A Necessary Action (26 page)

He could never decide whether he had seen her stand in this way just once or whether it had been repeated every time they were together.

Anyhow that was their starting-point. Then she turned round, swiftly and softly, and came over to the bed with her blue eyes shining with confidence and expectation.

Later on, he had on numerous occasions found that she was a steady and well-made girl, but that she would probably have grown fat on a diet containing high-quality nourishment. And that her eyes were shining because she wanted him, which she undoubtedly did. But that made no difference.

She was by no means a virgin when they met, but he persuaded himself that she changed with him and showed the same tendencies to awakening and liberation as he did himself. Naturally he was quite right, even if he did not know whether he wanted it.

They made love quite uninhibitedly, in every way they could think of and with a persistence and systematic eagerness that even they themselves found surprising, at least at first.

He remembered this part of their life very well and found he usually remembered her from behind.

Lying on her stomach with her cheeks against the coarse grey pillow-case, her thighs apart as she thrust away with her elbows and knees to try to get in a better position. She whimpered and whined, her tongue running over her lower lip and beneath him her body thrashing about with wild uninhibited frenzy. During her orgasm, she kicked out desperately with her legs and threw her head from side to side, biting the dirty pillow.

He had a whole gallery of memories of her, mostly in various attitudes of abandonment.

She was sitting astride him, panting wildly, her mouth open and her eyes glazed, riding him until her shoulders and breasts grew shiny with sweat, and as it came for her, she bit her lower lip and beat him on the chest with her fists.

Or she was lying on her side along the wall with her head towards the end of the bed, her knees wide apart and the soles of her feet together so that her loins were wide open to him. He caressed her, lightly but methodically and inexorably over one single spot, tenderly extending her until she broke and collapsed, sobbing and helpless in total surrender.

That happened one of the last times, when they had already discovered most of each other’s nerve-points, late one January evening, with refugees seething round the quays and the thunder from the front a dimly distant sound beyond the banks of fog and driving snow.

There were other memories too, less photographically and coldly registered, but he had managed to make a chrysalis of those a long time ago, and they appeared only seldom, mostly when he was ill or totally exhausted.

Her hands on his body, for instance, and the times he had
woken with his head on her shoulder, enveloped in her soft, safe warmth.

Barbara reminded him of Hugo Spohler in one way. She possessed a capacity for reacting normally under abnormal circumstances, and for finding simple positive ways out of apparently hopeless situations. And she was a great fixer. She found it easy to tackle things and considered a problem something to be solved. It was she who arranged for the attic room, and if she had not taken the initiative it was doubtful that they would ever have found a mutual bed to lie in. It was she who got fuel for the cracked tiled stove in the corner behind the wardrobe, and it was she who began to undress the moment she had slammed the door shut and put on the hook. It was she, too, who got hold of contraceptives the first time, though they did not bother to use them later.

It was she who had stood naked a little way away from him, her head bowed and one heel raised off the floor, staring at something, before turning round and looking at him with eyes shining with happy expectation.

She was not a nymphomaniac, which otherwise would have been a cheap explanation and later could have been an evasion. On the contrary, she was, as far as he could make out, a perfectly normal young woman with normal sexual reactions. After their meeting she was happy and content, but pale with exhaustion, occasionally finding difficulty in walking.

The very first time, she had known more than he had done, but only a little of what they both knew when they parted. He was quite certain of that.

But she wanted to use her hands and her lips, her mouth and her tongue, her tenderness and her body for something which all those were meant to be used for. Before it was too late. As he did. And they did not have much time.

This in itself was banal. Many other people behaved in just the same way at that time and naturally there too, even if most of them had to make do with tin shacks and empty goods-wagons. But that did not make any difference either.

At first he often thought about how they had met and made love to each other on sixteen different occasions, mostly with two or three days in between, because of the difficulties of
arranging leave at the same time. The first time was a Sunday and they did not use contraceptives. It was in the middle of the day and quite light in the attic room and they were naked and he lay over her on the bed. When it began to fire in his loins and the paralysis began to spread, he was seized with his old uncertainty and thought of stopping. But she noticed it at once and drew her legs high up and grasped his testicles and forced him to spurt his hot fluid seed deep into her. She did not let go until his convulsions had stopped and his organ had begun to soften. Then he lay in her arms and she held him as if he had been a toy teddy-bear or a doll. After that neither of them had hesitated, not on any occasion, and this gave him cause for thought. Even ten years later.

They spoke very little to each other and then only of the present, never of the past or any possible future.

She was happy and lively and was never irritable. Neither did she ever raise her voice, but once she had wept, quite without cause.

She came from Königsberg.

This was more or less what he knew of Barbara Heinemann.

Otherwise he knew very little.

The most ridiculous thing of all was that he did not know whether she was dead or alive.

The evacuation came more quickly than had been expected. It was carried out in haste and confusion, after a stream of orders and counter-orders. Much was hurriedly planned and did not go well. The grey liner which had been the quarters of the Submarine School was torpedoed at the height of Stolpmünde, keeled over and sank with more than five thousand people on board. Exactly how many, no one knew. There were nearly four hundred Women’s Naval Auxiliaries on board, their quarters in the bowels of the ship. One of the torpedoes landed there and all of the girls but two were killed, the others trapped when the watertight doors were closed, drowned like mice in a sealed tin. The name Barbara Heinemann was not on the passenger list, but that was nothing to go by. On the other hand, she had been on special duties on some staff and might well have been put on another ship. Most of these got through, as did the old liner Willi Mohr ended up on. But two others were sunk.

Though most got through.

And tens of thousands of people were left ashore.

It was an insoluble equation.

And he had not done very much to solve it. At first he had had no opportunity, then he had not devoted sufficient energy to the task, and as time went by it grew too late.

When he ever thought about the matter, he preferred to think of her trapped behind the hydraulic steel doors, deep down in the great passenger liner, which had turned over and sunk into the ice-cold water. Even if this alternative was not really the most believable. Or was it after all the most logical?

He did not know, and in time, forgot. Most of it, but not all.

Nothing more ever happened to him, he met no one else, and when he made casual acquaintances, nothing much ever came of most of them. He had long ago got used to this being the case. If there were a brothel in the vicinity, he perhaps went there, but he usually did not bother.

And yet he had had Barbara Heinemann with him for ten years. It was her hands and shoulders which haunted him when he was tired and defenceless and could not stop dreaming. But most of all, it was his memories of her physical attitudes which he turned to when he occasionally thought of sex. She was also the one who was his free-pass when it came to that kind of sense of inferiority. No one could possibly possess another person so fundamentally as he had possessed her.

At least, not physically.

For a short time, perhaps six months, she had been thrust aside for someone else, a woman who used to come padding bare-footed through his room very early in the morning, when she thought he was asleep. She used to be wearing a dressing-gown, but once he had seen her naked, her body covered with small pearls of glass in the trailing pale beam of a lighthouse. He had resisted her as long as she had been there, but gave way after she had gone.

A short while ago. Barbara Heinemann had returned, with her bowed head and loosely hanging arms, and now it already seemed that she had never been away.

Barbara was also the only person who had been able to touch
him while he was asleep without the usual consequences. Several times when she had woken first or he had fallen asleep from exhaustion before her, she had woken him. She never said anything on these occasions, but just caressed him awake with her hands.

Ever since he was very young, he had always disliked people surprising him in his sleep, and he detested anyone touching him. During the early days in the house in Barrio Son Jofre, he had even found it difficult to get used to the cat, which used to creep in under his blanket when it was cold.

Willi Mohr felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes. He had been dreaming about something, deeply and vaguely, and when he felt the hand, he knew whom he had been dreaming about. It was a large, sunburnt hand, with broad curved nails and a signet ring with a reddish stone in it. A man in a green uniform was leaning over him, shaking him slowly, the middle-aged civil guard with a heavy, sleepy face and a stubby grey moustache. He was holding his carbine in his left hand with the butt on the floor. Willi Mohr violently threw off his hand and sat up.

‘You didn’t hear when I knocked,’ the man said apologetically.

Willi Mohr shook his head and looked at his watch. It was a quarter-past eight. The morning sun was shining outside the open door. Two hours had gone by since he had come home from the previous interrogation.

‘Come,’ said the civil guard, slinging on his carbine, ‘let’s go.’

They walked down the steep crooked alleyway and turned right on to the main road. Then they passed the fork in the road, continued along the Avenida Generalissimo Franco and crossed
the square with its pump and three cafés. Willi Mohr, as usual, strode along, light and energetic; it was he who decided the tempo, and the civil guard with a stubby moustache walked on his left, half a stride behind him. Although his rest had been short and uneasy, he did not feel sleepy or thick-headed, and in the clear white sunlight he noticed details along the road with an almost unnatural clarity. He had stopped reflecting, and his movements and actions were mechanical, exactly as if he were following a well-rehearsed schedule. At the Café Central, he stopped and asked the same question as before, the guard shrugged his shoulders and leant his carbine against the edge of the table. They drank their vermouth and walked on, and in some way everything was as it should be. He was on his way to Sergeant Tornilla and they would sit opposite each other in the little windowless room with its portrait and filing-cabinet and green lampshade, and he would be very tired and thirsty and suddenly would be given water and everything would come to an end, so that he could go home and sleep. It was also part of the scene that it was the man with the grey moustache who had come to fetch him, not any other of the civil guards, the small one with the round face, for instance. Just before they got to the straight gravelled road between the olive trees, a fat, shabby woman appeared in a doorway and tugged at the civil guard’s sleeve, his wife presumably, and she embarrassed and worried him. Then he made a sign to the arrested man and followed the woman into the house. This was not part of the schedule, and as a result was a cause of irritation. Willi Mohr felt badly treated and shifted his feet as he stood out on the street listening to the excited voices inside. A small child with a dirty face in a short yellowish garment was standing in the doorway staring at him. After a while, the civil guard came back, lifted up the child, patted its bare backside and gave it a smacking kiss on the cheek. This seemed to cheer him up, for as they walked on, he smiled and said apologetically: ‘Women …’

The guard-post seemed quiet and peaceful and the striped flag hung immobile in the still air. Willi Mohr looked at his watch and noted that fifty-five minutes had gone by since they had left the house in Barrio Son Jofre. The guard tapped lightly with his knuckles on the door of the interrogation room. Then he opened
it slightly, peered in and at once shut it again. He pointed at a narrow wooden bench in the porch and said: ‘Wait.’

Then he went farther in, opened a side-door and was gone. Willi Mohr sat with his elbows on his knees and waited. He had nothing against waiting and also found a certain pleasure in the fact that he seemed to be the first at the meeting-place. It strengthened his self-confidence and in some way gave him a better starting-point. His brain was functioning a little better now, but he could not draw any lines of direction for the coming conversation or even concentrate on the present or the near future. If he was thinking at all, it was only of an irregular and capricious series of pictures and tableaux. He sat leaning forward, staring down at the smooth concrete, thinking about the stone floor in the house in Barrio Son Jofre, and then of the spanner he had clutched in his hand two days ago as Santiago Alemany had stood leaning over the engine of the lorry, his head bare, only a foot or so away from him. When he had got that far, he tried to begin from the beginning again and reconstruct the chain of associations. He could not remember all the links, but anyhow most of them. He had thought about floors in general and then about the metal plates in his quarters in Gotenhafen and the varnished boards in the attic room and about Barbara Heinemann’s feet and pink heels and what they felt like in his hands, and then about another woman and her left breast which had lain in his hand like a small frightened animal, and about a kitten which he had once held when he was small, and the puppy with the black spot over its eye, and the sound when the other puppy, the near-black one, hit the rock wall, and about a man in blue trousers and a black jersey on all fours in front of him, whining and whimpering, trying to creep under a narrow screwed-down table, and about a system of concentric circles in the water, and—the smooth brown curl in Santiago Alemany’s hair, and then he was there. The last part of the chain made him feel so ill that he felt sick and his forehead grew hot. He shook his head roughly, and turned to look at what was going on round him. Which was practically nothing. A telephone had rung twice inside the building and someone must have answered it at once, because each time there was only one signal. A thin pig, evidently belonging to the guard-post, walked past outside the
entrance, sniffing with its long black snout along the ground. From the military camp on the other side of the town a few scattered shots could be heard, then a donkey braying and far away there was the rumble of an explosion, presumably from the road works.