Free A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks Page A

women and children. After a week, Geoffrey had taught himself not to look at any aspect of the people who came in, especially their faces. He was not in any case on duty at the chute when the women came, but was carrying the cut logs in rapid relays to the furnace mouth. It seemed from shouts he heard from fellow-workers that some of the corpses were still living. When the number of people being killed was more than the gas chambers could process, the gassing time was cut to a barely sufficient ten minutes; then some last protective gesture had caused the women to hold the faces of their children tight against them and this perhaps had spared them the full effects of the gas.
    Geoffrey latched his eyes on to the wooden logs and redoubled his efforts, beneath the, for once, silent stare of the guards. He had lids of skin that he could bring down over his eyes. He closed them when he could; at other times he fastened his gaze to the backs of his hands – to the veins, the pores – to keep the eyes from straying.
    He heard the rumble of the chute and wished he had had lids with which to seal his ears.
    He decided he would rather die now than go on. There was an SS man in the crematorium whom he had noticed eyeing him as he worked. He was a slight, feral creature with small black eyes. His name was Muller. An instinct told Geoffrey that the way this man stared at him was personal. At the end of his twelve-hour shift, as he was leaving the crematorium to return to the asylum of the Special Unit barracks, he asked Muller if he might transfer from the crematorium to the detail that worked in the woods outside the fence.
    Muller looked him up and down. He seemed almost amused. ‘Are you English?’ he said.
    ‘Yes. You speak my language?’
    ‘Yes. I study before the war. Why do you wish to move?’
    ‘I’m fit. I’m strong, I can do more work outside.’
    ‘Those prisoners there live a few days only. It is the worst.’
    Geoffrey felt Muller’s gaze on him, sliding over his torso.
    He said: ‘If it would please you, Lieutenant. I would like to please you.’
    The man’s face froze over suddenly. ‘Go, then. You disgust me.’
    ‘Will you arrange my transfer?’
    The fear left Muller’s eyes. Contempt returned. He smiled a little. ‘You want to die? You are a … coward?’
    ‘You will authorise it?’
    ‘Go and die.’
    Geoffrey was dismissed. He went with a group of twenty prisoners through the wire to a clearing in the woods, where they exchanged their striped uniforms for rubber boots and waterproof overclothes. The job was to clear mass graves where the land had subsided, leaving ponds and pools of such fetor that even the Alsatian dogs would not go near.
    They were near the section of the wire that the Russians had chosen for their escape, which was due in thirty-six hours’ time. Knowing that his end was near, Geoffrey hurled himself into the work. He would have to complete only two shifts. He could do it.
    ‘
Schnell!
’
    The dogs for once cowered and whimpered. Geoffrey had an implement like a boat hook that he fished with in the swamp, hauling viscera and limbs out and carrying them to the pyres.
    The quantity of ash cleared from the crematoria and dumped among the trees meant that nothing would grow; it looked like the surface of another planet. All the SS wore gas masks. One thrust a bottle at Geoffrey. It was vodka. He drank. The guards lifted their masks for a moment to drink. They passed the vodka round from guard to prisoner, from prisoner to guard.
    There was continual screeching from the Germans. More. Faster. Harder. The prisoners were screaming, too, in Polish, Russian, Yiddish. Geoffrey’s throat was raw with retching, raw with screaming. He shouted all the words he knew. Parts of human were dropping on him.
    A prisoner turned on his guard, and was shot. Two men threw themselves on the pyre to die. One was hauled off and made to work again. Geoffrey pressed on with his eyes shut. His belly