blanket over him. 'Noo—leave yer byuts sticken' oot the end thar, an' cover yer face—there, that's champion! Noo, divunt mek a noise, an' aah'll coom back for yew when aah can.
Mayntime, aah'll gan oot th' back way—'
For a moment, there was silence, but then Bastable heard the beating of his heart, his tell-tale heart, which he must still somehow.
This was the second time that he had been dead, and with his boots showing too— passing for dead among the dead once again, except that this time he knew what he was doing and was not at all sure he could act the part with the conviction it required if the Germans looked under the table.
The blanket against his face wasn't soft, it was strangely stiff, almost like cardboard.
At first he had hardly understood a word the Tynesider had said, it had almost been a foreign language. But then, quite suddenly, he had understood every word, every fukken word.
In the silence he could still hear the distant pop-pop-pop of machine-guns, and the heavier poop— it was not a rumble, but merely a gradation up from the pop-pop-pop— the poop of heavier guns.
And now the crunch of footsteps in the passage, much closer.
It seemed that all he had left was his sense of hearing—
The blanket against his face was stiff with blood, of course.
But he could no longer feel that, it was the knowledge inside his head, mixed with equally sickening fear.
dummy4
The door cracked open.
German voices. Once again Bastable experienced the humiliation of hearing only guttural sounds, without the least understanding of what they meant. Wimpy would be lying there beside him, making sense of those sounds, while all he could do was to lie like a block of wood, like a dead man, like a donkey—like a dead donkey—and understand nothing.
He forced himself to listen to the harsh voices. It was incredible that this was the same language as in the German lieder— those meaningless, but heart-wrenchingly beautiful songs Mother loved to play—the language of Goethe and Bach and Beethoven, about whom he knew next to nothing except that they were great men like Shakespeare and Milton and Newton, and that it would be in their language that the orders for his death might come in the next moment.
He knew that he was trying to keep sane, and to stop screaming with terror in protest that he hadn't been born and brought up with love and gentle kindness, and trained and educated, to lie under a blood-stiffened blanket in a French laundry on a summer's afternoon with the fear of death sweating out of him through every pore—this wasn't Harry Bastable at all—it was a stranger, because this couldn't happen to Harry Bastable—
Bastable!
One of the Germans had said his name—
dummy4
Bast-abell- schwisser-glutzig-aben-geruber-begegen-schlikt-wollen-nachtvice- Bastabell-gabble-gabble-gabble-abuzsleine-gabble-gabble-gabble-gabble- Willis—
Willis!
There was more than one voice, in fact there were three voices: there was the subaltern's voice, which was now deferential, almost scared, with only the shreds of obstinacy left in it—the voice of a junior officer— who knew his orders, but also knew that he was overmatched; then there was a bullying voice, before which the subaltern's voice retreated; and finally there was a third voice, softer than the bullying one, yet somehow more frightening, because it seemed to require no loud threats to make its points—it was this voice which finally reduced the subaltern to heel-clicking obedience.
After that the door opened and shut again. But just as Bastable was about to breathe out a full shuddering lungful of relief the second voice started up again, only more conversationally, as deferential as the young officer's had been.
The third voice replied, and as Bastable caught his own name and Wimpy's he became conscious again of the fear that had been pulsing through him all the time. He could also feel the lanyard, which was screwed up into a sweaty ball in his right hand, which he had had no time to get rid of— the symbol of his pride in his regiment and in himself for being privileged to wear it, which had become the mark of Cain for every man dummy4
who wore it, the insignia of death in primrose-yellow and dove-grey.
The voices droned on and on, back and forth, until finally the door banged open again and heels clicked.
The bullying voice challenged the heel-clicker.
The heel-clicker spoke, and it was the young officer again, only now he wasn't scared, he was terrified.
For a second neither of the SS officers replied. In the stifling darkness under the blanket Bastable heard the pop-popping of the machine-gun once more, and because of the sudden silence in the room—and also presumably because the door was still open—it sounded much louder. And then, in the last fraction of that same second, he knew why the young officer was frightened, and also why the SS officers had been struck momentarily speechless, and even what was going to happen next, all these thoughts travelling through his brain with the speed of light to fill the slow-moving instant of silence with time to spare in which his own terror was transformed into panic.
The bullying voice roared out in exactly the tone of incredulous rage that he had expected—that he even recognized from his own experience of bullying senior officers, so that although every word was still unintelligble to him he knew their sum total down to the last syllable.
'What the bloody hell d'you mean—"they've gone"?'
He lost the rest in the tide of hopelessness which engulfed dummy4
him. They had vanished—they had passed through the main door into the field hospital, and their guards simply hadn't thought to follow them, and now they couldn't be found so the Germans would search for them more thoroughly, and in no time at all they would be found again without difficulty.
All they had to do was to look under the table—
The door banged and boots stamped and scraped metallically on the stone floor within inches of his ear.
Now they were going to be discovered. It was impossible that they could escape, it had always been impossible—he might just as well throw back the blanket himself, rather than wait to have it ripped off him, and surrender to the inevitable with dignity and courage . . . except that it wouldn't be dignity and courage, it would be in the fear and horror of death, shaking like the coward he was—he could feel his hands shaking at the very thought of it and his body turning to water in physical rejection of what was about to happen to it.
Oh God— he 'd wet himself! He could feel the uncontrollable spasm of the muscles in his penis as they relaxed, and the warm damp spread in his trousers as his bladder emptied itself, the warmth turning colder even as he tried unavailingly to stem the flood.
Oh, God— oh, God—oh, God—
Now he couldn't stand up even if he wanted to. If he stood up now they would see a great dark patch in his trousers, and they would know he had wet himself— the great dark hateful badge of shame—
dummy4
'Listen to me carefully—'
An English voice—? Bastable's senses reeled with the shock of it.
'I will ask you a question. You will answer it.'
Not an English voice: it was too perfect—each word was too distinct and complete in itself, not like the related parts of a whole sentence, but like carefully chosen samples picked deliberately from a rack in order to make a sale to a customer who didn't really know his own mind.
And he knew the voice, too—
'If you do not answer .. . correctly . . . truthfully ... I will have you taken out and shot—do you understand? Shot—do you understand that?