The Last Supper

    I’ve clearly had enough. And this is a true account of all that really happened, and I would swear it on a Bible if that is what it takes. It has been long and twisted in the doing of it, but surely won’t be long in telling. I would love to get down to it in my own humdrum fashion, since there isn’t much point now in hurrying up. I wish it would end up reading like one of those adventure page-turners. You wouldn’t mind reading that sort of yarn, but people are usually averse to listening to true accounts, I know, just because its true.

    But this one is true, and I hope, interesting. That I’m stuck in this place is a matter of little surprise. A stupid plan like that never could’ve worked, I knew that always. But it was still worth a try and between us two, it was nearly managed, I’d like to believe. A pat on the back after all I’ve been through is well-deserved.

    My past seems very hazy, lost behind curtains of battery-smoke. Trying to remember it is like recalling details of your past life. I know it isn’t possible. All I can recollect is that I was in a cockpit, with an array of dials and buttons, and several meters and indicators were running alarmingly low. That is where it all ends, with an earth shattering crash. It is the last vestige of my history. Oftentimes it has seemed like I was teetering on the verge of remembering everything in a sudden blast, but that never came.

    When I woke up after that, I was in this hell-hole of a place, surrounded by filth, walls, fences, watch-towers, and lots of armed Germans. That’s what they call a camp. They kept calling me 23, and that’s what I call myself too. I was treated with as much generosity as Germans can extend to their prisoners, especially British ones. Hence I was, like the rest, put to work. I slogged like a cur all day long, helping them strengthen their base so that they can catch more flies in that web like me, in exchange for just one square meal a day. They had some devilish beauty about their calorie mathematics, sparing exactly enough to keep a body alive and slaving, and not fighting. But I wasn’t really the sort who could ever endure starvation much. Bullets seem better than that to me. God, I feel I can eat all the world right now.

    There were bitter battles in the yard where we spent our days, before retiring to our nauseating quarters at night. We fought amongst ourselves for food. Much like the animal kingdom, it was survival of the fittest. And I’m very fit, you know. You wouldn’t be of a mind to write this thing had you been in my place. Takes a different sort of fitness, this.

    Teeth were broken, eyeballs squashed, and necks broken, for the sake of a cindered loaf of bread and a stale egg. The Germans found it very interesting, and placed bets on us, and I swiftly became a favourite in this rampage. So much so that I was shifted to the tiniest room in a corner of the camp, to keep me from being murdered by the others. It was more like a kennel, and I shared it with my nameless friend who had somehow contracted leprosy. I shuddered at first, but decided it was safer than staying at the quarters and having my throat slit in sleep.

    13, for he wouldn’t tell me his real name, was a truly piteous spectacle. It was not the ailment so much as it was the starvation. He looked clean enough apart from a blanched patch here and there. But he was slowly, certainly, and visibly dying of starvation. He wasn’t willing to fight for his life either. He confessed it would be of no use to him anymore, and that he had tried attacking the guards so they might have mercy and shoot him. But the cunning guards, far from doing that, even offered to help him escape, knowing full well that life out in the world as a potential leper would be far worse than in this cage. And they’d knock him unconscious and place him back in his hole again.

    I told the guards, who had taken a liking for me, that I didn’t want to be cooped up with a leper, but they assured me that they had punched him with bare hands and not got it, so I could do the same without scruples if he drew too near. A leper is a leper, they said, nodding sagely and lending me a cigar or two on the sly. Indeed, they mentioned, that was why he was number 13 in the register, and had been there for a long, long time. He was the last remaining member of the first ‘flock’ of planes they shot down. But they wouldn’t tell me his name. There was something wrong about it, and I thought it best not to press the matter.

    Apart from dermatological and nutritional shortcomings, though, 13 was a man of enormous education and refinement. He must have hailed from some wealthy, noble family, and was more learned than anyone I ever knew. He retained, even after all the vile suffering, a classical, well-bred beauty that I remember seeing in museum statues.

    I naturally didn’t mind sharing my fare with him. He always wished to die in some way other than starvation or disease, he said. We were fast friends, and he was a great talker, and told me of things I never knew existed. But I discerned a streak of madness in him, even more reason for him not to leave this place. He would be quarantined either as a leprosy sufferer or a lunatic, and administered ‘treatment’, that would surely kill him.

    But I was fairly driven madder still when he told me, being drunk off a bottle of whisky I had secretly procured, that he knew of an escape. He had never told me, fearing the loss of the only friend he had in the world.

    I finally managed to persuade him to join me in effecting an escape, chiefly by concocting lies about a herbalist who had a panacea. That was the only way to get out his secret, and having swigged several glasses by then, he believed it.

    It turned out be a long tunnel that he was literally sitting on. Just beneath his chair was the trap door, skillfully concealed by heaps of rope, odds and ends, and dirt buckets.

It used to be some kind of forgotten pipeline or sewer branch, which they never finished digging. 13 said that it stretched out to a distant field at the other end, but there had been a little cave in towards the end of the passage, and without the necessary tools it was fairly useless.

    To cut a long story short, the next few weeks passed by gathering stuff from around the camp, torches and spades, shovels and pickaxes. Stealing them was hard, but my only thought was of the rewards at the end.

    The first few nights, we investigated the subterranean route. Long ages of disuse had turned it into a hive of grotesque vegetation. Parasitic plants of sickening odour featured the walls, and hung like stalactites from the ceiling of the rodent-infested tunnel. Rats of amazing varieties and sizes scurried away with every step we took, and many-hued reptiles sped out of their crannies as we passed with our torches, their eyes like sparkling gems of surprise. It was a long and exhausting journey, and we lost all sense of time until we came up against a wall of soft-packed earth that 13 had spoken of. It would need several days of hard work to clear it up, and was so far away from the camp that it was impossible after the hard labour to make it back in time. The only way, thus, was to ensure that we could stay away for quite some time and escape directly by burrowing our way through. And even if the escape route was detected, it would take them a large amount of time to get to us.

    The last step in this madcap plan was checking what we had. Apart from a tiny heap of iron tools, tangled up in metal prongs and hilts, I had managed to grab a large bundle of rations, well salted and preserved, on a rainy evening when it arrived by truck. The final touch was a can of oil, which we watered the walls and floor of our lair with, and set on fire just as we scrambled down the tunnel like mice.

    Of course, I can almost see your guffawing face. We found how insane it all was in a matter of weeks. The eats disappeared even before we knew it, and it felt that, after all, we had managed merely to scrape the surface of a mountain. And there was no turning back. More than a week went without food and I could only sit there and look at 13 through a cloud that was settling more densely before my vision with each passing day. He had utterly given up, and it was evident that he would soon bid adieu to the world.

    But the purgatory failed to sap my will to live on. Somewhere deep within that rickety heart which had sunk into the famished vacuole that used to be my stomach, I wished to live. Every throb sent jolts of agony all over my body in monster tentacles, and existing even a minute longer seemed a daunting task.

    A pang of flaming need arose unprecedented. I could restrain myself no more, and writhed over in agony to a dying 13’s side. Just then, a highway of harsh light streamed searchingly over to us, followed by torch-wielding German soldiers. One of them fainted upon observing me.

    I can tell you that 13 didn’t struggle, but only gasped once. And also, he tasted good.