You don’t have to show your fins today, said the older boy in the top bunk as Thomas pulled his sweater over his head. You go diving today.
The other boys laughed. Today Thomas would go diving. Take a header. The pit was over twenty metres deep, but the day before the water had been low, Thomas remembered it, the rocky bottom had kept scratching his stomach when he went full length underwater.
Test of courage, said one of the boys, everyone has to take it. Thomas didn’t reply. He heard the voices of the older stoneworkers in the next room. Thomas opened the door. He would join the older men before the boys were out of bed.
The group leader decided who had to load trucks down in the quarry, and who stood on the edge of the pit by the funnel, or spread the stones over the load surface of the big truck with a spade. He positioned Thomas at the foot of the hoist today. Muscles, that was the idea. Anyone with poor muscle tone would build it up, crushing and loading the stones. Fitness training, the group leader said, was the name of the game in this position, and like all new trainees Thomas was assigned to fitness training. In the morning he broke and crushed stones. Only after a good hour did he decide to take a sip from his water bottle. When he opened it, the bottle had a suspect smell; someone had peed in it. Thomas asked all the men working with him, but none of them were prepared to give him a drink from their own bottles.
When Thomas, following the others, went back to the hut for the midday break for the first time, a horrible smell of blood sausage met him. Dead Granny — the boys were delighted. Thomas went to the toilets and drank cold water from the tap until his stomach was taut. Then he washed out his water bottle several times and filled it with fresh water. He couldn’t eat blood sausage. Potatoes were heaped on his tin plate, and afterwards there was semolina with raspberry syrup. The sticky semolina clung to his mouth, he worked the sticky mass with his tongue and palate, it was like sweetened cement.
Days of rain had left the bottom of the stone quarry underwater in parts. One afternoon, when the first sleet was burning the men’s faces and their gloves, shoes and work clothes were drenched, the group leader stationed himself in front of Thomas, his booted legs apart, put his hands on his hips and said: Your turn today. It’s dry in the explosives storeroom. The gallery’s only eight metres deep. You’ll get your kit from the demolition expert up in front. The lads will show you what to do. Thomas obeyed, he propped his pickaxe against the rock and followed the group leader over the terrain. From the demolition expert he got his equipment, a helmet, a box with the explosive in it, a belt to strap the tools on. The demolition expert explained something to him, something about switching on the lamp and the importance of the water. Thomas found it difficult to listen; he was in the clutch of his fear of darkness. Thomas turned at the entrance to the storeroom. The group leader clapped him so hard on the shoulder that it hurt. Just so as you know, not everyone gets to go down, but you do. Whether that was a threat or praise, Thomas couldn’t make out. At the moment he felt he no longer knew anything about people, what they said and the meaning of their words. Good luck, he heard the group leader call out his watchword. Thomas put the helmet on. His hand was trembling so violently that he couldn’t find the eyelet in the strap. No one here could know how much Thomas feared the dark. There was no Ella for miles, an Ella to scrabble about in the low-roofed gallery for him in return for his doing her maths homework, to put on the helmet instead of him. He was shaking, the rigid fingers of his trembling hands sought the eyelet on the strap of the helmet and couldn’t find it.
Want me to help? The group leader laughed, he didn’t mean it, he certainly hadn’t noticed any knocking of Thomas’s knees, however slight; he brought his heavy hand down on Thomas’s shoulder for the second time and gave the demolition expert a sign. Thomas went downhill in cramped darkness, groping his way forward on all fours. What had the group leader said about the lamp, how did you switch it on? Thomas couldn’t remember if he even had the lamp with him, and if so where. Cold darkness surrounded him. He strained all his muscles, fear forced him on, he worked his way forward, legs at an angle and hurting, feet numb, as if the tension in his limbs had sent them to sleep, he could hardly move them. The deeper down he went, the colder it was. How could he know when the gallery came to an end? Eight metres, said a voice in his ear, it couldn’t be long. But he saw no end to it. Nor did it seem to him certain whether eight metres was really the right measurement. The galleries were short, the others had said, they were just below the bottom of the quarry.
He wasn’t getting enough air, he felt that clearly, the weakness, the mist in his head, he could be about to faint. He must pull himself together, how often had he heard that, pull yourself together, no weakness, no fainting, no moment of thoughtlessness. Keep thinking, resist the darkness, the Should and Must of the school of socialism, think of your last German essay before the final exams, the flexibility that he should, could, must show. I was lucky! He had written that because he had to show that he was worthy to live and study in this society. I was able to go to school, and my teachers were people who made real efforts to form the personality of the generation now growing up. With their help I realised that this was the time when I too could give something to our human society, could support it in its struggle for the freedom of mankind. He was hardly struggling himself, his legs like pillars of stone, no more feeling except that his hands hurt when he had to grope his way over the stone with them, he wasn’t free, he knew very well what a look at West Germany would reveal. And I also know only too well the cry of freedom that comes to us from across the border. Over there it means the right of the stronger over the weaker, the right to go hungry, and the right to die a hero’s death in pursuit of foreign goods. . The ins and outs of it were strange, the cold walls of the stone into which he was burrowing as if into the shaft of a tomb, surrounded. What did freedom and goods say, familiar or strange, what could they be to him? But true freedom is insight into necessity — their struggle is the unconquerable will to liberation of the entire nation, to unlimited rights to all the good things of life for everyone who has earned them. What had he earned? Darkness, labouring at the stone. I have come to know life in our Republic, and I have enjoyed all the advantages that can be granted to a young man in this state — I have become what I am now. How often has the term fatherland been misused in the past! The fatherland of a people is where the great mass of it is in the right and is free to choose its fate. Born in this Republic, we owe great obligations to the pioneers of socialism, obligations in the present. But what was it that he should, could and would do? The battle for socialism that will be for the good of all mankind. Although contradictions and doubts sometimes emerge in me, and not in me alone, out of the sad situation of our divided country, yet I hope for the victory of our cause, for which I with all my might will fight and which I will defend! I hope I am not alone in knowing it! He knew how it went, turn away from your own soul, go into silence, endure darkness. No stars shone down here, no icy light from above, deep down in the distance there was a warm glow now, it was no illusion, a light was approaching, taking him into it, he could see his hand, something dazzled him, he closed his eyes, but his own soul was strange to him. Today he knew more about stone and his own being. Perhaps he was dreaming; he was amazed to find that in a dream he could remember his essay, word by word, understand and feel contempt for it.