‘You could do with a bit more light on the subject,’ he says. ‘All you need to do is take those two planks off the window over there and we’ll make a fire to keep the place warm… We’ve had fires going here a few times before. But then they start to smoke the place out. Look, we just need to get those boards down… I’ll give you a hand. But I can’t be bending down.’
Herbert creates ‘a bit more light’. Cold, fresh air rushes through the opening into the miasma in the room. Only now does he have a clear view of his surroundings. There are around fifteen men lying in the two-windowed room. On the other hand, it’s quiet, uncannily quiet. Just that one guy over there… he’s lying on his back, with his ivory-coloured face, tinged with bluish shadows, looking up at the ceiling. His large, black-rimmed eyes are rolled up into his head, showing the whites. The only thing moving – incessantly – is his spittle-wet mouth. He’s babbling away incoherently to himself, apparently having a heated conversation with someone, and between whiles he utters a fleeting laugh or hums snatches of songs. Then there’s a lieutenant with his left arm missing, who’s sitting with his back against the wall. His right hand keeps a tight hold on the stump, which is wrapped in bloody rags, like he’s fearful that even this pitiful remnant might also fall off. His upper body sways back and forth in a regular pendulum motion. Every time he rocks forward, his thick mop of hair flops into his face, and he moans softly and wheezily through his mouth and nose. Whenever the chirpy gnome pipes down, these are the only sounds in the room. In any event, the man over by the window wearing an Organisation Todt[2] uniform keeps working away in silence. He looks to be in his fifties; the stubble on his lined face has already turned white. He’s stretched his legs out in front of himself and his naked feet are blue with cold. On his knees is a coat, which he’s busy cutting up into strips of a hand’s width each with a small pair of scissors; he works away industriously, sunk in thought. Every so often he stops and holds up one of the strips to the light with a satisfied smile… The rest of the men lie there motionless, only distinguishable from the three dead bodies in the room by the fact that they are no longer covered by blankets or coats. The whole scene is one of gruesome unreality. Even the gnome perched on his pile of coats like an overseer doesn’t seem to regard his comrades in the room as living beings any more. He follows Herbert’s horrified gaze with the unassuming pride of a fairground sideshow proprietor presenting his freaks. Yet his face suddenly grows sharp and tense when Herbert turns to a soldier who is lying a little apart from the others. He’s still a boy, around nineteen or twenty years old perhaps. He’s lying there with his hands folded on his chest and smiling so sweetly that he could be dreaming on a summer meadow in the sunshine. In actual fact, what he’s lying on is a grey blanket; but it’s a strange, coarse-grained grey. It looks like a thick sheet of waterproofing. As Herbert bends down to take a closer look, the realization suddenly hits him: the grey surface is alive! Lice – hundreds and thousands of lice! ‘Remarkable, eh?’ says the gnome. ‘There’s not a single one left on him or his clothes. And when he arrived here, he was teeming with the things. Made him look like he had mildew… Then in the blink of an eye, they all migrated. Did you ever see such a thing!’
Herbert feels his gorge rising.
‘There was a time when they could all walk,’ the gnome continues. ‘But then they started bringing up a few invalids, too. And then the ones that were still mobile cleared off ’cos there was no food left. So, the first thing we need to do now is get those three out of here. Then you can go and fetch some snow! I can’t bend down, see…’
Propping himself against the wall, he painfully straightens up and with stiff legs gingerly extricates himself from the coats and blankets. He really is very small, a whole head shorter than Herbert even with the fur hat on. Herbert doesn’t notice that, though. He’s transfixed by the man’s feet. They’re in a pair of black jackboots that have had the toecaps neatly cut off, and his toes are sticking out. No, wait a minute, it’s not his toes, but a row of white bones framed in a blue-black mass of something! … The gnome follows Herbert’s gaze, looking lovingly and wistfully at his putrefying feet. Even they, it seems, are part of his cabinet of curiosities.
‘Before,’ he says, nodding down at them, ‘when they still hurt, I kept rags tied round ’em and bundles of straw. But now they don’t hurt at all, not in the slightest in fact. Only my legs and knees are giving me gyp now. So I don’t need to keep changing the rags on my feet any more. Quite practical really, eh?’
They drag the three dead men out by their feet into the corridor. The gnome says he reckons they won’t decay in the cold out there. Then Herbert goes down to collect some snow. In the meantime, the gnome lights an open fire in the middle of the room. Acrid smoke billows out of the door.
‘I… I’ve got… some wheat grains here,’ coughs Herbert. ‘But it’s… it’s not enough to go around everybody.’
‘No problem,’ says the gnome. ‘All they want is water.’
They sit round the smoking fire, using one hand to dangle mess tins with the wheat in them on sticks over the flames while wiping their streaming eyes with the other.
There’s another dreadful incident during the night. A shot rings out. Herbert gives a start, and then feels something warm dripping on him and trickling down. He shouts in alarm and struggles free from where he was wedged sleeping, lashing out all around in fear as he does so. But there’s nothing to be seen. So he curls up in a ball and lies there trembling and wide awake until dawn breaks. Then he sees what happened. The lieutenant with the stump of an arm has blown his brains out by putting a gun in his mouth. He’s lying slumped forward on his face. The back of his head is missing.
Lieutenant Dierk was asleep on the ground in a free corner. The other two were sitting against the wall. They, too, were exhausted by the hours they’d spent roaming around. One of the tins of meat had gained them entry to the little house where they now found themselves. It was unbearably hot in the building. The stink of unwashed bodies lay on their chests like a stifling blanket. Around ten Romanians – enlisted men and officers – had spread themselves out in the room. They sat around, lolled over the bare wooden table, and lay or cowered on the floor. Only their eyes were still animated in their otherwise expressionless, dreadfully emaciated faces. Large and black, they smouldered with bitter resentment and hatred. One man was poking the wood fire that had been lit in a tiled stove. A sultry tension hung over the room. Whenever anyone spoke, his words, underscored by jabbing hand gestures, stabbed home like sharp pecks from a bird’s beak. Surreptitiously, they kept casting looks of undisguised greed at the bread and tins of food that Görz unpacked from the kitbag.
‘We can’t stay here,’ the corporal told Breuer under his breath. ‘In the night, they’ll finally work up the courage to do us in.’
From an adjoining room came the sound of someone crying. When the door opened, they could see that the room was full of civilians – men and women of all ages, and children. Children, thought Breuer. How could children be living in this hellhole!
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you all along,’ he said to Görz. ‘How on earth did Dierk get into that state?’
The corporal shrugged his shoulders and stared at the ground.
‘Yeah, I’ve no idea what’s got into him,’ he replied. ‘I mean, I’ve only known him for a few days, but in the beginning he was quite different.’
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