13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [81]
28. “Do such collections interest you, Trevor?”
29. Oh, I am sick again. The fever burns in my face, the back of my neck, the pit of my chest. My hands are searing hot and shaking; I feel as if they might singe whatever I touch but I must not—I must not damage the record with this unreasonable heat in my body. The images come and I am so frightened, but it is not my fear that I feel. It is yours. I am you on that day, November 3, 1915. We are Camille Victor, Sergeant in the Third Infantry Battalion, Second Company, First Section.
Our company captured some Germans today. Our Captain turns to us and says, “Let’s have some fun” and we cannot fathom what the Captain means by that until he takes one of the German prisoners, a small smooth-faced blond one. He takes the boy out in the back, in a quiet patch of trees, and brings us along—us alone because he likes us best out of all the company. Perhaps the Captain even loves us in a way we do not utterly understand but we accept it and are glad of it.
The Captain holds the German by the back of the neck and throws him to the ground, flat on his stomach. He orders the boy not to move and the boy does not. He lies there with his hands palm down, held slightly off the ground in a gesture of surrender. The Captain whispers in our ear, “Give him a good scare—I want to watch you give him a good scare” and he hands us his gun—his revolver, an officer’s gun that we do not ourselves have, so that it is an honor for us to touch this weapon.
We have no volition. We watch ourselves move in heated fascination. The handle of the gun is so cold in our warm palm. We pin the German to the dirt by grinding our knee into the boy’s back. We press the barrel of the gun into the haunch of the limp body beneath us. We run the barrel up along the spine—we take our time doing this—and then we hold it against the back of the boy’s head. Then we rest it gently against the back of the German’s downy neck so that the boy can feel the cold metal there, against his goose-fleshing skin. Is our nauseous thrill something like delight? It must be we are an animal, a savage, an apache—just like Father said when we beat that boy senseless in the schoolyard who had called us a coward.
The side of the German’s face is pushed into the brown loam. We can see one of his eyes. They are held tightly shut in a gesture of negation—poor boy, to obliterate this moment from your life, you never will. You don’t want to grant us the pleasure of seeing your terror, but we do.
We stand up now, with our feet around the boy’s waist bracing his prone body on the ground. We take aim with the revolver, yes. We cock it. The dry click of that hammer is delicious. We are frightened every day and in every moment and on this day we are still frightened, but now it is almost good. It is an ecstatic fear.
Oh the Captain watches us as we discharge his weapon—yes. We quiver at the dreadful, the fantastic impact. The detonation echoes in a way that sounds as if all of us are at the bottom of a huge chasm in the ground, surrounded by rock. We have shot the earth two inches beside the boy’s skull.
The bullet hole in the packed dirt is a small innocent-looking thing, no bigger around than our little finger. It looks like the burrow of some beetle.
We glance over the boy to see if he’s pissed himself, or left scratch marks in the dirt in a gripping spasm of his fingers—at that moment—the moment that we, as far as he knew, killed him.
He has not moved at all. He lies there limp, his eyes open and staring so dazedly that we briefly think perhaps the back of his head has been blown off after all.
“Shit,” the Captain says wistfully. “It’s better when they piss themselves.”
So the Captain has done this before, this pretend execution. We can see why. It does let out some of the pressure and the German deserves it because he is German so we step off him and we kick him in the stomach and he curls and groans—he is alive after all and we are relieved—oh—what are we doing?
Camille, what have you done? It must be that something ill will come