PART TWO
The Prisoner
‘I noticed that you do not sleep. Sometimes at night you cry out.’
He glanced over to where the speaker was sitting. The man did not look quite like the other prisoners. After so long in this British prison camp in the Egyptian desert, with poor food, disease rife, blistering heat and perhaps worst of all a monotony of existence that ate at the soul, many of the men had acquired the look of the walking dead.
And yet this man, though thin, his cheeks drawn, had something almost elegant about him. Unlike most of them he had not long ago decided to neglect his appearance. His hair was carefully combed, his cheeks freshly shaven, his moustache newly waxed. He had a gleam in his eye that could be described either as enlightened … or, less kindly, fanatical. This in itself was a novelty. So many of the men’s eyes were cloudy with boredom or hunger or the beginnings of the blindness that had blighted so many of them: a condition that even their captors did not seem to have intended, or to understand.
He thought: what could be the harm in talking of it, in such a place? For so long it had been stoppered up inside him, poisoning him from within.
‘I have done terrible things. Evil things.’
‘And what are they?’ The man, though only ten or so years his senior, had an almost fatherly air.
He hesitated.
‘However bad they may be, I am certain I may have heard worse.’
As he admitted them, those deeds that he could actually bring himself to talk of, he found that he could hardly believe in them … that if he had not actually been there himself to witness them, to commit them, he would think that they had to be unspeakable lies. But he could feel them in him; a deep sickness, deeper than flesh and bone, a poison that would destroy him from within.
Finally the man put up a hand. ‘It is enough. I know what it is you speak of.’
‘You too were involved?’
The man did not appear to have heard him. ‘But at a time like this what is important is how one may justify the act.’
‘I’m not sure that there can be any—’
The man stopped him with a brief motion of his hand. There was an innate authority in the gesture, an assumption that he would be obeyed, and the idea came to him that this prisoner had been no ordinary soldier before his capture.
‘For too long this Empire has been a sick, tired, lumbering thing. Those differences that once made us strong are now destroying us: when something is so fractured it cannot be efficient, or strong. To move forward, we need to be whole, uniform. Our differences are weaknesses because they represent a conflict of interest. Do you see?’
‘I’m not certain.’
‘War means doing terrible things for a just, even noble, cause. The smallest boy knows this. Every army has killed traitors of its cause. What happened to the Armenians was yet another tragic, but necessary, by-product of the war. There is no virtue in tormenting yourself.’
That night he lay in his cot, thinking of what the officer had told him. For months he had thought of himself as something less than human, denatured by the hideousness of his acts. But now he had been presented with a new possibility: that these acts were not merely justifiable, but perhaps even worthy of praise.
It would explain everything; it would make it all condonable. But that was too easy. He could not believe in it: could he? He wished that he could. If he could he might be able to find some relief. The thing that had seemed so senseless, a random flowering of evil – inside himself as much as without – might acquire meaning and definition. He might even be able to sleep again; to stop fantasising about ways to end the play of horror within his mind.
It was a seductive possibility. It was as though a mirror had been held up to him in which everything was reversed. In which he was not a monster but a hero; in which his acts were not cowardly but courageous. Acts that an ordinary man might not have had the strength of character to commit.
But it could not be true. Could it?
And yet each day, over the weeks that followed, he sought out the officer. He found that merely to hear the man speak was soothing. He was so certain. Another version of events. It might be a fiction but it was a comforting fiction at least. It glittered to him in his dark place.
With enough retellings, it ceased to be merely a story.
Here is something true: it is not difficult to believe in a better version of oneself. A man must be very strong-willed indeed if he is to refuse to accept another’s idea of him as heroic, not monstrous.
Gradually his own memories began to acquire the shimmer of unreality. The things that had happened – that he had done – became like a bad dream. They were a nightmare that pervaded every moment of his waking life, yes, but perhaps not quite so vividly as they once had. Where they had him so firmly in their grip he now found himself able to halt them for a time, to ask questions of them.
What this man offered was an antidote to that poison that had gone deep inside him. He was like a dying man – thinking himself too far gone for help but willing to try anything. So
