“Phew!” said Alain.
The Italian opened his tunic a fraction to reveal the handle of a tool.
“I had this, but we were fucked. Now shut up. There’s nothing to do but stick it to them between the shoulder blades from behind, round midnight. Only snag is, we’d need to be outside.”
The sun shone mildly. Now every time the guard passed by them, he slowed down. He seemed hypnotized by the expanding puddle of the Croat’s blood. Alain was biting his lips. He began speaking under his breath, as if to himself, offering the back of his head to the submachine gun: “Blut, Blut, Blut, Tod, Tod, und Tod! Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death!”
“Shut the fuck up, you’ll get us killed!” the Italian hissed.
“Possibly,” said Alain.
The obsessive litany ticked on: Blood, blood, blood, and death, death, blood and death, blood…
The forest-green cape halted above them, dark against an azure sky in the full glare of noon. In a low, personal voice, imitating the Frenchman’s, he ordered: “Schweigen! Silence!”
The Frenchman merely lowered his own voice further, and it was still audible, an obedient muttering: “Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death, blood, blood, blood…”
It went on for seconds or minutes, in a sluggish interval that clotted like blood. The blackish puddle spread outward. The guard walked jerkily on, boards squeaking under his weight. The incantation continued. The squeaking stopped. There was an abrupt thump, followed by a sun-drowned stillness. The guard had collapsed at the foot of the sentry box; his helmet had come off, and the childish head with its shaven skull was lolling against the boards.
“Got him,” breathed Alain, his forehead dripping. “I knew it.”
A whistle blew in another sentry post, rapid footsteps thudded along the boards. Some figures bustled around the fallen guard before bumping him down the ladder like a sack of potatoes. A beardless youth in a policeman’s cap, with bunches of grenades attached to his belt, paced the catwalk nervously.
“Now we’re fucked,” the Italian said.
“Yes,” said Alain.
The chain of events progressed in broad daylight as though in a madman’s nightmare. The new guard looked at the coagulating pool under the Croat’s thatch of hair. Alain struck up his muted litany once more: Blood, blood, blood, death. The boy in the policeman’s cap burst out laughing. His laughter was answered from the remote horizon by great rumbling, like air coming out of a tire, deepening into a hurricane roar, the distant sabbath of the big guns. The laughter of the grenade-belted boy broke off in a kind of hiccup. Two important commanders were coming into the main yard; Alain could see them through the gap in the wall. The Italian rolled over onto his back, arms flung out, laughing with all of his broken teeth, all of his arched spine, his eyelids fluttering against the sun. His head lay close to the black puddle, so that in laughing he, too, seemed to bleed. The litany of blood continued, the distant booming of the sabbath continued, the placid sunshine continued, guttural commands raked the air.
The Italian and the Frenchman appeared together before the two commanders, in a spotless office with potted geraniums flowering on the windowsills. They performed the ritual salute in style. The chief of the subdivision for guest workers attached to the Extraordinary Security Service of the (et cetera), Fauckel by name, questioned the Frenchman at the same time as Gutapfel, the joint subdirector of Civil Defense under the Department for Emergency Mobilization of the Counterespionage Corps of the State Secret Police (or whatever it was) questioned the Italian — thus expediting the proceedings. Fauckel had stiff, brush-cut hair and appeared to be chewing gum, but it was only a facial tic. Gutapfel had slicked-down hair, a starched collar, a bulging tunic, and a blunt nose, like a pig’s snout. The eyes of the first were tiny, creased, and watery, the eyes of the second bulged dully. Neither trusted the other. “Listen to that,” said Fauckel into Gutapfel’s ear, “they’re going at it hammer and tongs to the north.” “The north, you think so?” In the direction of our one single decent supply or evacuation route? Are we to being sacrificed like lambs, or will the evacuation orders come through in time? It’s all very well to hold out and die standing fast, but who will save the nation then? We are the flower of the nation, after all. The gauleiter’s last remarks were inspired by the field marshal’s “Order of the Day” — as if this were a time for epic literature!
The red-eyed Owl thrust his kepi — peaked like the crest of a silver cock — between their heads; as he whispered, the two commanders stared at the two prisoners. “Very good,” Gutapfel said to the Owl, “I approve!” From the next room came the exhausted sobs of a woman punctuated by cries of “I won’t! I won’t!” A male voice rapped “Silence, whores!” just as the artillery salvos appeared to be moving closer. “Those are our big guns,” Fauckel hoped, sweaty browed. After reaming out his nostrils with a pudgy finger, Gutapfel assumed the impassivity of a younger Hindenburg. Next door the weeping ceased for a moment, then broke out afresh. “I’m the wife of an unimpeachable Party member! You have no right!” The callow and pomaded Hindenburg turned into a bulldog about to bite. “Silence those hysterical females! Not another sound!” “Straightaway, Commander.” Clicked heels and ramrod shoulders, even if they were only the Owl’s, provided a heartening reminder of the existence of discipline. The cannon to the north emitted a prolonged hoo-hoo-hoo that was crushed flat by a baoom-rrh at the very instant at which the wailing — next door — was cut off. “Explain yourself!” Fauckel demanded of the Frenchman. “Pitelli, deserted to the enemy,” Gutapfel read out in quiet voice. “Do you admit the charges?” The accusation — death penalty — had become so commonplace that it impressed him no more than the theft of a can of beans, red-handed pillaging, unpatriotic talk, or the fornication of a refugee’s daughter with some Polish worker; if the laws were actually to be enforced in our demolished cities it would require execution squads working around the clock (when the manpower is badly needed elsewhere) and a limitless concentration camp. Fauckel listened as Alain, standing at attention, recited a string of explanations that formed an irrefutable argument like a madman’s closed system. Fauckel studied this dirty, determined, reasonable young man with grudging interest, for the French were beginning to regain, in his esteem, something of the prestige of the victors of 1918. He well remembered the occupation of the Rhineland, and de Gaulle was undeniably a character to be reckoned with. Alain was breezing through a faultless enumeration of the blown-up bridges, obstructed railway lines, barred roads, and broken-down trains, the orders from one checkpoint and counterorders from the next that all together had combined to make his progress so tortuous; he did not omit to relate what he had seen at the third checkpoint — sergeants hacked to pieces in a tiny guardroom drenched from ceiling to floor in blood. Blut, Blut, Blut everywhere, it was terrifying, and the corpses were minus their heads! “That’s quite enough,” Fauckel interrupted. Due to these contretemps, the honest truth was that while Altstadt was not perhaps on the prescribed route for this prisoner-of-war-cum-voluntary-worker-on-sick-leave, he simply could not have gone anywhere else, given his firm and loyal undertaking never to infringe regulations. For some time now, Fauckel had been unable to tolerate the sight, the very idea, of blood, “our blood.” He returned the Frenchman’s papers, supplemented with a new violet card on which he stamped his stamp. “You will report to Workforce Center at headquarters…” Alain’s heart leaped. Was there still a Workforce Center at headquarters? You’ve got a bad case of the runs, Commandant.