Legion of the Damned (9 page)

"You've let yourself in for a honeymoon," I replied thoughtfully. "Our honeymoon."

She laughed; then having sat for a while looking ahead of her with wrinkled brow she suddenly grasped my hand and pressed it to her cheek. We sat thus looking out across the restaurant.

"I don't know about that," she said. "I don't know about that. But because you have only five days, and because you will perhaps never... you shall have your wish, you shall. Are you happy?"

That took me completely by surprise, and it fooled me into looking at her with a great hope. But she had not granted me that great hope; she was just indulging me, because she wanted to be kind to me.

"It is not my wish I want," I said, "but yours. . . and you shall have your wish all right. Shall we go to that train?"

As we were walking along the platform she took my hand again, stopped and looked at me.

"Go back and buy a bottle of cognac."

When the staff captain saw us in the compartment, a smart woman, a bottle of cognac and a shabby private from a penal regiment, he turned on his heel. Shortly afterward the military police appeared. An abrupt silence fell between us while I produced my papers and showed that I had a supplementary ticket for second class. Ursula answered their looks with dark red, silent indignation. It was a good thing that she said nothing. The captain got out at Linz. He had not had a pleasant journey, for Ursula's gaze had not left him for a second. The civilian couple got out at Setztal, and so we had the compartment to ourselves. To my surprise she gave me a long, lingering kiss that left her breathing in little trembling gasps.

"You shall have everything you want," she said breathlessly, while she looked out through the window. "There are limits to what they can be allowed to do to you." She turned toward me, her eyes still angry. "You shall have it now, if you want."

It was lovely to be able to laugh, laugh properly. "Don't mind what they say. We don't ourselves. They are petty and despicable. You sometimes slip on one, then you wipe your shoes clean and walk on. Scrape yours clean, my girl, and we'll go on."

I opened the bottle.

"Shall we drink to clean shoes?"

Outside the mountains were filing past the window, along with the rain and the telegraph poles and the twilight. In the end came the darkness, and it stayed out there, keeping us company. When we woke it was three o'clock and we should have got out in Hochflizen at a quarter past twelve.

The loudspeaker on the platform woke us with its:

"Innsbruck. Innsbruck. Innsbruck."

We staggered out, drunk with sleep, and while Ursula went to tidy I rang round to the hotels.

"Have you got a room?" she asked when we met beneath the clock.

"Hotel Jagerhof," I replied.

"Was it difficult? Now I'm cold."

I had rung twenty-three different hotels, but I said it had been easy, that they had not been able to refuse my melodious baritone. The huge station hall was deserted and lay half in darkness. Someone was rattling a bucket somewhere, and nearby a man with a broad, soft broom was methodically sweeping oiled sawdust across the terra-cotta colored flags.

"So we're to have our honeymoon in Innsbruck," she said. "Are you sorry?"

"No. There are mountains here too. Let me take your case." The square in front of the station was also deserted. It had been raining and the air was chilly. What now? Where was Hotel Jagerhof?

"Wait a bit," said I, and went back into the station to find someone to give me directions or to ring for a taxi. There was not a soul to be seen, but beside the newspaper kiosk was a telephone booth. I was just about to open the door.

"One moment!"

I let go of the handle and turned round. Slowly the door closed with a sigh.

"Follow me."

It was very light in the military police office. I began to sweat. The light was far too white. A white light can still make me sweat, even now.

The duty NCO looked interrogatively at the two who had brought me in, and then searchingly at me.

"What's up?" he said.

The two stood stiffly at attention. "We came across this man in the station."

The other looked at me again. "What were you doing there at this time of night?"

I stood to attention. "I wanted to telephone for a taxi. My wife and I came by the night express from Vienna to spend my leave here. Here are my papers."

He looked at them. "Leave for a convicted soldier. That sounds peculiar."

We looked at each other. A fly was buzzing somewhere--buzzing and buzzing, as it zigzagged about the room.

"Where is your wife?"

"She is standing outside by the main entrance."

He nodded to one of the other two. "Fetch her."

I listened to the man's steps outside, squinted up at the fly. The NCO shifted in his chair. A side door opened and a sleepy head appeared in it. "What's the time?"

"Half past three."

The head withdrew again.

"Meanwhile, let me see your ticket."

That gave me a start. Should I say I had thrown it away? Then he would ask if I had not had a return to Vienna. He would also ask to see Ursula's ticket. There was no getting out of it.

"This is only for Hochifizen. How do you explain that?"

"We fell asleep and only woke here in Innsbruck."

"You mean to say that you have traveled without paying from Hochfilzen here?"

"Yes. There was no time to pay. We had to hurry to get out of the train. But, naturally, I will gladly pay the extra."

He did not reply. His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver.

"Station police--who? One moment." He ran his finger down a list pinned up on the wall beside him. "No, we haven't got him.

It must be a mistake.... Yes, it's the usual mess. They always have their things in a muddle there.... I'll gladly have another look, but you won't get anything out of it...."

Ursula came in. She looked at me, frightened. We waited. The fly buzzed. Penal battalion. Penal battalion. Convicted. Conviction. Convict. The man at the desk laughed into the telephone and replaced the receiver.

When he saw us he asked for Ursula's papers, and then we had to confess that we were not married. "Not yet," said Ursula, "not till tomorrow." Suddenly she pulled herself together. "Now listen," she said, "let us go. The whole thing is an unfortunate mistake, and if we had not overslept we would have got off where we meant to and none of all this would have happened. You know yourself how difficult it is for a man in--a----well, in a penal battalion to get leave. My husband has got leave. He has not done anything wrong; it was my fault that we overslept. You understand, we had not seen each other for so long, and I badly wanted to make it a really happy reunion; I wanted to make everything really nice for him. And then we had something to drink"--she held out the bottle of cognac a little way--"and it was I who got him to get it, and also to--to--"

"Yes?"

She was magnificent. Blushing furiously, her eyes sparkling and flashing, she bored right to the man's heart in woman's unscrupulous way.

"You see, we had the compartment to ourselves. And it was so long since I had seen him. He has not done anything wrong; he has behaved like a good soldier."

The last remark was a stroke of genius. The man at the desk handed us our papers. "You may go." Then he turned to me. "And keep on behaving like a good soldier."

As the door closed behind us the men inside guffawed noisily. "Let's get away," she whispered and pulled me along almost at a run. "I am afraid."

When we were back outside in the rain-sodden, deserted square, I saw that her face was white and her forehead beneath her black hair covered with tiny beads of sweat. "Hold onto me," she groaned. "I think I'm going to faint."

There I stood with a bottle in one hand, a suitcase in the other and Ursula in my arms. I had to put the suitcase down hastily and support her till I got her seated on one of the steps. "Head down between your knees," I said. "Now stay quite still. It will go off in a bit."

"I'm fine now," she said, when she had recovered. "Are you very angry?"

"Over what?"

"Over my fainting like that. I'm not much help."

"I like that! If you hadn't saved the situation you never know what it might not have developed into. At any rate, by the time they had investigated my statement and rung round from Herod to Pilate I would never have got away until sometime in the morning. That sort of thing can take an awful time, and you don't get a telephone call through to Bucharest in a quarter of an hour, I can assure you. I think you have been magnificent and very brave.... You must be horribly tired now. Shouldn't I try to get a taxi?"

"No, no. We won't leave each other any more. I'll come with you. If I can just sit another couple of minutes we'll go together and look for a cab...."

So we sat for a while, with her snuggled close to me. Then she gave herself a shake. "I'm cold."

"Come. Let's go."

We found a horse cab and rattled to the hotel. It was large and white and asleep, with open balcony doors and a drive with a deep layer of gravel that made the horse suddenly go slower. The old night porter scratched out Ursula's name when I wrote it in the register, telling me in a friendly tone that I did not need to put my wife's maiden name. "Now we'll just put 'and wife,' said he with a slight smile. "That's sufficient." I was as red as a peony. We even thought the elevator boy smiled, and I looked rigidly ahead of me. While the chambermaid was turning down the bed Ursula went out onto the balcony and I said "Hm" and went into the bathroom, and shortly afterward we were standing alone in the middle of the floor, looking at each other.

"Well--here we are! Cigarette?"

The match broke and her hand trembled slightly.

We were appallingly embarrassed. The dry air in the strange hotel room, where everything was clean and unhomely. The emotional excitement. Was the whole thing just emotional excitement? The tiredness. I felt as drained and heavy-limbed as after maneuvers; and she stood there with drooping shoulders and had hazel eyes, and no eyes can look so infinitely sad and weary as hazel eyes; and neither knew whether the one expected it in a little of the other, or thought the other expected it and could we, did we want to, or would we both fumblingly exert ourselves to please each other without knowing what was the right thing to do? Or do it wrong? Tense the wrong muscles and in the end draw apart out of reluctant necessity, tormented by tiredness and imaginings?

"Now I'll go and finish my cigarette on the balcony, while you get--undressed."

This was awful. Didn't I dare even say "bed?"

Is there anything so still as the night? The mountains were a massive, enormous something in the darkness, waiting for the day to be able to show what they looked like. Big mountain, great mountain, tomorrow I shall see you, and Ursula shall see you. Tomorrow we will have slept, and we shall have breakfast with you, and talk about visiting you. Tonight it is dark and you have nothing to show us.

"Now you may come."

In the bathroom one glass was almost half-full of cognac. The other was empty, but I could smell that there had been cognac in it too. The bottle was empty. I picked up the glass.

If I say that we are too tired she may think that I am just being considerate, and so she'll say that yes, we are, and so we'll come to a standstill and we will both be afraid to be the first to fall asleep. Perhaps, too, she will be slightly disappointed, even if she is dead tired. And if I say.

It is really not easy to know about that sort of thing. Those human bulls and stallions in the hard-boiled American novels, the Hemingwayish, sensitive, sexual heroes with bursting hearts--at that decisive moment I envied them. But no, no moment is decisive before you are dead.

"Here's to clean shoes," I said aloud and drained the glass.

"You are sweet," she said in a subdued voice from the room. I put her head on my shoulder and pulled the quilt up over her breast.

"Tomorrow," said I, "I will be one of Hemingway's most emotional, sexual heroes. The mountain asked me to tell you that tomorrow it will show us all that it has. And now, by heaven, I want to sleep."

She laughed. "You are sweet."

I got out of that one very well.

Shortly afterward she added: "Thanks, darling."

She put her head on her own pillow, bent my left arm and tucked her right one through it, and so we fell asleep. We slept a heavy, good, cognac sleep, and woke several hours later simultaneously and in the same position, and the mountain did show us everything, and we climbed it together and afterward rested on it.

You just have to sleep on it.

"I love you. I love you with all my heart."

Big, shining tears glistened on her long lashes and ran down her cheeks. She kept her eyes shut.

The morning sun was shining in upon us through the open door of the balcony. We sat, each in a chair, having the breakfast that the waiter had just brought us. She held out a well-buttered slice.

"You're to eat something more!"

"I can't eat so much," I said. "I've so long been accustomed not to eat much. That's why."

"You must get rid of your bad habits. You eat too little. Good heavens, boy, you're just skin and bone."

I looked down at myself. She might well say that. My arms were so thin that I could span them with one hand. Heavens, what did she want with a person like me? She, a woman who was well-covered, lissom, buxomly graceful. Heavy behind, strong and nicely rounded. Made to be the center of a sunburned brood; pudgy toddlers, big long-haired boys and cackling girls continually coming in demanding something to eat and so out again. And a tall, big man to come home in the evening, a bear of a man. A mighty man. Not me.

"Now eat, and don't sit being sorry for yourself. You are good enough as you are. I expect a lot of you when we've finished. A lot. But you must eat first. You must have two eggs. And then be fearfully oriental."

"You can't do that," said I peevishly. The bread was so dry in my mouth. It just went round and round.