Unforgiving Years (34 page)

Once they had conversed as follows: “Do you trust me, Tony?” “Yes.” “How do you imagine me?” (Erna avoided any references to sight.) He reflected for a moment, his features bizarrely illuminated by a smile in which the eyes played no part. “Young, very young …” (Erna felt herself aging; thank you, blind man!) “And tall and slim … with long soft tresses, all gathered up. Loyal and understanding. Straightforward.” (Erna’s frizzy hair was turning gray. Loyal, that was true, mortally so, and yet the word was like a slap. Understanding, indeed, knowing that the deepest grief is to understand. Straightforward, yes, as a string of infernal knots … ) “You’re a little off the mark, Tony. No tresses, not soft hair …” But let him think that I’m young! “May I touch you?” he said, moving a translucent hand toward her. She clasped it between her own. “And I’m tough.” “One’s got to be,” the invalid said, with conviction. “So be tough, Tony, and answer me, your friend. Do you want to live — or — ” (warming these words with her voice) “would you prefer not to?” She saw the almost imperceptible tightening of his nostrils, his lips, the premature lines around his mouth. “But do you think I can live, Erna?” (No reprieve from lies and treachery!) “Yes, I do.” “Then I want to live.” And pity, which is the last form of love, must also be betrayed. The nurse knew she was lying again. “And so you will, I know you will.” She forced a tinkling laugh (the sound of laughter a lie) and added, “I’ve never been wrong before …” The ward doctor was taking a twenty-four-hour leave, she could do it then. She was sorry she’d put it off.

Tony ground his teeth while she removed the antiseptic dressings and replaced the catheters. A testicle was turning blue beneath the shrunken member. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much, Tony?” He smiled, beads of sweat under his nostrils. “Not too much. Just a little … You’re so good! I get the feeling you’re pleased, too. Are you?”

If only he didn’t ask why!

“I am, it’s true. Rest now. I’ll drop in later.”

Footsteps were running up the stairs. Someone was whimpering wretchedly. “Erna, come quickly to the operating room …” Pleased by the breakdown, the demise of an entire world, pleased! You should never say the word “good” again, Tony, it’s a meaningless word, a blind word … The old rafters of the operating room were black. White-shrouded forms were stooping and shifting around prostrate forms. The lamps created a mist of asphyxiating brightness surrounded by visceral penumbras. Scissors could be heard snipping through cloth and leather to expose wounds. Three surgeons, their faces partly masked, stoked with Benzedrine to keep them awake, worked amid raw flesh, pus, gangrene, dying flesh, hallucination. Their shining steel instruments, wondrously pure and cruel, preserved an impenetrable yet intelligent disorder from one torture to the next. Basins filled up with reddened cotton swabs mixed with scraps of flesh. In the bucket by the door, a pink, bristly male ear was resting on dark and light tufts of hair, beside some severed fingers. Rubber tubes and electric cables curved gracefully through the foggy glare … Erna, at a sign, clamped a man’s head between both hands. His throat was an open wound, and she immediately felt the death tremors through her palms. Dr. Felix put down the scalpel, gazed hypnotically into the gray face, and clicked his tongue: “Done for. Take him away …” And he turned aside wearily. On the neighboring table a colossus with an uncovered belly, starred with wounds, had fallen into an incoherently euphoric delirium: “Ha ha, ha ha, La Chênaie … four thousand … three thousand six hundred marks … Snapdragons! Mama …” A long bout of groaning, then he launched into a verse from the Ninth Symphony: “We enter, drunk with joy, Thy bright sanctuary … Drunk with joy.” Gently Erna fitted the anesthetic mask onto a feverish head like a ball of roots pulled out of the soil.

The day staff usually partied through the night, for life is short, death easy (in a certain sense), and joy fleeting, so

The demolished city was preparing for sleep. Patrols were following perilous itineraries which intersected with those of lucky pass holders who were out looking for a good time. Muted singing could be heard deep in the charred ruins, in alcoves like the dens of shipwreckers, around daintily embroidered tablecloths, with plentiful quaffing of that delectable scotch someone swiped after an American retreat, or the last of the champagne from the plunder of France, or the sweet Rhineland wine they call
liebsfraumilch
, Milk of the Beloved Woman, or the chiefs’ coffee filched from the storeroom; and every bottle, if its story could be known, would relate a gory melodrama full of episodes of the last days of a civilization. “The trophies most prized by victorious armies,” Conrad once remarked, “are the ones they treasure up to the very last minute of their own defeats, are the bottles …” The heroic survivors of slaughtered units organized group-sex parties, for lack of privacy and anyway the proud but not-too-proud depravity of warriors is more fun. Couples entwined wherever they could, mingling lips, breasts, hips, and groins, bursts of laughter and tears, rage and joy. All together now, softly, allegretto:

Or suddenly switching to a mode of lyrical lamentation so touching that the eyes of the Adelinas became moist and it took five men to prevent a pilot from emptying his revolver on everyone:

“I find myself wondering,” confessed a grenadier of the Battalion of Death, “whether I shall ever again be able to sleep with a woman in private and without beating her; I actually tried it the other day, with a classy, good-looking one — between clean sheets if you can imagine that — and I couldn’t get it up! Me!” Someone shot back gaily, “You won’t have that problem much longer!” Indeed (
in aparte
):

Sung to the tune of a lively march, the words were Conrad’s, disseminated thanks to the Secret Service, which was hell-bent on arresting the author. Under cover of such fraternal orgies of boozing and brawling (after which the corpse, thrown into the street, would be attributed to Polish outlaws), Erna met with Conrad, a volunteer on the night security shift with perforated lungs; skinny, properly helmeted and shined, the young man looked shy — and resolute. People imagined that they enjoyed having their pleasure in the open air, pressed up against derelict walls like homeless animals, and this was the subject of a good deal of joking speculation.

“Well?” Erna questioned anxiously, when Conrad had come for her and they were standing outside under the portico of a bank that still lorded over the surrounding devastation.

“The committee has found a new meeting place,” he said.

“And the voice, do we know who?”

“No, but I suspect an amputee who ran into Corporal Boehm’s patrol about twenty minutes later. I’ll find out. Come along. Careful. There are six steps down, then a gap to hop over, it’s got water in it. Hold on to my arm, we can’t use the light.”

Conrad did not switch on his flashlight until they were crawling over a rubble of cement dust and burned paper. The candlelit vault was genuinely pleasant and clean, though chill as the grave. Erna shook hands with Bartek the Polish delegate, Alain from France, and the Spaniard Ignacio before glancing around her. There were separate piles of weapons, canned food, and clothes. More surprising was the presence of a pair of massive strongboxes, tilted toward each other, intact.

“How about it, we’ve infiltrated the very foundations of capitalism,” said Conrad, the German delegate. “Now for the super-structure!”

He went straight on to the technical specifications.

“The volume of air and the seriously inadequate ventilation limit us to a maximum of ten people staying here. There’s a risk of flooding if bombed. Extremely unlikely to be detected, though, save through our own carelessness. The two schoolboys who found it have been evacuated to Thuringia. They used it for hiding potatoes …”

Bartek the shoemaker, based on his experience as a staff officer, predicted that the Americans would capture the city within the week; much given to making solemn prognostications, his rate of accuracy was as high as fifty percent, if he said so himself — a not dishonorable record for a tactician trained by ignoramuses who understood nothing of warfare … Apart from two groups of armaments workers, his Polish contingent was proving hard to discipline. They got into fights every night: yesterday, seven were shot! Alain reported the formation of a tolerable resistance committee within the most privileged — that is, the most corrupt — French commando. Alain was afraid of gangsters, informers, anti-Semitism, the radio, dirty deals. He asked for two guys with guts, dressed as petty bourgeois, to carry out a delicate assignment. “Got them for you,” Ignacio said. “Myself and a Trotskyite from Madrid I know …” Erna shot him an arch look. “You heard right, dear lady,” Ignacio said teasingly. “Right,” said Alain.

Conrad briefed them on the latest developments. The elite division — it was discussed all over the town — had melted away under a storm of sulfurous bombs and the like, ground into pulp by the Shermans, the last survivors machine-gunned from the air by well-targeted fire, for lack of air cover. Formed of veterans and recently drafted young replacements, half fanatics and the other half chickenshits, marching toward the firing line like condemned men to the scaffold, encouraged by summary executions. The division was not at its full complement, either. “So which half were chicken?” Bartek wanted to know, moved by a professional interest in the behavior of fighters under pressure. “Both,” smiled Conrad. As for the population, it was on its knees. “The petty bourgeois is skidding on the vomit of its own abjectness …” “Ugh!” Ignacio winced. “Nobly put!” “Factual. They’ve always been that way.” The
Volkssturm
was thoroughly demoralized, save for one ravening company of Young Wolves packed with the teenage scions of Nazi families. “So anyone who hasn’t deserted already will be chopped into little pieces, which is fine by me. Good riddance. Seventeen-year-old brain matter is so damn malleable, it’s enough to put one off youth forever …” A surprisingly healthy black market,
Gott sei Dank
!, kept supplied by the quartermaster general. Prices for civilian clothing rising, identity papers, ration cards, and certificates declining: the colossal demand stimulated wholesale production, and the supply of forgeries nearly outstripped the demand. The Party was on its last legs. The hard-line faction was contemplating suicide or possible resistance from mountain redoubts (“That’s a laugh!” said Bartek). There was some acknowledgment of ideological and political blunders; the military caste ought to have been purged long ago. The hard-liners, though numerically insignificant, might still pull off some desperate coup. The bulk of the Party, stupefied and discouraged; but there’s no shortage of smart thinkers discreetly getting rid of their Führer portraits, calf-bound
Mein Kampfs
, uniforms, and armbands, which means we can get hold of some. Those rats think only about leaving the ship, the trouble is they have a deadly fear of salt water! As for the old working class, all but a handful of true stalwarts have become disoriented by the bitterness they feel. “You can see their point. Two wars, a revolution, waves of inflation, crises, persecutions, unemployment, demagogy, anti-Bolshevism, pact with Bolshevism, war on Bolshevism, a whirlwind of traumatic events, all in one generation! The worst of it is, these used to be men with sound heads on their shoulders …” “Come to the point,” said Alain. “Right. The Communists are more active than the Social Democrats, the Social Democrats more reliable …”

Erna cut in, her voice level: “In the interests of unity, best to abstain from political psychologizing. Broadly, what do people think?”

“They think they’re in hell, that tomorrow will be worse than today, that there’s nothing left to believe in or to hope for, but still, they’d rather not all be wiped out just yet …”

Ignacio remarked fliply, “They do display a healthy philosophy of nature. Lacking a political psychology they have a zoological mentality … And I couldn’t agree with you more, Erna, providing we could forget an awful lot of things … I’m all for unity, no one keener, but I won’t hide from you that if I were in the east and the CP took over, I would adopt a few personal precautions pronto:
Underground zwei
, number two!”

Bartek concurred, with a pained grimace. Alain shrugged grumpily. The Pole distracted the committee by tiptoeing up to one of the safes and gluing his ear to the side. “Something is up,” he said. “I have had eighteen long hours to study the hard heart of these financial idols, and I’ve found it reacts to the great emotions of the earth. My reading is, major artillery offensive west by northwest …”

Conrad led Erna out by the other exit: a good meeting place must have two exits. The pair of them emerged on what used to be a commercial thoroughfare, strangely well preserved and animated. Large clumps of splintered buildings remained upright around their blacked-out display windows and vacant interiors; this architecture was vaguely reminiscent of the badlands of Colorado or Afghanistan as seen in geography books: vertical mountains chiseled into castles … A procession of trucks straggled down the cleared roadway like a giant snake of black vehicles, hissing and growling, guided onward by obscure glimmers of light. A youth tightly belted into leathers checked Erna’s pass and Conrad’s registration card, zealous enough to play his flashlight over their faces. “Where have you come from?”

“Bed,” answered Erna, smiling. “Does that tempt you?”