers with toothless, pink babies’ mouths; a fox and a bunny-rabbit hugging … Then there were building kits: tall houses with prominent wings, low shops with their counters and shelves, staircases and columns; trains with tracks and barriers, and stations with benches and ticket offices; cars of all colours, and mechanics’ workshops, and lorries loaded with bottles of milk, demijohns of wine, packets of sugar, coffee, chocolate; horses and carts, fire engines with ladders and extendable hoses and firemen clinging to the sides … There were dolls, too, all shapes and sizes, girls and boys, with hand-sewn suits and porcelain faces, eyes that opened when you picked them up, and smiling or serious mouths. My favourites, of course, were the little soldiers in their hand-painted uniforms on their lead bodies; the tanks with hidden wheels that turned, the propeller-planes with bombs hanging from their wings … My father used to pull them out of the suitcase by the handful and I’d already be playing with all of them at once, weeping in anticipation at the loss of those I couldn’t keep; and he, smiling and crouching beside me, with one hand resting on the floor from the pain of his new boots, would stroke my hair and say “You know the rule: one toy at a time. Play with them all a little bit, touch them, press them to your heart. Then close your eyes and picture which one is clearest in your mind. That will be the one to keep,” and he’d carry on down the flagstone path to the front door, where my mother would sometimes be waiting for him, wiping her hands on her apron, without looking at him or me and my toys. Did you know I was a country boy at heart, Felipe?’ he asked, smiling open-mouthed, and I noticed that the caps had fallen off two of his teeth to reveal the sharp, black pins on which they’d been inserted. ‘Those landscapes are never wiped from the memory: the landscapes of childhood. As with the houses, the gardeners had done everything possible to reproduce an Alpine postcard over that flood-prone plain swept by the north wind, damp and smelling of the sea. They’d brought rocks, mountain flowers, small fir trees that took well thanks to the abundance of fertiliser; and the gardeners, dark men in grey uniforms with sunken eyes, who spoke a language I couldn’t understand (“Polish,” my mother told me when I asked) came twice a week to keep it in shape. My father would allow no changes, save the natural ones of the seasons, and wouldn’t let the trees exceed a certain height without replacing them so as not to lose the effect of his miniature native Bavaria, his own private Zwölfkinder. I suppose that’s where I get my taste for bonsais from,’ he said, pointing without looking to the bare ombú and the withered leaves scattered on the dry soil at its base. ‘I spent my childhood in that garden, separated by the wire from the oceans of mud that stretched out to the horizon, in that oasis of order and neatness, with no more contact with the outside world than the nocturnal glow of the ovens (which my mother’s fables transformed into friendly dragons lighting up their walks in the woods), the noise of the bulldozers and the smell of ash when the wind blew in our direction.

‘When playmates were available, I’d often ask them to help me choose the toys. My father wouldn’t let me keep them long, perhaps fearing that, like the fir trees, they’d grow too high and be out of keeping with the landscape, or possibly to stop me growing too fond of them and suffering unnecessarily later. The life of a soldier is made of losses, he’d tell me, and one had to learn not to get too attached to anything — except the Army, the Fatherland and the Family. They’d invariably arrive walking beside him, trotting to keep up with him and dragging the suitcase with great effort but not a word of complaint. My father used to bring them straight from the station, where there were lots to choose from. They were usually children with dark skins and eyes, very skinny and dirty and always silent. He wouldn’t let me touch them when they arrived: “He’s crawling with lice,” he’d tell me, “we have to give him a shower to disinfect him,” and, on pronouncing these two words, he’d unfailingly wink at me. My mother, without saying a word, would take the boy by the hand and, speaking softly to him, lead him inside, where she’d bathe him and give him clean clothes. With her round, red, Dutch face and resigned smile, my mother had something about her that used to soothe them. She’d often forbid me to treat them badly and I knew that, when she was watching, there were certain games I couldn’t play, such as “Guards and Prisoners”, “Out of the Hole, Rat” and “Digging your own Grave” (I’d been taught them by other children, officers’ children, before the camp began to empty and I was left alone). Once, when I was hitting one of them with a rock because he hadn’t said a single word in three days, my mother gave a cry from the house, leaped on me and twisted my arm till she bruised it. That evening, when my father came home, they took him away, in spite of my mother’s pleas, and at night I heard her weeping and the powerful words of my father, in his harsh highland German, warning her of what could happen to her. I became very close to many of them: Simon, the pampered son of an influential Danzig tradesman, who’d swear every time I hit him that his father was coming to punish me — in the form of acid rain, I suppose; I wept into my mother’s apron the morning I awoke to find his bed empty. There was Hilman or Hilborn, a delicate, fair-haired, pale-looking boy with the body and manners of a girl. His whole family had been musicians and the day he arrived he had in his suitcase his father’s violin, which he could play almost as well. After dinner he’d entertain us with Mozart, Beethoven (I’ve never heard a performance of his D major concerto as pure) and Schubert. Later on, when they made us go up to our room (he slept at the foot of my bed), I’d disguise him in my mother’s clothes and make him suck my dick; I’d urinate on him and force him to eat my excrement; once I tried to stuff his violin bow up his arse — without much success I have to say. He never once complained or resisted, forcing me to devise ever more extreme ways to test him. He was with us for quite some time, until he inevitably began to repeat his repertoire so, tiring of him, my father had him taken away. That day my mother made her first suicide attempt, shooting herself in the temple with the gun we kept in the house and opening up this long groove. Her head in a bandage, she ministered to me for days without a word and I felt guilty without knowing exactly why. The most problematic of them was a gypsy boy, who on the first day, when we were out of sight of the houses and I tried to mount him like a horse, dealt me several punches to the stomach and, when I was down, held a piece of broken glass to my throat and told me he’d kill me if I told on him. From then on my life was a constant terror: I had to steal food and money and clothes for him, which he passed on to other gypsies on the other side of the wire; he beat me every day, and at night, when Mutter left the bedroom, he’d climb onto my bed and sexually abuse me, then make me sleep on the floor. I don’t think I was ever so afraid of anyone as that little boy with the fierce eyes, except perhaps of my partner — in his good old days, of course. Now,’ he said, putting the acrylic prism to his eye like a monocle, ‘he doesn’t frighten anyone much. Eventually the thefts came to my father’s attention and he decided to take him away. “Wild animals don’t belong in houses; they belong in the countryside,” he said, pointing to the frost-covered plain that stretched to where the horizon met the sky, green and black with the clouds of smoke and the floating ash. They never brought me a little girl to play with, perhaps to avoid racial contamination, and in a way it was better. For me there was no other woman than my mother, with her big breasts and her butter-coloured plaits and her strange accent whistling at the back of her throat when she forgot her hatred of me and sang songs from her country, songs that, with the little Dutch I knew, evoked pictures of mills and polders with placid cows and a sea always black and threatening and tall, thin houses lined up like wafers in a packet. The last day in the camp, in an end-of-holiday confusion, with everyone running disorganised back and forth hurriedly packing their suitcases selecting only the most valuable things to carry and running after lorries that left without waiting for stragglers under orders that nobody obeyed, their guns drawn as they went from room to room in their own houses, my mother took advantage of the prevailing confusion to disappear with my last companion, a little Dutch Jewish boy so young (towards the end there wasn’t much to choose from, and my father had been forced to take whatever was going) that I used him more like a dog than a playfellow. In his search for them, my father went in and out of several houses, dragging the brown leather suitcase with gold catches along the floor for the weight of it, shouting orders and questions to soldiers who took no notice, threatened at gunpoint a group of prisoners who’d crossed the fallen wire and were standing wide-eyed on one of the Alpine flowerbeds … Eventually the roar of the planes flying overhead almost without interruption in the stormy sky forced him to give up the search and we got into a jeep with some other officers abandoning the camp. That was the only time I saw what lay on the other side of the triple barrier of barbed wire. Some were still trying to conceal the high stacks of corpses, which yielded before the onslaught of the diggers, as soft and flexible as boiled vegetables. I peeked out of the side, incapable of taking my eyes off them, recalling the rivers and woods and peasants with cows, waving from the door of their cabins that my mother’s voice had so often raised from the sea of ashes. It was as if a long spell had been broken, the palaces opening like shells to show the rows of barrack huts, the vineyards coming into focus as coils of barbed wire, the lofty minarets resolving themselves into watchtowers, the mossy paths of the wood into caterpillar tracks over human bones, the carriages into lorries piled high with bodies, the knight errant into a sergeant trying to finish off a survivor with a table leg and his companions shouting “Get a move on!” from the running lorry, the chests of priceless jewels into piles of gold teeth, and a mud-covered boot forgotten in the headlong flight waiting for someone to find its rightful owner. Midnight had struck for everyone, taking them by surprise and forcing them to run around a world where they no longer recognised themselves. My mother wasn’t there to cover my eyes with her hands and whisper in my ear what she was seeing, what only then I realised she had never seen. “It’s better like this, mein lieber Faust,” she’d say whenever I asked to look. “The eyes of the imagination see prettier colours.” I thought that I might be able to recognise one of my playmates in the pile-up of unknown faces, but I soon gave up trying. All the faces were the same: they all had the same expression of exaggerated laughter and even the bodies of men, women and children had become indistinguishable in the general shrinkage of starvation.