The Innocent (12 page)

“Just so. Soldiers! Is this how you win the war? With these soldiers?” Leonard came up for air and she looped her arms around his neck.
“Mein Dummerchen
, my little innocent, what have you learned down there today?”

“I listened to your belly. It must be dinnertime.”

She drew him in and kissed his face. Marie was free with her demands, and she allowed Leonard his curiosity, which she found endearing. Sometimes his inquiries were teases, forms of seduction. “Tell me why you like it halfway,” he whispered, and she pleaded, “But I like it deep, really deep.”

“You like it halfway, just here. Tell me why that is.”

Leonard naturally inclined toward a well-ordered, hygienic existence. For four days after the inception of the first love affair of his life he did not change his underwear or socks, he had no clean shirt and he hardly washed. They had spent that first night in Maria’s bed talking and dozing. Toward five
A.M.
they had cheese, black bread and coffee while a neighbor just through the wall was messily clearing his throat as he prepared to go to work. They made love again, and Leonard was pleased with his powers of recuperation. He was going to be all right, he thought, he was just like everyone else. After that, he fell into a dreamless sleep from which he was woken an hour later by the alarm clock.

He came up from under the bedclothes into a cold that contracted his skull. He lifted Maria’s arm free of his waist, and shivering naked on all fours in the dark, he found his clothes beneath the ashtray, under the omelette plates, under the saucer with the burned-out candle. There was an icy fork in the arm of his shirt. He had thought to store his glasses in a shoe. The wine bottle had toppled, and the dregs had drained into the waistband of his underpants. His coat was spread over the bed. He pulled it clear and rearranged the covers over Maria. When he groped for her head and kissed it, she did not stir.

With his coat on he stood at the kitchen sink, moved a frying pan to the floor and splashed stinging cold water over his face. He remembered there was, after all, a bathroom. He turned on
its light and went inside. For the first time in his life he used another person’s toothbrush. He had never brushed his hair with a woman’s hairbrush. He examined his reflection. Here was the new man. The day’s growth of beard grew too sparsely to make for a dissolute stubble, and there was the hard red beginning of a pimple on the side of his nose. But he fancied that his gaze now, even in exhaustion, was steadier.

All day long he wore his tiredness well. It was just one aspect of his happiness. Lightweight and remote, the components of his day floated before him: the ride on the U-Bahn and the bus, the walk past a frozen pond and out between the white spiky fields, the hours alone with the tape recorders, the solitary steak and french fries in the canteen, more hours among the familiar circuits, the walk in the dark back to the station, the ride, then Kreuzberg again. It was pointless, wasting the precious workless hours by continuing past her district and heading for his own. That evening when he arrived at her door she was just back from work herself. The apartment was still a mess. Once again they got into bed to keep warm. The night repeated itself with variations, the morning was repeated without them. That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday and Thursday went the same way. Glass asked, rather coolly, if he was growing a beard. If Leonard needed proof of his dedication to a passion, it was in the matted thickness of his gray socks and the aroma of butter, vaginal juices and potatoes that rose from his chest when he loosened the top button of his shirt. The excessively heated interiors at the warehouse released from the folds of his clothes the scent of overused bedsheets and prompted disabling reveries in the windowless room.

It was not until Friday evening that he returned to his own apartment. It seemed like an absence of years. He went around turning on the lights, intrigued by the signs of a former self—the young man who had sat down to write these nervous, scheming drafts strewn across the floor, the scrubbed-clean innocent who had left scum and hairs round the bath and towels and clothes on the bedroom floor. Here was the inexpert coffee maker—he had watched Maria and knew all about
it now. Here was the childish chocolate bar and beside it his mother’s letter. He read it over quickly and found the little anxieties expressed on his behalf cloying, really quite irritating.

While the bath was filling, he padded around the place, luxuriating once more in space and warmth. He whistled and sang snatches of songs. At first he could not find the untamed number to carry his feelings. The crooning love songs he knew were all too courteously restrained. In fact, what suited him now was the raucous American nonsense he thought he despised. He recalled scraps, but they were elusive: “and make a something with the pots and pans. Shake, rattle and roll! Shake, rattle and roll!” In the bathroom’s flattering acoustics, he boomed this incantation over and again. Bellowed in an English voice it sounded foolish, but it was the right sort of thing. Joyous and sexy, and more or less meaningless. He had never in his life felt so uncomplicatedly happy. He had solitude for the moment, but he was not alone. He was expected. He had time to clean himself up and tidy the flat, and then he would be on his way. “Shake, rattle and roll!” Two hours later he opened his front door. This time he took with him an overnight bag, and he did not return for a week.

During these early days, Maria would not come to Leonard’s flat, despite his exaggerated description of its luxuries. She worried that if she started spending nights away, the neighbors would soon be telling each other that she had found a man and a better place to live. The authorities would hear about it, and then she would be out. In Berlin, demand even for a one-bedroom flat with no hot water was enormous. To Leonard it seemed reasonable she should want to be on home ground. They bundled up in bed, made dashes to the kitchen for hastily fried meals. To wash, it was necessary to fill a saucepan and wait in bed until it had boiled, then hurry to the bathroom to tip scalding water into the frozen basin. The plug leaked, and pressure in the single cold tap was unpredictable. For Leonard and Maria, work was where they got warm and ate decently. At home, there was nowhere else to be but bed.

Maria taught Leonard to be an energetic and considerate lover, how to let her have all her orgasms before he had his own. That seemed only polite, like letting a lady precede you through a door. He learned to make love in
der Hundestellung
, doggy fashion, which was also the quickest way to lose the bedclothes, and also from behind as she lay on her side, facing away from him, on the edge of sleep; and then on their sides, face to face, locked in tight, barely disturbing the bedclothes at all. He discovered there were no set rules for her preparedness. Sometimes he only had to look at her and she was all set to go. At others he worked away patiently, like a boy over a model kit, only to be interrupted by her suggesting cheese and bread and another round of tea. He learned that she liked endearments murmured in her ear, but not beyond a certain point, not once her eyes began their inward roll. She did not want to be distracted then.

He learned to ask for
Präservative
in the
Drogerie
. He found out from Glass that he was entitled to a free supply through the U.S. Army. On the bus he brought home four gross in a pale blue cardboard box. He sat with the package on his knees, aware of the passengers’ glances, and somehow knew the color was a giveaway. Once, when Maria offered sweetly to put one on him herself, he said no too aggressively. Later he wondered what had troubled him. This was his first intimation of a new and troubling feature. It was hard to describe. There was an element of mind creeping in, of bits of himself, bits he did not really like. Once he was over the novelty of it all, and once he was sure he could do it just like everyone else, and when he was confident that he was not going to come too soon—when all that was cleared away, and once he was quite convinced that Maria genuinely liked and wanted him and would go on wanting him, then he started having thoughts that he was powerless to send away when he was making love. They soon grew inseparable from his desire. These fantasies came a little closer each time, and each time they continued to proliferate, to take new forms. There were figures gathering at the edge of thought; now they were striding toward the center, toward
him. They were all versions of himself, and he knew he could not resist them.

It began on the third or fourth time with a simple perception. He looked down at Maria, whose eyes were closed, and remembered she was a German. The word had not been entirely prised loose of its associations after all. His first day in Berlin came back to him. German. Enemy. Mortal enemy. Defeated enemy. This last brought with it a shocking thrill. He diverted himself momentarily with the calculation of the total impedance of a certain circuit. Then: she was the defeated, she was his by right, by conquest, by right of unimaginable violence and heroism and sacrifice. What elation! To be right, to win, to be rewarded. He looked along his own arms stretched before him, pushing into the mattress, at where the gingerish hairs were thickest, just below the elbow. He was powerful and magnificent. He went faster, harder, he fairly bounced on her. He was victorious and good and strong and free. In recollection these formulations embarrassed him and he pushed them aside. They were alien to his obliging and kindly nature, they offended his sense of what was reasonable. One only had to look at her to know there was nothing defeated about Maria. She had been liberated by the invasion of Europe, not crushed. And was she not, at least in their game, his guide?

But next time around the thoughts returned. They were irresistibly exciting, and he was helpless before their elaborations. This time, she was his by right of conquest, and then,
there was nothing she could do about it
. She did not want to be making love to him, but she had no choice. He summoned the circuit diagrams. They were no longer available. She was struggling to escape. She was thrashing beneath him, he thought he heard her call out “No!” She was shaking her head from side to side, she had her eyes closed against the inescapable reality. He had her pinioned against the mattress, she was his, there was nothing she could do, she would never get away. And that was it, that was the end for him, he was gone, finished. His mind was cleared and he lay back. His mind was clear and he thought about food, about sausages. Not bratwurst or
bockwurst, but English sausages, fat and mild, fried brownish-black on all sides, and mashed potatoes, and mushy peas.

Over the following days, his embarrassment faded. He accepted the obvious truth that what happened in his head could not be sensed by Maria, even though she was only inches away. These thoughts were his alone, nothing to do with her at all.

Eventually, a more dramatic fantasy took shape. It recapitulated all the previous elements. Yes, she was defeated, conquered, his by right, could not escape, and now,
he was a soldier
, weary, battle-marked and bloody, but heroically rather than disablingly so. He had taken this woman and was forcing her. Half terrified, half in awe, she dared not disobey. It helped when he pulled his greatcoat further up the bed, so that by turning his head to the left or right he could catch sight of the dark green. That she was reluctant and he was inviolable were the premises of further elaborations. As he went about his business in a city full of soldiers, the soldier fantasy appeared ridiculous, but it was easy enough to put out of mind.

It was more difficult, however, when he found himself tempted to communicate these imaginings to her. Initially, he only squeezed her harder, bit her with considerable restraint, held her outstretched arms down and fantasized that he was preventing her from escaping. He slapped her buttocks once. None of this seemed to make much difference to Maria. She did not notice, or she pretended not to. Only his own pleasure was intensified. Now the idea was growing ever more urgent—he wanted her to acknowledge what was on his mind, however stupid it really was. He could not believe she would not be aroused by it. He slapped her again, bit and squeezed harder.
She had to give him what was his
.

His private theater had become insufficient. He wanted something between them. A reality, not a fantasy. Telling her somehow was the next inevitable thing. He wanted his power recognized and Maria to suffer from it, just a bit, in the most pleasurable way. He had no trouble keeping quiet once they had finished. Then he was ashamed. What was this power he wanted recognized? It was no more than a disgusting story in
his head. Then, later, he wondered if she might not be excited by it too. There was, of course, nothing to discuss. There was nothing he was able, or dared, to put into words. He could hardly be asking her permission. He had to surprise her, show her, let pleasure overcome her rational objections. He thought all this, and knew it was bound to happen.

Toward the middle of March featureless white cloud covered the sky and the temperature rose sharply. The few inches of dirty snow melted in three days. On the walk between Rudow village and the warehouse there were green shoots in the slush, and on the roadside trees, fat sticky buds. Leonard and Maria emerged from their hibernation. They left the bed and the bedroom and brought the electric heater into the living room. They ate at a
Schnellimbiss
together, and went to a local
Kneipe
for a glass of beer. They saw a Tarzan film on the Kurfürstendamm. One Saturday evening they went to the Resi and danced to a German big band that alternated romantic American love songs with bouncy Bavarian numbers in strict oompah time. They bought sekt to toast their first meeting. Maria said she wanted to sit apart and send messages through the pneumatic tubes, but there were no vacant tables. They had a second bottle of sekt and just enough money left over to take a bus halfway home. As they walked to Adalbertstrasse, Maria yawned loudly and put her arm through Leonard’s for support. She had put in ten hours overtime in the previous three days because one of the office girls was out with the flu. And the night before, she and Leonard had been awake until dawn, and even then they had had to remake the bed before they slept.