Graham Swift - Shuttlecock

This silence seemed more set to last than the first. I guessed it was now night. I sat propped against one of the walls. The sheer pressure on the nerves of waiting for something to happen was beginning to tell. I was cold and nearly every bone in my body seemed to have taken a sharp knock. I took consolation by reminding myself that I had spent the previous night in a water tank. I reflected that they were deliberately letting me stew before they questioned me, and therefore I should stop myself from stewing. I began to combat negative thoughts by methodically exploring my cell with my handcuffed hands. I started at a corner near the door and worked round in a clockwise direction, beginning at floor level, working up as far as my hands would reach, then down again, and so on. Then I began on the floor, working from the wall furthest from the door.

My hands confirmed what my eyes had briefly seen when the blindfold had been removed: a brick room about eight feet square, containing nothing and with no outlet save the door. The floor was strewn with a thick mixture of what I took to be dust, grit and sawdust. The smell of the sawdust, and of damp wood generally, was what pervaded the room, but why this smell was so peculiarly familiar I could not tell. The brickwork of the walls was rough and coated with dust and cobwebs. Here and there, there were sections where the mortar had crumbled between the courses. My fingers groped, in vain, in the gaps. But they found something that, in due course, was to prove invaluable. Sticking into one of the walls, high up, was a single, long, straight-sided, rust-covered nail. I made a note of the position of this nail. By persistent efforts, I managed to pull it free, and placed it, lengthwise, in one of the mortarless gaps in the brick courses, for safe keeping.

I must have fallen into a deep sleep. I was woken by my door being unbolted, by shouts and the entry of two guards (not those of the day before) into my cell. I suffered the exquisite pain of believing for a moment I was not where in fact I was. The guards pulled me on to my feet and I was shoved along the corridor. I thought to myself: the moment has come. But I also considered: better for it to happen like this, suddenly and even after having slept than to sit and wait for it. My body was stiff and ached cruelly. We took the same route, in reverse, as the day before: along the corridor, where now, with my eyes uncovered, I noticed, on either side, other doors, doubtless to cells like my own; up the stone steps, and through the outer door, on the other side of which a guard was posted. Here, for the first time, daylight, subdued and indirect though it was, stabbed my eyes. I was marched round a corner to the left and then, not left again, which would have accorded with my route of entry the day before, but right — and face to face, all at once, with a magical vision. We were in a narrow hallway, painted in delicate duck-egg blue, with gilt cornices and hung with two or three gilt-framed pictures. At the end of this hallway — about eight yards ahead — was a tall, stately, deep-casemented window opening on to a view of a classical French garden bathed in the light of a September dawn: terraces, urns, statuary, long ornamental ponds between lawns silvered with dew; a low sun looming over misty trees. As unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude.

We walked towards this mirage, the sun streaming through the glass on to our faces, and I had a brief, preposterous notion that I was going to be flung into it. But I was jerked abruptly to the right, round a corner. During the second or two in which we passed the window I had rime to notice that the ground sloped away quite steeply from the back of the Château, that the window was several feet above ground level and that below it was a long, balustraded terrace which at least one sentry was patrolling.

We climbed up two flights of grand, carved stairs and emerged on to a landing in front of an ornate double door behind which, I instinctively knew, were my interrogators. An officer, whom I recognized as the dark-haired, fat-cheeked officer present at my capture, was lounging on the landing, his black tunic unbuttoned, a coffee cup in his hand. He looked at me with distaste and motioned to one of the guards. I was taken along a side corridor and ushered, almost considerately, into a cubicle containing a large marble wash basin, a mirror and a lavatory. In the mirror I became aware of the filth — dust and dried blood — that had collected on my face. The sentry removed my handcuffs. ‘ Waschen Sie sich .’

Marian is finishing watering her plants. She straightens up and rubs a palm on her hip. She does not know I am looking at her. She is a creature undergoing scientific scrutiny: her sandy hair, slightly hunched shoulders, her slim, almost too slim body, her exposed midriff. She turns and catches my clinical stare. A bewildered look crosses her face. I return my eyes to the book and do not look up again until she speaks. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she says, as if I’ve implied she’s unclean.

After I had washed (it seemed my handcuffs were not going to be replaced), the guard jostled me back towards the double doors, which had been partly opened. The second guard was standing on the landing. He jerked his head as a sign to his companion, who shoved me through the doors and pulled them shut behind me.

Here description must be blurred. Not through any weakness of recollection, but because events themselves at the time were blurred. The first step towards breaking the resistance of a spy is to confuse and disorientate him, and deprivation, isolation, hunger, sleeplessness, as well as the spy’s own ignorance of the next move of his captors, normally achieve this — even before other methods are employed. The room into which I was pushed was large, thick-carpeted, with a marble fire-place set in one wall, and the wooden scrollwork and gilt which characterized the corridors and staircase. Another door, in one corner, led off it. Blinds were drawn over the windows and although light filtered in, electric lights, set in chandeliers, were switched on. Before me was a large, leather-topped desk, strewn with papers, and behind it, sitting in heavily upholstered chairs, were the fat-cheeked officer and a second officer, in the uniform of an SS colonel, with neat grey hair and a long, delicate, almost scholarly face, like that of some amiable civil servant. Up to now my journey up from the cell had had a strangely reassuring quality, as if nothing worse were going to happen to me than happens to some refractory schoolboy. But I noticed that on the small wooden chair in which, if I was lucky, I would be told to sit, there were dark stains of blood, and the chair itself was placed on a large piece of canvas material, over the carpet, on which there were more obvious stains of blood, and, if my nostrils did not deceive me, urine.…

‘Do you want one?’

‘What?’

‘A bath.’

‘Why?’

‘I mean, do you mind if I take all the hot water?’

‘No, no.…’

She stands in the doorway, like some subordinate, waiting to be told she is dismissed.

… I was to sit in that chair, on that piece of filthy canvas, many times in the ensuing few days. How many times exactly, I could not say, nor for what duration, nor with what intervals in between; nor, were it not for certain regular daily procedures, could I have said at the time that what was involved was merely a matter of days, not weeks, months — an epoch. My recollection compresses into a series of dream-like, constantly recurring impressions: the darkness and silence of the cell punctuated (as you sank into exhaustion) by the tramping of boots, lights, shouts, the rasping of locks and bolts and the slam of doors; the journey, on which your own legs could scarcely convey you, along the passage-way, up the steps, along the upper corridor, past that incredible window, which every time became more and more like an illusion; the staircase, the double doors, the guard shoving you into the cubicle, and that persistent command: ‘ Waschen Sie sich ’. Perhaps there is much about my days at the Château which I simply do not remember. They say that you only recall what is pleasant. Or perhaps the truth is that certain things defy retelling.