Christian pushed through the knot of men near the dead Volkssturm soldier. Carrying his weapon, he walked briskly down the road, back towards the advancing Americans. He did not dare go the other way deeper into Germany, because one of the men at the gate might have noticed it and challenged him.
Christian walked swiftly, limping a little, breathing deeply of the fresh spring air to get the smell of the camp from his nostrils. He was very tired, but he did not slacken his pace. When he was a safe distance away, out of sight of the camp, he turned off the road. He made a wide swing across the fields and circled the camp safely. Coming through the budding woods, with the smell of pine in his nostrils and the small forest flowers pink and purple underfoot, he saw the road, empty and sun-freckled, ahead of him. But he was too tired to go any farther at the moment. He took off the chlorine-and-sweat-smelling garments of the trusty, rolled them into a bundle and threw them under a bush. Then he lay down, using a root as a pillow. The new grass, spearing through the forest floor around him, smelt fresh and green. In the boughs above his head two birds sang to each other, making a small blue-and-gold flicker as they darted among the shaking branches in and out of the sunlight. Christian sighed, stretched and fell asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE men in the trucks fell quiet as they drove up to the open gates. The smell, by itself, would have been enough to make them silent, but there was also the sight of the dead bodies sprawled at the gate and behind the wire, and the slowly moving mass of scarecrows in tattered striped suits who engulfed the trucks and Captain Green's jeep in a monstrous tide.
They did not make much noise. Many of them wept, many of them tried to smile, although the objective appearance of their skull-like faces and their staring, cavernous eyes did not alter very much, either in weeping or smiling. It was as though these creatures were too far sunk in a tragedy which had moved off the plane of human reaction on to an animal level of despair – and the comparatively sophisticated grimaces of welcome, sorrow and happiness were, for the time being, beyond their primitive reach. Michael could tell, staring at the rigid, dying masks, that a man here and there thought he was smiling, but it took an intuitive act of understanding.
They hardly tried to talk. They merely touched things – the metal of the truck bodies, the uniforms of the soldiers, the barrels of the rifles – as though only by the shy investigation of their fingertips could they begin to gain knowledge of this new and dazzling reality.
Green ordered the trucks to be left where they were, with guards on them, and led the Company slowly through the hive-like cluster of released prisoners, into the camp.
Michael and Noah were just behind Green when he went through the doorway of the first barracks. The door had been torn off and most of the windows had been broken open, but even so the smell was beyond the tolerance of human nostrils. In the murky air, pierced ineffectually here and there by the dusty beams of spring sunshine, Michael could see the piled bony forms. The worst thing was that from some of the piles there was movement, a languidly waving arm, the slow lift of a pair of burning eyes in the stinking gloom, the pale twisting of lips on skulls that seemed to have met death many days before. In the depths of the building, a form detached itself from a pile of rags and bones and started a slow advance on hands and knees towards the door. Nearer, a man stood up, and moved, like a mechanical figure, crudely arranged for the process of walking, towards Green. Michael could see that the man believed he was smiling, and he had his hand outstretched in an absurdly commonplace gesture of greeting. The man never reached Green. He sank to the slime-covered floor, his hand still outstretched. When Michael bent over him he saw that the man had died.
The centre of the world, something repeated insanely and insistently in Michael's brain, as he kneeled above the man who had died with such ease and silence before their eyes. I am now at the centre of the world, the centre of the world.
The dead man, lying with outstretched hand, had been six feet tall. He was naked and every bone was clearly marked under the skin. He could not have weighed more than seventy-five pounds, and, because he was so lacking in the usual, broadening cover of flesh, he seemed enormously elongated, supernaturally tall and out of perspective.
There were some shots outside, and Michael and Noah followed Green out of the barracks. Thirty-two of the guards, who had barricaded themselves in a brick building which contained the ovens in which the Germans had burned prisoners, had given themselves up when they saw the Americans, and Crane had tried to shoot them. He had managed to wound two of the guards before Houlihan had torn his rifle away from him. One of the wounded guards was sitting on the ground, weeping, holding his stomach, and blood was coming in little spurts over his hands. He was enormously fat, with beer-rolls on the back of his neck, and he looked like a spoiled pink child sitting on the ground, complaining to his nurse.
Crane was standing with his arms clutched by two of his friends, breathing very hard, his eyes rolling crazily. When Green ordered the guards to be taken into the Administration Building for safekeeping, Crane lashed out with his feet and kicked the fat man he had shot. The fat man wept loudly. It took four men to carry the fat man into the Administration Building.
There was not much Green could do. But he set up his Headquarters in the Commandant's room of the Administration Building and issued a series of clear, simple orders, as though it was an everyday affair in the American Army for an infantry captain to arrive at the chaos of the centre of the world and set about putting it to rights. He sent his jeep back to request a medical team and a truck-load of ten-in-one rations. He had all the Company's food unloaded and stacked under guard in the Administration Building, with orders to dole it out only to the worst cases of starvation that were found and reported by the squads working through the barracks. He had the German guards segregated at the end of the hall outside his door, where they could not be harmed.
Michael, who, with Noah, was serving as a messenger for Green, heard one of the guards complaining, in good English, to Pfeiffer, who had them under his rifle, that it was terribly unjust, that they had just been on duty in this camp for a week, that they had never done any harm to the prisoners, that the men of the SS battalion who had been there for years and who had been responsible for all the torture and privation in the camp were going off scot-free, were probably in an American prison stockade at that moment, drinking orange juice. There was considerable justice in the poor Volkssturm guard's complaint, but Pfeiffer merely said, "Shut your trap before I put my boot in it."
The liberated prisoners had a working committee, which they had secretly chosen a week before, to govern the camp. Green called in the leader of the committee, a small, dry man of fifty, with a curious accent and a quite formal way of handling the English language. The man's name was Zoloom, and he had been in the Albanian Foreign Service before the war. He told Green he had been a prisoner for three and a half years. He was completely bald and had pebbly little dark eyes, set in a face that somehow was still plump. He had an air of authority and was quite helpful to Green in securing work parties among the healthier prisoners, to carry the dead from the barracks, and collect and classify the sick into dying, critical and out-of-danger categories. Only those people in the critical category, Green ordered, were to be fed from the small stocks of food that had been collected from the trucks and the almost empty storerooms of the camp. The dying were merely laid side by side along one of the streets, to extinguish themselves in peace, consoled finally by the sight of the sun and the fresh touch of the spring air.