The Sailor in the Wardrobe

When the time came to execute Eichmann, they had to discuss what to do with his body afterwards. The court decided that he should be executed by hanging, but there were no instructions given about what to do with the remains. They didn’t want to burn the corpse in a crematorium, because that would have been too similar to what happened to his victims in Auschwitz. Neither did they want to bury him in Jerusalem, because they were afraid that his evil bones might contaminate the earth. It was never revealed and nobody knows what they finally did with Eichmann’s body, whether he remained on Israeli soil or whether he was secretly flown out to some other country like nuclear waste. Perhaps he has now gone to the same place as all his victims. There is no grave and no resting place and it looks like he’s become invisible again.

After that I tried to put all the things that happened to me out of my mind. I became the expert at forgetting. I developed a bad memory. I trained myself to go for weeks without remembering anything at all, but then it would come back again through my spine. There was an ache left over from the operation that wouldn’t go away. I could still feel it following me around even when I sat down or leaned back against a chair. If anyone touched me I would jump with the sensation of the needle going into my spine again. At night, I had to sleep with my back to the wall. In school I sat at the back of the class. On the bus, too, always the back seat. I even started walking home sideways, like a crab, with my back to the side of the buildings as much as possible. I kept looking around all the time to make sure there was nobody after me, whispering or laughing behind my back.

One day at the harbour, I was in charge, standing at the door of the shed when these girls came up asking questions. Everybody was gone out fishing and I was left to look after the place on my own, leaning against the side of the door just like Dan Turley does all the time. I was the boss and one of the girls came right up and stared into my face, chewing gum.

‘How much is your mackerel?’ she asked.

I knew she wasn’t serious about buying fish, because the other girls started killing themselves laughing. They were falling around the place, sitting down on the trellis, saying lots of other crude things about mackerel and asking how big they were. I didn’t answer them. All I could do was smile.

‘How much is it for a trip round the island?’ she asked, and I could smell the sweetness of the chewing gum in her mouth, she was up that close to my face.

When they got no answer, they started having a big conversation among themselves, putting words into my mouth. They asked if it mattered how many were in the boat and one of them said I wouldn’t mind as long as they didn’t all sit on top of me at the same time. They wanted to know if it would be a big boat and the others said, big as you like. They asked if I would show them the goats on the island and they answered themselves and said I would catch one of the goats for them so they could ride him around the island all afternoon.

‘Don’t mind them,’ the girl with the chewing gum said. ‘Seriously? How much is it for the four of us out to the island?’

I wanted to laugh out loud and have something funny to say back to them. I thought of picking up a mackerel and holding it up to their faces for a laugh, to see what they would say then. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid they would discover who I was. I kept leaning against the shed with my shoulder stuck to the door frame. I felt the pain starting up like a big weight on my spine, as if I was lying face-down with a concrete block on the small of my back. I know that if you say nothing, people will put words in your mouth. They kept guessing what was in my head. They came past me into the shed and walked around examining things.

‘You can’t go in there,’ I said.

‘Did you hear that? He can talk.’

But I was a dead-mouth and they walked right in past me. They were taking over the place, touching everything. One of them lay down on Dan’s bunk. Others were trying on life jackets, modelling them and dancing around behind me to a song on the radio. They laughed at a calendar with a picture of the Alps that was three years out of date. They saw the spare oars tied up to the ceiling and asked what the white markers were for, playing football or what? They rang the brass bell on the wall. They put a lead weight onto the weighing scales and said it was very heavy. One of them started brushing her hair into a new ponytail and with the sunlight coming in through the window I saw a blond hair floating through the air on its way down to the floor.

They went around saying everything was so dirty. Did I ever think of cleaning the window, for fuck sake. They wanted to know if anyone slept there at night and the others said how could you sleep with the smell of petrol and fish all over you and where was the fuckin’ toilet? They kept finding things like oarlocks and asking what the fuck was this for and what the fuck was that for. The others answered and said what the fuck do you think it’s for and they all fell around laughing again. They could do what they wanted. They could have taken the petrol out and set the place on fire. I thought of what Packer would have done, how he would have started making up some kind of situation out of it that he could later tell the lads about, offering them some of Dan’s pink Mikado biscuits maybe, as long as they didn’t mind a few mackerel scales on them as well. Maybe he would have sat down on the bunk with them and shown them Dan’s blue mug with years of brown tea-stain inside or cut up a mackerel in front of them until they said, Jesus, let me fuckin’ out of here. But I had no way of inventing a life around myself. I had the weakness and I could do nothing until they got bored at last and left of their own accord, laughing and smoking as they walked away up the pier.

And then I could see Dan’s boat coming back into the harbour. There was a buzz of motorbikes and the harbour lads were all returning as well and within minutes they were sitting outside the shed again with Packer talking.

‘Wait till you hear this,’ he said.

He said he was about to tell us the most amazing story. He had just come back in from being out on the water with Dan. They had been pulling up the pots, when they suddenly came across a lobster that had rubber bands already tied around his claws. I’m not joking you, Packer kept saying. There was Dan, complaining about the lobster being less plentiful, and then they came across a lobster that had put his own rubber bands on as if he had given himself up.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.