Part 1: THE BRIDGE
Camp F.
We used to joke that the F stood for fucked. We were the hard-luck crew, the down-and-outs, the lowest of the low. Prisoners were in Camp F because they were still tough enough to work, but too beaten-down to try and escape. For us, there was only the camp. The camp and the Bridge.
Camp F sat at the farthest-back corner of some unpronounceable estate ringed by barbed wire fences and guard towers. Camps A through E stretched out before us – the poor sods too poorly to fight back at all, they got to watch us trudge out every morning and thank their lucky stars they weren’t among us. On the other side was a long, low, concrete shed which stretched almost the length of our six cabins. Part of it was the guard house; part of it was storage. We’d see the guards go in and out morning and evening, and they brought the shovel crates out from there to load onto the trucks.
The part of the shed opposite Camp F was where the prisoners disappeared. The strong and rebellious were herded in there, the door was closed… and they never came out.
The occupants of Camp F were an ever-rotating cast. Except for myself and Chief, there were some ever-changing faces whose personalities I got to know well enough to put a name to: Ox was broad-shouldered and tall, slow to think and quiet to boot – people took advantage of Ox, whatever face he wore; there was always an Old-Timer, some wiry septuagenarian who still had enough vim to wield a shovel, and moved with a limping, stiff-legged gait; Vulture, so called because he was always picking at the scraps, or needling the dead (and we all might as well have been dead); and one I called Quisling, some pathetic brown-noser who’d snitch on the guards for the smallest thing, though there was never anything of substance to report in Camp F. Aside from us six, there were eighteen ever-shifting faceless prisoners who roomed with us. I was never sure when they changed, or where they came from, but I figured they always went over to that shed in the end.
Our little cabin was mostly filled with bunk beds – I had the bottom bunk at the end, beneath Vulture, and with a bunkmate like that you quickly stop caring about your possessions. We kept the rows between beds narrow enough that you could reach out and touch the person next to you, but that was mainly so we could squeeze a little more room out for a common area. We had a little table where folks would play cards or gather to watch arm-wrestling (I didn’t take part – it seemed like a good way to injure an arm and earn a one-way trip to the Shed). There was an old leather chair we’d swiped, Quisling managing to cajole the guards who were throwing it out into giving it to us instead; Chief reclined in it most days, reading his books. Some of them were scripture, some were poetry, some were plays. He’d tried early on to get them to take part in a play, once – this was before I turned up, I would’ve loved it – but they got through two acts of King Lear before Vulture declared the whole thing stupid and Quisling threatened to report him for having a penknife he’d stolen from a guard.
Apart from the table and the leather chair, we had a stove which kept us warm in the evenings (the perks of being a working crew) and a cabinet we’d long-ago lost the key to. That was fine, because the Old-Timer had hammered out a panel in the side and we’d found some old rations and a tin of pemmican inside – we kept it hidden from the guards and doled out the drink after particularly rough days, at Chief’s order. We’d mix up a big helping in a bowl and pass it around the room, each of us taking a little to keep things fair. To enforce the fairness, Vulture didn’t get to drink until last.
We’d be woken before first light by the guards hammering on the door. They’d slam it open just to prove they could, and anyone not on their feet by the time they came in would get the butt of a rifle in their stomach. Then the Captain would enter and address us.
‘Get dressed, Camp F!’ he’d yell. ‘I want you ready and in your lines in five minutes!’ He and the guards would leave for five minutes so we could hurry to get dressed, and then we’d stand in two straight lines, bunkmates next to each other. Which meant I was always paired with Vulture. When the Captain ordered, ‘Move out!’, he’d shove me or yank the back of my collar so he got to leave ahead of me each time. We’d exit single-file, taking a turn past the cauldron for some scalding hot gruel in a tin cup, and they’d call out our names and tick us off as we stepped up into the back of the trucks to take us to the Bridge. It was pointless Vulture pulling me back every day, because they always called out my name before his.
The journey over we’d all be silent – two guards sat with us in each truck bed, next to the open rear, lest any of us get any ideas. Not that we had the imagination for that; we all sat there in sullen silence and sipped breakfast from our tin cups. In our minds, we were all steeling ourselves for the work ahead.
Our destination every day was the same: a bridge over a wide, slow river, outside a village in a quiet part of the country. We were unloaded and made to line up again; then Vulture, Chief, Ox and I would be barked at and harassed as we got the crates out of the trucks and opened them up. Twenty-four prisoners, twenty-four shovels. We were given one each – Vulture inevitably the one with a rusted-away fixing that wobbled like Hell, which he would inevitably shove into my hands as he grabbed at mine – along with a pair of not-very-good gloves and a tarp, and we were marched out onto the thick and slippery ice of the river. Then it was down to work: tarp down behind us, shovel in front, we cleared the snow from the icy river. Dig a mound of it, twist, drop it onto the tarp. When our tarps were full (each to our own judging), we dragged them over to the far bank and dumped the snow. Then we dragged them back and started the process again at the next patch.
For ten hours a day this was our duty, and we were watched at it by the hawklike eyes of the guards. The only sound would be the chill wind and the rattle of their buckles against their rifles as they shifted uncomfortably. That and the steady shuff, shuff, shuff of our shovels against the ice.
It was quiet work, dull drudgery which make our hands ache and blister from the weight of the shovels and our feet tingle and blacken from the cold. Our clothes did little to protect us from the vagaries of the weather after the first hour, and we had to rely on our constant motion to keep us warm and awake. As the hours went on our hands would slip on the handles, we would stumble and trip over ourselves dragging our tarps, or the guards would just get bored enough to start singling people out for punishment. They’d drag them to the bank and beat them with their rifle butts, careful not to break any bones – they’d be in trouble with the Captain if they broke one of the few workers the camp had. But any sign of idleness or weakness was an excuse to them, so we never spoke for fear of raising their ire with our voices.
So it was quiet work, and that was what led to our hearing the song.
When the sun rose, it rose through the bridge. Had we been able to clear the snow all the way through, we might’ve seen a perfect circle of sunlight through it – the arch of the bridge feeding into the slope of the banks beneath, which all curved into the river. We could’ve watched the sun rise from the bridge, and perhaps ridden it up and away from this place. But we could not – could never – be fast enough.
Instead, as the full orb of the sun rounded against the arch of the bridge, we all heard the song. I don’t usually hear things, not well – blast from a shrapnel mine made me deaf in one ear, and it tore up my leg for good measure – but I heard this like the church bells from my childhood. I paused in my digging, consumed by it, the sound ached in my chest.
I’ve tried to transcribe the song below as faithfully as possible, but I’m not sure I ever could. When I could cajole the camp regulars about it, they returned vastly different descriptions of the melody and the lyrics. Maybe none of us heard the same song (Ox regularly and reliably informed me that it was some kind of honky-tonk ragtime song that he heard as a child).
Whatever the case, this is the closest I can come to what I heard:
The last leaf has died
And the birds head for warmer climes.
But here I must remain
To reckon with my crimes.
To desire to feel
The wind and the sun on my skin;
For this solemn wish
The brambles grow thick and trap me within.
I am stuck with thorns,
How much must I bleed for you?
I am stuck with thorns,
My wings are staked wide for you.
I am stuck with thorns,
The brambles grow thick and trap me within.
I stood entranced to hear it. The others around me shook their heads and groaned, they tried to shut it out and return to their digging. But I could not. I simply had to see who sang in such an enchanting voice.
I was utterly under the spell of the voice. I heard guns cocking around me as I dropped the shovel, walked towards the bridge. There was shouting behind me, my fellow prisoners, but in that moment I felt unable to do anything other than walk towards the bridge, towards the voice that dwelt within.
I made it two faltering steps before Chief’s shovel caught me at ankle height, and I tumbled head-first into the snow. The cold shock burned my face and brought me back to reality; I came up gasping as a fist balled up the back of my jacket and dragged me to my knees. Chief laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and glowered into my eyes with a fearful intensity.
‘One rule, Bard!’ he hissed urgently. ‘Don’t listen to the music! Don’t let it in! Just dig your patch and block it out.’ I stared back into those eyes, so filled with fear, and I wondered what could have engendered such emotion in Chief.
And then I felt hands grasping my shoulders, and I was hauled to the bank in the arms of two guards. Two more joined them, and one of them socked me in the jaw as the other yelled, ‘What the Hell do you think you’re doing, prisoner?’ The guard drove a fist into my gut and I doubled over instinctively; before I could receive more punishment there was a cacophony of alarm and I was dropped unceremoniously into the snow once more.
A rifle cracked overhead and to my left. I raised myself up to look: one of the guards stationed by the trucks had his rifle against his shoulder, it was still smoking. I followed the line of the gun and traced its destination: a body on the far side of the river. One of the other new inmates, having been craftier than me or more reckless, or simply surrounded by less prudent prisoners, had used my punishment as a distraction to run for the bridge himself. He’d made it halfway before the guards had spotted him. Now he lay spread-eagled in the snow, unmoving, unseeing, melting the snow and staining the ice a rich, dark red. I stared at the body, somehow jealous – he’d gotten so much farther than I had. Had we been hearing the same song? Had he been drawn to the bridge, as I had? I hoped that he heard it even as he lay dying – how beautiful, to hear such a sound as you die. As we returned to our digging, I thought I could die happy if only I heard that voice lit up in song once again.
The sun rose. Being a man down, our day ended up being longer than most; we finally got finished as the sun reached its feeble peak, our hands bloodied and our feet stinging with pins and needles. Breathlessly we dumped the spades into the crate and hauled ourselves aboard the truck. As I pulled myself onto the footplate, I paused to catch my breath, and my eyes lingered over the body on the far bank. Vulture squatted in front of it, going through its pockets, until a guard barked an order at him raised the butt of his rifle. Cringing, Vulture made his awkward, hopping run back to our group. The remaining eleven of us sat in silence on the way back, most staring at the floor, though I kept my wary eyes on Vulture.
He returned my gaze levelly, as though he’d done nothing wrong.