Read Online The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene - Free Book Online

am doing my best to describe a typical lesson which I received from the Captain, but I realize only too well that my description cannot be factually accurate. It has passed through the memory and the memory rejects and alters, much as the Captain may have changed a lot of facts when he recounted his wartime experiences. Sometimes Liza sat with us during a lesson, and I noticed then that her favourite story – of his escape to Spain – which even found a place in his language lessons as well as his geography ones (on one occasion at least he even attempted a bit of modern history) – became more detailed when she was with us, and the details did not always tally; it was as though with Liza in his audience he wanted to make the story a bit more interesting. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, he may deliberately lie a little. For example when he described to me his escape with his companions across the Pyrenees he told me – that I’m sure – how they lay in the dark listening to the noise of the boots made by the German patrol, but later when Liza was sitting with us he added a dramatic detail, telling how a stone was dislodged and fell from above and struck his ankle and to this day in damp weather the pain came back and he would find himself limping, something which I had never seen him do.
    (2)
    The beard did not last more than a week or two. One morning when I came down to breakfast I found the Captain was busy shaving it off. Perhaps because he was whistling at the same time he cut himself twice. ‘I never feel at home in this thing,’ he told me. ‘It always reminds me of those fuliginous days in the Pyrenees. No chance of shaving there. Anyway Liza doesn’t like it. She says she gets prickled.’
    He turned around, razor in hand, to where Liza was making the tea and exhibited himself. ‘That’s the way you like it, Liza?’
    ‘I don’t like to see you bleeding.’
    ‘A little blood-letting does no one any harm.’ That was a phrase that I’m quite sure he used, for it remained in my head for years, though I have no idea why. They were also the last words I can remember him saying for some weeks, for he didn’t come in that day for supper, and the next morning he wasn’t there for breakfast.
    ‘Where’s the Captain?’ I asked.
    ‘How would I know?’ Liza said in a tone which, when I think of it now, comes back to me as almost a cry of despair.
    ‘But he said we were going to have another history lesson,’ I complained with the egotistic disappointment of my age, and, just as I feared, it was a religious lesson from Liza which took its place.
    The religious lessons had been much less of a success with me. Of course at school with the Amalekites I had attended what my fellows called ‘Divvers’, but I was a bit vague about the events in the New Testament except for the birth at the inn (not the sort of inn I felt sure which served gin and tonics), the crucifixion and the resurrection. All these had impressed me like a fairy story with an unlikely happy ending. (I never really believed that Cinderella would marry the Prince.)
    Liza had obeyed the Captain’s instruction and bought me a Bible at a second-hand bookshop, and I dipped into it now and then, but I found the old-fashioned language very difficult and the business of the Virgin birth confused me. One evening before she turned off the light over my sofa I asked Liza to explain it. ‘I always thought a virgin meant …’ But she interrupted me quickly and left me in darkness. I thought that perhaps she didn’t like talking about babies because she hadn’t succeeded in having one of her own and the word ‘virgin’ obviously embarrassed her too.
    All the same – to please the Captain – she would ask me every Sunday to read a bit of the Bible out loud to her, but I soon discovered a way of escaping this routine by twice choosing passages which she couldn’t possibly explain. For this I dived into that part which was called the Old Testament