Toll for the Brave

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‘Remember what I told you, boy,’ St Claire called and then I was taken out through the door on the run and helped on the way by the young officer’s boot.

I was kicked and beaten all the way along the passage and down four flights of stone stairs, ending up in a corner against a wall, cowering like an animal, arms wrapped around my head as some protection against those flailing truncheons.

I was dragged to my feet, half-unconscious, the clothes stripped from my body. There was a confusion of voices then an iron door clanged shut and I was alone.

It was like those odd occasions when you awaken to utter darkness at half-past three in the morning and turn back fearfully to the warmth of the blankets, filled with a sense of dreadful unease, of some horror beyond the understanding crouched there on the other side of the room.

Only this was for always, or so it seemed. There were no blankets to turn into. Three weeks St Claire had survived in here. Three weeks. Eternity could not seem longer.

I took a hesitant step forward and blundered into a stone wall. I took two paces back, hand outstretched and touched the other side. Three cautious paces brought me to the rear wall. From there to the iron-plated door was four more.

A stone womb. And cold. Unbelievably cold. A trap at the bottom of the door opened, yellow light flooding in. Some sort of metal pan was pushed through and the trap closed again.

It was water, fresh and cold. I drank a little, then crouched there beside the door and waited.

I managed to sleep, probably for some considerable period, which wasn’t surprising in view of what I had been through and awakened slowly to the same utter darkness as before.

I wanted to relieve myself badly, tried hammering on the door with no effect whatsoever and was finally compelled to use one of the corners which was hardly calculated to make things any more pleasant.

How long had it been? Five hours or ten? I sat there listening intently, straining my ears for a sound that would not come and suddenly it was three-thirty in the morning again and it was waiting for me over there in the darkness, some nameless horror that would end all things.

I felt like screaming. Instead, I started to fight back. First of all I tried poetry, reciting it out loud, but that didn’t work too well because my voice seemed to belong to someone else which made me feel more alarmed than ever. Next, I tried working my way through books I’d read. Good, solid items that took plenty of time. I did a fair job on Oliver Twist and could recite The Great Gatsby almost word-for-word anyway, but I lost out on David Copperfield half-way through.

It was about then that I found myself thinking about St Claire for he was already a kind of mythical hero figure as far as the American Airborne forces were concerned. St Claire and his history were as much a part of recruit training as practising P.L.F.s or learning how to take an M16 to pieces and putting it together again blindfold.

Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, himself alone from the word go. Son of a Negro millionaire who’d made his first million out of insurance and had never looked back. No silver spoon, just eighteen carat gold. Harvard – only the best – and then he’d simply walked out and joined the paratroops as a recruit back in nineteen forty-one.

Captured in Italy in forty-three, as a sergeant, he’d escaped to fight with Italian partisans in the Po marshes, ending up in command of a force of four hundred that fought a German infantry division to a standstill in three days. That earned him a field commission and within a year he was captain and dropping into Brittany a week before D-day with units of the British Special Air Service.

He’d earned his Medal of Honour in Korea in nineteen fifty-two. When a unit of Assault Engineers had failed to blow a bridge the enemy were about to cross in strength, St Claire had gone down and blown it up by hand, himself along with it. By then no one in the entire American Army was particularly surprised when he was fished out of the water alive.

And his appetite for life was so extraordinary. Women, liquor and food in that order, but looking back on it all now, I see that above all, it was action that his soul craved for and a big stage to act on.

God, but I was cold and shaking all over, my limbs trembling uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around myself and hung on tight, not that that was going to do me much good. I think it was then that I remembered what St Claire had said, recalled even a line or two of some Taoist poem he had quoted. In motion, be like water, at rest like the mirror.

I had nothing to lose, that was for certain, so I sat crosslegged and concentrated on recalling every step of the breathing exercises he had described to me. His method of developing this mysterious ch’i he had talked about.

I tried to relax as much as possible, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. I closed my eyes, not that it made much difference, and covered my right ear with my left hand. I varied this after five minutes by covering my left ear with my right hand. After a further five minutes, I covered both ears, arms crossed.

It was foolishness of the worst kind, even if it was a technique a couple of thousand years old according to St Claire, but at least my limbs had stopped shaking and the sound of the breathing was strangely peaceful. I was no longer conscious of the stone floor or of the cold, simply floated there in the cool darkness, listening to my breathing.

It was like the sea upon the shore, a whisper through leaves in a forest at evening, a dying fall. Nothing.

They had me in there for eight days during which time I grew progressively weaker. Using St Claire’s technique, I slid into a self-induced trance almost at will, coming out of it, as far as I could judge afterwards, at fifteen or twenty hour intervals.

During the whole period no one appeared, no one spoke. I never again saw the small trap in the door open although I did discover several more containers of water, presumably pushed through while I was in a trance. There was never any food.

Towards the end, conditions were appalling. The place stank like a sewer for obvious reasons and I was very weak indeed – very light-headed. And I was never conscious of dreaming, of thinking of anything at all, except at the very end of things when I experienced one of the most vivid and disturbing dreams of my life.

I was lying naked on a small bed and it was not dark. I was no longer in the Box for I could see again, a pale, diffused golden glow to things that was extraordinarily pleasant. It was warm. I was cocooned in warmth which was hardly surprising for the room was full of steam.

A voice called, slightly distorted, like an echo from far away. ‘Ellis? Are you there, Ellis?’

I raised my head and saw Madame Ny standing no more than a yard away from me. She was wearing her uniform skirt and the leather boots, but had taken off her tunic. Underneath, she was wearing a simple white cotton blouse.

The blouse was soaking up the steam like blotting paper and as I watched, a nipple blossomed on the tip of each breast and then the breasts themselves materialised as if by magic as the thin material became saturated.

It was one of the most erotic things I have ever seen in my life, electrifying in its effect and my body could not help but respond. She came over beside the bed, leaned down and put a hand on me.

I tried to push her away and she smiled gently and said, still in that distorted, remote voice, ‘But there’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ellis. Nothing to fear.’

She unfastened the zip at the side of her uniform skirt and slipped out of it. Underneath she was wearing a pair of cotton pants as damp with steam as the blouse. She took them off with a complete lack of concern, then sat on the edge of the bed and unbuttoned the blouse.

Her breasts were round and full, wet with moisture from the steam, incredibly beautiful. I was shaking like a leaf in a storm as she reached out and pulled my face against them.

‘Poor Ellis.’ The voice echoed into the mist. ‘Poor little Ellis Jackson. Nobody loves him. Nobody.’ And then she pushed me away so that she could look into my face and said, ‘But I do. I love you, Ellis.’

And then she rolled on to her back, the thighs spreading to receive me and her mouth was all the sweetness in life, the fire of my climax such a burning ecstasy that it had me screaming out loud.

I came awake to that scream in the darkness of the Box again, the stench of the place in my nostrils and for some reason found myself standing up straight and screaming out loud again, a blank defiance at the forces ranged against me.

There was a rattle of bolts and a moment later, the door opened and a great shaft of yellow light flooded in.

They were all there, the young officer and his men and Colonel Chen-Kuen, Madame Ny at his shoulder, very correct in full uniform including a regulation peaked cap with a red star in the front. She looked white and shocked. No, more than that – distressed, but not Chen-Kuen. He was simply interested in how well I’d stood up to things, the complete scientist.

I stood swaying from side-to-side while they busied themselves with a door next to mine. When it swung open, there was only darkness inside and then St Claire stepped out.

He had a body on him like the Colossus of Rhodes, hewn out of ebony, pride in his face as he stood there, his nakedness not concerning him in the slightest. He caught sight of me and his eyes widened. He was across the passage in two quick strides, an arm about me as I reeled.

‘Not now, Ellis – not now you’ve got this far,’ he said. ‘We walk to the medical centre on our own two feet and shag this lot.’

Which gave me the boost I needed, that and the strength of his good right arm. We made it under our own steam, out through the main entrance, crossed the compound to the medical hut through a thin, cold rain falling through the light of late evening.

Once there, they parted us and I found myself alone in a small cubicle wrapped in a large towel after a warm shower. The old doctor appeared, gave me a quick check, then an injection in my right arm and left.

I lay there staring up at the ceiling and the door clicked open. It was a day for surprises. Madame Ny appeared at the side of the bed. There were tears in her eyes and she dropped to her knees beside the bed and reached for my hand.

‘I didn’t know they would do that, Ellis. I did not know.’

For some obscure reason I believed her, or perhaps it didn’t really matter to me any more, but in any event, I have never felt comfortable in the presence of a woman’s tears.

I said, ‘That’s all right. I made it in one piece, didn’t I?’

She began to cry helplessly, burying her face against my chest. Very gently, I started to stroke her hair.

The weeks that followed had a strange, fantasy air to them and things dropped into a routine. I still shared the room with St Claire and each morning at six o’clock we were taken together to the Indoctrination Centre. Once there, we were separated to sit in small, enclosed booths in headphones, listening to interminable tapes.

The indoctrination stuff was mainly routine. Marx and Lenin to start with, then Mao Tse-tung until the old boy was pouring out of our ears. None of it ever really got through to me although I have noticed in later years that I have a pronounced tendency to argue in most situations using Marxian terminology. St Claire was a great help to me in this respect. It was he who pointed out the real and tangible flaws in Mao’s works. For example, that everything he had written on warfare was lifted without acknowledgement from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War written in 500 B.C. As the Jesuits have it, one corruption is all corruption and I could never again accept any of the great man’s writings at face value.

Five hours a day were devoted to learning Chinese. In one of many interviews with me, Chen-Kuen told me that this was to help promote a closer understanding between us, an explanation which never made much sense to me. On the other hand, languages were something I’d always been good at and it gave me something to do.

Each afternoon I had a long session of ‘instruction’ with Madame Ny which St Claire made me report in detail to him each night, although that was only one of our activities. He taught me karate and aikido, subjected me to lengthy and complicated breathing exercises, all designed to make me fit enough to face up to the day when we were going to crash out of there, his favourite phrase.

But he was the original polymath. Philosophy, psychology, military strategy from Sun Tzu and Wu Ch’i to Clausewitz and Liddell Hart, literature, and poetry in particular, for which he had a great love. He insisted that we talked in Chinese and even gave me lessons on his guitar.

Every minute had to be filled to use up as much as possible of that burning energy. He was like a caged tiger waiting his chance to spring.

I once tried to sum him up and could only come up with words like witty, attractive, brave, totally unscrupulous, amoral. All I know, and still believed at the end of things, was that he was the most complete man I have ever known. If anyone ever lived with total spontaneity, bringing it right up from the core of his being, it was he.

My relationship with Madame Ny was perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair.

I was taken to her office in a room on the second floor of the monastery each afternoon. There were always two guards in the corridor, but inside, we were quite alone.

It was a comfortable room, surprisingly so, although I suspect now that was mainly by design. Chinese carpets on the floor, a modern desk and swivel chairs, a filing cabinet, water colours on the wall and a very utilitarian looking psychiatrist’s couch in black leather.

It became very plain from the beginning that these were psycho-analytical sessions. That she was out to strip me to the bone.

Not that I objected, for it quickly became a game of question and answer – my kind of answer – that I rather enjoyed playing and the truth is that I wanted to be with her. Looked forward to being in her company.

From the beginning, she was calm and a little remote, insisted on calling me Ellis, yet never by any remark or action, referred to that emotional breakdown at my bedside on the evening they had released me from the Box.

What I could not erase from my mind was the memory of that strange dream, an erotic fantasy so real that to see her simply get up and stretch or stand at the window, a hand on her hip, was enough to send my pulse up by a rate of knots.

A great deal of her questioning, I didn’t mind. Childhood and my relationship with my grandfather, schooling, particularly the years at Eton which seemed to fascinate her. She seemed surprised that the experience hadn’t turned me into a raving homosexual and asked searching and vaguely absurd questions about masturbation which only succeeded in bringing out the comic in me.

We spent a month in this way and it became obvious to me that she was becoming more and more impatient. One day she stood up abruptly after one particularly feeble joke, took off her tunic and walked to the window where she stood in the pale sunshine, angrier than I had ever seen her.

From that angle, half-turned away from me, it became obvious that her breasts managed very well without the benefit of such a western appurtenance as a brassière and I could see the line of them sloping to the nipples as the sunlight filtered through the thin cotton.

‘All men are at least three people, Ellis,’ she said. ‘What they appear to be to others, what they think they are and what they really are. Your great fault is to accept people at face value.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said mockingly.

She turned on me in anger, made a visible effort to control it, went to the door. ‘Come with me.’

We didn’t go very far. Through a door at the end of the corridor which led to a gallery above what was obviously the central half of the old temple. There was a statue of Buddha at the far end, flickering candles, the murmur of voices at prayer from a group of Zen monks in yellow robes.

Madame Ny said, ‘If I asked you who was the commander of Tay Son you would say Colonel Chen-Kuen of the Army of the People’s Republic.’

‘So what?’

‘The commander is down there at this moment.’

The monks had risen to their feet, their Abbot magnificent in saffron robes at their head. He glanced up at that moment and looked straight at me before moving on. Colonel Chen-Kuen.

We returned to her office in silence. I sat down and she said, ‘So, nothing is as it seems, not even Ellis Jackson.’

I made no reply and an orderly came in with the usual afternoon pot of China tea and tiny porcelain cups. It was unfailingly and deliciously refreshing. She passed me a cup without comment and I took the first long sip with a sigh of pleasure and knew, almost instantly, that I was in trouble.