Trespass Excerpt

- by Matthew Funk

Captain Odo

            In such events, who fired first is never an issue. After the fact this may be sorted out for use of political leverage against one’s opponent, but even then the matter is negligible when compared to the results of the victor’s pure, brute force. It is not the dead who decide what is written on their graves. We fired and they fired, releasing together.

            I fired as well and again the Maxim treated me to the force of its rollicking release, letting my body fight against its while it fought back. This time the experience was private, but somehow this made it more scandalous, as if the absence of others in the dugout gave my feelings wide enough berth to grow beyond the confines of collective decency. I fired, we fired, they fired. They dropped.

            Some four of them dropped. 

            I proceeded down the draw on my own, the mountain winds and my own mischief at leaving my unit leaderless biting at me. The situation down there in the final stretch of hills was as I had seen it from far away at the dugout. Somehow this surprised me. I had expected more to result from the initial contact of the two violent powers. I had anticipated a storm and had only seen a flurry. I partly thought that more had in fact gone on, only that somehow it had been invisible to me, and that getting up closer what had appeared as a peaceable resolution would reveal itself to be a vast garden of human bodies entwined with death and pain. This was not the case. Instead they had reached some manner of negotiated armistice. I felt left out of this – as I had been – acutely left out and, resentful at being severed, I adopted a hostile air immediately. No one seemed to mind.

            The Nazis were in no position to take umbrage with my demeanor anyway. They were in a truly sorry condition, their wounded aside. All of them save the women looked as though they had been passed through the body of a large animal with a very poor diet. Their hats, their tunics, even their parade ribbons – which they shamelessly displayed – were filthy, further adding to my revulsion. The women were hardly much better. One of them, a spry looking young blonde, was wearing what we had come to call, “partisan standard issue”, this being the assorted remnants of many Nazi uniforms. She was in histrionics of grief, apoplectically casting herself over the bodies of two of the fallen Nazis. One of them was the other girl, also wearing partisan standard issue but with the feminine flare of a poncho. She had been hit through the chest and now lay motionless and silent, regarding the other woman with an eerie reserve. That there was a connection between them beyond merely that of grief of living over the dying was unmistakable. It was a connection fascinating in its nudity: that it bared all to us mere onlookers who had given little to it in return. They seemed queer partners, the dying girl and the woman. They were both interested in the other with an intensity that could be felt like a rapist’s embrace, even from where I stood some 5 meters away; intensity the mode of which was entirely different from the others’.

The blonde woman was manic in her misery, her vitality finding outlet through fat tears and keening shrieks. She cut at uncaring air with hands shaped into talons. She stared as if to burn a hole through space in which she could crawl in and hide. She moaned and pleaded and gentled the dying girl. And all the while a calmness about her was evident, a desperate, coiled calmness, impatiently waiting for time to reverse itself and grant her a better present.

The girl seemed very still but was anything but calm. She met the woman’s passion with all she could convey of her own. She was hardly subtle in this though; for all the attention everyone granted the woman, the dying girl was the far more captivating of the two. Every inexpressible passion she had she poured from her through lamp lit eyes, through her ferocious silence, through every aspect of her being. Her face seemed to always be close to the blonde’s as it was protuberant in its beauty – her eyes bulging, lips extruding a weal of blood. Everything about her strained, even her sweat. In this torrid quiet she spoke of a lifetime of rages and resignations, using her chalky flesh and the welling blood that spilled from her mouth rather than her words.

Together, she and the woman were joined in a ritual we all were excluded from but all intimately understood. This understanding was not from experience, though I and many of my partisans have mourned dying comrades while still on the hot field. We understood in much the same way as we understood our bodies to be the same, that there is a similarity of human physical function, and therefore human physical need. And these needs were sometimes as excited by loss, by destruction, as they are by the gain of intimacy. Sometimes more so.

The other man the blonde grieved over was also well on his way to dying. He was shot clean through the gut and lay on the grass near the feet of the girl. His manner bore no resemblance to those of the two women though; it was as if he were undergoing an entirely different process. He was silent and still but these qualities had no relation to those qualities of the same names as exhibited by the dying girl. Instead he had a look of being discarded, as if the bullet that had struck him had picked him up and absently deposited him on the ground while the rest of humanity moved on. He lay with all the silence of a piece of litter, waiting for whatever oblivion claimed matter for which there was no use to come and pick him up. That he was sad to have this fate was undeniable. He cried through gritted teeth and one could almost see the mental image of the other - the better - that he was staring at reflected in his eyes. Still, he was resigned to the inevitability of his death. He was a man who had been so long in the waiting room that now, when his wait was coming to an end, he could not recall how or why to act differently.

The blonde often touched this man, touched him with desperate consolation as if he were a force that pulled her grief to itself for short periods before releasing her back to the orbit of the dying girl. He would have been entirely unobtrusive were it not for the physical presence of his gut wound. Noisy and gaseous, the ropes of intestine unwinding from the ragged red mouth were aggressively noxious. The man would not allow himself to be bothered. While most of his mind stared at the house, the family, the girlfriend or some other vision of a bright future, he retained enough to will to ignore his wound as one might the offensive antics of an annoying companion.

I moved past these two and through the crowd of Nazis, ignoring the overtures of their officer – presumably the man I was supposed to give safe passage. He was a striking man, very young and very good-looking. Immediately I felt these two things to be true with a certainty that was rare for a man so given to consideration and sensitivity as myself. But I was resolved to play the director of this scene and moved on.

The other Nazis were clustered around the third wounded man, a fellow who had been shot through both legs. He was of little interest to me, his wounding too much of a loud and public thing. I proceeded to the last man, who had been struck in the chest and legs and now lay dead.

The man – the corpse of the man – also held little fascination for me. It was now something emblematic of the Nazis, not of me, as if they had brought it with them as a totem of a faith I could not understand. It lay, as most corpses lay, in a grotesquely twisted shape. It already had the gray complexion of dead flesh, looking as if it were made out of paste, and I hated it for bringing its ugliness into my world.

I kicked playfully at it, showing it that it was under my shoe, and turned to address the crowd.

“Everyone back now, back away from the wounded.” I did not feel a need to explain myself. Not because the reason for my command was evident, no; I had no interest in appealing to these monsters. Because the dynamic of power was so evident, so obviously pressed upon them by us, that they could not move without our command.

Most obeyed. The exception was predictable – the blonde woman. She remained by the side of the dying girl and the man, despite our raising our guns at the entire crowd. I threatened to open fire if she didn’t withdraw and the Nazi officer, most likely her owner I judged, pulled her away with no small amount of kicking and screaming.

Of all the options I had at that time, none of them seemed so appealing as to follow my instincts and eliminate them all. This was not a very viable option however as it would ensure that continuation of my power to have such options would soon and finally cease. Second to killing them all I could at the very least inflict pain on them all. This was an unorthodox situation and in such circumstances it is well to choose a course that is not only well charted but that you know through personal travel. I could have made an effort to extend aid to them but this would have been false and strange and so could have ended in further chaos. I resolved to do what I truly felt, and told Mstislav that he was to hold the prisoners there until I personally returned with orders contrary. They were not to move. Not an inch. He nodded, but seemed displeased.

On this count I could sympathize. Not only was the man with the gut wound unpleasant to be around now, but no matter how tough he was, he would undoubtedly worsen. He was a mature man with a paternal look about him, the typical “papa NCO” that the Nazis seemed to breed in droves, and was holding himself together in a manner that befitted the well-kept uniform, complete with cap, he wore. He was heavily set but not fat, obviously affected by malnutrition, but still with a broad, open face. He had, his stomach’s contents showed, eaten boiled glue and wood chips recently – he was a man of sacrifice, and his eyebrows were like the eaves of a church. But though he looked longingly at that far off fantasy he maintained, then longingly at the blonde woman, then longingly back to the fantasy, given time he would be pulled back to the hole in his body by sheer weight of pain. This would be decidedly unpleasant to witness and it would surely take him some time to die.

The girl was also proving to be revolting to be around. There was no telling when or how she would die. Blood came in foamy ejaculations from her swollen lips, but this really meant nothing. She could continue as such, her fascinating condition undergoing all manner of mortal eruption, for hours, perhaps even into the next day. She could die within minutes of septic shock. But like the man, her physical discorporation was reaching its compelling climax.

She had vacated herself, her legs stained to the ankles, and a small monkey had also vacated itself on her. This frantic little beast hopped noisily around her chest as if trying to inspire her with its animation.

The prospect of abiding with this spectacle indefinitely alarmed Mstislav, this was apparent. I could not blame him. Who knew along what course of events this pattern of viscera would next grow and spill?  

I departed without saying a word to the Nazi, walking back up the way to the dugout. There I smoked a cigarette and let my nerves gradually knit themselves back into place after the forcible fraying of being exposed to that delirium. Spreading my hand as I smoked, I regarded the webbing of my flesh. In the lines there, I mused, could be contained the congress of thousands of organisms. The notion was truly awesome. The greatest wealth of travesties, virtues, of all manners of violence, were contained between two invisible hairs. Over the lip of the dugout, miniscule in the draw, the Nazis and my partisans waited with the dying and dead. I could not see their wounds but I knew they were there. How huge those wounds must have seemed to those who were enduring them. The feeling that my command inflicted them on others’ bodies, that I was inflicting them still as they changed, worsening or healing, exhilarated my sex. Externally, I was mortified and, as I always am when forcibly mortified, livid and offended. Internally an erection stirred to full life.  All I had done that morning: whole worlds of feelings introduced to body parts that would otherwise have been utterly ignorant of them, transfixing the wounded.

I had feared for a time that I was getting old – this was when the War was on her deathbed – and this fear assaulted that morning in the dugout as I smoked. I extinguished the cigarette at once, stood and brushed myself clean of any ash. I still felt vigorous, still sexually excited, but now I was suspicious of this feeling.

I proceeded back to the village, walking alone even though such a thing was unwise. Honestly and more likely, it was because such a thing was unwise. And that after crossing through the dense prepared positions my Section had carved into the side of the hill, I found myself possessed of a powerful urge to venture into the woods in search of something. What, I do not know. I looked for what must have been hours, wandering amongst the taciturn trees, but nothing offered itself. Only my pulse and the retreat of wildlife before it. 

Teplice was quiet. The only noises were the ambling movement of the partisans who had been rotated from the front and the liberated enjoying the breadth of their liberation. Occasionally the shrill protest of one of the residents could be heard but no one listened. We may be able to hear the cries of carrion birds but that does not mean we waste the time trying to understand them.

The headquarters of the ORION Detachment was in the local inn, The Cat’s Eye, an establishment that was the pride of the town. This location served several purposes for our command and control structure. For the purposes of command, its centralized location, hardy workmanship and considerable size met our practical demands. For control, lodging the officers in the local inn made certain that none of the men would find it easy to get drunk on our watch, at least not without permission. What’s more the bar on the main floor was also centrally located and circular, allowing us an ad hoc map table around which the officers could collect.

We collected that day as same as ever, taking our time to form up to discuss the situation as a group. There was no cause to hurry during this phase of the conflict, no need to rush or worry as back in the beginning. Things had been at their most dire only last year and many of us were still allowing ourselves time to recover from that tumult. I had a glass of cognac from Teplice’s mayor’s bloated reserves, admired how still the liquid sat in the glass, and waited for a courier to summon the others.

They came at their own pace, all my platoon commanders save Mstislav and finally, from a radio conference with the approaching Red Army, Bronislava. By that time I had finally unwound from the wild moments back in the draw. I was still in such a state I wondered if the pangs in my body were from the cognac stinging me or I stinging it. None of the male commanders were senior enough to actually start a conversation with me; it was simply assumed among we comrades that those oldest in the Detachment got the first word by virtue of being there first. Ludmila had been serving the Progressive cause longer than Bronislava or I, her expertise had gained her leadership of the weapons element of our detachment. She was not, however, considered my senior. This fact, and her uncanny tenderness, ensured that I would drink in silence, admiring the stillness of the liquid in my glass, until Bronislava arrived. 

She wanted to kill them all and left this as a standing order, only held in check by lack of opportunity.

We were confident that such an opportunity would present itself, relations in Teplice between enemy elements sure to degenerate until they had fermented to the point of violence. The emissaries from western intelligence were quite explicit in their demands that they retrieve the Nazi officer alive however and so we should not take any direct action until this demand was satisfied. This sounded well enough to me but despite how convinced my mind was my hands felt like heavy, undependable things good for nothing but lolling at the ends of my wrists. Paralysis was hardly the word, but we knew we had been hobbled by our dependence on the westerners to supply us with arms and until the Red Army came to liberate us from this situation and exact some morally honest justice against the Nazis, we had to remain in these stocks of our own devising. The alternative was risking death, something we’d done often enough that we knew we had no desire to do so again. So the conversation went until we were wild with our own impotence. Before this frustration reached critical mass Bronislava and I departed to take care of official business. The Nazis, we had resolved, would neither go to the grave nor the village until we had the rubber stamp of the west on our proposed action.

Would that it had proceeded this way without a hitch but the intelligence men seemed determined to complicate what should have been a simply sanction. Upon hearing my report – and I ought to mention that in a state of partial inebriation I somewhat exaggerated the horror of the situation – the chief of the trio, one “Bob Baxter”, was compelled to spring from his seat in anger. “Bob Baxter” apparently found the notion of our right to defend ourselves against a possible Nazi ruse to be preposterous and, without any ability to rectify the situation himself, “Bob” could only stand and fume like a broken transformer. Borne about the room by an excited imagination, “Bob” settled on atrocity after possible atrocity, making the most hideous inquiries over how the prisoners were now and how we intended they be in the future. He painted lurid possibilities of our butchering the men without killing them, about mass rapes of the women, all manner of humiliations, violations and wounds were depicted in “Bob’s” fluorescent prose. Ultimately he settled down though and we made no issue of being treated like we, rather than the Nazis, were the barbarians. Instead we protected the serenity between our groups like the wounded thing it was. The westerners did the same.

Bronislava and I were of a certain understanding; we both knew we had to have the Nazis dead and buried in a shallow grave of Moravian soil, and passing this thought between us we immediately began our stratagem to achieve this.

“What is the imperative about having the rest of the officer’s companions alive?” Bronislava asked, feigning naiveté while playing with a ruler that had been laying about.

Baxter did not reply. Instead his second, a man named “Don Clay” said, “Not all that much, save that he’s supposed to be cooperative once he left.”

The idea of a cooperative Nazi was so loathsome and lunatic I was nearly sick on the table. Bronislava and I felt each other’s bodies flush, even through the quilting of our uniforms. The weapons on our shoulders felt heavy and restless. We shifted them.

“He needs to be at least content,” “Don Clay” continued, “that means anyone with his personal protection should be off limits. That means his intimates.”

We did not bother suppressing the smile the reference of our Nazi friend’s intimates inspired in us. Bronislava assented but qualified in reply, setting down the ruler, “But he can’t be allowed to administer to all of his men while here, can he? It would pose a threat.”

To that statement even “Don Clay” had to agree. His solution, produced a little too quickly to have been impromptu, was “we will lock them in the camp.”

This was more than adequate; it was what Bronislava and I had hoped for. Our design depended on having the Nazi monster under a spell of security in a new lair, one we could have infiltrated thoroughly with the same persons his kind had locked in there to die a slow death. The list of ways one could die in such a factory of mortality was long enough to present Bronislava and I with a means of escaping the high tower of regulations that the western intelligence had sealed us in. After all, how could we be denied the weapons that would allow us to continue the fight against the Nazi supply corridors when their beloved officer and his whore had died at the hands of former inmates? We could not. The delightful bind in which we lashed the Nazis to their deaths with instantly improved the mood of Bronislava and I.

We were tugging on it, testing its weaknesses, when we encountered Sebastian.

Don Clay

Don’t mess with the G-man, says Don Clay. 

Trouble is my middle name. 

These documents aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. I toss them back at Roy like the trash they are. What do these people think, that we’re setting up a lemonade stand here? I can’t give the Nazi his safe passage if I offer the partisans that’ll ensure that passage a single crate of popguns. 

The big stuff or bust, Don Clay tells them. The big stuff or we walk out of here short one Nazi and his entourage. Don Clay makes it clear. 

They’re reasonable people. Business people. I speak their language. 

Odo and Broni are stand up freedom fighters. They do their country proud. They are an oppressed people fighting a tyrannical power. This is the very spirit of freedom. The very spirit of America is what it is. And I should know. 

I’m Don Clay. 

Weapons check. Okay. The gun’s okay. The gun’s better than okay. I cleaned it myself. The gun is ready to let the sunshine in. Let the sun. Shine. In. 

Don’t mess with the G-man. 

Take it back and do it right this time. Roy does as he’s told.  

Roy’s a good man. A family man. He’s got an understanding of family values. He has family values. He fights for them. On his own shores and in the heart of the enemy.  

Roy, I can use. Don Clay needs patriots like Roy. 

America needs patriots. She can’t be abandoned like an old maid. She is in the prime of her life, ripe and ready to give the next generation a firm upbringing. She needs a good husband. We provide that. We are the Office of Strategic Services. We take out the government’s trash. 

Their trash, we take out, Don Clay thinks. 

Weapons check. Okay. The gun’s perfect. 

The deal is clear-cut, and I expect the Nazi to understand that. He comes from a heathen, Godless country of barbarians but even the Hun can understand the simple language of American dollars. The deal works. America works. It what she does. The business of America is business. Don Clay works for the Company. 

Some companies deal in stereos, others in auto parts or baby cradles. We make futures. We sell freedom. At low, low prices. Buy-out prices for countries down on our luck. Like this country. Czechoslovakia is Central Europe’s only working democracy. It needs the services of the people in the Company. As many as it can get. And but soon. 

The Nazi is our next employee, and that’s okay by Don Clay. Jesus said to forgive those that forgive themselves In Him. And Don Clay understands. People like Roy understand. Patriots. Christians. The good people of America. And I believe in America, I do. I know some think it’s silly to believe in your country. Well then, Don Clay is a silly man. 

Don Clay, well, he’s a G-man. Don’t mess around with the G-man. 

Even the East needs us. The radio just said so. The radio’s linked up with the ever-vigilant network our daring men and women have set up across the hooded face of occupied Europe. Fortress Europe, the network has been set up through the doughty earthworks of Fortress Europe. Through this we combine our efforts to bring tyranny to its just end.  

There are other wars to be fought. Elsewhere, peoples cry out and fight to be free. People cry out and fight to be free.  

Don Clay hears those cries, my little yellow sons and daughters. 

Don understands, even though Don’s wife does not. Let her. I ride alone. I am a lone crusader against the perils that would seek to deny people who cry out and fight to be free their freedom.  

I’m riding this one alone. 

Weapons check. Got the gun. The gun’s ready. 

So Don Clay lays it on the line. With a face made of Detroit steel he tells him, Get it right, Roy. Send it back and get it right this time. Transmit it again. I know it’s the fourth time. Do it. 

The Company’s sending out their supplies on the same bird that’s going to be picking the Nazi and I up. Roy’s signing off on it. It’s a dilly of a deal. It’s crackerjack. 

Just like Don Clay. Too hot to touch, like a gun that’s just been fired. 

Gun’s ready. Gun’s okay. 

The Company’s sending the plane already, Don Clay reasons, his eyebrows cocked like Colt Peacemakers. He means business. If they’re sending it anyway, tell them to throw some of the weapons on it. The big stuff. The stuff that means business. 

Don Clay’s all business. Out of his way. Look out. 

So then the partisans get the guns, we get the Nazi and his troupe out of here. Aces, right? 

Someone’s stalling Don Clay, Roy. And he isn’t too partial to that. 

“No, sir.” Says Roy. He’s as dependable as the afternoon post. 

Well, let’s bust some heads then. Let’s get results. Results, Roy. We’ve got to get the plane on deck soon, we’ve got to get enough weapons delivered to make Golian’s small army of scrappers into a fighting force to be reckoned with, and we’ve got to get the Nazis entourage out of here. 

There’s no saying how large that entourage is. We can’t go above two people of course, and he’s got to understand that. The Nazi’s a reasonable man. He can be reasoned with. 

Don Clay can tell that, he senses that. 

Now to make the camp go along with it. They’re a carton of tough eggs, Roy, says Don Clay. Roy readily agrees. 

Even that Sebastian mug they’ve got leading them. 

Don Clay sips his coffee, looking at the mist outside the window fit to burn right through it. The mist. And the window too.

Especially that Sebastian mug, says Don Clay.

All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2007, all rights reserved.

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