Charity

Here the lights were less bright, the armed soldiers less threatening. I stood in the corridor watching the whole circus. Fur hats bobbed everywhere. The soldiers climbed aboard first. Then the ticket inspector came, and then the customs officer, and then two immigration inspectors with an army officer in tow, and a security official in civilian clothes. It was a long process.

An elderly English woman came shuffling along the train corridor. She was wearing a raglan style camel-hair coat over a nightdress. Her greying hair was dishevelled, and she clutched a bulging crocodile-skin handbag tightly to her breast. I’d noticed her on the platform at Moscow, where she’d got into an argument with a railway official about the seats assigned to her and the teenage boy with whom she was travelling.

‘The soldiers have arrested my son,’ she told me in a breathless croak. She was distressed, almost hysterical, but controlling her emotions in that way that the English do in the presence of foreigners. ‘He’s such a foolish boy. They discovered a political magazine in his shoulder bag. I want to go with him and sort it out, but they say I must continue my journey to Berlin because I have no Polish visa. What shall I do? Can you help me? I heard you speaking Polish and I know you speak English.’

‘Give the sergeant some Western money,’ I said. ‘Do you have ten pounds in British currency?’

She touched her loosened hair, and a lock of it fell across her face. ‘I didn’t declare it.’ She mouthed the words lest she was overheard. ‘It’s hidden.’ She nervously flicked her hair back, and then with a quick movement of her fingers secured it with a hairclip that seemed to come from nowhere.

‘It’s what they want,’ I said. ‘Give them ten pounds sterling.’

‘Are you sure?’ She didn’t believe me. She had become aware of her unladylike appearance by now. Selfconsciously she fastened the top button of her coat against her neck.

‘Why else would they let you come here and talk with me?’ I said.

She frowned and then smiled sadly. ‘I see.’

‘The sergeant,’ I said. ‘Take the sergeant to one side and give it to him. He will share it with the officer afterwards, so that no one sees it. If things go wrong the sergeant gets all the blame. It’s the way it works.’

‘Thank you.’ With as much dignity as she could muster in a frilly nightdress and scuffed red velvet slippers, she hurried off back to her compartment. The door was opened for her when she got there and the sergeant poked his head out and looked at me. I smiled. Expressionless he drew his head back in again.

More uniformed officials came crawling along the train; resolute and unfriendly like a column of jungle ants. But the Polish security man who took me into the conductor’s compartment at the end of the carriage was an elderly civilian, a plump man with untidy wavy hair, long and untidy enough to distinguish him from the soldiers. He was wearing a red-striped bow tie and belted brown corduroy overcoat. He scanned my passport with a battery-powered ultra-violet light. There was nothing wrong with my papers – it was a genuine German Federal Republic document but he ignored the name in my passport and said: ‘Welcome to Poland, Mr Samson.’

If they knew who I was, they knew what I did for a living. So they were not to be persuaded that I was an advertising executive from Hamburg.

He didn’t give the passport back: instead he put it in his pocket. That was always a bad sign. He questioned me in German and in English. He told me his name was Reynolds and that his father was English, and born in Manchester. The Poles all had an English relative up their sleeve, just as the English like to keep an Irish grandmother in reserve.

I pretended not to understand English. Reynolds told me all over again in German. He was very patient. He smoked cheroots and kept referring to a bundle of documents that he said were all devoted to me and my activities. It was a thick folder, and once or twice it looked as if the whole lot of loose pages would end up cascading to the floor of the train, but he always managed to save them at the last moment.

I told him that it was a simple case of mistaken identity. Mr Reynolds lit a fresh cheroot from the butt of his old one and sighed. Another ten minutes passed in fruitless questions, and then they escorted me off the train. Sneaky Jack did nothing except stand around in the corridor, getting a glimpse of me through the door now and again, and overhearing as much as he could. I didn’t blame him. He was no doubt assigned to look after Jim. Solving the predicaments of a supernumerary field agent like me was not something upon which his career would hang.

As far as I could see I was the only person being removed from the train. I jumped down and felt the chill of the hard frozen ground through the soles of my shoes. It was darker now; the moon was hiding behind the clouds. They didn’t handcuff me. I followed the two soldiers – a sergeant standard-bearer and a trumpeter, if the badges on their arm were taken seriously. We crossed the tracks, stepping high over the rails and being careful not to stumble as we picked our way through piles of broken sleepers and other debris. Mr Reynolds was breathing heavily by the time we climbed the embankment. We waited for him to catch up.

I looked back at the train. There was lots of noise and steam, and all the squeaky commotion that is the ritual of trains as they prepare to move. The yellow blind of Jim’s compartment went up, and the nurse was framed in the window. There was condensation on the glass and she wiped a clear patch with her hand. She looked this way and that, but it was too dark for her to spot me. She wasn’t a Departmental employee, just a Canadian nurse engaged to accompany a casualty to London. Having a travelling companion suddenly disappear was no doubt disconcerting for her.

I stood shivering alongside Reynolds and his soldiers and we all watched the train pull away slowly. When it had disappeared the night was dark and I felt lonely. I looked the other way: back across the frontier to the Soviet checkpoint half a mile distant. It was still bathed in light but all the frantic activity there had ceased: the army trucks and the officials had disappeared. The lights were still glistening upon the oval of hardened snow, but the only movement was the measured pacing of a single armed sentry. It was like some abandoned ice-hockey stadium from which teams and spectators had unaccountably fled.

‘Let’s go,’ said Reynolds. He flicked the butt of his cheroot so that it went spinning away in red sparks.

Before I could react the sergeant hit me spitefully in the small of the back with the metal butt of his gun. Caught off guard, I lost my balance. At first I slipped and then, as my knees buckled under me, I tumbled down the embankment with arms flailing. At the bottom there was a drainage ditch. The thick ice cracked and my foot went through it into cold muddy water.

When I got back on my feet I was wet and dirty. There was a wind that shook the trees and cut me to the bone. I wished I’d put my overcoat on before leaving the compartment to go and answer their questions. After five minutes stumbling through the dark, there was the sound of a diesel engine starting and then the headlights of a dark green army truck lit up a narrow road and trees.

They didn’t take me to Warsaw or to any other big town. The truck bumped along country roads while the crimson dawn crept out from the woodland. The sky was beginning to lighten as we arrived at the grim-looking castle in Mazury. Without anything much being said they locked me in a room there. It was not a bad room; I had endured worse accommodation in Polish hotels. The worrying thing was our proximity to Rastenburg, where I’d recently shot some Polish UB men and not gone back to feel their pulse. Thinking about that made it a long time before I went to sleep.

The man who liked to be called Reynolds was apparently in charge of me. He came to see me next morning and directly accused me of killing two security officials while evading arrest. Reynolds talked a lot, and continued talking even when I did not respond. He told me I would be held and tried here in the military district headquarters. In the course of the investigation, and subsequent court martial, the army witnesses, prosecutors and judges would go and visit the place where my crime took place. He didn’t mention anything about a defence counsel.

The second day was Wednesday. He questioned me all the morning and into the afternoon, and accused me of not taking the charges seriously. I didn’t admit to any of it. I said I was German but he didn’t believe me.

‘You think your government is now strenuously applying for your release through diplomatic channels, do you not?’

I looked at him and smiled. He didn’t know much about my government, or its diplomatic service, or he would have known that having them do anything strenuously was far beyond reasonable expectations.

‘You’ve nothing to smile about,’ said Reynolds, banging his flattened hand upon a dossier lying on the table.

How right he was. ‘I demand to see the consul from the embassy of the German Federal Republic,’ I said.

I’d made the same demand many times, but on this occasion he became angry and rammed his cheroot down hard so that it split apart in the ashtray. ‘Will you stop repeating that stupid cover story?’ There was real anger in his voice. ‘We know who you are. The Germans have never heard of you.’ Perhaps it was because he’d missed lunch.

They had me in a rambling old fortress that Reynolds called the citadel. It was the sort of fairy castle that Walt Disney would have built on a mountain-top, but this was a region of lakes and marshland and the prominence upon which the castle stood was no more than a hillock.

The buildings that made up the complex provided a compendium of fortification history: twelfth-century dungeons, a keep almost as old, and a seventeenth-century tower. There were three cobbled yards, the one beneath my window crowded with ramshackle wooden huts and other structures that the German army had added when it became a regional school of military hygiene during the Second World War. The walls were thick and castellated, with a forbidding entrance gate that had once housed a drawbridge. The top of the walls provided a path along which armed sentries patrolled as they had no doubt done for centuries. To what extent the poor wretches slapping themselves to keep warm were there because the army thrives on sentry duty and guard changes, or to warn of approaching danger, was hard to decide. But in this eastern frontier region at that time, the prospect of a Soviet invasion was never far from anyone’s mind. Some Moscow hard-liners were proclaiming that the Poles had gone too far with their reforms, and the only way to maintain communist power throughout the Eastern Bloc was by a brotherly show of Soviet military repression.

Whether they were reformers, communists or khaki-clad philanthropists, the military government in Warsaw wouldn’t welcome Soviet spearhead armour lunging across the border. Perhaps that was why this enlarged battalion of Polish infantry was garrisoned here, and why their day began at five-thirty with a flag-hoisting ceremony, accompanied by a drummer and that sort of discordant trumpeting that drives men into battle. And why the congregation that lined up at the subsequent Holy Mass was in full battle-order.

They had brought my suitcase off the train. In my presence they’d unlocked it and searched through its contents and photographed selected items. Now the case was open and placed on a low table in my room. They found nothing incriminating, but I didn’t like this development. The suitcase, the photos, the polite questions, and everything else they did, smelled like preparations for a public trial. Were you ill-treated? No. Were you tortured? No. Were you properly fed? Yes. Were you given a comfortable room? Yes. Were these answers given freely and without coercion? That’s the sort of dialogue I smelled in the air, and I didn’t like the prospect one bit.

My third-floor window looked down upon a small inner yard. Beyond it there was the main courtyard, where the morning and evening parade took place. My room wasn’t a cell. They weren’t giving me the thumbscrews, rack and electric shocks treatment. They didn’t take away my watch and seal off the daylight to disorient me, or try any of the textbook tricks like that. The only torture I suffered was when Reynolds blew cigarette smoke in my face, and that was more because it reminded me of the pleasures of smoking than because I was overcome by the toxic fumes.

The room they’d given me high up in the tower also smelled of ancient tobacco smoke. It smelled of mould and misery too. Its thick masonry was cold like ice, whitewashed and glistening with condensation. On the wall a plastic crucifix was nailed and on the bed there were clean sheets; frayed, patched, hard, grey and wrinkled. A small wooden table had one leg wedged with a wad of toilet paper. On the table half a dozen sheets of notepaper and two pencils had been arranged as if inviting a confession. Fixed to the wall above the table there was a shelf holding a dozen paperbacks; Polish best-sellers, some German classics, and ancient and well-read Tauchnitz editions in English: Thomas Hardy and A. E. W. Mason. I suppose Reynolds was hoping to catch me reading one of the books in English, but he never did. It took too long to get the massive lock turned, and I always heard him coming.

There was a water radiator too: it groaned and rattled a lot, but it never became warmer than blood heat, so I kept a blanket around my shoulders. A great deal of my time was spent staring out of the window.

My small inner yard was cobbled, and in the corner by the well lay a bronze statue. The statue had been cut from its pediment by a torch which had melted its lower legs to prong-like petals. Face down, this prone warrior waved a cutlass in one final despairing gesture. I never discovered the identity of this twice-fallen trooper, but he was clearly considered of enough political significance to make his outdoor display a danger to public order. While only a small section of the main yard was exposed to my view, I could see the rear of the officers’ mess where half a dozen fidgety horses were unceasingly groomed and exercised. Early each morning, fresh from a canter, they were paraded around the yard, snorting and steamy. Once, late at night, I saw two drunken subalterns exchanging blows out there. Thus the limited view of the yard and the exposed secrets of the officers’ mess was like that provided by the cheap fauteuil seats, high up in a theatre balcony, the obstructed view of the stage made up for by the chance to see the backstage activity behind the wings. I saw the padre preparing for Mass in the half-light of early morning. I saw two men plucking countless chickens so that the feathers blew around like smoke, and during meal-times the mess servants would sometimes emerge for a moment to covertly upend a bottle of wine.

The bigger yard was equally active. For most of the daylight hours it was filled with young soldiers who jumped and ran and reached high in the air at the commands of two physical-training instructors. The trainees were dressed in khaki singlets and shorts, and they moved furiously to keep warm in the freezing air. The instructors ran past my line of vision, shadow-boxing as if unable to contain their limitless energy. When in the afternoon the final company of men had completed their physical training, the sun would come out of hiding. Its cruel light showed up the dust and cobwebs on the window glass. It set the forest ablaze and edged the battlements with golden light, leaving the courtyard in cold blue shadow, luminous and shimmering as if it was filled to the brim with clear water.

My room was no less comfortable than those assigned to the junior officers who shared the same landing with me. Often, when I was on my way to the washroom and toilet, or when Reynolds was taking me downstairs to his office, I caught sight of smartly uniformed subalterns. They looked at me with undisguised curiosity. Later I discovered that a security company used part of the ‘citadel’ for training courses, and the officers had been selected for politically sensitive duties supervising municipal authorities. For Poland was a land governed by its soldiers.

I was punched and slapped a few times. Never by Reynolds. Never when Reynolds was present. It happened after he became exasperated by my smartass answers. He would puff at his cheroot, sigh and leave the office for ten minutes or so. One or other of the guards would give me a couple of blows as if on his own account. I never discovered if it was done on Reynolds’s orders, or even with his knowledge. Reynolds was not vicious. He was not a serious interrogator, which was probably why he’d been assigned to this military backwater. He wasn’t expecting me to reveal any secrets that would raise questions in Warsaw, or even raise eyebrows there. Reynolds was content to do his job. He asked me the same questions every day; changing the order and the syntax from time to time but not waiting too long for a reply. Usually the final part of the day’s session would consist of Reynolds telling me about his sister Hania and his lazy good-for-nothing brother-in-law, and the wholesale delicatessen business they owned in Detroit.

On Friday afternoon the wind dropped and the trees were unnaturally still. From under low grey cloud the sun’s long slanting rays hit the battlements. A sentry stepped forward and stood fully in the light to capture the meagre warmth. Watching him I noticed a flickering in the air. Tiny golden pin-pricks, like motes of dust caught in a cathedral interior. Snowflakes: the winter had returned. As if in celebration, from one of the rooms along the corridor Tauber burst into a scratchy tenor rendering of ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’. He sounded terribly old.

By morning the snow was no longer made of gold. It had spread a white sheet across the land, and my bronze warrior was dusted with it. It didn’t stop. By Saturday evening the snow covered everything. I heard the grinding sounds of the trucks that brought sentries back from guard duty at the nearby radar station. They came in low gear, their engines growling and their wheels intermittently spinning on the treacherously smooth section of roadway that was the approach to the main gate. The snow had blown across my yard, to form deep drifts along the wall, and the bronze warrior was entombed in it. I opened the window and put my head out into the stinging cold. The world was unnaturally hushed with that silence that such snow always brings. Then I heard shouting and saw an agitated sentry aiming his gun at me. I pulled my head in and closed the window. Happy to see such a quick response he waved his gun and laughed so that his happiness condensed on the cold air.

On Wednesday night, after five days in custody, a soldier came for me in the middle of the night. I recognized him as one of the PT instructors. He was a wiry fellow with the inscrutable face that seems to go with gymnasts, as if prolonged exercise encourages the contemplative condition. He led me down the back stairs and through a part of the building I’d not seen before. We passed through the muggy kitchens and a succession of storerooms that had once been cellars. Finally he indicated that I should precede him.

As I bent my head under the low doorway, he hit me in the small of the back. He followed that with another punch that found the kidneys and sent a jolt of pain though my body from heel to head. It was like an electric shock and my mind blanked out as I contended with the intense pain. I fell like a tree.

It was dark, but there was another man in the darkness. He came from the shadows and caught me, giving me a couple of hard jabs in the belly that brought my supper up into my mouth. I tucked my head down and tried to cover myself from their blows but they weren’t deterred, nor inconvenienced. These two were experts. They worked on me systematically as if I was a side of beef being readied for the stewpot. After a few minutes one of them was taking my whole weight, holding me up to be punched. When he let go of me I crashed to the stone floor only half-conscious. I couldn’t think straight. Every part of my body was singing with pain. Under me I could feel coarse matting, and, reaching beyond its edge, smooth pavement. I moved enough to press my face against the cold stone. I vomited and tasted blood in my mouth.

The two men stood over me watching; I could see a glint of light, and their shoes. Then they went away, satisfied no doubt with the job they’d done. I heard their footsteps fade but I didn’t try to get up. I pressed my head against a bag of onions. At the bottom of the sack, rotten onions had fermented to become a foul-smelling liquid that oozed through the sacking. I blacked out and then came conscious several times. Despite the stench I remained there full-length for a long time before very very slowly rolling and snaking across the floor, slowly getting my back against the wall and inch by inch sitting up. No bones were broken; no bruises or permanent marks on my face. Theirs was not a spontaneous act of brutality or spite. They had been assigned to hurt me, but not permanently cripple me, and they’d done their job nicely. No hard feelings, chaps, it’s all in a day’s work for a soldier serving in a land ruled by generals. Lucky me that they hadn’t been told to tear me limb from limb, for I’m confident they would have done it with the same inscrutable proficiency. Having decided that, I lost consciousness again.

Someone must have carried me up to the room in the tower. I don’t remember anything of it but I certainly didn’t get there unassisted. But why, after a week of Mister Nice-guy, suddenly take me out of my bed and beat the daylights out of me without interrogation or promises? There was only one explanation and it slowly became clear to me. Some higher authority had ordered my release. This was Mr Reynolds’s tacit way of protesting that decision, and saying farewell to me.

Higher authority was satisfied, I suppose. The generals in Warsaw were not trying to provoke World War Three. They just wanted to show their opposite numbers in London that they didn’t like nosy strangers coming into their territory and doing the sort of things I’d done last Christmas at Rastenburg. They didn’t want me demonstrating short-take-off-and-landing aircraft after dark, and kidnapping useful Polish spies. They didn’t like me torching shiny new government-owned Volvo motor-cars which were in short supply in Poland in 1987. And they didn’t like the way I’d shot and wounded Polish security men who, having failed to stop me, had made sure that arrest-and-detain notices were posted throughout the land.

Well, that was my mistake; I should have killed the bastards.