Are there no cracks in their compact dream? Oh, how he tried to grope his way around those white sepulchral walls in search of secret cavities, but he was too weak, too crippled, too isolated in himself. Then one morning, when they’d all gathered round him again with their commiserations and their chilly angst, he bit hard into the hand of the artillery captain, Wilson, who was feeding him crumbs of ship’s biscuits with the cynical patience of an animal trainer. He remembers how the hand, already on its journey to death, with ragged blue fingers where the flesh was glowing hard and red in deep hollows, hovered temptingly above his eagerly open mouth, whose lips always curled to form a ring without his being able to prevent them. The sea below them was like the giant black wall of a gasometer and the sand seemed to be crunching under the feet of some unseen rambler, while the sky itself was as blue as metal, seemingly bowed under the weight of some unknown force: only the powerful columns of their will kept them up. Then, just before he bit, clouds of birds as white as snow seemed to emerge from the captain’s shoulders, their cruel beaks, with small drops of congealed blood seeming to hang from their vicious, pincer-like tips, were pointing steadily down; it was painful enough to feel, as it were, the pecking which would sever the ailing flesh from his bones, skilfully and triumphantly. Then he shuddered with horror as he noticed the self-satisfied red spot on the end of the captain’s nose acquiring a life of its own, just as vicious and ruthless as the beaks in the air above, and when he looked slowly round, he saw that all the people encircling him had identical spikes of blood pointing directly at him. Scared, but also determined to break down once and for all the secret door behind which their secret hopes were hiding, he first closed his eyes in readiness for the preposterous happening; he suddenly found himself shut in a blood-red cave dotted with stalactites, filled with forgotten, hushed, primitive music; the stalactites dug their long fingers into his soft being and seemed to resound with furious whispering. Then, in order to free himself at last from this horrific company, he tensed himself like a catapult, oblivious to his paralysis, but all he could manage was a weak thrust with his upper body; even so, it was so high and so unexpected that he was able to dig his teeth into the captain’s hand, just under the knuckle of his thumb. He bit as hard as he could, dragging the hand with him as he fell back on to the sand.
Now he expected a violent outburst, a powerful, spiteful blow across his cheek which would have released him from any form of obligation to suppress the truth — but the captain’s face and his nose with the fierce red spot merely sank down towards him, and the circle of the doomed closed in on him. Smiling confidently the captain slowly coaxed his hand out of his grip, slowly straightened his back and, half turning towards the circle of onlookers, raised his hand towards his heart, as if it had been a medal. All that happened was a regretful shrug of the shoulders; then the circle dissolved and he tried to flee and flee, but in vain, as they always came back and kept him paralysed with their watchful charity. The fear of death, now growing by the hour, seemed to envelop them all as they sat beside him wearing their cosmetic masks of clay; they hardened in the hot sun, and every quick, fearful smile left behind a battery of creases and furrows; these faces looked like a ghastly ruined landscape in what had once been beautiful countryside as they bent over his: curious, frowning uncomfortably, inquiring anxiously, half triumphant in advance or merely riddled with terror, whenever they thought he was asleep or had fallen into terminal unconsciousness. Worst of all was the young English girl who lay down beside him, slender and gazelle-like, her thin birch-leaf fingers frequently fluttering about his face; eyes increasingly as fixed as frozen lakes in the snowy landscapes surrounding her pupils examined him meticulously, and interpreted every change of expression with remarkable rapidity.
‘You want something to drink now,’ she would say immediately — or, ‘Now you’d like to get rid of this canvas sheet for a while.’
She spoke his language, slowly, darkly, with strange palatizations, almost like a tropical negress. It would have been touching and loveable in normal circumstances, but now he found it extremely distasteful, another stage in the process of stifling imprisonment. The girl’s peculiarities forced their way under his hard shell of resistance and scratched like a grain of sand, more irritating than the others’ easily exposed charity born of fear, since he detected a comical genuineness about the girl as she lay beside him; at first it seemed boundlessly ridiculous, but soon it became painfully intolerable as it immediately made everything so complicated, even more so than the hypocrisy of the others hindering his flight. Aha, a Florence Nightingale, he thought contemptuously, and made himself extra heavy when she came with her thin hands and tried to change the rags wrapped round his filthy lower body, He could see point in annoying her as she didn’t possess the honourable falsehood characteristic of all her shipwrecked companions. She was genuine, that is, she considered herself to be genuine, and so her lies were all the greater.
She would lie down beside him, and they often watched the velvet ships of the clouds gliding majestically over the sea. The new line running from the blood-red corner of her mouth grew severe and deep, and the fine, blue bow of her temples was ready to snap at any moment; her frozen gaze suddenly thawed, she seemed to reach out for him even though she was lying there without moving.
‘Can you see it?’ she said in his language, trembling away in the parcel of cloth her body was encased in, ‘There goes the good ship Tong, with its masts lost in the mists. Can you see the captain, the one standing smoking by the raiclass="underline" the mists come from his pipe. A sailor is just emptying a bucket of mist overboard, you see, the Tong would go too fast otherwise. A lady from Shetland in her phantom fur-coat is evidently not feeling too well, can’t you see how sinister she looks as she stands on deck, waving her white letter of credit? The schoolboy who’s run away from my smoke-infested homeland has just whistled a shrill greeting to freedom, you can see that white column shooting up from the ship and you probably think it’s the steam whistle, but it’s the boy, I can assure you: his jubilation is so boundless that it has to look just like that.’
With meaningless prattle of that kind in the air, she’d go for a little walk on her own, but Jimmie refused to let himself get carried away; silent and compressed by his longing to run away from it all, his hunger, his thirst and his contempt, he wanted to cry out: ‘You’re lying, you’re making up that rescue ship in the clouds, you’re emptying your heavy box of fear on to a bank of clouds, but keep out of the way when it falls, the floor isn’t very steady. Just wait till my legs have got better and my paralysis has eased, there’ll be nothing to hold me back; I know your fear and your plans for me, but I’ll run away to where nothing can get at me.’
But then one day he came to with a start, it may even have been the same day everything else happened, for periods of consciousness in between the darkness of his oblivion were deplorably short. There was a new nuance in her way of talking; it’s possible it had been there all the time, knocking away at his window, but now it suddenly struck him: words that she palatized with the same noble energy as before took on a new tenor, and the blue quaking of her thin nostrils also had some message to impart. He lay there with his eyes almost closed and seemed to hear or see nothing, but in fact he was observing everything she did with intense concentration; at first he was put out, but increasingly he was filled with disgust and despair as he saw the love for himself that glinted like SOS signals behind her every movement and every word. She turned bravely away from him, but even so he could see her face muscles twitching with a desire to turn and face him, and tear down all the curtains of modesty.