Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
start thudding and the light slapping of water against the side tells them that they are once more on their way to the main channel. But now, it will never be the same again. Fear of death is lodged in the very walls and every bump against the side of the barge awakens it as if the hull were covered with living skin and the regular beating of the engine were the sound of their own pulse, slowing down and speeding up and slowing again as they make their way through the swift waters. When the hatch was opened again, twenty-four hours had passed and the convoy had pulled up at Stein. All he grasped was the place name that was passed on in whispers from one boy’s parched lips to the next. The engine noise died down and Miss Santer’s windswept hair could be glimpsed through the hatch against a fragment of clear blue sky. They were allowed out of the hold for the first time in two days and nights. All three boats had pulled up along the quayside and he was able to confirm, with eyes that stung and ached in bright sunlight, that his guess had been right and that his barge was the first of the two. The tugboat swayed on its anchor just ahead of them, swinging to and fro in the silvery, glittering light reflected off the waves. In the dancing light, he saw Mr Rache talking to a sturdily built, shortish man who was probably the tugboat captain. Along the quayside, special police in field-grey uniforms stood at the ready, their rifles pointing towards the barges. They weren’t taking risks even though none of the prisoners could reasonably be in any shape to resist. They stood clustered together on deck in their stinking clothes. Mr Rache exchanged a few words with one of the guards and then picked half a dozen boys to help with carrying water and provisions from the prison. Around Adrian, several of the boys said they’d soon be joined by more prisoners. Stein was one of the largest prisons in the country and where would the inmates go from there? But when Rache returned a few hours later, he was still
escorted by the policemen, who didn’t bring any more prisoners with them. The boys who served as porters were hauling a cart loaded with large drums of water. Food was handed out: sausages smelling strongly of acetic acid preservative, and
Schwarzbrot
, the black rye bread. Everyone had to queue to fill the water flasks they had been given in Wien. For a while he stood close to Mr Rache, looked into his face and could have asked him where they were going and how long it might take, but their ferryman’s face was reduced to a mask of contracted muscles and blank eyes. Then, the dull thud of the tugboat engines started up, the exhaust fumes drifted across the water and they were ordered to go below. At least for a while, it seemed possible to travel in mid-stream. Despite the oven-like heat, the crowded, unwashed bodies and the increasingly evil stench from the latrine bucket, he managed to sleep a little, with his head pressed against the familiar bulkhead plate. Soon, though, he woke to the sound of running feet on deck (like blows with a club just above his head) and shouting voices that seemed to be answered from somewhere on land. They pulled in to the bank again. The hatch was opened. Outside, night had come. Miss Santer’s face flitted past but there was already a fight brewing at the open hatch. People were struggling blindly to get up on deck and at least steal a quick look at what was going on. He managed to get out by supporting himself on the shoulders of some boys who were squashed too tightly together to move and saw, as if in a nightmare, the fortress-like building of the hospital at Ybbs come drifting towards him out of the dark. The past, in this majestic shape, had returned to attack him. A heated discussion was going on between Mr Rache and the solid little captain, who absolutely wanted the prisoners to stay in the hold. They compromised in the end. The prisoners were allowed on deck, but only so long as they stayed completely still. The cold up there felt
biting and almost unreal in contrast to the hot, repulsive air below. He sat with his arms around his pulled-up knees, watching the long hospital buildings with their sheds and walls emerge through the hazy dark. Not a single light was visible in the main block, as if the whole place had been evacuated. But the hospital staff must have come from somewhere because here they were, their small torches gleaming like fireflies in the dark. In that ghostly, wavering light, he saw two boys carried off the other barge and stretchered up towards the huge, dead-looking hospital. Some of the prisoners were handed torches as well, but then the guards turned up and waved with their rifles to make them go back below. The hatches were screwed on again and, as the boats chugged back out into the river channel, something inside his belly turned over like a large animal and he had to shout out that he needed the latrine. A light flickered between the bodies and, from the uncertain shadows, a hand reached out to support him and usher him to the bucket. It was upright but had fallen over so many times it was surrounded by a grim pool of urine and faeces. The wavering torchlight picked out a boy squatting with his naked feet in the filth, his hands gripping his stomach with an expression of unfathomable suffering on his face. Adrian pulled his pants down, straddled the bucket and emptied his entire gut in one massive, disgusting rush. There was of course nothing you could wipe yourself with. Exhausted and still nauseous, he made his way back to his place by the bulkhead and lay there, probing the nuts in the plate, scratching the paint with his nails and trying to calculate the distance between Ybbs and Linz. So, if their speed was fifteen knots, how long before they arrived? If one included a factor for the speed of the current going the other way? He tried to hold the numbers in his head but couldn’t even visualise the outlines of the figures. He fell asleep. Or thought he slept. But he was woken over and over by
the same noise, a fearful coughing of the engines that then went back to quiet regularity. Twice, it was a false alarm. The third time, it was for real and panic had already broken out in the hold. He heard one boy screaming exactly like an animal, in long, stuttering howls. At the same time, someone tugged at his arm and a voice very close by was saying
please, please, help me
. The torchlight searched and then picked out the boy he had seen squatting by the latrine. A length of gut dangled between his legs. He stood and held that thing in his hand, trying to push it back in but fell over when the barge suddenly jumped against the waves. When the light found the boy again, he was lying on his side, curled up and with the loop of gut still hanging out. His face was a pale mask. Someone shouted from further along,
help help!
and hammered with what looked like a broom handle against the middle hatch cover. The hatches stayed shut. They heard the engines cough, then fall silent. The only sound was the splashing of water against the hull. The convoy had moved to the bank again. Fast footsteps passed above them.
Open up!
Open up!
It was the same voice as before and the boy thumped at the hatch cover again. There was a violent crash and the entire barge made the same heart-stopping dive as before. It was followed by a long series of massive explosions that made the barge pitch this way and that, up and down in an insane dipping movement that slowed and then quickened again after the next wave of bombs. Across the racket he still heard the stubborn plead
please, help me
, but it was becoming fainter and more monotonous. Everyone hung on to what was closest at hand, a piece of rope, an iron stanchion. In the dark, Adrian could hardly distinguish his own body from all the others that were lying near or partly on top of him. He felt others slipping or crawling on him, their feet or sharp elbows pushing into him as they tried to get up. Everything was becoming less distinct now, as if all the bodies in the
hold were fusing into a single being. He was sinking deeper into foggy togetherness, ever more deeply as the shouting and movements died down and when he next opened his eyes, everything around him was quiet. At first, he thought he was dreaming. Not a sound from anywhere. No slow, empty engine sounds, no creaking plates below him, no trickling of the wake flowing along the hull. When he raised his head to look out over the dark sea of bodies around him, no one was moving. Then the hatch just above him opened. A shadow fell into the hold, sharply outlined by the light from above. Someone called something. He turned. In the slanting light he saw a hand lying, palm upwards, with its fingers lightly curled. The hand seemed to be cut off at first but then he realised that it was attached to an arm which was a single, large, bleeding wound. The blood had flowed and clotted in the pool that reached all the way to a head. It was Jockerl’s head, the same mask-like bloodied face, the same staring, rolled-up whites of his eyes, the same pale porcelain teeth.
Seems there are some dead’uns down there
, he heard one guard say to another in a sober, almost indifferent voice. Booted footsteps. Someone fetched a ladder. The two guards clambered down, guns rattling against their belts. Mr Rache followed their heavy uniformed bodies, pressing a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Above it, his eyes looked around, as pale and expressionless as before. Adrian sat stock-still next to the ladder, suddenly frightened that they would drag him away even though he wasn’t dead yet. The guards tramped about and turned bodies over with their rifle butts. Some boys crawled away like crabs, one (perhaps the same one) screamed in pain, some cried for help. The dead bodies were pulled along to the hatch and then up on deck. Because he was so close to the ladder he saw that one of the corpses had his guts hanging out. The boy’s body was stiff and lifeless but his naked feet
with small splayed toes seemed almost touchingly alive. The corpse was hauled up the ladder and he heard it being dragged across the deck to the railing and tipped overboard, making a dull splash followed by a short but intense wave motion that caused the barge to rock like a cradle. Then, another splash. And another. He counted four, then five bodies. Immediately afterwards, the tugboat engine started up again as if it had been waiting only for the barges to be rid of some of the ballast. The journey continued. He had no idea of how long it took or how far they travelled but when he emerged from his semi-comatose state, the engine had stopped, the hatch had been opened and the ladder was in place. This time there were doctors among the guards patrolling the hold. Real doctors in real white coats. Somehow, the hold seemed more spacious around them. Their voices resounded more strongly. Or perhaps he just imagined it. He heard one of the medics, an older man with a white moustache, ask Mr Rache where these youths were meant to be taken. Someone else raised his voice and said that they should be hospitalised, the lot of them. Simply not
transportfähig
, the first one said, or maybe it was the second one. To the remarks, Rache replied (his voice was sharper, more piercing than Adrian had expected): that’s none of your business. I’m just obeying orders. Anyway, they were all taken up on deck. The nurses helped those who couldn’t climb out on their own. They had reached Linz. The quayside was packed with Red Cross staff manning tables and primitive sickbays. They lined up for food, a bowl each of rice soup and a piece of bread. He wolfed it down without being aware that he ate. They stayed there for a little more than a day and a night. Adrian watched as the crew loaded water and provisions. When they set out again, all the hatches were left open and groups of them were allowed on deck. Miss Santer was standing aft, watching the swilling water as the tugboat ploughed along. She
was wearing the same dress and sandals as before but had put her hair up. The sky was overcast. They seemed to be pushing on into some alien, threatening part of the world, and the landscape reinforced the feeling of menace as it rose taller and closed in on them. By the end of that day, the mountain ridges were obscuring the sunlight and they travelled among darkening rock faces. The only sounds came from the engine, strangely harsh and choppy inside its own echo, from the water that splashed and rushed along the hull, and from the birds that rose above the racket and swept past under the dark grey sky in a lacework of white wings suddenly flung out into the gathering night. This is all he remembers. The next day, they chug past Passau and arrive in Germany. Here, or perhaps at some other stop, the medical people must have come on board again, because the ladders are back, lifeless bodies are hauled up, dragged across the deck and heaved overboard. By this stage, he is long past caring. Exhaustion has invaded his body and his mind feels as clear as water and utterly empty. Thinking is no longer possible. All he does is sit and finger the two nuts, following the crack that his nails have worked into the layer of paint. Except, by now, the crack has deepened into a cut. Then, one day (the seventh day? Or the ninth? Or the eleventh? He lost count long ago) they arrive at Regensburg. An officer materialises in front of him and yells at him to stand up. He smiles stupidly and leans against the bulkhead to steady himself. But however hard he tries, his feet seem to slip and his knees fold under him as if made of rubber. The man grabs him under the armpits and, with the help of someone on deck, he is dragged up through the hatch. On the quayside, Mr Rache stands around puffing on a cigarette as if totally unconcerned about the macabre load that is hauled or led out of the barges. Miss Santer is perched on a bollard further along, busy fixing her make-up. The reflexes from her pocket mirror dance on the oily
harbour water. When she has put her mirror away and clicked her handbag shut, her lips are as red as his mother’s once were. They are taken to the local state prison, though that was something he learnt much later. From that morning, all he remembers is a large, white-limed building with several wings, which towered over the railway station opposite. Inside it, he struggled to get up the steps in the large, dim stairwells. He remembers iron doors that opened and then closed behind them, the echoes of yelling voices through seemingly endless corridors and the large cells they were shoved into, twenty or thirty at a time. While he slept that night, he seemed still to be travelling on the river, as if the hard floor beneath him was rocking and swinging up and down. But it actually had. When he woke up next time, it was still night. Now, the floor shook and trembled, and his mouth was full of grit. Someone (he didn’t know who) tried to pull him closer to the wall but it was shaking, too. Then, finally he realised that they were in the middle of an Allied bombing raid. Getting out was not worth thinking about. He looked out through the barred window and saw that station building on the other side of the square was burning. The freight train pulled up on the tracks further away was on fire, too, and inside the tall flames one could make out the dark outlines of the trucks. Black smoke was rising towards a spookily rust-coloured sky. His first thought was that the prison was on fire as well and they would burn to death locked up in it. But the cell door stood open. In the corridor outside, a cloud of stone dust welled forward like a gigantic, grey tongue. Soon, their cell was also filled to bursting point with dust that hurt your eyes and scorched your lungs. In the end, the air became unbreathable and they all sat with their heads between their legs, waiting for the floor to open under them like a trapdoor. Finally, the building stopped shaking. But the terrible clamour did not cease: the air-raid sirens