The Other Side of Love (7 page)

Jiirgen von und su Gilsa was an inch or so shorter than she in her silver evening sandals, but his tall Luftwaffe cap and gleaming black boots made up for it. He was quite handsome, with dark hair, lively brown eyes and a wide smile. He was attentive; his manners were polished without being obtrusive; he complimented her smoothly; he had an excellent command of English - a necessity for Araminta, whose German was limited to danke schon, bitte and Auf Wiedersehen. She used her vocabulary often that night as Jiirgen helped her on and off with the little pink bolero jacket in various crowded nightclubs.

Around midnight, she was on the broad pavement of the Kurfiirstendamm dancing in a Maypole circle around a standard topped with the Nazi eagle emblem. She needed Jiirgen’s ever-courteous assistance into his low-slung open two-seater Mercedes-Benz.

“How I do adore this motor-car’s long bonnet,”

she said.

“What does it mean,

“500K”?”

“That she has eight cylinders,”

Jiirgen responded, starting the engine.

“She’ll go a hundred miles an hour.”

“But how d’you know?”

The car started smoothly forward.

“I’ve tested this baby.”

Jiirgen larded his conversation with British and American slang.

“I can drive. Do let me test her, too.”

“Araminta, in Berlin there are laws against speeding.”

“You Krauts are too law-abiding.”

“I’ve heard the same about you Limeys,”

he said.

“Some day we’ll both give her a whirl.”

“Now,”

she said.

Jiirgen, immensely proud of his new car, his twenty-first-birthday gift, glanced around. It was almost midnight. Here and there along the Kurfiirstendamm groups of revellers were walking, waiting for the bus or going into the S-bahn station. Only one set of taillights showed.

“We’ll take a spin out to the stadium on the Via Triumphalis, as

“

our dearly beloved Fiihrer has renamed our streets.”

Jiirgen, nearly as squiffy as she, showed the Junker class’s routine scorn for Hitler; in the three hundred traceable years of the von und su Gilsa family prior to the Nazi ascendancy, nobody had ever done anything but bark orders at a corporal.

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They sped through the open countryside beyond the Olympic grounds. The headlights bathed the fields in an emerald brilliance, and big German farmhouses whizzed by. The wind streaming above the open car swept away Araminta’s pretty, high-pitched laughter.

“Oh, isn’t this too divine?”

Araminta cried.

“Jiirgen, are we doing a hundred?”

“Let me convert from kilometres. No, more like eighty-five.”

“Faster, faster.”

“This is nearly as good a thrill as flying,”

he shouted, pressing his foot all the way down.

Araminta rested her head back on the leather seat.

“Does the Hindenburg float around up there all night?”

By day, the Zeppelin, trailing an enormous Olympic flag, hovered above the Reichssportsfeld.

“If I had my Stuka, I’d fly up and find out for you.”

Laughing, she squinted up at the darkness. Even if there were stars, she couldn’t have seen them, for she wore her glasses only when it was absolutely necessary.

Over the rush of wind and the roar of the supercharged roadster, she heard a shrill cry that sounded nothing like Jurgen’s voice.

“Gott und Himmel!”

As he jammed on the brakes, Araminta’s head snapped forward then back. There was a sickening squeal of tyres. The car swerved across the roadway. With an immense and drawn-out crashing noise and sharp clatter of breaking glass, the world turned upside down.

Araminta sank into the deep silence.

IV

Far over her head a man was muttering some sort of foreign incantation.

With a tremendous effort, she opened her eyes. A hard slant of light showed Jurgen’s face up close. The dark strands of hair falling across his forehead were like thin snakes. A streak of blood showed on his jaw.

“Jurgen …”

“Thanks are unto Gott,”

he said, his English frightened from him.

“I vas praying for you not to be die. Dead.”

“Dead … ?”

“You is thrown from the car. And I find you here, by the ditch. So still you vere.”

The way the light was falling darkened the worry-lines etched between his eyes.

She half-sat to reach her white arms around his neck, pulling him down with her as she fell back into the moist matted grasses of the roadside. Although she had done considerable kissing and caressing in dark automobiles, her moral code dictated that she keep her virginity. Now, though, she was confronted by the awesome face of

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eternity. Jiirgen must have been going through a similar emotional upheaval. With a groan, he buried his face in the lush curves of her breasts.

There were no words. There were no kisses, no caresses. She shoved aside her silken garments that separated them; he raised up to unbutton his blue Luftwaffe trousers.

At the tearing pain between her thighs she gave a shrill cry.

Then there was only his hoarse rhythmic gasping, the breath rattling between her clenched teeth until a spasm uncontrollable as hiccups shuddered within her and the living blood tingled to her earlobes and fingertips.

y

Jiirgen stood, turning to button his trousers.

“It was your first time?”

he asked in a tight voice.

” Traid so.”

“Gott!”

“Darling, it had to happen sooner or later,”

she comforted.

“I will speak to your father first thing tomorrow.”

“Daddy?”

She got up. Her left ankle stabbed, and she put her weight on her right foot.

“But whatever for?”

“To ask for your hand.”

This old-fashioned turn of events took Araminta by surprise. She looked at Jiirgen’s tensed face and knew he was no more in love with her than she was with him. He was behaving decently.

She’d enjoyed a ripping two weeks in Berlin but to live in Germany? She thought of the reception in Griinewald and Aunt Clothilde’s friends, the women dowdy and dull, the men uniformed with thin mouths and iron crosses hung around their wrinkly necks. How different would the von und su Gilsa clan be? And how could she survive so far from England and her family? Besides, although her brief joining with Jiirgen had sent her into involuntary spasms, she didn’t love him.

“You’re being very sweet, Jiirgen. Honestly, though, we don’t take this sort of thing so seriously.”

“But I adore you,”

he muttered.

“And me you,”

she lied, saving his face.

“Still, we come from two different countries, so we must be sensible.”

“What if a child results?”

“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,”

Araminta said.

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i

“Tell me every detail, darling. I have it on the best authority that you and Adolf had an endless tete-a-tete, and he as good as invited you to a holiday at Berchtesgaden.”

“Araminta,”

Aubrey interjected,

“that’s Uncle Humphrey’s version and”

“He’s won all the gold medals in exaggeration,”

Kathe finished.

The three of them laughed indulgenA”

at the predictable foibles of the older generation. W

It was late afternoon, and they were sitting in a secluded corner of the Hotel Adlon’s writing-room. The cast encasing Araminta’s left leg from above her knee to her visible pearly toenails was propped on an ottoman. Because of her cousin’s automobile accident, the Baronin von Wangenheim had permitted Kathe to leave the Olympic environs before the evening of the following Sunday, 16 August, when the Games would come to an end.

“The Chancellery looks so cold and grey from Wilhelmstrasse,”

Araminta said. The Adlon was close to the government buildings with their swirl of Nazi flags.

“What’s it like inside?”

“The courtyard’s nice, but the building is impersonal and grandiose. Blond bodyguards all the same size were stationed along the walls like black-dressed statues. There were several hundred guests, and we waited in line for an hour until the Chancellor shook our hands. He told me I should have medalled in the hundredmetre”

Helen Stephens, the tall American, had taken the gold, and Kathe

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had been placed a dismal fifth.

“The cakes afterwards were stale. You would have adored every moment.”

“Having Hitler make goo-goo eyes at me would be an improvement on sitting around here all day.”

“A terrible ordeal,”

Aubrey said, smiling at Kathe.

“Why, thus far today this poor unfortunate’s been visited by only five of her young men.”

Jiirgen, a tape across his jaw, had presented himself each afternoon, but with a fellow-officer, comforting proof in case she needed any that he was not ardently in pursuit.

Araminta smiled, then frowned.

“It just occurred to me that every one of them was in a uniform.”

“I’d noticed,”

Aubrey said quietly.

“It’s a nation of uniforms - Thor’s hammer, on the ready to be hurled.”

“Darling, what a writerly thing to say. But think of how civilized everything is, how divinely clean the public loos are. The people are so friendly.”

Araminta shifted in the settee with an over-dramatic little pout which meant they shouldn’t take her continuous movements to heart. In actuality the broken bone ached and the itching under the cast was driving her mad.

“I must say it’s impossible to believe that anyone I’ve seen here would go around bashing communists and innocent Jews.”

“The country’s been given orders not to go in for any rough stuff during the Olympics,”

Kathe murmured.

Aubrey glanced around. An elderly matron sat at a table, writing; otherwise they had the room to themselves.

“I assumed that,”

he said quietly.

“But isn’t it dangerous for you to be saying this?”

“Dangerous? Aubrey darling, she’s talking to us.”

“I’m a journalist.”

“Twelve people read Ibis. Everybody knows you’re an Oxford man writing essays for a lark.”

“Not everybody.”

Aubrey edged his chair closer to them.

“Yesterday, a man came up to my room. Don’t ask how he found out about me. He told me I ought to take a trip to Oranienburg.

“It’s less than an hour from the Olympic Stadium; you get off the electric railway where the line ends,” he said.”

“There’s a prison-camp in Oranienburg,”

Kathe said.

“So he told me. Konzentrationslager 208.”

Aubrey paused, tapping his chest pocket.

“He gave me a handwritten report about the place. The dormitory was a brewery cooling-room, and it’s always damp. Men are packed like sardines into three-tiered wooden bunks. They’re fed slops. They’re marched out before dawn every morning for hard labour - his squad drained swampland.”

Aubrey took out the closely written letter, reading a description of fearsome twelveto-fourteen-hour workdays followed by drills on the parade-ground.

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Shuffling the three flimsy pages, he read a paragraph about the meagre rations. Refolding the papers carefully into the envelope, he said:

“For any minor offence they’re whipped or beaten with rubber truncheons. And the punishments for more serious offences …” He shivered.

“Well, it’s a prison, isn’t it?”

Araminta said.

“They’re criminals.”

“Not necessarily.”

Kathe’s whisper shook, and her face and throat were crimson with shame.

“The Nazis have put in something called Schutzhaft, protective custody. That means people the Government thinks of as enemies - some are Jewish, others are communists or union leaders - can legally be put away without a trial.”

She clenched her hands.

“I knew there were camps; everybody does. But I never heard any details.”

“Not many people do. The man told me that when he was released he was commanded never to describe what had gone on. If he did, he’d suffer far worse and”

“Look who’s come!”

Araminta interrupted, beaming and waving at the foyer.

“Wyatt! In here!”

Wyatt, raising a hand and smiling, moved towards the open glass door of the writing-room. Kathe, despite the horror of Aubrey’s disclosures, felt a clearly delineated stir of pleasure.

Wyatt leaned over to kiss Araminta’s vivid hair, handing her a crimson chocolate-box.

“To cheer you up,”

he said.

Araminta thanked him prettily. Aubrey shook his hand and cornplimented him on the United States gold medal in basketball. Kathe, who had remained silent, added her congratulations.

“To you, too,”

Wyatt retorted.

Remembering the wonder of that perfect race, Kathe’s lips parted in a soft smile.

“Your advice made all the difference in the world.”

Araminta, who was untying the satin ribbon, looked up.

“Advice? Wyatt, you can’t have coached the opposition. How dare you help these Jerries win even more medals!”

She laughed.

“Have you heard? Dear little Adolf is now one of our Katy’s close friends.”