The Dark Arena (16 page)

“Push their caps back,” the corporal said. Mosca did so, exposing two grinning gnomelike faces to the camera.

“Those butts are too small,” the corporal said. “They won't show up.” Mosca took out some whole cigarettes and threw them into the gutter.

The corporal had made a few shots but was not satisfied. He was preparing for another when Mosca felt someone's hand on his arm and he was spun around.

Before him were the two policewomen, the one who had spun him around nearly as tall as he, her hand still on his arm. He gave her a push that was nearly a blow, feeling the soft breast beneath the rough, blue wool of her uniform. She staggered back, her hand falling away from his arm, then said defensively, “That is not allowed here.” She turned to the boys and said in a warning voice, “You two leave here instantly.”

Mosca grabbed the children by their coats. “Stay here,” he said. He turned on the two women, his lean, dark face ugly and vicious with anger. “Do you see that uniform?” pointing to the corporal. He held out his hand. “Give me your identification.” The two women began to stutter explanations, that it was their job to keep the children away, keep diem from begging. A German man going by stopped, the boys edged away from the quarrel, and the man said something to than in an angry, scolding voice which frightened them, and they began to nm. Mosca caught them again as the corporal let out a warning shout The man began to walk away quickly to get to the throng of fellow Germans waiting on the comer for a streetcar. Mosca ran down the street after him and when the German heard the pounding feet he turned around, his eyes blinking with fright.

‘TMd you tell those children to leave?” Mosca shouted at him.

The German said quietly, apologetically, “I did not understand. I thought they were begging!.”

“Give me your identity pass,” Mosca said. He held out his hand. The German, trembling with nervousness and shock, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the usual enormous wallet stuffed with papers. He fumbled unseeingly, trying to watch Mosca at the same time until Mosca took the papers out of his hand and found the blue card himself.

Mosca handed the wallet back. “Come to the police station in the morning for your pass,” he said, and turned to walk back to the jeep.

Across the street, on the other side of the square, he saw in the failing November light a dark, silent mass of Germans watching him; tall, giantlike, black as the outline of a forest For one moment he knew fear and terror as if they could see into his heart and mind, and then his anger flared up again. He walked slowly, calmly, to the jeep. The two boys were still there but the policewomen had disappeared.

“Let's go,” he said to the corporal. He drove down to
the Metzer Strasse and got out. He said to the corporal, “Take the jeep back to the base for me.”

The corporal nodded and said quietly, “I think those shots will be enough.” And Mosca realized that he had forgotten to renew the taking of pictures and had left the children standing in front of the Glocke, not given them the chocolate he had promised.

When Mosca entered the room, Hella was warming soup on the electric plate, a red-labled empty can open on the table. A pan full of bacon waited its turn. Leo sat on the couch reading.

The room was warm with the smell of food, comfortable in its well-filled largeness. The bed and its night table in one corner, on the table a lamp and small radio; the great white wardrobe in the corner near the door, and in the middle a great round table surrounded by wicker chairs. Along one wall the enormous, empty china closet helped give the room a coziness that was not crowded, that yet gave plenty of space to move around in. A hell of a big room, Mosca always thought.

Hella looked up from her cooking. “Oh, you're home early,” she said and rose to kiss him. Her face always changed when she saw him, he could see the happiness there, giving him always a sense of guilt and fear because she built so much of her life on him. As if she did not know the many dangers he felt in the world around them.

“I had something to do in town and didn't go back to the base,” Mosca said. Leo raised his head and nodded to him, then continued to read. Mosca reached into his pocket for a cigarette, and his fingers touched the German's identity card.

“How about giving me a lift to the police station after we eat?” Mosca asked Leo. He threw the card on the table.

Leo nodded and said, “What have you there?” Mosca told them what had happened. He noticed that Leo was watching him with a curious, amused smile. Hella poured the hot soup into cups and said nothing. Then she put the bacon on the electric plate.

They drank the soup carefully, dipping crackers into it Hella lifted the blue identity card from the table. Holding the cup in one hand she flipped the card open with the other. “He's married,” she said. “He has blue eyes and brown hair and works as a printer. That is a good job.” She studied the picture. “He doesn't look like a bad man; I wonder if he has children.”

“Doesn't it say on the pass?” Mosca asked.

“No,” Hella said. “He has a scar on his finger.” She let the card drop back onto the table.

Leo tilted his head back and drank the last of his soup, then leaned over the table, the tic in his face working a little. “Tell me,” he said, “why didn't you go to the police station with the man right away? It was close by.”

Mosca smiled at him. “I just wanted to scare the guy, Tm not going to do anything. I guess I just wanted to scare the son of a bitch.”

“Hell have a very bad night,” Hella said.

“He deserves it,” Mosca said angrily, defensively. “Where does that bastard come off putting his two cents in a deal like that.”

Hella lifted her pale, gray eyes to him. “He was ashamed,” she said, “and I think he felt it his fault that these children beg and pick up cigarettes in the streets.”

“Ah hell, let him sweat,” Mosca said. “How about some bacon before you burn the hell out of it?”

Hella put die bacon and a loaf of gray German bread on the table. When they had finished eating the grease-soaked sandwiches, Leo and Mosca rose, Leo searching for his jeep keys on the trunk. Hella picked up the identity card and looked at the address. “See,” she said eagerly, “he lives on Rubsam Strasse. That is closer than the police station.”

Mosca said curtly, “Don't wait up for me. We're going to the club after.” Then he smiled at her as she leaned her head to be kissed, her thin, closely drawn light-brown hair like a helmet. The sentimental action always endeared her to him though he smiled at it and never made the first move himself. “Do you want me to bring some ice
cream?” She nodded. As he went out the door she called after him, “It's on the way to the club.”

In the jeep Leo said to him, “Where do we go?”

“Okay, for Christ's sake, take me to the guy's house.” Mosca shook his head. “You and her give me a big pain in the ass.”

“I don't give a damn,” Leo said, “but it is on the way to the club. And besides I know what it is to ‘sweat,’ as you say. That is a very accurate word.” He turned his big-boned face to Mosca and smiled with a touch of sadness.

Mosca shrugged. “I don't even want to see the bastard. How about you going in the house, Leo?”

“Not me,” Leo said with a grin. “You took it away from him? You give it back.”

They had no trouble finding the house, a private, two-family home cut up into a tenament to provide much-needed housing. On the vestibule door was a list of all the tenants, including every member of the family, and what apartments they occupied. Mosca looked at the identity pass and compared names. Then he went up to the second floor. He knocked sharply and the door was opened immediately. He realized that he had been seen from the window and his knock waited for. The man at the door had the same bullethead and stern features but his face was set in a constrained mask and softened by the now naked baldness of his skull. The German stood aside and Mosca went in.

He had interrupted the evening meal. The table in the large room held four dishes filled with black gravy in which floated dark, shredded vegetables and large pasty white potatoes. In one corner was a bed, farther along the wall a sink hung awkwardly, above it a great framed painting in dark greens and browns. A woman, light hair drawn against her skull, was trying to bring two small boys through the door to the other room of the apartment. But as she turned to see Mosca she let the children escape her. They all looked at Mosca and waited.

He handed the German the blue identity card. The man took it and said falteringly, “Yes?”

Mosea said, “You don't have to go to the police station. Forget about everything.”

The blunt, stern face turned ghastly white. The relief from fear, the shock of the day, the jeep screaming to a stop in front of his house, all combined now—a poison disintegrated his blood. He trembled visibly and his wife hurried to his support, helped him to one of the four empty wooden chairs surrounding the table. Mosca, alarmed, said to the woman, “What's the trouble, what's the matter with him?”

“Nothing,” the woman said, her voice dead, completely empty of emotion or any life. “We thought you came to take him away.” Her voice wavered slightly.

One of the children began to cry with quiet fright, as if the strength and walls of his world had been destroyed. Mosca, thinking to quiet him, took a few steps forward and brought out a bar of chocolate. The child was terrified and began to scream great hysterical screams, so high pitched they were barely audible. Mosca stopped and looked at the woman helplessly. She was bringing her husband a small glass of schnapps. As the man drank, the woman ran over to the child, slapped him full in the mouth and then picked him up in her arms. The child was still. The father, still terribly agitated, said, “Wait, please wait,” and almost ran to the cupboard for a bottle of schnapps and a small water glass.

He poured Mosca a drink and forced it into his hands. “It was all a mistake, you see, all a mistake, I thought the children were annoying you. I did not mean to interfere.” And Mosca remembered the man's angry tone when he had scolded the two boys in front of the Glocke, the angry shame and guilt, as if its owner were himself the cause of the children's degradation.

“It's all right,” Mosca said. He tried to leave the drink on the table but the German kept hold of his arm and forced the drink on him again.

Forgetting his wife and children watching him, as if he were pleading for his life, the father went on feverishly,

“I was never a Nazi. I joined the Party to keep my job, all printers must join. But I paid my dues. No more. I was never a Nazi. Drink. It's good stuff. Drink it. I save this for when I feel ill.” Mosca drank and broke away for the door but the German caught him, shook his hand. “I am very grateful for your kindness. That is from the heart. I will never forget this. I have always said the Americans were good. They are kindhearted; we Germans are fortunate.” He wrung Mosca's hand for the last time, his head shaking up and down with nervousness and passionate relief.

At that moment Mosca felt an almost uncontrollable urge to strike him down, to make the blood flow from that bald skull and twitching face, and turned his head away to hide his contempt and disgust.

Framed against the brown door, in the room beyond, Mosca saw the wife's face. The flesh was drawn tight around the separate and distinctly seen bones. The skin was dead white and her head was slightly lowered, the shoulders hunched by the weight of the child in her arms. Her gray eyes, almost black now, were dark pools of unforgetting hatred. Her hair, too, seemed dark beside the child's golden one and her gaze did not flinch as it met Mosca's. Not one muscle of her face moved.

As the door closed behind him, Mosca heard her voice, quiet but sharp, speaking to her husband. Out in the street, by the light of the lamp-lit room, he could see her looking down at him, the child still in her arms.

Wolf ate his cold sapper German-peasant fashion,
picking up the long, blood-red wurst and slicing off a thick, glutinous chunk with his pocketknife. Then he cut a block of dark bread from the enormous loaf resting before him. The German girl he lived with, Ursula, and her father, took the bread and wurst in their turn. Each had a can of American beer beside their plates with which they filled small wine glasses when necessary.

“When do you have to go?” Ursula asked. She was a small, dark girl with an ungovernable temper. Wolf had taken pleasure in taming her. He had already put in his marriage papers, and it was with this understanding that he had been allowed to move into the father's house to live with her. There were other considerations.

“I have to meet Mosca at the Rathskellar in about an hour,” Wolf said, looking at the watch he had taken from the Polish refugee after the war. The dead Polack, Wolf thought.

“I don't care for that man,” Ursula said. “He has no manners. I don't know what that gjurl sees in him.”

Wolf cut another slice of wurst and said jokingly, “The same thing you see in me.”

As he knew she would, Ursula flared up. “You damn Americans think we'll do anything for your goods. Try treating me as your Ami friends treat their girls. See if I keep you. Out the house you go.”

The father, munching on the hard bread, said placatingly, “Ursula, Ursula,” but he said it out of habit, thinking of something else.

When Wolf had finished supper he went into the bedroom and stuffed his large, brown leather briefcase with cigarettes, chocolate, and a few cigars. He took these from a locked wardrobe to which he had the only key. As he was about to leave Ursula's father came in.

“Wolfgang, before you leave. A word if I may.” The father was always polite and respectful, always remembering the lover of his daughter was an American. Wolf liked this in him.

The father led Wolf to their cold storeroom in the back of the basement apartment. The father threw open the door and in a dramatically concerned voice said, “Look.”

From the wooden beams hung bare bones of hams with tiny shreds of dark meat clinging to them, small ends of salamis, and a white cheese like a thin quarter moon.