Ice Cold (14 page)

‘Kathie. What are you doing here?’ A voice brings her
out of her dreams. She turns in alarm. Wanting it to be his voice, hoping it is. Hoping he’s here at last. The voice is so like his, yet without setting eyes on the speaker she knows it can’t be him. Feels the disappointment even as she turns, even before she sees who’s asking the question. A man she knows in Wolnzach. What’s she doing in Munich, he asks, has she found work? And all the rest of it.

Her thoughts are far away, her eyes searching the passengers hurrying past. She has no time to talk to the man from Wolnzach. No time to listen to him telling her he’s come to visit his sister in hospital and so on. Time seems to stand still. He talks and talks. She tries not to lose sight of the train now coming in. Looks at the people passing her. Hardly hears the man from Wolnzach say goodbye. By now she can’t bear the waiting any more. She wants to go out to Waldperlach and the log cabin herself. But suppose he’s coming back to Munich at the same time? She can’t make up her mind. And what would she be doing out there? He had told her that the log cabin wasn’t all his own, his aunt had put some money into the property when he bought it. She didn’t want to run into the aunt. What could she say to her? So she stayed where she was. Stayed on the station all day, waiting. Waited all day long.

Twice someone wearing almost the same Alpine jacket as his got out of a train. Both times she ran after the man. Both times it wasn’t the driver.

She is discouraged and disappointed, and increasingly
uncertain. Just as she is on the point of giving up, because there’s no sense in it, she sees him. He is getting out of a train just as she imagined. He’s wearing the Alpine jacket in the picture taken outside St Corbinian’s. She recognizes him a long way off. She’s about to run to him, throw her arms round him, hold him tight, never let him go again. And then she sees the woman. She’s pretty. No older than the driver. She is wearing a dress with a cardigan over it. Her dark blonde hair is cut short. They are arm in arm, they seem to know each other very well as they walk past her. Kathie doesn’t know whether he has seen her too. She is just behind him when he kisses the woman. Gives her the kiss she wanted for herself. She follows the couple at a distance. Keeping far enough away not to be seen, but near enough to see everything. They go to the tram stop. Kathie stands at the corner of the street. Waits for them both to get into the tram, and then she walks all the way back to Soller’s in the valley. First with tears running down her cheeks, but after a while they dry up. She walks and walks. Down streets, past buildings, she can’t remember where, or how long she has been walking. She remembers only that at some point defiance slowly surfaced in her, and that was what dried her tears at last. She’s not going to let this get her down. After all, here she is in Munich, in the big city, come to make her fortune. And she will, too. She’s sure of that. She’s a pretty girl, after all, as everyone can see. She can see it herself when she passes
the display windows. She knows she’ll make her fortune. She’ll be happy.

It’s after midnight when the two motorcyclists arrive at Soller’s in the valley. They left Nuremberg early in the morning on their NSU bike. They planned to see Munich, go to the Wiesn, stop on the way for a snack, have a nice day. If the motorbike chain hadn’t broken outside Ingolstadt they’d have been in Munich by the afternoon. As it was, the two of them pushed the bike to the nearest workshop, and by the time they finally did arrive in Munich it was dark. So they went straight out to the Wiesn, parked the bike, and stayed there until late at night. When they go back for the motorbike they ask the parking attendant where they can find an inn to stay the night. He gives them the name of Soller’s in the valley.

At Soller’s they ask Gretel the waitress for a room.

No, they don’t need two single rooms, they’ll share the room and the bed too if necessary. The main thing is somewhere to stay the night.

Oh yes, and they need to be able to park the motorbike safely overnight. Did they have a garage or a shed at Soller’s where they could put the NSU?

Well, there’s a room free, says Gretel, but the bed would cost them two marks for the night. Each.

The couple agree, and get her to show them the shed where they can leave the bike. Then they order half-litres of
beer from Gretel inside the inn. As they drink their beer one of them tells his friend about the girl who spoke to him just now. While the other man was putting the motorbike in the shed. Just outside their guest-room.

She has asked him whether he’d mind if she spent the night in the room with them, his friend and him. She has nowhere to spend the night, and she was sure Gretel would have asked them about it already.

He was taken by surprise. What could he say? She was pretty, too, so he didn’t want to say no. He told his friend to take a quick look in the direction of the toilets, inconspicuously, and then he could see her. The one in the blue dress, at the table next to the blond man.

No, look the other way, three – no, four tables further on.

He meant the girl with the dark braid of hair, had his friend spotted her now?

The girl with the dark braid of hair glances at them. She is sitting between the blond man and a young woman in a pale coat and a little dark hat.

She raises her glass to them and smiles.

When she passes the motorcyclists’ table later, the one who has been steering the bike gets the impression that she winks at him. The pretext that he must ‘just go and take a look outside’ is all he can think of at this moment, so he follows the girl through the doorway. She is already waiting for him on the other side of the door.

Would it be all right, she asks, for her to spend the night
in the room with him and his friend? She doesn’t have anywhere else to stay the night.

Yes, that’s fine, his friend has already mentioned it, he says. If she likes she can certainly sleep in their room that night. As he talks to her he looks at her face, sees her dark eyes, sees the hair combed back from her forehead and plaited into a braid. His friend is right, she’s a pretty girl, he likes her.

So as not to just keep staring at her, he asks where she comes from, and what she’s doing in Munich. He doesn’t care about the answer, he just wants to keep the girl here with him outside the bar for a while. Talk to her about something, anything, just to keep her from going back inside.

She comes from near Ingolstadt, she says, she’s looking for a job in Munich.

But she herself doesn’t seem interested in a conversation either. Smiles at him. Well, if she could spend the night with him and his friend in their room, she says, then now she’ll go back to her acquaintances at the other table. She’ll be able to see when the two of them leave the bar and follow them. She stops once more at the door and smiles at him before going back inside. He waits a moment before rejoining his friend at their table.

As soon as the girl is inside their room she undresses without false modesty and without hesitating. She takes off her black patent leather belt, puts it over the chair in the
room. Unbuttons the blue dress, puts it down with the belt. The two beds, up against the walls, give her just enough room to undress between them. The motorcyclists sit on their beds watching her undress without haste.

They watch her take off her stockings, put them with her dress and belt. In her vest and knickers, she slips into bed with one of the two men.

He hears the rustle of the bedspread. Smells the warm fragrance of her skin. Closes his eyes as he breathes it in. The girl lets him put both hands under her vest to push it up, take it off over her head. He passes his hands down her body. Feels her smooth skin, her firm flesh. She lies there perfectly still. He pushes the covers down to the foot of the bed.

He wants to see her, wants to see her naked body.

His hands caress her white breasts. The other man sits on his bed, watching his friend. Sees him take the girl’s knickers off as well as her vest. Sees his friend touch her body with his hands, stroke her legs, feel her vulva. Sees the girl lying naked on the bed. She lies there perfectly still, with her eyes closed.

He watches his friend lie on top of the girl, penetrate her. He sees her naked body glowing faintly white in the darkness of the room. Feels how imagining it all rather than watching it is arousing him. He hears his friend’s panting breath when he comes to orgasm. Sees him slip off the girl’s body and roll aside.

As if it were the natural thing to do, the girl gets up directly afterwards and moves over to him, gets into his bed. Her body is still warm and damp with his friend’s sweat; he too touches her body, comes inside her. She lets him do as he likes, lies underneath him soft, warm and still.

In the night the girl changes beds again, gets up as if nothing had happened, goes over to his friend. He sees her lie down beside him, sees his friend’s hands on her body again, hears his friend’s moaning.

In the morning the girl is back in his bed, sleeping close to him, naked. He sees his friend getting dressed. ‘I’ll wait downstairs for you, join me when you’re ready.’ So saying, his friend closes the door behind him.

Left on his own, he sleeps with her one last time, penetrates the drowsy girl at his side. Feels the soft, warm body under him once more. Then he gets up, gets dressed, and like his friend before him leaves the room

Kathie lay in the bed. Watched the motorcyclist dressing. Picking up garment after garment from the floor: under-pants, undershirt, socks, trousers. She has pulled the bedspread over her breasts. She had not been ashamed to be there with her breasts uncovered, but she felt cold here in the room at Soller’s now. Cold and drained. So she’d pulled the covers up so far that her bare legs were showing. She lay there rubbing her cold feet together. The motorcyclist had turned to her.

‘What is it? Are you cold?’

She just looked briefly at him, without saying a word, without even taking in what he said. She was far away; in her thoughts she was back in the summers of her childhood when she went without shoes and socks. The summers when she ran barefoot along dry, dusty paths, over meadows wet with the morning dew, through puddles with mud between her toes.

She was remembering how her toes were always the smallest and roundest of anyone’s, just as she herself had always been the roundest and smallest of them all.

Only when the motorcyclist let the door latch behind him did she come back from her thoughts, was back in bed in the room at Soller’s again. Before the motorcyclist left the room he had taken some money out of his jacket pocket. He put it on the bed beside her. On the place next to her feet. She, Kathie, had glanced briefly up at him and looked at him without seeing him.

Once the door had closed Kathie got up too. She pushed the warm bedspread aside. Stood up, put on the clothes still hanging over the chair from the day before, picked up the money.

She could wash at Mitzi’s. She wanted to be out of that room. Go through the city, cross the Viktualienmarkt to Mariahilfplatz.

The motorcyclists were still in the yard of the inn, standing beside their bike and looking awkward. One of them
tried to start a conversation with her. What was she going to do now? Where was she going?

Kathie didn’t answer. What could she have told him – that she herself didn’t know what she was going to do today, didn’t know where she was going? What use would that have been? Or should she have told them about the summers when she went bare-legged, and the lovely time she had wading through puddles with her bare feet? Should she have told him that those summers were the best in her life, and this morning, when she had watched one of the two of them dressing, she had guessed – no, she had known – that they would always be the best summers in her entire life?

Or should she have told them about the brilliant red of the cotton reel in her hand? A red that warmed her, like the brief happiness she had felt out there with the driver that afternoon. What good would that have done her? She didn’t want to reply, so she said nothing. Just shrugged her shoulders briefly and walked away.

She went towards Mariahilfplatz, the way she had gone with the driver, an eternity ago. It was only a couple of days in the past, yet it seemed a lifetime since then. She passed the market-women’s stalls. Went along Reichenbachstrasse and over the Reichenbach Bridge. She stopped for a moment on the bridge at the place where the driver had kissed her. Went on to Mariahilfplatz. Her head was empty, no thoughts in it at all.

Mitzi opened the door wearing only her underclothes. She sat opposite Kathie at the kitchen table in her vest. She pushed a mug of coffee over to Kathie. Kathie put both hands round the mug. Drew it closer to her and felt the warmth in her clammy fingers.

Later, Kathie took the motorcyclists’ money out of her bag and put it on the table. She got off the chair and went over to the sofa. Just as she was, she lay down on the sofa and fell asleep.

Some time during the day Mitzi left the apartment, because when Kathie got up again she was alone. She stood up, washed her face and hands and between her legs. Dressed, put her little blue hat on, slipped into her green coat, and went out.

T
uesday 13 October was a mild autumn day. The leaves on the trees and bushes had already turned russet brown. Johann Reiss rode his motorbike out along the main road towards Hohenschäftlarn with his brother Alwin in the side-car. They had set out early. The autumnal mist was just beginning to lift, the sun could already be seen here and there. It was going to be a fine day. One of the last days of late summer weather this year. They had left Munich behind them. There was hardly any traffic on the road. They both felt it was pleasant to go out for the day, riding along with no particular destination in mind, stopping for a snack, riding on, enjoying the landscape. They had all the time in the world today.

They rode out of Hohenschäftlarn, past the abbey, and on in the direction of Säge. Just after the Bruckenfischer inn they turned off the main road. Took the little road going south. It was only a path really, not a paved road. Johann reduced speed, avoiding the potholes. They went on through fields and meadows, down to the old millstream.