The Young Lions (22 page)

"Waste of time. Buy me a little present." She got out of bed and went over to the table where she had dropped the lace. She draped the lace over her head. "A little pin," she said, holding the lace together under her throat, "a little brooch for here would be very nice, don't you think?"

"Yes."

"Marvellous shop," the woman said, "on Tauentzienstrasse corner Kurfurstendamm. They have a little garnet pin that might be very useful. You might go there."

"I'll go there."

"Good." The woman smiled at him and came slowly in her sliding naked walk over to the bed. She dropped down on one knee and kissed his throat. "It was very nice of the Lieutenant," she said whispering into the crease of Christian's throat, "very nice to send that lace. I must write him and tell him it was delivered safely."

Christian went to the shop on Tauentzienstrasse and bought a small garnet brooch. He held it in his hand, thinking of how it would look at Mrs Hardenburg's throat. He grinned as he realized he didn't know her first name. The brooch cost 240 marks, but he could cut down on his other expenses. He found a small boarding-house near the station that was cheap and he left his bag there. It was dirty and full of soldiers. But he wouldn't be spending much time there, anyway.

He sent a telegram to his mother, telling her that it was impossible to get home on his leave, and asking if she could lend him 200 marks. It was the first time since he was sixteen that he had asked her for money, but he knew his family was doing very well this year, and they could spare it.

Christian went back to the boarding-house and tried to sleep, but he kept thinking of the morning and sleep would not come. He shaved and changed his clothes and went out. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, still light, and Christian walked slowly down Friedrichstrasse, smiling as he listened to the bustling snatches of German spoken on all sides. He shook his head gently when he was solicited by girls on the corners. He noticed that they were spectacularly well-dressed, real fur-pieces and smartly designed coats. The conquest of France, he thought, has had a beneficial effect on one profession, at least.

As he walked pleasantly among the crowds, Christian had a stronger feeling than ever before that the war was going to be won. The city, which at other times had appeared so drab and weary, now seemed gay, energetic and invulnerable. The streets of London this afternoon, he thought, and the streets of Moscow are probably very different from this. Every soldier, he thought, should be sent back on leave to Berlin. It would have a tonic effect on the entire Army. Of course, and he grinned inwardly as he thought it, it would be advisable for every soldier to be supplied with a Mrs Hardenburg when he got off the train, and a half-bottle of vodka. A new problem for the quartermaster.

He bought a newspaper and went into a cafe and ordered beer.

He read the newspaper. It was like listening to a brass band. There were triumphant stories about thousands of Russians being taken, stories of companies that had defeated battalions in the North, stories of armoured elements that lived off the land and the foe, and made week-long sorties, without communications of any kind with the main body of the Army, slashing and disrupting the enemy's crumbling rear. There was a careful analysis by a retired Major-General who cautioned against overoptimism. Russia would not capitulate, he said, in less than three months, and the wild talk of imminent collapse was harmful to morale at home and at the front. There was an editorial that warned Turkey and the United States in the same paragraph, and a confident assertion that, despite the frantic activities of the Jews, the people of America would refuse to be drawn into a war that they saw very clearly was none of their business. There was a story from Russia about how German soldiers had been tortured and burned by Soviet troops. Christian hurried through it, reading only the first line in each paragraph. He was on leave now, and he did not want to think about things like that for the next two weeks.

He sipped his beer, a little disappointed because it seemed watery, but enjoying himself, with his body weary and satisfied, his eyes occasionally leaving the paper to look across the room at the chatting, bright couples. There was a Luftwaffe pilot in the cafe, with a pretty girl, and two good ribbons on his chest. Christian had a fleeting moment of regret, thinking how much dearer this place and this holiday must seem to a man who had come down from the embattled skies than to himself, who had merely come from the police barracks, the double bed of Corinne's corporal, from the sharp tongue of Lieutenant Hardenburg. I must go and talk to Colonel Meister in the War Office, he thought, without conviction, about the possibilities of being transferred to a unit in Russia. Perhaps later in the week, when things are more settled…

The week passed in a riotous haze for Christian. The city around him, the millions going to and fro, the clang of tramcars and buses, the placards outside the newspaper offices, the Generals and politicians in their gleaming uniforms who sped by him in the long armoured cars, the shifting hordes of soldiers on leave and on duty, the bulletins on the radio of miles gained and men killed in Russia – all seemed to him shadowy and remote. Only the apartment on Tiergartenstrasse, only the wild pale body of Lieutenant Hardenburg's wife seemed substantial and real. He bought her a pair of ear-rings, sent home for more money and bought her a gold chain bracelet, and a sweater from a soldier who had carried it back from Amsterdam.

She had got into the habit of calling him demandingly at any hour of the day or night at the boarding-house where he was living, and he forsook the avenues and the theatres and merely lay on his bed, waiting for the phone to ring downstairs in the grimy hall, waiting to rush through the streets to her.

Her home became for him the one fixed place in a shadowy, reeling world. At times when she left him alone, waiting for her in her apartment, he roamed restlessly through the rooms, opening wardrobes and desk-drawers, peering at letters, looking at photographs hidden between books. He had always been a private man and one who had a deep sense of others' privacy, but it was different with her. He wanted to devour her and all her thoughts, possessions, vices, desires.

The apartment was crammed with loot. A student of economics could have pieced together the story of German conquest in Europe and Africa merely from the things tucked away carelessly in Gretchen's apartment, brought there by the procession of rigid, shining-booted, beribboned officers whom Christian occasionally saw delivering Gretchen in heavy official cars as he peered jealously out of the window to the main door below. Apart from the rich profusion of bottles that he had seen the first day, there were cheeses from Holland, dozens of pairs of French silk stockings, bottles and bottles of perfume, jewelled clasps and ceremonial daggers from all parts of the Balkans, brocaded slippers from Morocco, baskets of grapes and nectarines flown from Algiers, three fur coats from Russia, a small Titian sketch from Rome, two sides of smoked Danish bacon hanging in the pantry behind the kitchen, a whole shelf of Paris hats, although he had never seen Gretchen wear a hat, an exquisite worked-silver coffee urn from Belgrade, a heavy leather-topped desk that an enterprising Lieutenant had somehow shipped from a captured villa in Norway.

The letters, negligently dropped on the floor or slipped under magazines on the tables, were from the farthest reaches of the new German Empire, and although written in the widest variety of literary styles, from delicate and lyric poems from young scholars on duty in Helsinki to stiff, pornographic memorials from ageing professional military men serving under Rommel in the Western Desert, they all bore the same burden of longing and gratitude. Each letter, too, bore promises… a bolt of green silk bought in Orleans, a ring found in a shop in Budapest, a locket with a sapphire stone picked up in Tripoli…

The amazing thing about her was that only three years before she had been a demure young schoolteacher in Baden, instructing ten-year-old children in geography and arithmetic. She had been shy, she told Christian. Hardenburg had been the first man she had ever slept with, and she had refused him until he married her. But when he brought her to Berlin, just before the beginning of the war, a photographer had seen her in a night club and had asked to take her picture for some posters he was doing for the Propaganda Ministry. The photographer had seduced her, in addition to making her face and figure quite famous as a model for a typical German girl, who, in the series of photographs, worked extra hours in munitions factories, attended party meetings regularly, gave to the Winter Fund, cleverly prepared attractive menus in the kitchen with ersatz foods. Since that time she had risen dizzily in the wartime Berlin social world. Hardenburg had been sent off to a regiment early in his wife's career. Now that he had seen the situation at home, Christian understood better why Hardenburg was considered so valuable in Rennes and found it so difficult to get leave to return home.

Hardenburg's letters from Rennes were stiff, almost military documents, empty, windy, cold. Christian couldn't help smiling as he read them, knowing that Hardenburg, if he survived the war, would be a forgotten and carelessly discarded article in Gretchen's swirling past. For the future, Christian had plans that he only half-admitted to himself. Gretchen had told him one night, casually, between one drink and the next, that the war would be over in sixty days and that someone high in the Government, she wouldn't tell Christian his name, had offered her a three-thousand-acre estate in Poland. There was a seventeenth-century stone mansion, untouched by war, on it, and seven hundred acres were under cultivation, even now.

"How would you be," she had asked, half-joking, lying back on the sofa, "at running an estate for a lady?"

"Wonderful," he had said.

"You wouldn't wear yourself out," she had said, smiling, "with your agricultural duties?"

"Agreed." He had sat down beside her and put his hand under her head and caressed the firm, fair skin at the base of her neck.

"We'll see. We'll see…" Gretchen had said. "We might do worse…"

That would be it, Christian thought. A great wild estate, with the money rolling in, and Gretchen mistress of the old house… They wouldn't marry, of course. Marrying Gretchen was an act of supererogation. A kind of private Prince Consort, with hand-made riding boots and twenty horses in the stables and the great and wealthy of the new Empire coming down from the capitals for the shooting…

The luckiest moment of my life, Christian thought, was when Hardenburg unlocked that desk and took the package of black lace out of it in the police barracks in Rennes. Christian hardly thought of Rennes any more. Gretchen had told him she had talked to a Major-General about his transfer and commission and it was in the works. Hardenburg was a miserable phantom of the past now, who might reappear for one delicious moment in the future to be dismissed with a curt murderous phrase. The luckiest day of my life, Christian thought, turning with a smile to the door, which had just been opened. Gretchen stood there in a golden dress, with a wrap of mink thrown easily over her shoulders. She was smiling and holding out her arms, saying, "Now, isn't this a nice thing to find waiting for a girl when she gets home from her day's work?"

Christian went over and kicked the door shut and took her into his arms.

Then, three days before his leave was due to expire, although he wasn't worried, Gretchen had said it was all being fixed, the phone rang in the boarding-house and he rushed down the stairs to answer it. It was her voice. He smiled as he said, "Hello, darling."

"Stop that." Her voice was harsh, although she seemed to be talking in a whisper. "And don't say my name over the phone."

"What?" he asked, dazedly.

"I'm speaking from a phone in a cafe," she said. "Don't try to call me at home. And don't come there."

"But you said eight o'clock tonight."

"I know what I said. Not eight o'clock tonight. Or any night. That's all. Stay away. Goodbye."

He heard the click as she hung up. He stared at the instrument on the wall, then put up the receiver slowly. He went to his room and lay down on the bed. Then he got up and put on his tunic and went out. Any place, he thought, but this room.

He walked hazily through the streets, hopelessly going over in his mind Gretchen's whispered, final conversation, and all the acts and words that might have led up to it. The night before had been, for them, an ordinary night. She had appeared at the apartment at one o'clock, quite drunk, in her controlled, nervous way, and they had drunk some more until about two, and then they had gone to bed. It had been as good as it had ever been, and she had dropped off to sleep, lying beside him, and had kissed him brightly and affectionately at eleven in the morning, when she left for work, and said, "Tonight let's start earlier. Eight o'clock. Be here."

There was no hint in this. He stared at the blank faces of the buildings and the hurried, swarming faces of the people around him. The only thing to do was to wait for her outside her apartment house and ask her, point-blank. At seven o'clock that night he took up his station behind a tree across the street from the entrance to her apartment house. It was a damp night, with a drizzle. In half an hour he was soaked, but he paid little attention to it. A policeman came by for the third time at ten-thirty and looked inquisitively at him.

"Waiting for a girl." Christian managed a sheepish grin.

"She's trying to shake a parachute Major."

The policeman grinned at him. "The war," he said. "It makes everything difficult." He shook his head commiseratingly and moved on.

At two o'clock in the morning one of the familiar official cars drove up and Gretchen and an officer got out. They talked for a moment on the pavement. Then they went in together and the car drove away.

Christian looked up through the drizzle at the blackout-dark side of the building and tried to work out which window was the one that belonged to Gretchen's apartment, but it was impossible to tell in the blackness.