Forgotten Soldier (25 page)

"Forgiven!"

Paula herself waved a cheerful goodbye to us all, and vanished through the door.

Paula! Paula! I would have liked . . . I didn't know what. I sat motionless, turned to stone, deaf to the conversation.

They asked me about my parents, my former life ... thank God, not about the war. I answered evasively. Paula's kiss burned against my forehead like a hot cartridge case. I would gladly have done a daily patrol with her, instead of with the war, and five or six other soldiers . . . God damn it!

It was late, and I would have liked an excuse to leave the table. But I had to sit patiently with these people for another hour, until everyone was ready for bed. The Neubachs offered me Ernst's room. I thanked them effusively, and explained that for military reasons I was required to return to the center. In fact, I couldn't bear the thought of sleeping in my friend's bed. Also, I felt like walking through the streets. I might run into Paula.

The Neubachs understood about military regulations, and didn't insist. In the street, I was suddenly seized by a wild sense of gaiety, and began to whistle. I asked for a few directions, and found my way back to the center without too much trouble. But I didn't run into Paula. I walked past the reception desk, where two civilians were playing cards with two soldiers, one of them the feld who had taken my deposition.

"Hey, you there!" he called.

Instinctively, I spun round and saluted.

"Aren't you Gefreiter Sajer?"

"Ja, Herr Feldwebel."

"Good. I have good news for you. One of your relatives will be coming to see you in a couple of days. I managed to get a special authorization for a member of your family."

"I don't know how to thank you, Herr Feldwebel. I am really very grateful."

"I can see that, boy. You certainly took your time coming back."

I clicked my heels and spun round, while the four of them joked about me.

"Put in a little time at the Fantasio Hotel, eh?"

They must have been talking about a bordello. I spent an agitated night, unable to think of anything but Paula.

Two days went by, filled with pleasures and delights. I never left Paula's side. We always had lunch with Frau X, and dinner at the Neubachs'. Frau X, who noticed everything, was aware of the growing feeling between Paula and me, and was horrified. She tried several times to make me realize that the war wasn't over, that it was idiotic to fall in love. After the war, it would be a fine thing for me to unleash my emotions, but for the moment anything like that was premature.

To my adolescent mind, the war had no power over my love for this girl, and holding back any emotion was out of the question. The only limits would be set by my leave, whose duration, unfortunately, I was powerless to affect.

One of my family was coming to see me, so I couldn't move too far from the center, where I spent my nights. This restriction irritated me, because I lost precious time which I could have spent with Paula. On the day of my visitor's expected arrival, I must have made five or six trips to the center. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, the kindhearted sergeant answered my question even before I asked it.

"Someone's waiting for you in the dormitory, Sajer."

"Ah!" I said, as if this was the last thing I'd expected.

"Thank you, Herr Feldwebel."

I ran up the stairs, and pushed open the door of the large room where I'd already spent several nights. My eye traveled past the double row of beds to a man in a blue-gray overcoat: my father.

"Hello, Papa," I said.

"You've turned into a man," he said, with the air of timidity which was always one of his characteristics.

"How are you? We haven't heard much from you, you know. Your mother's been very worried."

I listened, as I always did when my father spoke to me. I sensed that he felt ill at ease in the heart of Germany, in this dormitory, where everything reflected implacable military discipline.

"Shall we go out, Papa?"

"If you like. Ah! By the way, I brought along a small package for you. Your mother and I had a hard time getting all these things. The Germans kept it downstairs." He lowered his voice when he said "Germans," as though he were speaking of a bunch of savages.

Although he had married a German woman, my father did not feel particularly friendly toward Germany. He had never shaken off the hatreds of the 1914-18 war, although he himself had been well treated when he was a prisoner. However, the fact that one of his sons had been stuck into the German army prevented him from listening to Radio London with any sense of relief.

Downstairs, I asked the feldwebel for my package. He handed it to me, while speaking to my father in almost perfect French:

"I'm sorry about this, sir, but all food is strictly forbidden in the dormitories. Here is your package."

"Thank you, sir," my father said, clearly abashed.

I checked over the contents of the box while we walked through the streets, talking: a chocolate bar, some biscuits, and-joy! a pair of socks, knitted by my paternal grandmother.

"These are just what I need," I said.

"I thought you'd be most pleased by the cigarettes, or the chocolate. But of course, there's no shortage for you."

My father was convinced that we feasted from morning to night. "With us, it's different. The Germans take everything."

"We do all right." I had learned to make the most of present pleasures, to forget the miseries of another day. But this answer was a mistake.

"Well, that's fine for you. For us it's another story. Your mother really has a hard time scraping our meals together. Life is far from easy." I didn't know what to say to this. I thought of giving him back the package.

"Well," my father said. "Let's hope it's all over quickly. Things are going badly for the Germans. On London Radio all we hear is the Americans here, the Americans there ... Italy . . . the Allies . . ."

This was all news to me. A group of men from the Kreigsmarine passed by, singing. I saluted, as required. My father stared at me with dismay. France was in such a state of chaos, and talking about it filled him with such despair that it was very hard to cheer him up.

For the next twenty-four hours, he told me about the suffering in France, explaining things to me as if I were Canadian or English. All of this put me in a very difficult position, and I didn't know quite what attitude to adopt. I held myself in check, contenting myself with "Yes, Papa. Exactly, Papa." I would have loved to talk about something else, to have forgotten the war, to have told him that I loved Paula. But I was afraid he wouldn't understand, that he might even be angry.

The next day I took my sorrowing father to the station. I was fool enough to snap to attention as the train pulled out-a gesture which I'm sure gave him no pleasure. I watched his anxious face pull away from me, into the hot June evening. I wouldn't see him again for two years-two years so full of experience they might as well have been a century.

As soon as my father was gone, I ran to the Neubachs'. I excused myself for not having introduced him, explaining that we had only been together for a very short time. They understood perfectly, and were not in the least offended. As I was clearly bursting with impatience, Frau Neubach gave me news of Paula. I was extremely disappointed to learn that she would be away until the afternoon of the following day. This was hard to bear. We had already lost twenty-four hours plus a day and a night: in the seven or eight days I had left, this counted for a great deal. I ate with the Neubachs, maintaining a gloomy silence which they understood and respected. Then I left them, to walk the streets, in the hope of meeting my love. I walked for about an hour, until the air-raid sirens drowned out the clocks, which were just striking eleven. The city filled with the sound of their long-drawn-out howling, and the few lights which had remained in the blacked-out streets disappeared. Our fighters were already climbing into the black sky above Tempelhof. The roar of their engines swept over the roof tops, and their trailing exhaust left occasional pink traces in the darkness. The sidecars of the territorial defense were ploughing through the streets, urging the few pedestrians to take shelter. I was still on the street, obsessed by a single idea, when we were suddenly enveloped in the heavy throb of enemy bombers.

I knew that the first-aid teams would turn out as the first bombs began to fall, and that perhaps then I would see Paula. I slid into a doorway opposite the entrance to a shelter under a low building beside a canal. I could see quite far down the canal to a large horizon washed in light fog. The sky to the northwest glowed in the light of an improbable-looking curtain of fire, which was probably concentrated on the big Spandau factories. Everywhere, little points of light crackled like fireworks. The numerous anti-aircraft guns defending the capital some of them firing from the terraces of houses-were erecting a lethal barricade against the approaching rain of death. Each brilliant light flaming suddenly in the sky and then falling to earth marked the death of an enemy plane. A thudding and hammering of incredible violence shock the wall of the stone porch against which I had pressed myself. Forcing my eyes to accept the brutal contrast between the darkness and flashes of light, I stared down the street and along the quai, where a few laggards were still running for shelter. Then a cacophony of breaking glass marked the blanket of bombs falling across a section of the city about a mile ahead of me. A hurricane of displaced air ran over the surface of the canal, whose water responded in a pattern of sinister waves.

I could hear thousands of objects falling all around me. In spite of my intense desire to stay in the street, an irresistible fear made me run to the shelter. The pavement trembled under my feet like a piece of badly attached plating on the hood of a moving truck. In no time, I was in the midst of a crowd of desperate, anxious people. The atmosphere was suffocating. A loud roaring which seemed to emanate with equal strength from above and below shook loose pieces of plaster from the ceiling. People looked for some reassurance on faces as tense with fear as their own. Children asked questions of childish innocence: "What's making that noise, Mama?"-while the mothers caressed the small blond heads with trembling fingers. The lucky ones, who believed in some God, prayed. I was leaning against a pipe which transmitted every sound and vibration from the street. The roaring noise grew suddenly louder, crushing the air in our lungs. The room filled with cries of pain, and then with an intensified din, like the sound of a thousand locomotives. Horrifying screams of terror, like screams from hell, rang through the darkness. The electric lights came on. Then the entire shelter filled with thick black dust, which poured in from the outside and engulfed us. We could hear some men shouting: "Shut that door!"

The door slammed. We felt trapped in a communal grave. Some of the women broke down from nervous tension and began to howl and wave their arms wildly. We felt the floor shake five or six times, as if in the grip of some overpowering force. We were all terrified, and clung together, despite a hideous sense of suffocation. An hour later, when the storm seemed to have died down, we left that ghastly hole. We were confronted by a scene worthy of Dante.

The dark waters of the canal reflected the numerous fires ravaging its banks and destroying the structures which had given it some point. What was left of the tidy street and its white-edged sidewalks lay strewn with rubble between two giant crevasses. A constellation of sparks ascended into the summer sky in a rising column of acrid, suffocating smoke. People were running everywhere, and as at Magdeburg I was immediately impressed into a cleanup squad.

After an exhausting night, and most of the next morning, I finally found Paula, who was just as done in as I. The happiness I felt when she told me she had worried about me during the bombing erased the miseries of the night in a single stroke.

"I was thinking of you too, Paula. I looked for you all night long."

"Really?" she asked, in a tone which told me that her sentiment was as strong as mine.

I felt giddy with emotion. My eyes remained fixed on the young girl before me. I wanted passionately to take her in my arms, and knew that I was blushing. She broke the silence.

"I feel like a limp rag," she said. "Why don't we go out to the country, somewhere around Tempelhof? It might make us feel better."

"That's a good idea, Paula. Let's go."

I rode out with my first love in a little motorcycle taxi to the sandy countryside near the civil and military airfield at Tempelhof.

We left the autobahn and climbed onto a small hillock covered with a kind of spongy lichen onto which we collapsed with delight. We both felt crushed by exhaustion. It was a marvelous day. Less than a mile away the ground was cut up and crisscrossed by the network of airport runways from which Focke-Wulf trainers leaped into the sky with astonishing speed. Paula lay on her back with her eyes closed, as if she were nearly asleep. I leaned on my elbow and stared at her, as if the rest of the world didn't exist.

My head was filled with things to say to her-a thousand amorous communications-but my mouth remained ludicrously shut. I felt that I should and must say everything to her right away, that they could wait no longer, that I must take advantage of this ideal moment and make her understand, that it was idiotic to be so timid. . . . Perhaps Paula was being deliberately silent, so that I would have a chance to speak. Time was passing-especially the time still left in my leave: but, despite all these considerations, my love for Paula imposed silence.

She murmured: "The sun is so hot."

I stammered a few stupidities. Finally, in a surge of courage, I slid my hand toward hers. The ends of our fingers touched, and I lingered for a moment at this delicious contact. Then I screwed up my courage so that my breath almost stopped, and Paula's hand was entirely mine. I grasped it fervently, and she didn't try to withdraw it.

My shyness had presented me with a problem more taxing than finding a safe passage through a mined field. I lay stretched on my back for a moment longer, recovering my strength. I stared at the sky, overwhelmed with happiness, lost to the rest of the world.