The Rendezvous (17 page)

There was a moment in that second love-making when she resisted; he overcame her quite deliberately, as he would have had to do if she were a virgin of eighteen and he had just seduced her. They went back together to the first relationship between them and it was properly resolved with skill and tenderness on his part, and complete acceptance on hers. He didn't let her talk again that night; he slept very briefly and woke if she moved. By the time the morning light showed through the slits in the curtains, they had been lovers many times.

It was mid-afternoon before they woke properly; he found her sitting up, watching him quietly. For some moments neither of them spoke. Then she put out her hand and laid it on his shoulder.

‘Have you any food here? I'm hungry.'

‘I'll ring for it; they'll send it up. Terese …?'

‘I'm all right, Karl. I know that's what you're going to ask, and I'm all right.' She smiled at him, and it made her look a very beautiful woman. The odd immaturity which had kept the years from showing in her face had gone in the course of the night. She was thirty-seven years old, she was in control of herself now. ‘I'm going to take a bath. Order something for me, please, darling. I'm too tired to think what I want for myself.'

They dressed and ate eggs and steak on rye in the living room; the service restaurant sent the order up, and she poured coffee for him, while they sat opposite to each other. If they had been married and were in his fantasy honeymoon suite with the Rhine castles and the view out of the window, they would have taken breakfast together like this.

He gave her a cigarette, and then when the meal was over and cleared away, he didn't know what to do. Or what to say. She had called him darling. ‘Please, darling.' When she looked at him he could see nothing but peace and fulfilment in her face. But it couldn't last; it was just a temporary euphoria because she was herself again and able to turn her mind back as well as forward. He understood this feeling because he had it himself. She had given him back his identity; now she had her own through his intervention in her life. She was still warm from the discovery of her capacity for love, and this warmth included him at the moment. But it wouldn't last; he was convinced of that. She came close to him and touched him.

‘Who are you wanted by?'

This was what he had anticipated, only it came far sooner than he thought it would. There was no point in lying; he had lied enough.

‘The Jews. I'm on their list. Like Eichmann.' He got up and moved away from her; he didn't want her to touch him, to be near him. He waited, and the question came.

‘What did you do, Karl? What do they want you for?'

He turned and said dully, ‘Do you really want to hear it? Do you want to know what I really am, after what we've been to each other?'

‘I want to know,' she said. ‘I've got to know. What happened?'

‘It was during the retreat from the East,' he began. The words should have been difficult to say, but they came fast as he started to describe it. ‘I was dismissed from the Gestapo after I sent you to hospital. I didn't care, I wanted to transfer anyway. You were the finish, as far as that kind of work was concerned. I wanted active service, and they gave it to me. I was sent to a Waffen S.S. division to fight in Russia. Terese, you will never be able to imagine what that war was like and I only came in at the end. The cold, the hunger, and always the dirty, filthy fighting. No prisoners, no quarter – atrocity for atrocity. My commanding officer – God, I can see him so clearly even now! – I never saw him without a greatcoat; he was just a face with ear-muffs to keep his ears from being frostbitten and a helmet pulled down on top of it. He scratched himself through his clothes, and the only thing that interested him was finding cognac from somewhere and shooting Russians when we caught any. He wasn't a man, a human being. And he was my commander. If you'd asked him what I was like he'd have probably described me the same way. My men weren't men at all; they were machines, they fought like machines too, and they killed in the same way. We did a lot of killing, Terese. We were being beaten and we knew it, and this made us mad, mad like machines, so that we felt nothing, not even hate, not even excitement. We just exterminated, because those were our orders, and we had never disobeyed. Then we got to Lodz and there was another order.' He stopped suddenly.

She was sitting very still, a cigarette in her fingers, with a long drooping ash on the end of it, watching him and listening. He could feel the sweat coming out on his face and through the pores of his body as he stood there, trying to tell her how he had given the command for four thousand people to be killed in cold blood. He took a cigarette and lit it, his hands shaking, and then he sat down away from her.

‘Do you still want to know?' He asked the question and she nodded. She couldn't speak; she could only sit and listen and feel a sense of cold growing inside her and spreading over her. He was hunched up in the chair, turning the cigarette over and over in his hands, taking deep breaths of smoke in between words.

‘We were told to round up all the Jews and take them out and shoot them. Outside the town, and bury them so they wouldn't be found.'

‘Oh God,' she said. ‘Oh my God!'

‘It was bitterly cold; our orders were to do this, and then drive the Polish population out while we set fire to the town. This was the usual pattern; everywhere our division came across a Jewish pocket we wiped them out. But it was the first time for me. I'd come in at the end. I remember my commander coming in with the order and throwing it to me; we were in a house in the city, but all the windows were gone and it was so cold that we ate and slept in our clothes all the time. He'd got some cognac and he was happy for the day. “See to this, Brunnerman, and make it quick. We're leaving tomorrow after we've fired this place. Get them all rounded up and we'll do it in the wood we passed on the way. We start in three hours.” That was all he said, and I did it, Terese. I sent my troops out and they herded all these people together and then we started off in a scout car, following the line of march. It was only a few miles, not more than four or five, and I remember the wood. There'd been an engagement with some of our tanks and the Russians and there were burnt-out wrecks on the way. I kept thinking how slow the line was and wishing they'd get on, get on. Can you believe it if I tell you something?'

‘I can try.' She said it in a whisper. ‘I can try and believe it.'

‘They weren't people to me at all,' he said. He got up suddenly and began to walk up and down the short space from one wall to another. Up and down, up and down, while he spoke. ‘Himmler once watched an execution like this one, and he fainted outright. The women and children upset him. So he issued an order that only the men were to be shot en masse. The women and children were taken away in special vans and gassed. We didn't have any vans. I went into the wood, Terese, while that bastard sat in the car keeping himself warm and getting drunk, and I watched them dig their own graves.'

‘I don't think I can bear any more,' she said suddenly. ‘I don't think I can listen to it.'

He didn't seem to hear her; he just looked up, confused because he had been interrupted, and went on.

‘I couldn't see them as human beings who were going to die. They were bundles, bundles of rags that moved about, making noises in a language I couldn't understand. If they cried for mercy, I didn't understand a word. They were filthy inhuman creatures; they didn't have faces, they weren't people at all. You couldn't tell the differences between the men and women; they all looked the same, like beasts. They weren't Jews to me, Terese, because that would have made them people again. They were just animals. It doesn't make sense now,' he said. ‘It didn't make sense as soon as I'd done it. I knew then. It's not even an excuse to say I would have been shot if I'd disobeyed that order. I should have disobeyed. But I didn't. I did as I was told and they were shot, and buried. Four thousand of them. There were so many; you lose the sense of reality when it comes to numbers like that. It's easier to kill hundreds by remote control than to put a bullet into one individual human being. I don't think I would have done that, Terese. I don't think anything would have made me go up to one of those people and see they had eyes, and then shoot. So I just gave the order and let my men do it. But I murdered them, just the same.'

There wasn't a sound after he had finished. He went back to the chair and sat forward, his head between his hands. She didn't move or speak.

‘That's what the Israelis want me for,' he said at last. ‘I used to wish to God they'd find me sometimes. I've run and run for twenty years. It would have been better if I'd given myself up after the war and let them hang me at home. I haven't tried to excuse myself to you, because there's no possible excuse for what I did.'

He made it a statement and she didn't contradict him. He heard her get up and he didn't move. He went on sitting in the chair. The front door of the apartment opened and then shut, and he knew she had gone. He leaned back and closed his eyes; he was very tired and his capacity for feeling anything was gone. He sat for a long time, and then got up and went into the bedroom to pack. He wasn't going to run away again, he was going back to New York to wait for the police or the Israeli executioners, or whoever came for him. He didn't care and it didn't matter. He had put himself into her hands and it was up to her what she did with him. He folded her clothes and put them away in her valise; he was methodical and slow because there was no hurry now.

‘You needn't pack for me,' she said behind him. ‘We've still got one more day together.' He turned and she was in the doorway; she had been crying.

‘I thought you'd gone,' he said.

‘I thought I had too.' She walked towards him, and he caught her in his arms.

‘Oh God, Terese, my love, my darling, I thought you'd left me.'

‘I tried to,' she said. ‘I tried to walk out and go home and I couldn't. I can't leave you, Karl, because I'm part of you now. There's nowhere else for me to go any more.'

‘Even though you know what I did,' he said, ‘you can still say you're part of me?'

‘I was walking,' she said, ‘round the streets, going over and over what you told me. You asked me if I'd believe something – when you said that they weren't people to you when it happened. Well, I do believe you. I've seen it happen myself. I saw it with the prisoners at Buchenwald.' She felt him stiffen. ‘Yes, I was there too. That's where they sent me from the hospital. What I saw in those compounds when I first got there weren't people to me, either, and I was half crazy then. But not completely. I was still clean; they were filthy. I hadn't had time to change from a woman into a
thing
because of what starvation and dirt and indignity had done to me. I couldn't pity them; they made me sick with the way they smelt, the way they crawled round or sat in their own dirt. I couldn't see them as men and women because they had become animals. When I did stop feeling this way it was because I'd sunk to the same level. I know what you saw in that wood at Lodz. I know how they looked to you. Nobody else might understand this, but I do. And I still love you. Do you believe that?'

‘I don't dare,' he said. Now she was holding him; the roles were reversed for the first time. ‘I wasn't going to try and run. I didn't care whether I was caught or not, because I thought I'd lost you.'

‘You'll never lose me,' she said. ‘If you hadn't tried to help me, you would never have gone to Russia. I realised that, too, during my walk. If things had been different with us – if I hadn't been obstinate and held out just too long, I'd have betrayed my friend. We'd have been lovers then, and you wouldn't have been sent away. Instead I'm a Resistance heroine. It makes me ashamed, knowing the truth. I'm a fake, Karl. Terese Bradford is a fake and so is Amstat. Only you and I are real, together.'

‘It was the telephone that did it,' he said. ‘If Knochen hadn't rung down, you would have given way, and our whole lives would have been different. But I want you to know this,' he raised her head, and kissed her, ‘you would never have collaborated. I know that now, though I didn't then, not at the time when I was working on you, trying to make you break. I was an expert at it; it was my speciality, making friends with prisoners, undermining them. That's what I did with you, deliberately. But I fell into my own trap, that was the irony. I wanted you myself. I took advantage of you, my darling, because you were a girl and alone and very frightened. I made you tired and hungry and confused, and then I woke your senses, just to destroy your will to fight me. You hadn't a chance against me, so don't blame yourself. But you were special to me and I failed you as much as myself when I let them take you. Do you have any idea what I feel every time I see those scars on your right hand? Do you know what it means to me to imagine how they hurt you?'

‘It doesn't matter.' She was guiding him to the next room; they sat together, still embraced. He was near breaking down and she knew it.

‘Nothing matters to me now but having you,' Terese said. ‘I don't care who you are, my love, or what you've done. I don't care about the past any more. All I want is the future.'

‘With me? Going on with me – do you really want that?'

‘I told you,' she said simply. ‘I walked out of here to go home. And that's when I realised I had no home to go to; I don't belong to Robert Bradford, or to his family and his friends. I'm not part of them. I'm as much an outcast here as you are. We don't belong in this comfortable country among all these nice conventional people. They wouldn't like us if they knew what we were; you'd be a murderer and I'd be a kind of freak – something that ought to be in an old movie about the war. I'm sure none of Robert's family know what really happened to me, and they wouldn't like it if they did. Concentration camps put people off. I turned back and came here because this is where I
do
belong. With you.'