The sky was blue; pulverized brick danced in red columns in the air like dust devils. A line of people picked their way across our front, across the rubble and around the bomb craters. The civilian who led them was incongruously tall and thin. His legs moved with an angular deftness; like spider’s legs. He was a walking scarecrow with some sort of dark visor around his forehead and over his eyes, and a dirty tattered trench coat, bleached white by sun and age. It can’t have kept back an icy wind. The scarecrow carried a long wooden box around his neck on a heavy leather strap, and wound a handle on its side. It leaked the weird music I had heard. Partially sighted, I’d guess, he stumbled occasionally, but otherwise moved slowly and deliberately, almost as if he was feeling his way with his feet. The figure behind him had one hand on the musician’s shoulder, and the person behind him had a hand on his shoulder, and so on. They all had dark glasses, or patches or dirty bandages on their eyes. Except one close to the tail. He had two old healed pits where eyes once rested. What it reminded me of was photographs I had seen of gas-blinded soldiers in the First World War. James was looking far further back than that. I squatted down alongside him, adjusting my balance for the child’s weight on my shoulder.
‘What’s the matter, James? What is it?’
What he said was, ‘Can’t you see it, Charlie? We’ve bombed the whole fucking continent back into the Dark Ages.’ He looked incredibly tired, and for once I thought about him, You shouldn’t be here: you’re too old for this. Les had known that all the time, of course.
‘War, famine and pestilence,’ I told him. ‘At least you’re doing something about the last two.’
My bones creaked as I stood up. The hurdy-gurdy man had stopped hurdy-gurdying, and shuffled on with his blind platoon. Maybe the fourth in line had heard my voice. I don’t think so, because we were too far away. Anyway, he turned his face in our direction. He had a heavy bandage over most of his face, which covered his eyes. He wore a black eyepatch over that. He was a tall man in olive drab coveralls. He sported a German officer’s cap, and a short leather jacket, cut not unlike mine. One of its sleeves was empty and pinned up, and it was blackened by burning or oil on one side. He walked with a marked limp that I didn’t remember. He cannot have seen us: I don’t believe that there was anything left to see with. I wouldn’t have minded, but he was grinning as if he had put one over on us. They were marching in the direction that the dead woman’s arm had pointed: Berlin. Faced front again, and limped on. I thought that it was Albie, and I never saw him again. You can read his name on the huge wall of the dead that looks out over the US Forces cemetery at Madingley, but I don’t think that he died in Germany. I think that he made it.
The kid in the jeep must have been fiddling with the radio. A kid’s life is a perpetual fight against boredom. Music exploded; shockingly real. Les said, ‘I know that. It’s coming from the ARC Grand Central Club in Paris. It’s that black bloke.’
That was when I heard Sidney Bechet for the first time. The double-time march he played was ‘Maryland, My Maryland’. I know that because I heard him play it live in 1952. What happened next was that the line of blind men picked up the rhythm. First they picked up the step of the march, and their shoulders went back; then they picked up the rhythm of the jazz, and they began to strut and weave a little. They moved away from us like a conga line, kicking up red dust, and disturbing the scent of putrescence that speared head-level across the rubble plain. It wasn’t the country of the blind we were in; it was the country of the mad. I bent down to James and told him, ‘It’s OK: you can come out now, Major, they’ve gone: you’re safe. We’re back in the 1940s.’
He kept his head down. He wouldn’t even look at me. No one else found it funny either. Black mark, Charlie.
It was Les again. He said, again, ‘We’ll need a car. Can we take Kate?’
‘What about James?’ I asked him.
It was Les who squatted down by him this time. He put a hand on James’s shoulder. James twitched, but didn’t look up, or say anything. The tears had stopped.
‘The Major’s fucked out. Aren’t you, guv?’ Les said. ‘He’s been fucked for days. He shouldn’t have been sent out here again. Mr Clifford can arrange for him to be looked after, can’t you, sir?’
Cliff nodded, but before he could reply I added, ‘And Ingrid, and the boy,’ I told them. ‘You’ll have to look out for them until I get back.’
Cliff smiled the tiger’s smile.
‘Any reason why I should, old son?’
‘So that you can justify staying on in Germany for a few more months. It’s where you want to be: Tommo always said that this is where it was all going to happen after the war.’
‘I should imagine he was talking about organized criminality, old boy . . .’
‘Isn’t that what you do, Cliff, only on a larger scale?’
He dropped the insolent smile then, shrugged, pouted, but then switched it back on. He looked like a little boy caught stealing apples. His smile could be quite dazzling.
‘OK. Why not?’
*
Later. Ingrid asked me, ‘You have sold me to him? Is that what has happened?’
‘No; I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You have given me to him then?’
‘No, I wouldn’t do that either. I haven’t given you to anyone.’
‘Do you want me to sleep with him?’
‘No. I don’t want you to sleep with anyone. Anyone
