Child of the Journey (19 page)

"Sich verwöhnen lassen,"
she whispered huskily. "Let yourself be pampered."

Pampered? An understatement. He felt the beginning of an erection.

Her hands stopped moving and she shifted position. He could see her, but not well, at the edge of his peripheral vision. With one hand she unbuttoned and opened the robe she was wearing--his robe, revealing a silk slip. He was unsure if her slight smile reflected amusement or contempt. My God, he thought, this one really does look like Miriam. Yes, she would definitely be a rehire. For many nights.

Happy birthday, Erich,
he told himself.

"Your hand has fed me well, but I can no longer accept your charity." She let the robe slide to the floor. "You really haven't had your money's worth, Erich Alois!"

"Miriam!" Was he still having a nightmare? He lurched upright in the tub, the bitterness in her voice instantly sobering him. "Where's--"

"I paid her the two hundred marks her and sent her home."

"I never said I was a monk." Annoyed at himself for sounding defensive, he shrugged and lay back in the tub, relaxing, as if to show her her being there did not upset him. "I have asked you for nothing. Why can't we forget--"

"Forget!"

He regretted having opened his mouth. When he was a boy, after a fight with Solomon about something insignificant, he had overheard Frau Freund say of Sol, "My son's words go from the lung to the tongue." The underpinnings of his self-anger took hold.

"I don't mean forget the larger picture," he said. "Nothing can right the wrongs done you years ago." He reached up and touched her hand. She pulled away.

"Life isn't real to you, Erich. Just one big hall of mirrors."

"You and your Jewish sense of the dramatic" He stared at her body in the soft candlelight. "I won't be taunted," he said suddenly. "Especially not by you."

"Is that your limit? When Uncle was alive I used to think the world was without limits because I was a Rathenau. I didn't realize that even he had me on a leash. The older I got, the more freedom I thought I had acquired, the more limits were secretly being imposed."

"What has that to do with us!"

"It has to do with me, and with what I wanted then."

"You still want what you want, when you want it."

"I'm still a Rathenau."

He wondered why her statement did not bother him. "What was your uncle really grooming you for? Not to be a dancer, I think. Marriage? To some foreign blueblood? An old-fashioned marriage of alliance?"

"Politics."

"Politics! I don't believe it!" He laughed derisively. "Did he hope to get you a seat in the Reichstag?"

"He found politics depressing and ugly. He had no intention of marrying, so
I
was to be politics' antithesis. His canvas."

"Purity on a pedestal, while he toiled in the mud of political trenches!" He motioned with thumb and index finger as if indicating a headline. "Miriam Madonna Rathenau, Virgin of the Grünewald."

"Not virginal, but at least not vile."

He blew cigar smoke toward the ceiling. "The man was an anachronism," he said, feeling suddenly small despite his lean muscularity. Turning abruptly, he pulled her down to him and kissed her hard, sliding his tongue into her mouth and along her palate, and then releasing her just as abruptly. "If only we had lived in another time," he said hoarsely, "maybe things would have worked out differently."

She raised her hand as if to slap him, then let it drop. "We did live in another time." Glaring at him, she stood up, put her hands beneath the slip's straps as if to slide them off her shoulders. "It's late and I'm tired. God forbid I should
upset
you, so either have me or have me leave."

Beneath the silk, her back and buttocks looked like tawny shadows. How could one so beautiful talk so cavalierly about sexual pleasure?

"Well, make up your mind," she said coldly.
 

"That's enough!"

She leaned down toward him. "And if I go on talking? What'll you do? Punish me? Take away my family estate?"

Furious, he stabbed out his cheroot in the water and, reaching up, gripped her by the throat. He tightened his grip on her neck and put his other hand on her breast, not caressing her so much as clutching it, clinging to her. But the pent-up rage of all his hatreds had not left him. Pulling her toward him, he again kissed her hard on the lips, put his arms around her waist and drew her awkwardly onto the rim of the tub.

She nuzzled her mouth down against his shoulder and, without warning, sank her teeth into his flesh.

Immediately, insistently aroused, he pulled her further onto the tub rim, forcing her knees apart, rising up in the water and pressing his hips against hers, unmindful of her angry squirming.

"You bastard!" Suspended unnaturally, she cried out in pain and anger. "I hate you."

Fighting as if for her life, she twisted from his grasp and climbed awkwardly off the rim of the tub. She picked up his jacket and began tearing off the Nazi insignia as if it were alive. Then she hurled it across the room and limped over to the bed.
 

"What's your game, Miriam?" He touched his cheek where she had hit him. "Tell me the rules so I can play too!"

"I want you not to be a Nazi. I want Solomon. I--"

"I can't change things no matter how much I'd like to turn back the calendar. I sit at my desk, intent on mapping out security, and instead find myself staring out the window for hours, thinking about the people out there I'd like to know, whose lives I would like to share. You're not the only one who
wants,
Miriam. I
want
too! Not possessions, not even power. Just to be part of others' lives." His emotion expended itself. So did his erection. "But I don't know how," he said quietly and bitterly.
 

He sat up and, elbows on his knees, put his head in his hands. On my birthday! he thought. Why is she torturing me like this on my goddamn birthday! Still, he could not stop himself from talking and--
telling her.
Maybe, he thought, he was rambling was
because
it was his birthday, the day he had hated for so long. "So much is happening out there, so much we can never know," he went on. "I feel locked inside myself...isolated from everything, everyone, that could have had real meaning for me."

He felt ashamed. He had never spoken like this to anyone before, not even Solomon. "I've no right to tell you my troubles," he said, staring at the rose-colored water. "Especially after the pain you've been through."

"Save the poetics for your Hitler Youth virgins." She lay down on the featherbed, face buried in the silver-tasseled pillow that homely Magda Goebbels had given him in remembrance of the time she had stayed the night with him.

He said nothing, waiting for her to do something. Anything. He felt too embarrassed and weak to fight any longer.

"I never credited you with the capacity for honesty," she said finally, in an emotionless voice. She lifted her head. "Everyone has the right to burden others with their despair, at least sometimes."
 

"Would things have been better between us if--"

"Had things been better, would you have lived differently?"

"You mean, would I have divorced myself from the Party? Would I hate Hitler more than I do? Probably not."

He rose from the tub and toweled himself. "Miriam? Miri? I'm sorry if I hurt you just now."
 

His mind in tumult, he knelt at the foot of the bed and massaged her feet. He had wronged her again, but was it, he wondered, really his fault? Was any of it? He could not have saved her estate, not even if she hadn't been off in her precious world of Parisian art and ballet. As for her taunting, she should know better than to treat him like some insentient being; he was a man, with a man's needs.

Yes, he had lied to her about Solomon. Intercepted the letters to her. Pretended regularly to be checking on Sol's condition, mostly to make certain that she would not take matters into her own hands and try to find him, but at least he had never truly planned the lie.

And the things he had done to keep her from learning the truth--things for which he had hated himself--he had done for her. Why else would he so degrade himself, except to hold onto her regardless of the price? Besides, he had lived that lie in the full knowledge that the man was safe in Amsterdam with his mother and sister. He had even broken a vow to never speak to his parents again. After they had ransacked the tobacco shop, he had phoned, reprimanding them. They swore they had stolen nothing; knowing they would be accused of a theft of which they were innocent, they had simply left town for a while--until, they had said, the real culprits were found.

Though he wanted to pretend that the lie was truth--the past could not changed, after all--the discussion had grown heated, and he had ended up slamming down the receiver, angry with himself for bothering with them again.

"I really am sorry I hurt you, Miriam," he said. "But God knows I've waited so long for you--"

"God? What do you know of God!" Hugging the pillow, she turned onto her back. She narrowed her eyes and glared at him, an expression of hatred. "Save your sorrow for the virgins with swastikas on their wings. That's what you're good at!"

"I'll show you what I'm good at."

Standing at the foot of the bed, he had the fleeting thought that perhaps the nickname Javelin Man had reached Miriam. Had she, not knowing his reasons for staying away from her bed, laughed at him on those many nights he had slept away from her? He looked at his penis. She wouldn't laugh at him after tonight.

Roughly, he pulled her forward until he was between her legs.
 

"Stop it, Erich! God
damn
you, let me go!"

Tightening his grasp, he entered her.

"You'll pay for this." She gasped. "I promise you'll pay!"

He concentrated, pushing deeply inside her. "I already did," he said. "You gave Anneliese two hundred marks. Now earn them."

Squirming and kicking, she tried to fend him off. Then, releasing the pillow, she gripped the rods of the brass headboard and let him slam into her with orderly, methodical strokes.

He gripped her hair. Turned her head to the side so that she faced the wall. "Count the money, as if I just gave it to you."

"You're crazy!"

"Now!"

"One...two...three..."

He reveled in the hatred in her voice. "Slower!"

"Four..."

"Again! From the beginning!"

"One..."

Hoping to delay orgasm, he closed his eyes and thought of his shepherds, seeing each with the clarity of a delirium dream. But he soon lost all control. Covered with sweat and unable to delay any longer, he came and crumpled on top of her, continuing to thrust--while she continued, tonelessly, to count--until sleep enfolded him.

He dreamed of a ship buffeted by the sea and of the beach where shepherds howled. When he awoke, the sun had broken through the clouds and he was alone, cold and uncovered yet strangely fulfilled. He climbed out of bed and padded across the carpet to the mirror. Contemplating his image, he decided he was better looking than ever.

Behind him, he saw the meal he had ordered the night before. It lay untouched, browning around the edges. They must have delivered it after he was asleep, after Miriam left, he thought. What a waste!

He walked over to the table, poured himself a glass of wine and nibbled at the dessert, a little astonished that he felt absolutely no contrition. If he owed Miriam an apology, she owed him one too for her lack of gratitude. He had taken her in. Kept her safe. As for Sol, he was safe in Amsterdam.
He
knew that, even if Miriam did not.

April l939

"W
hy don't you get up, get dressed and come with me, Miriam? An outing will do you good. You've hardly left the estate since...since Christmas."

Erich avoided looking into Miriam's eyes and allowed his gaze to rest on the slight swell of her belly. In the past he had avoided pregnant women. They had appeared clumsy to him, repulsive, their eyes filled with a secret awareness that excluded him and the rest of the male world. Yet the idea of this child--his child--conceived though it was in anger, continued to excite him.

"You really want me to get up before dawn and come with you to Abwehr headquarters?" Miriam's voice was laced with sarcasm. "To do what, pray tell--enlist in the military? Today's Easter, Erich. You should go to Mass. You and all your Nazi friends. I'm having lunch with Werner."

"Never mind," he said bitterly.

Annoyed with himself for having made the suggestion, Erich swung his legs out of the bed they again shared. Women were peculiar...Miriam no less than the rest. He had expected fury when he demanded to return to her bedroom, but she had simply shrugged, saying she did not care where he slept or with whom. She did not refuse him when he touched her, though he sensed that she knew he was sustaining his erection by reliving what he had come to think of as the Christmas Rape.