the grim-looking castle in Mazury. Without anything much being said they locked me in a room there. It was not a bad room; I had endured worse accommodation in Polish hotels. The worrying thing was our proximity to Rastenburg, where I’d recently shot some Polish UB men and not gone back to feel their pulse. Thinking about that made it a long time before I went to sleep.
The man who liked to be called Reynolds was apparently in charge of me. He came to see me next morning and directly accused me of killing two security officials while evading arrest. Reynolds talked a lot, and continued talking even when I did not respond. He told me I would be held and tried here in the military district headquarters. In the course of the investigation, and subsequent court martial, the army witnesses, prosecutors and judges would go and visit the place where my crime took place. He didn’t mention anything about a defence counsel.
The second day was Wednesday. He questioned me all the morning and into the afternoon, and accused me of not taking the charges seriously. I didn’t admit to any of it. I said I was German but he didn’t believe me.
‘You think your government is now strenuously applying for your release through diplomatic channels, do you not?’
I looked at him and smiled. He didn’t know much about my government, or its diplomatic service, or he would have known that having them do anything strenuously was far beyond reasonable expectations.
‘You’ve nothing to smile about,’ said Reynolds, banging his flattened hand upon a dossier lying on the table.
How right he was. ‘I demand to see the consul from the embassy of the German Federal Republic,’ I said.
I’d made the same demand many times, but on this occasion he became angry and rammed his cheroot down hard so that it split apart in the ashtray. ‘Will you stop repeating that stupid cover story?’ There was real anger in his voice. ‘We know who you are. The Germans have never heard of you.’ Perhaps it was because he’d missed lunch.
They had me in a rambling old fortress that Reynolds called the citadel. It was the sort of fairy castle that Walt Disney would have built on a mountain-top, but this was a region of lakes and marshland and the prominence upon which the castle stood was no more than a hillock.
The buildings that made up the complex provided a compendium of fortification history: twelfth-century dungeons, a keep almost as old, and a seventeenth-century tower. There were three cobbled yards, the one beneath my window crowded with ramshackle wooden huts and other structures that the German army had added when it became a regional school of military hygiene during the Second World War. The walls were thick and castellated, with a forbidding entrance gate that had once housed a drawbridge. The top of the walls provided a path along which armed sentries patrolled as they had no doubt done for centuries. To what extent the poor wretches slapping themselves to keep warm were there because the army thrives on sentry duty and guard changes, or to warn of approaching danger, was hard to decide. But in this eastern frontier region at that time, the prospect of a Soviet invasion was never far from anyone’s mind. Some Moscow hard-liners were proclaiming that the Poles had gone too far with their reforms, and the only way to maintain communist power throughout the Eastern Bloc was by a brotherly show of Soviet military repression.
Whether they were reformers, communists or khaki-clad philanthropists, the military government in Warsaw wouldn’t welcome Soviet spearhead armour lunging across the border. Perhaps that was why this enlarged battalion of Polish infantry was garrisoned here, and why their day began at five-thirty with a flag-hoisting ceremony, accompanied by a drummer and that sort of discordant trumpeting that drives men into battle. And why the congregation that lined up at the subsequent Holy Mass was in full battle-order.
They had brought my suitcase off the train. In my presence they’d unlocked it and searched through its contents and photographed selected items. Now the case was open and placed on a low table in my room. They found nothing incriminating, but I didn’t like this development. The suitcase, the photos, the polite questions, and everything else they did, smelled like preparations for a public trial. Were you ill-treated? No. Were you tortured? No. Were you properly fed? Yes. Were you given a comfortable room? Yes. Were these answers given freely and without coercion? That’s the sort of dialogue I smelled in the air, and I didn’t like the prospect one bit.
My third-floor window looked down upon a small inner yard. Beyond it there was the main courtyard, where the morning and evening parade took place. My room wasn’t a cell. They weren’t giving me the thumbscrews, rack and electric shocks treatment. They didn’t take away my watch and seal off the daylight to disorient me, or try any of the textbook tricks like that. The only torture I suffered was when Reynolds blew cigarette smoke in my face, and that was more because it reminded me of the pleasures of smoking than because I was overcome by the toxic fumes.
The room they’d given me high up in the tower also smelled of ancient tobacco smoke. It smelled of mould and misery too. Its thick masonry was cold like ice, whitewashed and glistening with condensation. On the wall a plastic crucifix was nailed and on the bed there were clean sheets; frayed, patched, hard, grey and wrinkled. A small wooden table had one leg wedged with a wad of toilet paper. On the table half a dozen sheets of notepaper and two pencils had been arranged as if inviting a confession. Fixed to the wall above the table there was a shelf holding a dozen paperbacks; Polish best-sellers, some German classics, and ancient and well-read Tauchnitz editions in English: Thomas Hardy and A. E. W. Mason. I suppose Reynolds was hoping to catch me reading one of the books in English, but he never did. It took too long to get the massive lock turned, and I always heard him coming.
There was a water radiator too: it groaned and rattled a lot, but it never became warmer than blood heat, so I kept a blanket around my shoulders. A great deal of my time was spent staring out of the window.
My small inner yard was cobbled, and in the corner by the well lay a bronze statue. The statue had been cut from its pediment by a torch which had melted its lower legs to prong-like petals. Face down, this prone warrior waved a cutlass in one final despairing gesture. I never discovered the identity of this twice-fallen trooper, but he was clearly considered of enough political significance to make his outdoor display a danger to public order. While only a small section of the main yard was exposed to my view, I could see the rear of the officers’ mess where half a dozen fidgety horses were unceasingly groomed and exercised. Early each morning, fresh from a canter, they were paraded around the yard, snorting and steamy. Once, late at night, I saw two drunken subalterns exchanging blows out there. Thus the limited view of the yard and the exposed secrets of the officers’ mess was like that provided by the cheap fauteuil seats, high up in a theatre balcony, the obstructed view of the stage made up for by the chance to see the backstage activity behind the wings. I saw the padre preparing for Mass in the half-light of early morning. I saw two men plucking countless chickens so that the feathers blew around like smoke, and during meal-times the mess servants would sometimes emerge for a moment to covertly upend a bottle of wine.
The bigger yard was equally active. For most of the daylight hours it was filled with young soldiers who jumped and ran and reached high in the air at the commands of two physical-training instructors. The trainees were dressed in khaki singlets and shorts, and they moved furiously to keep warm in the freezing air. The instructors ran past my line of vision, shadow-boxing as if unable to contain their limitless energy. When in the afternoon the final company of men had completed their physical training, the sun would come out of hiding. Its cruel light showed up the dust and cobwebs on the window glass. It set the forest ablaze and edged the battlements with golden light, leaving the courtyard in cold blue shadow, luminous and shimmering as if it was filled to the brim with clear water.
My room was no less comfortable than those assigned to the junior officers who shared the same landing with me. Often, when I was on my way to the washroom and toilet, or when Reynolds was taking me downstairs to his office, I caught sight of smartly uniformed
