The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

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 had repeated the words over and over that I’d finally understand what we’d both been talking about. One day I said to him, ‘Suppose I buy you a Linguaphone course; do I get out of here?’ For that I not only remained unfed by day, but that night he didn’t bother to bring the paper-thin dirty blanket either. I learnt what colour the sky was by the ninth day. By then K.K. merely pointed and I reeled off all the junk I could remember. But I’d done it wrong. Somehow ‘Sky is red; silk is blue.’ K.K. shouted and hit me softly against the face. I had no food or blanket and shivered with the intense cold of the night-time. From then on sometimes I got things right, sometimes wrong, according to the colour K.K. had decided everything was that day. Even with gruel every day I would have become weaker and weaker. I passed the ‘wisecrack stage’, the ‘asking questions’ stage, the ‘do you understand English?’ stage. I was weak and exhausted and on the day I got everything so correct that K.K. brought me a piece of cold cooked meat, I sobbed for an hour without feeling sad – with pleasure perhaps it was.

      Every morning the door was opened and I handed out my slop pail; every night it came back again. I began to count the days. With my fingernails I incised a crude calendar in the soft wood of the door, behind it I was out of sight of the peep-hole. Some of the days were marked by means of a double stroke; those were the ones I heard the noises. They were generally loud enough to wake me, the noises, when they happened. They were human noises but difficult to describe as either groans or screams. They were somewhere between the two. Some days K.K. gave me a small slip of paper; typewritten on them there were orders such as ‘The prisoner will sleep with arms above the blankets.’ ‘The prisoner will not sleep in the daytime.’

      One day K.K. gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. As I sat back to puff at it he said, ‘Why do you smoke?’ I said I didn’t know and he went away; but the next day Grass was Sepia, and I got beat about the head again.

      After I had marked twenty-five days on my calendar K.K. brought me a slip that said, ‘The prisoner will receive a visitor for six minutes only.’ There was a lot of shouting in the corridor and K.K. let in a young Hungarian Army Captain. He spoke reasonably good English. We stood facing each other until he said, ‘You requested a meeting with the Great Britain Ambassador.’

      ‘I don’t remember it,’ I said slowly.

      K.K. pushed me in the chest with force that thudded me against the wall of my cell and left me breathless.

      The Captain continued, ‘I don’t question. I say this. You ask.’ He was charming, he never once stopped smiling. ‘A secretary is without. He sees you now. I go. Six minutes only.’

      K.K. showed a man into my cell. He was so tall he beat his head against the door jamb. He was embarrassed and awkward. He explained reluctantly that the decision wasn’t his, that he was only the third under-secretary, and that sort of thing. He explained that there was no record of my being a British citizen, although he admitted that I sounded like an Englishman to him. He was so embarrassed and awkward that I almost believed that he was the British official he purported to be.

      ‘You wouldn’t think me impertinent, sir,’ I said, ‘if I asked you to give proof of identity.’

      He looked madly embarrassed and said, ‘Not at all,’ a few times.

      ‘I don’t mean papers of identity, you understand, sir. Just something to show that you are in regular contact with the old country.’

      He looked at me blankly.

      ‘Everyday things, sir, just so I can be sure.’

      He was keen to be helpful; he came back with the everyday things and a load of reasons why the Embassy could do nothing. His greatest anxiety was in case I should implicate Dalby’s group, and he was always fishing for news of any statement I was going to make to the Hungarian Police.

      Doing this while maintaining that I wasn’t a British subject was a strain even for old-school British diplomacy. ‘Don’t get sent to a Political Prison,’ he kept saying. ‘They treat prisoners very badly.’

      ‘This isn’t the YMCA,’ I told him on one occasion. I began to wish he’d stop coming. I almost preferred K.K. At least I knew where I was with him.

      Every day seemed hotter and more humid than the previous one, while the nights became more chilly.

      Although K.K. knew enough English for everyday needs, that is, to feed me or punch me on the nose, I found I could get a cup of sweet black coffee from one of the guards when I learnt enough Hungarian to ask. He was an old man looking like a bit player in a Ruritanian smaltz opera, sometimes he gave me a small piece of chewing tobacco.

      Finally the tall British man came to see me for the last time. They went through the shouting and preliminaries, but this time it was only the Army Captain who spoke. He told me that, ‘Her Magestyries Government’ under no circumstances can regard me as a British subject. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘the trial will proceed under Hungarian law.’ The man from the Embassy said how sorry he was.

      ‘Trial?’ I said, and K.K. smashed me against the wall again,