The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (9 page)

Of course, Hector felt himself begin to fall, but a person falling may not reach the ground to his certain knowledge, but instead arrive somewhere else. Hector fell on to the grey tarmac of the ribbon road and the priest and the mourners, seeing a man in a foreign uniform lying in their pathway, came on steadfastly towards him.

Hector, however, is entering a different moment of time. He is reporting for duty . . .

It is summer, exquisite summer. It is dawn in East Berlin. Hector is entering the door at the base of a watchtower and he begins to climb up the concrete steps. Above him is the perfect octagonal of the tower itself, with its eight viewing windows. Every day, Hector notes and admires the simple yet solid and efficacious construction of the towers, so well designed for the task in hand, to enable the Border Guards to see everything going on beneath them. And now, once again, his heart is beating with pride, pride in the tower, pride in the duties which await him in the coming day. Up and up he goes. The steps are dark near the base, but as Hector climbs, he knows that when he enters the octagon – at that very moment – will be falling the extraordinary beauty of the dawn light, arriving from the East.

When Hector woke, it was dark. He was lying in a bed in a small room, painted brown and lit by an oil lamp. The flicker and fumes from the oil lamp eddied round on the brown ceiling. He could remember nothing.

Something cold touched his face. A dampness lay on his forehead. There was the smell of rose water.

Then a voice, very near, said in broken German: ‘Are you waking, sir?'

Hector didn't recall making any reply, but the same voice decided to say next: ‘I am a train driver.'

Then, the lamplit room and the train driver and the smell of rose water were removed from Hector's consciousness and he was submerged again in sleep, while the man (who was a driver of freight trains between Poznan and Warsaw) got up quietly and went to talk to his wife, Katarzyna, telling her reassuringly that the German soldier had woken up and that his fever was passing.

‘Good,' said Katarzyna, ‘so I hope he can leave tomorrow.'

‘Well,' said the train driver, ‘we shall see.'

‘I don't want to “see”,' said Katarzyna, who was old and afraid, and had a long memory. ‘I want him out of the house tomorrow. I don't know why I had to marry a man with such a stupidly kind heart.'

‘He was lying in the road, Katarzyna.'

‘I don't care where he was lying.'

He is lying in Ute's bed. He knows he shouldn't be here, not yet. He'd forbidden himself to come here, but here he is all the same. Outside the apartment building, in the first light of morning, Ute's swan, Karl, is screeching in his cage. Ute is lying on top of Hector, kissing his eyes. He isn't inside her, but he can feel his erection begin against her flat stomach, and with his encircling arms he presses her closer to him, moving her body so that her breasts will rub against his chest. He whispers to her that he wants her, that he will want her for ever, that he can't help himself, that his passion for her will have no end, and she says to him sweetly, giggling, licking his ear: ‘Hecti, it will end when you die . . .'

The dark room returned. A nightlight on a saucer had replaced the oil lamp and Hector could just make out the shape of a small window, shuttered with louvres, beyond which it was possible to imagine an icy, moonlit sky. Hector turned his head, looking for the train driver sitting beside him, but no one was there.

He lay very still. There was a wet patch in the bed and Hector supposed that he had pissed in it in his sleep, but wasn't particularly disconcerted, because this was a thing that had gone on happening to him long after boyhood and two doctors had told him that there was nothing to be done about it.

Then, hearing a train's mournful whistle, Hector remembered that he was in Poland. He remembered the striped fields and the procession of Catholic mourners. He sat up and looked around the room for his knapsack and rifle and, not finding them, was overcome with anguish. Weeping was for the weak, for people like Elvira, not for him. But in the Polish night, Hector wept and he didn't seem able to stop, however hard he tried.

After a while, he heard someone get up in the room next door and an old woman came and stood by him, wrapped in a shawl, with her hair in a grey plait. She stared at him for a few moments, then shook his shoulder quite roughly. ‘German soldier,' she said, ‘stop crying, please.'

Hector S. lay in the little room for another day and a night. Katarzyna swore at her husband and asked him: ‘Have you forgotten the war? Have you forgotten the destination of those freight trains?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I've forgotten nothing.'

‘Then why are we sheltering a German soldier in our house?'

All the train driver said was: ‘I am a man. And so is he.'

While he changed Hector's sheets and fed him some of the beetroot soup that always simmered on the stove, Katarzyna went through Hector's knapsack and removed the lemon that she found there. She pressed it to her nose and inhaled its refreshing scent, which reminded her of days long gone, when she was a girl in a green meadow. Then she made herself a beautiful jug of lemon tea. She refused to share the tea with her fool of a kind-hearted husband, but only announced to him as she drank: ‘This is the first gift I've ever had from a German. And the last.'

Two days later, Hector and his bicycle and his knapsack were helped into a truck and driven to Poznan station. Katarzyna scrubbed the room the German had vacated with a disinfectant so strong it made her teeth sting.

Hector S. was put into a freight car full of cauliflowers. ‘I am sorry,' said the train driver, ‘to put you with vegetables, sir.'

After this, there was just the dark of the freight car and the sound of all the miles and miles of the Polish heartland moving under the train. Hector lay down and covered himself with his overcoat, and was as still as a man can be on a bed of cauliflowers. His head and body ached, and it seemed to him that this ache was right in the substance of his skull and in the marrow of his bones.

His future was going wrong. Every thought that came to him, instead of being clear and precise, was clouded and difficult. It was as though thoughts were harmful chemicals, setting off explosions in his brain. The train was taking him nearer to his destination, but he began to see, with embarrassment, that it was towards the old eternal Russia of his imagination that he was travelling and that although he'd prepared quite well for his journey, he hadn't prepared at all for his arrival. When his D-Marks ran out, where and how was he to live? For a start, he spoke only a few words of the language. He knew the Russian word for ‘now', but not the Russian word for ‘tomorrow'. What kind of work could he find which allowed him to be totally silent?

Then a new thought came. The colour of its chemical felt white. It was a thought about silence and the new world, the world of the West, creeping east. Westerners were thieves of silence. They stole the quiet in a place and in the mind of a man, and replaced it with longing, just as they stole the mystery from a city by lighting it orange. Darkness and quiet were leaving the world. It was only a matter of time before the dawn wouldn't be the dawn any more, but some other computer-adjusted piece of time, with colours other than its own.

Hector felt pleased with this thought, not because it was an optimistic one, but because it seemed rational and not blighted by confusion, and so he said to himself that perhaps he was going all this way in search of the perfect silence. He'd imagined a wilderness, a birch grove, a lake, or at least, he'd imagined cycling or walking through this kind of landscape
on his way
to his future in Russia. But the truth was that the future had no location. He'd never got further with his own story than the lake. Now, he understood that he might never get further – ever. In all probability, the lake was his destination.

Hector sat up and tried to eat a pickled cucumber. He had no appetite for what remained of the tinned meat. He lay down again, liking the train now, soothed a bit by the train, as if the train were Elvira and Hector a child falling asleep on her lap, wrapped in her apron.

He didn't want to show his face in Warsaw. He knew he would be stared at and he couldn't abide the thought of meeting the stare of Polish women and girls.

He dreamed the place smelled of spun sugar, that there was dry rot in the old houses, that church bells kept ringing and ringing the hours, that pigeons continuously ruffled the air. He would fall ill again in such a place.

So he resorted to bribery. He offered DM10 to the train driver and asked him to put him in another freight going east to the border with Belarus or beyond.

The train driver took the money and looked at it and shook his head. ‘Now from here in a freight train going east, you will die of cold, sir.'

‘I'm used to the cold,' said Hector.

‘Not this one. This is more cold.'

‘Please,' said Hector.

So the money was paid and a second driver was found who agreed to take him in a night train carrying medical supplies to Minsk. Katarzyna's husband then performed his last act of generosity: he gave Hector the blanket he kept in his cab. ‘In the cold night,' he said, ‘cover your body, German man.'

Hector missed the cauliflowers. In this second freight car, piled with boxes, every surface was hard and in whatever way he lay down, Hector's bones hurt. He tried folding the blanket in three and lying on top of it. This was more comfortable and Hector was beginning to drift towards sleep when he opened his eyes and saw in the darkness the freezing cloud of his own breath lying over him like a ghost. In time, he would have breathed all the air in the box car and the ghost would be very large and attempt to make more room for itself by entering the cavities of his body and taking away his life.

The blanket smelled of oil and it was old and worn, but there was still a little warmth in it. Hector stood up and wrapped himself round and round in it and lay down again on the boxes of pharmaceuticals. He imagined he was lying on glass syringes, as clear as ice.

The night would be so long. Poland, thought Hector, is a place where the nights have subdued the days and stolen half their territory. The bit of space left to the light is so pitiful, you just have time to cycle a few kilometres, buy some hard bread, pass a church where women kneel at open-air confessionals, hear a village band wearing hats with emperor's plumes play an ancient march, and then the dusk comes down, and it's futile to look forward to morning, because morning is so far away. It wasn't so mad, so completely foolish to imagine that here, on certain days, you could go into a post office, say, to buy a stamp, and that when you came out again with the stamp in your wallet, the day had given up hope and the words ‘post office' had faded into the wall.

These thoughts made Hector remember the line of post boxes in the lobby of the apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg and how he'd imagined letters from Russia arriving there, letters which described an epic journey, an honourable arrival, a life built in a place where the structures of the old familiar world were still standing.

Now, in his freight car, wrapped in the train driver's blanket, as heavy snow started to fall, Hector began to compose in his mind a letter to Ute, to the sister he'd desired since the day, at the age of five, when she'd licked his penis in the bath. It might be, he thought, the only letter he would have time to think up, and so he wanted it to describe a place that would seduce Ute, a place in which she would recognise that she could be happy, a place he had made safe for her in advance.