The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

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      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Handle the people around you with tact. New acquaintances could provide prospects of travel and excitement.]

      The days following were clotted together in an inseparable mess. It stayed 4.22 all the time – one long fluorescent day punctuated by interrogations like TV commercials in a peak-hour play.

      For an hour each day I was medically examined. I had IQ tests, interviews, and was told to write my autobiography. I matched triangles and circles and put wooden rods into racks. I was tested for reaction, speed, co-ordination and muscular efficiency. My blood was measured, and identified, its pressure checked and recorded. Birth marks, I never knew I had, were photographed and tape measured. Cold showers and hot lights blurred into a month, like blades of grass blur into a field. I ceased to remember that Jean or Dalby existed, and sometimes I doubted if I did.

      Sometimes the guards would tell me the time, but mostly they’d say it had just turned 4.20. One day or perhaps night, it was the first guard change after cornflakes, anyway, a US Army Captain came into Waiting Room No. 3. I didn’t get up off the stretcher, I had begun to feel at home there. He was about forty-two and walked like a European, that is, like a man who wears braces to hold his trousers up. His hands were wrinkled and looked like no amount of soap would ever remove the farm soil that lay dark and rich in his pores. The lobe of one ear was missing, and it was easy to imagine the village midwife, tired and clumsy in the small hours of a Balkan morning.

      ‘Jo napot kivavok,’ he said.

      I’d met this greeting in the Café Budapest a couple of times and had always found that ‘kezet csokolom’ (kiss your hand) had given good mileage with the younger waitresses.

      With this boy it went over like a lead balloon.

      ‘Make on the feet, mack,’ he said, changing his approach.

      He spoke with a heavy accent liberally sprinkled with idiom. The idiom was to convince you he was the all-American boy, and gave him respite during which to translate the next sentence.

      ‘No spik Inglese,’ I said, giving a characteristic shrug and presenting the palms of both hands upwards.

      ‘Op, or I kick you some!’

      ‘Just as long as you don’t damage my watch,’ I said.

      He opened the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and unfolded a white paper about 10 in by 8 in.

      ‘This is your deportation order, signed by the Secretary of State.’ He said it like he was going to paste it into the back of his vest pocket edition of Thomas Paine. ‘You can think yourself stinking lucky that we are exchanging you for two fly boys that know senators, or you’d be for a slow tcheeeek.’ He made a revolting noise as he ran his finger across his windpipe.

      ‘I don’t dig you, Uncle Tom,’ I said. ‘Why is England exchanging me for two fliers?’

      ‘England ho ho ho!’ he said; it was a merriment symbol. ‘England! You’re not going to stinking England, you pig, you going back to stinking Hungary. They’ll like you there for fouling up the detail. Ho ho! They’ll tcheeeek ho ho!’

      ‘Ho ho to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll save you some black pudding.’ I didn’t take the idea of being sent to Hungary very seriously at first.

      There was little I could do. Neither Dalby nor Jean had had a chance to speak to me. I could reckon on little or no help from any other source. Now there was this Hungarian stuff.

      I worried about it for two hours then a medic came with a long trolley and an enamel tray containing ether, cotton wool and a hypodermic. He fluffed up the clean white pillow on the trolley and smoothed out the red medical department blanket. He took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and listened to my chest with a stethoscope. ‘Would you lie on the table, please. Relax completely.’

      ‘What’s the time?’ I asked.

      ‘Two-twenty, roll up your sleeve.’ He rubbed a little ether on the skin and eased the sharp shiny needle into the unfeeling flesh with a professional flourish.

      ‘What time?’ my voice boomed out.

      ‘Two-twenty,’ he said, again.

      ‘What, what, what. Time, time, time.’ It wasn’t me talking; it was a curiously metallic echo, ‘Time, time, time.’ I looked up at the white-coated boy and he grew smaller and smaller and smaller. He was standing far away near the door now, but still he was gripping my arm. Was it possible? Time, time, time. Still gripping my arm, arms, I mean, both of them. Both those men, both my arms. So far away; such little men near that tiny door.

      I rubbed my forehead because I was slowly going round and round on a turn-table and sinking down. But how did I get up again because I kept going around and down but I was always high enough to go sinking down and around again. I rubbed my forehead with my huge heavy hand. It was as big as a barrage balloon, my hand; you’d expect it to envelop my head, but my forehead was so wide. Wide. Wide as a barn. I was being wheeled along. Towards the door. They’ll never get huge me through that little door. Not me, never. Ha ha. Never, never, never. Thud, thud, thud, thud.

      Into my subconscious the drumming of engines brought me almost to the threshold of awakening. But each time there came a body bending low over me. The sharp pointed pain in the arm brought the noisy throbbing nausea breaking over me in feverish waves of heat and intense cold. I was moved on stretchers and trolleys over rough ground and polished wooden corridors, handled like a dust particle and like a dustbin, dropped into trains, helped into planes; but never far away was a blurred moon bending over me, and that sharp pain that pulled the blanket of unconsciousness over my face.

      I came up to the surface very, very slowly; from the dark deeps I floated freely towards the dimblue rippling surface of undrugged life.

      I hurt, therefore I am.

      I hugged close against the damp soil. By the light of a small window I was able to closely inspect the broken wristwatch upon which I was gently vomiting. It said 4.22. I shivered. From somewhere nearby I heard voices. No one was talking, merely groaning.

      I gradually became sentient. I became aware of the heavy hot humid air. My eyes focused only with difficulty. I closed them. I slept. Sometimes the nights seemed as long as a week. Rough bowls of porridge-like stuff were put before me, and if uneaten, removed. It was always the same man who came with the food. He had short blond hair. His features were flat with high cheek-bones. He wore a light-grey two-piece track suit. One day I was sitting in the corner on the earth floor – there was no furniture – when I heard the bolts being drawn back. Kublai Khan entered, but without food. I’d never heard his voice before. His voice was hard and unattractive. He said ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’ I looked at him for a minute or so. He said it again, ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’

      ‘So what?’ I said.

      He walked towards me and hit me with his open hand. It didn’t need much to hurt me at that stage of my education. K.K. left the room and the bolts were closed and I was hungry. It took me two days to discover that I had to repeat the things K.K. said after him. It was simple enough. By the time I made that discovery I was weak from hunger and licked my food bowl avidly. The gruel was delicious and I never missed the spoon. Sometimes K.K. said, ‘Fire is red; cloud is white,’ or perhaps, ‘Sand is yellow; silk is soft.’ Sometimes his accent was so thick that it would be hours later when I СКАЧАТЬ