I must have fallen into a deep sleep. I was woken by my door being unbolted, by shouts and the entry of two guards (not those of the day before) into my cell. I suffered the exquisite pain of believing for a moment I was not where in fact I was. The guards pulled me on to my feet and I was shoved along the corridor. I thought to myself: the moment has come. But I also considered: better for it to happen like this, suddenly and even after having slept than to sit and wait for it. My body was stiff and ached cruelly. We took the same route, in reverse, as the day before: along the corridor, where now, with my eyes uncovered, I noticed, on either side, other doors, doubtless to cells like my own; up the stone steps, and through the outer door, on the other side of which a guard was posted. Here, for the first time, daylight, subdued and indirect though it was, stabbed my eyes. I was marched round a corner to the left and then, not left again, which would have accorded with my route of entry the day before, but right — and face to face, all at once, with a magical vision. We were in a narrow hallway, painted in delicate duck-egg blue, with gilt cornices and hung with two or three gilt-framed pictures. At the end of this hallway — about eight yards ahead — was a tall, stately, deep-casemented window opening on to a view of a classical French garden bathed in the light of a September dawn: terraces, urns, statuary, long ornamental ponds between lawns silvered with dew; a low sun looming over misty trees. As unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude.
We walked towards this mirage, the sun streaming through the glass on to our faces, and I had a brief, preposterous notion that I was going to be flung into it. But I was jerked abruptly to the right, round a corner. During the second or two in which we passed the window I had rime to notice that the ground sloped away quite steeply from the back of the Château, that the window was several feet above ground level and that below it was a long, balustraded terrace which at least one sentry was patrolling.
We climbed up two flights of grand, carved stairs and emerged on to a landing in front of an ornate double door behind which, I instinctively knew, were my interrogators. An officer, whom I recognized as the dark-haired, fat-cheeked officer present at my capture, was lounging on the landing, his black tunic unbuttoned, a coffee cup in his hand. He looked at me with distaste and motioned to one of the guards. I was taken along a side corridor and ushered, almost considerately, into a cubicle containing a large marble wash basin, a mirror and a lavatory. In the mirror I became aware of the filth — dust and dried blood — that had collected on my face. The sentry removed my handcuffs. ‘Waschen Sie sich.’
Marian is finishing watering her plants. She straightens up and rubs a palm on her hip. She does not know I am looking at her. She is a creature undergoing scientific scrutiny: her sandy hair, slightly hunched shoulders, her slim, almost too slim body, her exposed midriff. She turns and catches my clinical stare. A bewildered look crosses her face. I return my eyes to the book and do not look up again until she speaks. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she says, as if I’ve implied she’s unclean.
After I had washed (it seemed my handcuffs were not going to be replaced), the guard jostled me back towards the double doors, which had been partly opened. The second guard was standing on the landing. He jerked his head as a sign to his companion, who shoved me through the doors and pulled them shut behind me.
Here description must be blurred. Not through any weakness of recollection, but because events themselves at the time were blurred. The first step towards breaking the resistance of a spy is to confuse and disorientate him, and deprivation, isolation, hunger, sleeplessness, as well as the spy’s own ignorance of the next move of his captors, normally achieve this — even before other methods are employed. The room into which I was pushed was large, thick-carpeted, with a marble fire-place set in one wall, and the wooden scrollwork and gilt which characterized the corridors and staircase. Another door, in one corner, led off it. Blinds were drawn over the windows and although light filtered in, electric lights, set in chandeliers, were switched on. Before me was a large, leather-topped desk, strewn with papers, and behind it, sitting in heavily upholstered chairs, were the fat-cheeked officer and a second officer, in the uniform of an SS colonel, with neat grey hair and a long, delicate, almost scholarly face, like that of some amiable civil servant. Up to now my journey up from the cell had had a strangely reassuring quality, as if nothing worse were going to happen to me than happens to some refractory schoolboy. But I noticed that on the small wooden chair in which, if I was lucky, I would be told to sit, there were dark stains of blood, and the chair itself was placed on a large piece of canvas material, over the carpet, on which there were more obvious stains of blood, and, if my nostrils did not deceive me, urine.…
‘Do you want one?’
‘What?’
‘A bath.’
‘Why?’
‘I mean, do you mind if I take all the hot water?’
‘No, no.…’
She stands in the doorway, like some subordinate, waiting to be told she is dismissed.
… I was to sit in that chair, on that piece of filthy canvas, many times in the ensuing few days. How many times exactly, I could not say, nor for what duration, nor with what intervals in between; nor, were it not for certain regular daily procedures, could I have said at the time that what was involved was merely a matter of days, not weeks, months — an epoch. My recollection compresses into a series of dream-like, constantly recurring impressions: the darkness and silence of the cell punctuated (as you sank into exhaustion) by the tramping of boots, lights, shouts, the rasping of locks and bolts and the slam of doors; the journey, on which your own legs could scarcely convey you, along the passage-way, up the steps, along the upper corridor, past that incredible window, which every time became more and more like an illusion; the staircase, the double doors, the guard shoving you into the cubicle, and that persistent command: ‘Waschen Sie sich’. Perhaps there is much about my days at the Château which I simply do not remember. They say that you only recall what is pleasant. Or perhaps the truth is that certain things defy retelling.
When grey-hair and fat-cheeks had finished with me that first time, I was taken back down not, at first, to my cell, but to the room at the end of the cell corridor where the podgy German with the truncheon officiated. I was detained here for perhaps an hour.
What was it like, Dad? What was it really like?
Dumped back in my cell, I was roused again, almost immediately, this time by a general activity in the corridor. What was about to take place was a regular event which occurred every morning; for the first time I was to see some of my fellow captives. In the corridor the cell doors were being opened and the prisoners were automatically forming a single file. I counted seven, excluding myself. Some of them were hardly able to stand. The doors to the cells either side of my own were unopened. I assumed from this and my previous unanswered tapping that they were unoccupied. Each of the prisoners in the corridor held a battered metal can — obviously provided for his needs of nature. I had none myself, but one was to be ‘issued’ to me during the proceedings that followed.