By Ken Foxe
Once, they used to race bicycles up the hill. Sinewy men and women, engorged calves and thighs, on near weightless machines resolutely climbing at what must have seemed like superhuman speeds. They called the race La Flèche, the Arrow, a coincidental harbinger of what the ascent has since become.
The hill itself is called the Mur, the Wall, dreaded, they say, even by professionals. In distance, it’s about thirteen hundred metres long, but it rises one hundred and twenty metres in that span. If you understand gradients, that’s an average of just over nine percent with one S-bend that goes above twenty percent. If these terms are unfamiliar, then steep is the word you’re looking for.
The Mur is lined with six chapels and a church, though if you plan to climb it, as I must, the last thing on your mind will be prayer. Once upon a time, the hill was a place of good cheer, hundreds of spectators clapping, shouting, beating hoardings, willing the professional riders up and up, and up. Now, it is a place of jeers. The road, le Chemin des Chapelles, is lined with half-soused soldiers of our autocracy, waiting, waiting for your bicycle to come to a dead stop.
There are some who simply refuse to pedal the hill knowing how remote their chance is of making even a fraction of the ascent. For that, they are made to suffer. Each chapel reached marks one day less in the torture chamber before death. If you can get within sight of the final church, the Église Notre-Dame, it is a single shot from a rifle, enough that the misery ends right in that moment.
The dungeon beneath the Citadel of Huy has been my quarters these past three hundred and sixty-four days. My crime? A series of newspaper articles written about a young ambitious politician, whose ambitions have now been chillingly fulfilled.
A fortification has been here, in one shape or another, for more than a thousand years. During the Second World War, it housed political prisoners as it does now amidst the latest European disintegration. In between the continental wars, it became a tourist attraction. But it bided its time, sulking on the stone quays of the River Meuse, getting ready to return to a truer purpose. You have to think if it could speak, you would not want to be listening to the walls of the Citadel of Huy.
The conditions in which I am held are worse than spartan. My cage measures no more than nine feet by nine. We get an hour in the yard each day if the jailers are feeling generous. They feed me only a watery porridge and boiled potatoes, the scraps of which I fight over with a fearless rodent population. Many of the prisoners fall ill with dysentery and other diseases of digestion. By some miracle, I have escaped serious illness so far.
A year in a tiny cell will decondition the best-kept body. I must weigh twenty pounds less than I did when I arrived here. My face is gaunt, my ribs a skin-covered ladder, my arms and legs well atrophied. I’m the right weight to ride a bicycle well, but my muscles have lost much of their old power.
I was in good health before my incarceration. I was an amateur endurance athlete, liked to run cross-country and up hill trails, fit enough so that I sometimes delude myself I can still take on the Mur. It might be enough to get me past a few chapels, each one buying me a day less torture and bringing me closer to escape from this battle-scarred Europe.
They roust us from our cells early, batons and the butts of assault rifles rattling against the iron bars that imprison us. We are fed some thin gruel and stale water. I greedily gobble my portion; another prisoner can’t finish his bowl so I ask him if I can take it. Each mouthful requires a concentrated swallow so that you do not feel like gagging. It’s not much but it’s fuel – fuel I am going to need.
We are loaded into the back of an open military truck and driven down onto the quayside. There are ten of us, our hands in cable ties, our ankles manacled to the floor of the vehicle. My head rattles from side to side as I face out towards the water. On the contaminated river, two barges pass each other, one laden with coal, the other with grain. Since the war began, the Meuse has turned sour as it wends its way through what we used to call Belgium and the Netherlands.
We pass a burnt-out restaurant, the letters s-u-s-h the only clue to what once was there. On the cobbles between the riverside church and the old tourist office, three crucified prisoners are being feasted on by crows. There is a subtle smell of death in the air but the pall of smog across the town is so thick it’s barely detectable.
There’s a roundabout at the King’s Bridge and we turn in, driving through the unremarkable, sooty streets of the town. The road begins its ascent, leading to the base of the Mur. A bonfire burns at the base of the hill, surrounded by a handful of young men in ragged uniforms, drinking cans of Jupiler. One of them throws one half-empty into the blaze and flames burst around it.
The soldiers are laughing in that way of young men who have seen no good and mean no good. They are feral, ready to be ‘entertained’, to taunt and torture this weekend’s ‘contestants’. They say the military commander of this half of Wallonie once wanted to cycle for a living, had failed in that ambition, and that this pedal-powered travesty was his creation. An apocryphal story? If somebody does know the answer, they’re probably not the type of people you should be asking questions of.
There is an old, tattered sign pointing to the top, the sommet, from a time when visitors, cushioned by chamois on featherweight carbon-crafted machines, would come from far and wide to tackle the Mur. It’s not the only reminder of the harmonious past. On the surface of the road, the town’s name Huy is painted over and over. It’s whitewashed but fading, the H bold and thick like a sign for a hospital, the u and y in dainty italics.
All ten prisoners, each of us as skeletal as the next, are ushered down from the back of the truck. There are no onlookers except for the soldiers. For the scattered people who remain living in the town, whatever perverse novelty there once might have been about this weekly parade has long evaporated.
I see the ‘bicycles’ we are supposed to use. They’re old, but even worse, they look quite heavy. None of them appears to have more than ten gears. On some, the chains are showing signs of rust. On another, there is a broken brake cable, not that anybody is going to be using that going up the Mur.
We hear a vehicle speeding towards us. It skids to a stop near the bonfire. From it, a short stout officer stumbles, already half-drunk and seeming eager to complete the other half.
“Each of you,” he slurs, “has been offered a very generous opportunity. At the top of the Mur rests a pardon. Otherwise, it’s death and the only variable is how long we take to go about it.”
Some of the soldiers begin to chuckle. The officer’s face slopes off in a quarter grimace of a smile.
“Le Chemin des Chapelles contains? Well, chapels. You’ll see six of them before reaching the church at the summit. Each chapel you pass buys a day’s worth of mercy. And that’s the only thing you need to know.”
The officer climbs back into the staff car, departing as abruptly as he arrived. For him, the appeal of this brutish tradition is as threadbare as the tyres of these bicycles. The young soldiers pick out the first of the competitors, and it is obvious why. He is not the oldest of us, but he is unmistakably the frailest.
“Choose your chariot,” one says, pushing the prisoner towards the haphazard pile of corroding bikes they’ve provided. The prisoner can hardly get his leg over the crossbar. He manages it somehow and begins to cycle. There is just the shortest stretch of road that rises somewhat gently, but it kicks up sharply almost immediately. Within seconds, he is already wobbling, the power running through his thighs and into the pedals scarcely enough to keep an incandescent light bulb lit.
The ramshackle bike comes to a stop, the prisoner falling in slow motion to one side. A soldier comes at him with a blade, slashing away at his legs. The prisoner curls himself into a ball and whimpers, too tired to scream.
“That’ll be the full seven days,” screeches one of his comrades at the foot of the Mur. I only hope the prisoner’s body will fail him before the week is out.
The second man did not reach the first chapel either before being roughly dragged away. The third through sixth vanished around the first corner. I do not know exactly how far they made it, but I’m almost certain it was not far as I could hear the sound of scraping metal, screams, and scuffles. I tried to pretend the terror I was feeling was the natural adrenalin rush I might have got before a cross-country race. I am the seventh to be sent on my way.
I don’t know too much about the intricacies of bicycles but I know that I am better off with something light. Every single ounce I have to lever up that hill will make a difference. There is one machine I have had my eye on. It may be the oldest of them, but it might well be the best. In truth, I’m guessing. Hoping.
I pick it up to see how much it weighs, raise it up and down in my hands to take its measure.
“Do you think you’re in a bike shop?” says one of the soldiers, pushing me hard from behind. “Get on it and start riding.”
I climb on. I have no time to get used to the machine, to test out its gears, to find its sweet spot. I am wearing a prison uniform. I’ve nothing to cushion my rear, no bike shoes or cleats, just my ragged boots in an old set of toe clips, like on a bike your grandfather rode.
There is no reward for speed, and besides, there is no way for me to build up enough momentum to bring that velocity into the base of the climb. I will start out in the lowest gear. There is only one chance of me getting up the Mur, and that will be painfully slowly.
I climb onto the bike, feeling that immediate familiarity of a skill that once learned can never be forgotten. I begin the ascent, the pedals turning smoothly. I set my sights on the first small chapel, its rusted iron railings, the white paint peeling, most of the roof slates slipped or dislodged.
In my mind, I tell myself this is seven separate climbs. Thinking of the summit itself would make the task seem insurmountable. At the first chapel, the road takes a sharp incline, drifting away to the right. I feel comfortable, almost in rhythm, my power even.
The road comes to a zig-zag, and then, as the second chapel comes into view, it grows steeper. On the cobbled path in front of me, three soldiers are jeering. I see one of them unzipping his combat trousers. He urinates out onto the tarmac in front of me, the liquid streaming back down the hill, steam escaping from it in the cold of the spring day.
The road continues to rise before it takes a sharp turn to the left. My heart sprints and my legs burn. I come out of the saddle. There’s a small metal monument of a cyclist here, to remember the forgotten days of professional bike racing, but it has been used for target practice and is punched with bullet holes. As the road twists around, the gradient feels almost impossible, but somehow I keep the pedals turning.
The third of the chapels is on my left and from it emanates a foul smell of human waste that fills my fragile burning lungs. It’s more of a latrine now than a place of worship.
Onwards I climb, the road steadily ascending. The fourth of the chapels passes on my right, and already I can see the next ahead. There is a look of curiosity on the faces of the soldiers as I pass the fifth. It is obvious few, if any, have come this far. I’m not sure if I really thought I would make it this far. My legs cry out in supplication, my lungs feel as if dipped in acid.
The road kicks up wickedly one last time; I neither know how much further I can go nor how much further there is to go. I tell myself to stop looking up, to keep looking at the blackness of the tarmacadam. My heart seems near ready to explode, and I half-wish that it would.
The road surface is rough with potholes. A soldier by the road throws a beer bottle out in front of me, but it skitters away harmlessly. I can hear it clinking down the hill behind me. I keep spinning the pedals, at my limit, beyond my limit, past all limits. I see the sixth small chapel on the left, and almost like a mirage, I see the church itself a little further on, the seventh and final stage, a decrepit ferris wheel on the other side of the road.
The Mur kicks one final time, as if to taunt me, and then, I’m rolling over a white painted line that I think once upon a time must have marked the finish of the famous Flèche Wallonne cycling race. There are no more soldiers up here. I can hear the sound of birdsong. My legs have lost feeling, and my hands tingle with pins and needles, but I can’t stop pedaling, I don’t need to. I feel like I could ride forever. How far I’ll get. How far they’ll let me get, I cannot say.
Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and likes to write short stories of horror, fantasy, SF, and speculative fiction.
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