Will said, ‘I’m not going anywhere until I have been shown the fish pond.’
‘Please wait.’ The man flapped his hand in the direction of a wooden chair then left the room.
Panic. The ants’ nest had been disturbed. Will sat and smiled to himself. The smile faded as he was kept waiting. Repeatedly, he checked his watch against the clock on the wall that filled the room with a chip-chip-chip sound. After fifteen minutes he decided he certainly would not stand for any French nonsense and called out, ‘I say!’ Nothing. He called out again and got up and smacked the desk with the flat of his hand. Noises behind the door and then the man appeared holding it open for someone who was evidently his superior, a slow, fat man with a face composed of heavy circles, dark orbits round his eyes, hanging cheeks, a drooping moustache.
‘Yes, you are here?’ he said.
‘Yes, I am here. I am here to see the fish pond.’
‘For any reason in particular?’
‘At this point,’ Will answered, ‘that is no concern of yours.’
‘Very well.’ The senior man shrugged.
‘What is your name?’ Will asked him.
‘Marchand. Look, I will show you but I don’t understand it can be interesting to you. It’s just the usual dirt.’
‘Nevertheless.’
‘Okay. Okay. You follow.’ Marchand hummed as he led Will out of the room, down a corridor and out into the courtyard. Behind them his junior scurried.
Will looked over the prisoners chained together. All of them Arabs, they weren’t saying anything. They looked at Will. Carefully, they did not look at the other two.
Marchand gestured and the junior bent down and inserted a key into a large manhole cover. The key turned, he pulled up a handle and dragged clear the heavy lid. Rolling up from the darkness below came a stench that made Will recoil.
‘What is it? A sewer? The usual dirt?’
Marchand looked at him with sorrow or contempt, it was hard to tell quite what that dark, slumped expression was. ‘It’s the fish pond,’ he said.
Will stepped forward, his hand over his face as his digestive tract bucked, returning the flavour of coffee to the back of his mouth. He looked down into the darkness. There were noises. Wounded by the sudden chute of light, cowering, streaked with filth, were naked Arab men, bearded, cringing. Slowly one stood up on weakened legs and turned his face upwards with closed eyes to breathe the fresh air.
16
This was the worst ever. It couldn’t get worse than this. The noise, emplaced guns, planes ripping over, guns, single shots, bursts, everything. From different heights. The ground surging up ahead, sinking away behind. Ray saw Randall fall just ahead of him. He ran over, crouching, holding his rifle in one hand. In the heavy fire Randall had gone down softly, crumpling into the foetal position. Randall’s eyes were shut. Both hands were closed around the barrel of his rifle the way a mouse holds onto the stem of grass with its little white hands in the picture on the cereal packet. There was a sore on his face but that was old, crusted dry around the edges. Ray yanked his arm. ‘Hey!’ He couldn’t see any blood. ‘Where are you hurt? Where are you hurt?’ Three yards to the right the ground stuttered with impacts. Ray could see Randall’s mouth saying quietly ‘What?’ then he sort of settled his lips together, swallowing. He pulled his rifle a little closer. He was sleeping. ‘Holy shit, Randall! Wake up!’ Ray slapped down hard onto Randall’s face. ‘Wake up! Wake the fuck up!’ He dragged his shoulder and got some movement out of him and then ran. Fire was coming in. He ran up around a corner of ground, tufted with growth. The path was a grease of trodden mud. He glanced behind. Randall was with him. A mortar thumped the place where they’d been.
They sheltered in a slit trench, someone else’s. Whoever had dug it was gone. Now Ray and three others were there. Above them was a bush charred black on one side. On the side closest to them it was green, its leaves dry and warped with heat. The earth of the trench was striped, layered, with stones in it and fine tangling yellow-white hairs of roots, the colour of under ground, of seeing no light, exposed now, like wiring ripped out of a wall. Once Ray had seen a building going up in his neighbourhood. The old one, condemned, had been pulled down in an enjoyably violent, almost festive demolition. He’d seen the new building constructed in stages, bricks and cavities, pipes, laths and plaster, toilets. It shocked him. He’d thought homes were as solidly consistent as prisms, definite places full of families, family odours, meals and arguments and objects. But they weren’t. They were fabricated out of layers of materials. They weren’t really anything. Artillery showed this to be true of the whole world. Life was a skin: it could be peeled away like strips of wallpaper with its coherent pattern. The soil wasn’t that deep. A shell gored it and there was rock beneath. Plants burned, uprooted. It could all be scraped off easily.
A curving arm up ahead. A voice calling. They had to get out and run. They were getting higher. This was good. They were getting up onto higher ground, safer ground. Where was George? Was he firing? Was he safe? There he was. They shivered, shouting to themselves. They ran.
17
All the cloud cover had blown away. The sky was empty. The planes seemed to race through it faster, towards the sun. The mountains were difficult now with light and shadow. Their eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough from one to the other. It was blind darkness or blazing saturation. Not that they wanted to move from where they were. They’d watched other men run past to be slapped onto their sides by a sniper across the valley. They were safe. They had cover. Alice bounced up and down on his bent legs. He said, ‘Nng. Nng God. Nah. Hmm.’ Below them down in the pass the fighting had gotten insane. All the American boys had to get through the same narrow throat of the mountain where Randall’s brain had given out and fallen asleep. The Germans had artillery positions now above it. The guns were pounding and pounding. Men were stuck there, among rocks, being mixed with the rocks. Stone bowl of his ma — what was it called? — a pestle. Garlic and salt in it. Smash. Her strong round dimpled hand on the stick thing. Smash. Molecules. The fragrance coming out.
Okay, fuck. That was something new now. A crater to their left from a new position throwing up a crown of dirt as it appeared. They couldn’t stay. George was fumbling at his fly. He was pissing himself and trying to get his penis out, spraying his hands and weapon before he could angle the stream clear.
‘We have to run! We have to run!’
‘What?’
‘Run!’
Ray held the brim of his helmet, stooped and ran. Rough ground rising and falling underfoot. Through wet matter, a soldier spread open, daubed across the rocks. Shit from everywhere, from overhead and the sides, the whole world lethal, folding over them and around, swallowing them. A bigger blast. Ray threw himself down. Film this. Take a camera and throw it. Put it on a rope and swing it. See everybody die. Another blast so close it hit him like a punch in the head and his whole body jumped an inch off the shuddering ground. He landed with grit of shattered earth burning him. Got up again and ran. His footsteps sounded strange. Strange that he could hear them, inside his body. His head was light, altered. He felt his face for blood. A high thin tone was ringing in his head. Beneath that there was a crackling, a sifting of something pulverised and shifting about. Voices, the explosions were quiet as though distant. There was blood on his cheek where stones had hit him. He found with his finger that there was blood in the hole of his right ear.