The Game of Opposites

by Norman Lebrecht

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In an unnamed country at the end of a world war, Paul Miller escapes from a labor camp, collapsing after a few hundred feet. Taken in by a young woman he learns to love, Paul decides to stay where he is, and, as the war ends, he marries, starts a family, and helps to rebuild the village. But Paul is inescapably haunted by his life before the war, by his time in the camp, and by the fact that the people who are now his friends ignored for years the horrors in their midst. So when the camp’s commander suddenly returns to the village, Paul finds himself forced to choose between vengeance and forgiveness. The Game of Opposites is a universal tale of good and evil, and a stunning evocation of the capability for both within us all.

Release date: July 7, 2009

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 336

Sample

Part One: Flight
 
Chapter One
 
At four in the morning, an hour before the cement mixer is due, Paul creeps downstairs in woollen socks and pulls on his trousers in the wood-panelled tavern bar, the air heavy with the past night’s conviviality. Fumbling past the silent coffee machine, a stair light winking off its curved steel wall, he brews himself a small black pot on the old crusted hob and sips the scalding bitterness through a rock-hard almond biscuit, the last of the batch that Alice baked for Easter. Crossing the room once more, he caresses the coffeemaker with trailing fingertips.
 
The coffeemaker was Paul’s dearest possession, his defining object. He had picked it up “on the lack” and trundled it for miles on the back of a jeep before unwrapping it in front of a twitter of village lives, his masculine perversity gratified by their shrieks of dismay. He had hoped the contraption would cause alarm, and it satisfied his wishes to the full. To the huddle of black bonnets around the bar, Paul’s machine was a pulsing threat, a disruption to the natural order. There was no telling the harm it might do. A man in need of strong coffee after a hard night’s lambing in the fields would be lured away from hearth and hob by this sibilant hussy. One sip, and a husband was lost. The ladies had read of such things in picture magazines and were not about to permit them in the village. “Take it away, landlord,” shrilled the butcher’s wife, “before I ask Father Hitzinger to denounce it this very Sunday.”
 
It cost Paul three rounds of free tastings to convince the bonnets that his novelty was innocuous, its dainty servings so different from their kitchen dispensations as to pose no challenge to their domain. A real man, he explained, would always require a large dose of the handmade. His tiny shots of steam-pressed coffee were meant for visitors, for city people jaded by luxury and condemned to a vapid quest for extreme sensation, effete couples who came to the inn for cynically themed “country weekends.” This machine was strictly for what Paul called “passing trade.”
 
The ladies, receptive to slick assurances, flattered by his attention, and emboldened by the fierce extract that surged through their child-worn frames, turned bold and mildly flirtatious, as people do when free drinks are being served. “It is a fine beverage, landlord,” declared the market carrot seller with the comically jutting bosom. “It is hot and aromatic and rasping to the tongue, but it is not what we around here call coffee, oh no. Coffee is what we grind by hand, with the grime of our fingernails and a fleck of sweat from the brow. When you want real coffee, landlord, boiled through and through and served in a man-sized mug, just knock at my door and I will show you proper coffee.”
 
“And if her gimpy old man is out in the fields,” cackled a wrinkled head scarf at the fringe of the throng, “our Regina will show you plenty else besides.”
 
“Shut your cesspit, Elsa,” snapped the carrot woman. “The landlord is a Christian gentleman. He does not need to hear such filth. I apologise for the feeble old lady, landlord. This posh coffee of yours has gone straight to her head.”
 
“ ‘Old’?” squeaked her antagonist. “She and I were in the same class at school. She’s got a prolapsed womb and can’t stand up straight for arthritis. I’ll give her old. . . .”
 
“Ladies, ladies,” soothed Paul, shepherding them to the door and bolting it when the last was gone, his plan fulfilled. Soon no man within miles would be unaware of his acquisition or incurious to see it in action, eager to sacrifice another slice of rural lore for the benefits of modern convenience.
 
As if in response to the women’s sensitivities, Paul hung a sign on the machine the next morning, saying that it was out of order, awaiting a vital part. For a whole month, it stood bare and idle on the bar top, like a villain in stocks on assizes day, an object of casual derision. Two days before its reinauguration, Paul posted a notice outside and took on extra hands behind the bar to cope with the anticipated rush. At the second unveiling of the miraculous steam machine, the Laughing Hind was packed so full with unfamiliar faces that its wooden beams seemed to bend outwards to accommodate them all. Rye farmers in mud-caked boots jostled lumberjacks from deep in the forest. Poachers were drawn from their traps and goatherds from vertiginous mountain huts. All converged to inspect a mechanical intruder which, rumour had it, was about to change a staple of their existence.
 
They rallied much as their great-grandparents had gathered a hundred years before to watch curls of  smoke from the first locomotive, aware that the steady tread of their lives was under attack, that a man might no longer earn his keep from the shearing of sheep, as his womenfolk spun wool and his sons repaired the looms and shod the village horses. The puffing iron carriageway would render their rustic crafts redundant and all would be forced to work in dark factories while the land returned to wilderness and foxes copulated on their parents’ graves, as the priest of that day thundered from his pulpit. His gruesome fears proved, by God’s mercy, to be greatly exaggerated, thanks to a hostile gradient which even mountain folk found intractable and an absence of commercially extractable mineral resources. A century later, at the coming of the coffee machine, the nearest railway station was still hours away by winding road and the village existed much as it had done since legendary times. The surrounding slopes were coated in virgin oak, uncut by fire lanes. Crested eagles, the last of their species, nested balefully on craggy heights. Hyenas howled at night. Pagan rituals were whispered in forest glades. Ramblers, ornithologists, and election-year politicians who reached the village on a bone-rattling detour from their cardinal occupations marvelled at its remoteness. It was a place where no radio signal was received and a person could sit all afternoon in a beer garden without hearing so much as a cough of internal combustion. “Paradise it is,” sighed the Christian party cheerleader over his frothing beer jug. “The crucible of our civilisation,” agreed the contented Socialist candidate.
 
The villagers smiled thinly at these pitiful compliments, the perfumed words of city folk who could not milk a goat to save a dying child. What did their paper-white fingers know of the skincracking struggle to hack sustenance from hard rock, their fat bottoms of hoar frost at dawn in a December earth closet? Waiters who replenished their tankards and chambermaids who turned the corners of their eiderdowns knew the cost in quotidian brutality of a picture-postcard charm. They did not ooh and aah at the loveliness of a living thing before it was killed, stripped, and eaten, its bones crushed for manure, its offal fed to the chickens. Paul, stomping through blood pools big as duck ponds in his backyard, warned his staff to mask their contempt for the visitors. Personally, he told them in a low voice, he would cheerfully suffocate townies who drooled at dinner over a dish they had photographed a couple of hours earlier frolicking in the field. Someday, he would frog-march their fat asses into a tour of the slaughterhouse before he admitted their hungry faces to the dining hall. “Good for you, landlord,” chimed an ancient jug washer. “Come the millennium, we’ll choke the parasites with their duck pillows and bury them in a compost heap.”