The Thing Itself

THIRTY-SEVEN

Victor Tempest exercise book four cont.

At the outbreak of the war I’d immediately volunteered. I’d enlisted as Victor Tempest. I’m not quite sure why — perhaps because the name sounded heroic. I felt prepared, but the violence I’d witnessed in the police and in the Blackshirts had not prepared me for the dreadful reality. I was taught how to kill in commando training but it still seemed like a game at which I could excel. Detached, I did well in training, keeping a cool head in the most heated of simulated situations. With secret masculine pride, I thought I would make an efficient killer. Until I tried to kill for the first time.

I was with a group of partisans in Greece. We decided to wait in ambush by the side of a narrow road between the German barracks and the nearby village where the soldiers drank. It was night. Six German infantrymen approached. They were armed but they had been drinking all evening and were off their guard. They had no idea there were partisans in the area.

We couldn’t afford to attract the attention of the rest of the garrison so we had knives and garrottes. We waited in bushes as the infantrymen, talking loudly, drew nearer. Two of the soldiers were trailing behind the others. These were the targets for me and a scraggy teenager called Mikos.

The other soldiers went by. It was a bright moonlit night and I could see them clearly. Young, open-faced men. One of them was chuckling as he told a story about his sister’s wedding day. (I was by that stage of my life proficient in German.) Another was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. My senses quivered. I could smell the alcohol on their breath as they passed by. I felt I could hear their hearts beating.

Cicadas rasped in the long grass. I waited for the two who were trailing to draw level. Slender young men with cropped blond hair. They were discussing poetry. When they were within five yards of my hiding place, one of them looked up at the stars and quoted a poem by Rilke that I knew well.

The moment they passed, Mikos ran out, wrapped his hand round the mouth of the nearest one and drew his knife across his throat. The soldier who had quoted Rilke stood stock still, open-mouthed in surprise. The partisans jumped out at the other soldiers. For a moment I was unable to move, then I too dashed on to the road. I reached the young soldier, whipping the wire garrotte up and round his neck.

Almost in slow motion, the soldier raised his arm to ward me off. I stepped behind him to tighten the garrotte as I’d done many times in training. I twisted the wooden ends. His hand was caught between the wire and his neck. I was bigger and stronger. I twisted harder, felt the wire cut deep into the hand. A terrible gurgling noise came from the soldier’s throat.

I looked down into my victim’s twisted face. For a long moment our eyes met. I could see the pleading and the terror. I couldn’t look away as I tightened the garrotte another turn. I held him off balance, cradling his head.

The soldier was scrabbling desperately at my leg with his free hand. Blood was running in huge gouts down his trapped hand. I noticed the long fingers and wondered absurdly if the young man was a pianist as well as a lover of poetry. I was thinking that this wasn’t going to work. I would never get through the hand so that the wire could do its job on the neck.

Mikos came up in front of us. He moved close and thrust his knife up beneath the ribs of the soldier. I saw the terror go from his eyes and then watched them slide back to look again at the stars — athough I knew the man was already dead, had felt his dying exhalation softly brush my cheek.

Later, I casually mentioned that I had heard the German Mikos had killed quoting poetry. Mikos, who was desperate to grow a moustache but was not yet old enough to produce more than straggly whiskers, stroked his top lip. He was illiterate but he wasn’t stupid.

‘Would it have been easier if he had been a peasant like me?’

And the answer was, yes, it would have been. But that was before I learned people could weep at the beauty of Beethoven’s music in the evening after a day shovelling fellow human beings into ovens.

In London, on a brief leave three months later, I fell into conversation with a fellow commando in our club bar. We didn’t swap names but he was an Irish fellow from south of the border. A literary man. We spent an intense couple of hours trying to get at it until he said:

‘The only true account is the thing itself.’

And that was it, right there.

We were both readers and we exchanged the novels we had on us. I gave him Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male about an assassin stalking Hitler. He gave me James Joyce’s Ulysses. He was big on it. He’d gone over to Paris before the war to buy a copy and smuggle it back into Ireland, where it was banned. He told me he’d packed it into a woman’s sanitary towel box, guessing correctly that customs wouldn’t want to search it. Claimed he learned the trick from the IRA.

His name is in the book but I don’t remember it and, you know, the minute he’d gone out the door I’d forgotten what he looked like. We could have passed each other in the street many times after, or sat down opposite each other, and I wouldn’t have recognized him. One of those things about the extraordinary circumstances of war.

Bob Watts put the exercise book down on the floor and walked over to his father’s bookshelves. He scoured the fiction ranged in alphabetical order by author. Ulysses was there, though he missed it the first time. The spine was so cracked the title and author’s name was almost obliterated. He took it down and opened it to the flyleaf. Underneath the flyleaf, in a clear hand, was the name of its original owner.

Watts weighed the book in his hand, smiling as he looked at the neat signature of Sean Reilly, the ex-commando who had been Dennis’s then John Hathaway’s aide de combat.

He resumed his seat, observing he was halfway down the bottle of whisky. He resumed his reading.