Legion of the Damned (10 page)

"What can't you?"

"Sit there coldly and calmly eating and waiting for afterward."

"You just stop waiting for afterward. Eat up now, darling. Here, drink a glass of milk; perhaps you're thirsty. If I have to stuff you myself, you're not getting away till you've got a tummy. You mustn't forget that I'm a doctor, and I can see you've got the English ill, you're suffering from lack of vitamins and a lot of other lacks, even if you are a skillful orientalist."

"I am very, very skillful."

"Where did you learn it all? Most men are just violent and think that is being skillful."

"When I got your telegram I practiced on nine thousand women and a Turkish drummer-boy specially ordered from Constanza."

She had her way. I ate everything and drank what she gave me, and then she and I were very, very skillful. It is nonsense that men only want that. Men want the same as women. They want what is the root and food of all culture:
to know
.

Afterward we walked in the mountains right up to a little monastery, where a white-haired priest showed us round. We saw everything there is in the mountains. At one place we met a flock of goats and parti-colored cows being watched by a picturesque herdsman with a full beard and alpine boots. Farther on we sat for a while and looked down on a little village with twisting alleys and bright, childish colors. A couple of chalet girls sang to the gay clangor of the cowbells, and from higher up came an answer:
Holidorio! Holidorio!
And there was an eagle up in the blue sky. A real eagle, a living creature, not a heraldic eagle that held Europe in its gory talons.

A scene that is so obtrusively idyllic as that can become intolerable. It is too beautiful, too clear, the snow peaks too calm. it does not fit in with man's restless soul. You must either get up and go on or sleep in the fragrant, myriad-buzzing heat.

The idyl continued. I, the soldier, was pelted with idyl. And while we sat and ate mountainous helpings of good food and quaffed Rhine wine in amber-colored stone mugs and I ran my hand down her thighs so that she drew away from the tickle of it, I was suddenly seized by apprehension and forebodings: we had only two days left.

"Just think," she said suddenly, "we have two whole days yet." That's how she said it. Yet she wept and was just as unhappy as I. The innkeeper said "Gruss Gott" and looked gravely after us as we left. When we had gone a short distance she turned. He was still standing in the doorway, and waved, still gravely.

"How sweet he was," she said.

"Wasn't he."

She put my arm round her shoulder. "Don't you understand, boy, that it would be hell for me if I fell in love with you?"

"Fall in love with me?" I said, surprised. "I thought you were."

"But I've told you the whole time that I'm not. Only you won't believe it. But that's another matter. I just couldn't not come. You--you are someone women aren't used to. Not I, at least. Perhaps because I am not particularly..."

"You are very, very," said I, and lowered my hand to clasp her breast; but she removed it and put it back on her shoulder again.

"No, don't let's talk of that," said she. "It will just make us confused. But. . . I don't know what to say."

"I do," said I. "You want to say that you are not in love with me. Don't let's use big words, Ursula. I know that I've been guilty of that myself, but for a long time you kept me so at arm's length, and yet you didn't. So it is really difficult to express oneself strictly objectively."

"And you are so thin and maltreated. Do you know that you cry out in your sleep?"

"Do I? But otherwise I'm fine."

"Perhaps. But things are hellish for me."

Suddenly she became quite wild. She flung herself at me and sobbed and sobbed. "You mustn't leave me, will you?" she sobbed. "They mustn't take you from me, will they?"

"No, no," said I; "no, no." That was all I could say. I patted her back and whispered, "No, no." I could not make head or tail of it all.

That evening she put on a simple, close-fitting black dress and a necklace of green and black beads. It looked very expensive.

I knew that my black tank uniform lent me a sort of grim elegance that was emphasized by my having no Iron Cross or other ribbons, just the mere, ordinary unit badges. It gave me a certain feeling of pride when I saw that people looked at us as we walked to our table.

While we were eating, a lieutenant walked past, almost brushing the table, dropping a folded piece of paper in front of me as though by accident. Puzzled, I picked it up and read:

"If you are here without permission, hurry and get out. The military police are next door. If you need help I shall be in the hail."

I looked at Ursula and she at me. We agreed that I should go out and thank him for the warning and tell him that my papers were in order.

I discovered him standing smoking in a corner of the hall. After a brief introduction, I thanked him and then said: "Would it be impolite to ask the reason for your kindness?"

"You are in the tanks, and so is my brother. Do you know Hugo Stege?"

I told him that Stege was one of my best friends in the company.

"You don't say so?" said the lieutenant gaily. "That calls for a celebration. Won't you and your lady be my guests this evening? I know an amusing place where we can go when we have eaten."

Together we went back to Ursula. He introduced himself as Paul Stege of the engineers. When, after a colorful night, we took leave of each other outside our hotel, he told us to ring him up if there was anything he could do to help us.

Up in our room we flung ourselves wearily into chairs and smoked a last cigarette without speaking. Outside it was beginning to grow light, so I got up and pulled up the Venetian blind from the balcony door. Then I switched on the radio. There was usually good music at that hour, a so-called "program for the front." A symphony orchestra, surely the Berlin Philharmonic, was working its way up toward the final burst of Liszt's
Preludes
. Hitler and Goebbels had ruined even this stirring, romantic piece, turning it into program music for their damned war. It was what UFA used as background for the newsreels of the Luftwaffe's raids. It was the Luftwaffe preparing the way for us tank troops. It was the Luftwaffe literally razing the Warsaw ghetto to the ground in three days and nights. When quiet returned and the smoke had drifted away there was nothing in that huge expanse more than five feet high. Only a handful of the many hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped alive through the laughing cordon of SS troops. A handful of Jews and some few million rats.

To the sound of Liszt's festival music.

"Shan't we switch it off?" said Ursula. "That piece gets on my nerves."

I switched it off and undressed.

"What a lovely day it has been. Look, it will soon be light. It's almost a shame to sleep."

"I think it will be lovely to sleep--at any rate for a few hours. We are pretty tired."

"Life should always be as lovely as this. What a lot one really has to be glad of! Eating when you are hungry. Drinking and becoming slightly elevated and witty. Opening your eyes and being wide-awake, because a wide-awake day full of light air awaits you. Being tired in the proper way. I am tired in the proper way; at this moment I ask for nothing."

And taking off her necklace. And her shoe. And then the zipper; yes, the zipper; ah, the zipper--there!

"How calm your hands are. They know a lot. When shall I have the other shoe off? No, not those now! Those last."

"No, those now."

I removed the shoe as well.

"Be careful the meshes don't catch on your nail. It is the last decent pair I have. Oh, didn't you say we were going to sleep?"

I did not reply. I had my doll to play with. I gave her a doll to play with, and so we fell silent, acquired a heavy, tranquil pliancy, that immeasurable slowness in which clouds pile up, huge, in a sky large enough for all kinds of lightning, rolling, rumbling and the sudden rain before the storm comes overhead.

One waits for so many superfluous things, and because they are superfluous you become impatient, restless, vehement and urgent, and meanwhile the clouds drift across your head and are gone, and you have only been appallingly confused.

But when the thing is a thing that is not superfluous, you wait confidently, and make the little wave quite ready, so that it can course on contentedly and give the great desire to follow it.

"Now I have eaten you."

To look up into a pair of eyes, in which a wave comes and goes. To be such good friends with oneself that the gods lend you their senses and you can feel a pressure of a milligram, a shift of a fraction of a millimeter. That is to unite body and soul.

"Move a tiny bit up," said I softly. "That's it.
There
."

"Well. . . and what now?"

I did not need to answer. Bigger waves came of themselves and washed across our faces.

Ursula flung herself abruptly on her side and lay with her back to me. Quivers coursed through her at regular intervals. I was the same. We were both shaken to our depths, felled, the two of us. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say. I picked the eiderdown off the floor before we grew cold.

I have written that as a memento, as a reminder that I did achieve what is called complete happiness before I switched the radio on again:

". . . the Soviet Russian armies to be used in the attack. The offensive has flared up from the northern Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, and already reports are coming in of advances and victory for the combined German--Italian--Romanian---"

I looked across at Ursula, went right up to the bed, called softly. She was asleep. God be praised.

Some people are sure to be offended and others will smile wry, superior smiles at my memento. But these, you will find, are people who still cherish ideas about spirit and matter, body and soul, and that one is on a so-called higher plane than the other. Let them be offended or smile their superior smiles. The day they are felled themselves they will understand it all much better.

The next day we got married at the little monastery. Paul Stege gave Ursula away. He brought her a large bouquet of white roses, which touched her. The white-haired priest was reluctant to marry us because I was who I was; but we pressed him, and when he heard that I was an
Auslandsdeutscher
of Danish-Austrian descent and as good as naturalized Scandinavian, he consented. "I spent a number of years of my youth in that little country in the North. An oasis in the middle of Europe. Let's hope it will be spared, and if it is, then go and settle there as soon as you can."

For her morning gift she got Romanian treasure: a silk nightgown with real lace, two sets of gossamer-thin undies, five pairs of real silk stockings and a ring Porta had got me. It was a gold ring with a big sapphire in the middle of tiny diamonds. Altogether the things were worth a fortune on the black market.

I have only fragmentary recollections of most of the last day:

"What does the silly war concern us? We know we have each other."

"No, no, no, you must promise me. If anything happens. You must promise me to get rid of it. We must wait till the war is over and see what the country's like."

"Darling! Do you remember, you said nothing but 'darling' in Vienna. Now it's I who says 'darling' and nothing but 'darling.'

"Promise me that you will take good care of yourself. Stop volunteering for everything. Promise me that you will write really often. Oh, Sven, Sven!"

"There, there. You mustn't cry now. There, there."

"Good-by, Sven. Have you remembered..."

Ursula, Ursula. A white face receding, faster and faster now. Ursula, Ursula. Ur-su-la, dum--dadum, dum--dadum, wheels, whe--els...

The telegraph poles were going the other way. The compartments were overfull. People talked and talked. They believed the reports of successes, and that, perhaps, made me feel more depressed and foreign than did the parting. To which of these gabbling, thoughtless, well-broken creatures could I explain that a perfect military machine like that of the German generals was going to come to a miserable end before long? Which of them could I tell that in the first place the perfection was not really so very perfect; that it consisted only of conditioned reflexes cultivated to perfection: the ability to stand at attention; that could not lay claim to any respect whatever, nor had they the cleverness
not
to demand anything more than perfection in standing to attention. What was utterly lacking was the ability to know and value the path down which one was marching in step. You were told to go this way, and you went that way.

The machine was marching at an enemy who possessed that which gives victory: moral superiority.

It was only to people like The Old Un and Porta that I could have said that we were just rotten old boots; but they knew that already. You had to keep that sort of thing to yourself in those years.

"For my part," answered The Old Un, "it was a very nice leave with my wife and the kids. Lovely--but what use are a few days? The wife's become a motorman on the 61 route. That's always better than being a conductor. Now they can make the money go round at home all right. Hellish that one has to come back to this filth. If only one could have the luck to have a leg sent flying, then one would be done with this rotten Nazi war."

"An arm would be better," said Porta.

"We have not even been in it yet," said I. "But, good Lord, perhaps we'll come through."

The Old Un hid his face in his hands. "I think we've been in enough," he whispered. "I'm not asking for any more. I am in no need of magnificent victories. I'm in need of peace. Come through! Who will have anything to do with us when we have come through? No one. Not even we ourselves. Hell take it."

Porta put the flute back in its case. He had not played it.

"They can take their report and ---- it. Before it comes in I shall be in the desert, and I should like to see them doing anything to me there just because a snotty railwayman received a well-deserved kick in his strawberry."