A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online

earnest figure as she leaned across the map, the light catching the red ribbon in her hair.
    She smiled and said in English: ‘So you are prepared to fight?’
    ‘We are,’ said Trembath.
    A door that led further into the house swung open quietly. Two German soldiers stood with rifles raised, pointing them at the Englishmen, one at each.
    Giselle sat down heavily and lowered her face into her hands.
    ‘
Je suis désolée
,’ she said. ‘
J’étais prise. Le mois de juillet. Ils m’ont torturée
.’
    Geoffrey could not speak. He wanted to translate for Trembath in case he hadn’t understood, but the outcome of it all was clear enough.
    The two of them stood with their hands above their heads and were pushed at gunpoint down a passageway towards the middle of the house. Though he could hear Giselle sobbing, Geoffrey did not look back.
    For a day they were held in a police cell in the local town; then, with other undesirables, they were put on a transport to Bavaria, where they spent a week in a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp. The conditions were tolerable, they agreed, and Geoffrey persuaded Trembath to do nothing rash in his desire to escape. Then one night the pair of them were taken out of the camp in a lorry and driven to the local railway station, where they were put into a cattle truck. There were about thirty others in the wagon, most of them Russians. The train moved slowly eastwards, though no one knew where they were going. There was no water or food, though every few hours the doors were drawn back and they were allowed out to relieve themselves while armed guards looked on.
    It was about three in the morning when they were finally told to disembark. They were at a railhead with a long platform and what looked like a normal waiting room with flowers in wooden tubs outside. A German soldier pulled along by a dog on a chain told them to strip naked; he was not the lazy infantryman one might have expected to volunteer for prison guard, but, Geoffrey recognised from his enemy identification course in Brockenhurst, an SS officer. Other guards emerged from the darkness and shouted at them to hurry. Some of the men, exhausted and bewildered by the journey, were slow to remove their clothes, and Geoffrey saw one beaten with a rifle butt and another with a whip. The SS men drove them into a building at the end of the platform where they had their heads shaved by unspeaking men in striped uniforms. Still naked, they were told to dip their heads in a bucket of green liquid. Only the guards spoke, keeping up a continual hectoring: ‘
Schnell! Schnell!
’ Hurry, faster, quicker. It was not the usual fear of rank that made the Germans so frantic, Geoffrey thought; there was no hidden superior they were trying to impress. It was something else. He caught Trembath’s eye, but neither spoke.
    They gave their names and nationality to a clerk who sat by the door. Geoffrey hesitated for a moment before deciding on his own name rather than that of Pierre Lambert; it would help the Red Cross to trace him. In the next building they were given striped uniforms and wooden clogs of their own, then herded at gunpoint down a path and into a brick block with the letter D chiselled into the stone lintel. Inside were rows of wooden bunks from floor to ceiling, designed perhaps for one person but holding two, three or even four men. There was a drainage channel down the centre and an ablutions room at the far end. A prisoner who appeared to be in charge pushed them to the end of the block, shouting orders at them in Polish. They climbed into a wooden bunk near the door, Trembath’s bulk causing the man already in it to lie tight against the side. It was too dark to see this man’s face, though they were aware of him scratching himself through the cold, uncomfortable night. None of the others showed any interest in the new arrivals; they had clearly seen many people come and go.
    Geoffrey closed his eyes, his body against Trembath’s.