The Young Lions Part 42

"I wrote," Christian said, seating himself stiffly. "I wrote again and again. You never answered."

"Letters ..." Gretchen made a face and waved her cigarette. "One simply doesn't have the time. I always mean to ... And then, finally, I burn them, it is just impossible. I loved your letters, though, I really did, it was awful what they did to you in the Ukraine, wasn't it?"

"I was not in the Ukraine," Christian said soberly. "I was in Africa and Italy."

"Of course, of course," Gretchen said without embarra.s.sment. "We're doing very well in Italy, aren't we, very well indeed. It is the one really bright spot."

Christian wondered how Italy could seem bright from any vantage point at all, but he did not speak. He watched Gretchen narrowly as she talked. She looked much older, especially in the wrinkled gray dressing gown, and her eyes were yellowed and pouchy, her hair dead, her movements, which before had been youthfully energetic, now neurotic, overcharged, quivering.

"I envy you being in Italy," she was saying. "Berlin is getting impossible. Impossible to keep warm, impossible to sleep at night, raids almost every night, impossible to get from place to place. I tried to get sent to Italy, merely to keep warm ..." She laughed, and there was something whining in her laugh. "I really need a vacation," she rushed on. "You have no idea how hard we work back home, under what conditions. Often I tell the man who is the head of my bureau, if the soldiers had to fight under conditions like this, they would go on strike, I tell him to his face ..."

Marvelous, thought Christian, she is boring me.

"Oh," said Gretchen, "I honestly do remember. My husband's company. That's it. The black lace. It was stolen last summer. You have no idea how dishonest people have become in Berlin, you have to watch every cleaning woman like a hawk ..."

Garrulous, too, Christian thought, coldly making the additions to the d.a.m.ning account.

"I shouldn't talk like this to a soldier home from the front," Gretchen said. "All the newspapers keep saying how brave everyone is in Berlin, how they suffer without a word, but there'd be no use hiding anything from you, the minute you went out in the street you'd hear everyone complaining. Did you bring anything with you from Italy?"

"What?" Christian asked, puzzled.

"Something to eat," Gretchen said. "So many of the men come back with cheese or that wonderful Italian ham, and I thought perhaps you ..." She smiled coquettishly at him and leaned forward, very intimately, her dressing gown falling open a little, revealing the sharp line of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"No," said Christian shortly. "I didn't bring back anything except my jaundice."

He felt tired and a little lost. All his plans for the week in Berlin had been centered upon Gretchen, and now ...

"It's not that we don't get enough to eat," Gretchen said officially, "but it's just that the variety ..."

Oh, G.o.d, Christian mourned within him, here two minutes and we are discussing diet!

"Tell me," he said abruptly, "have you heard from your husband?"

"My husband," Gretchen said, checking herself, as though she regretted giving up the subject of food. "Oh. He killed himself."

"What?"

"He killed himself," Gretchen said brightly. "With a pocket knife."

"It's not possible," Christian said, because it did not seem real that all that fierce, ordered energy, that intricate, cold, reasonable strength could have been self-destroyed. "He had so many plans ..."

"I know about his plans," Gretchen said aggrievedly. "He wanted to come back here. He sent me his picture. How he ever got anyone to take a picture of that face I honestly don't know. He regained the sight of one eye and suddenly decided he wanted to come back and live with me. You have no idea of what he looked like." She shuddered visibly. "A man must be crazy to send his wife a picture like that. I would understand, he wrote, I would be strong enough. He was queer enough to begin with, but without a face ... There are some limits, after all, even in a war. Horror has a proper place in life, he wrote, and we must all be able to bear it ..."

"Yes," said Christian. "I remember."

"Oh," said Gretchen, "I suppose he told you some of it, too."

"Yes," said Christian.

"Well," Gretchen said, petulantly, "I wrote him a most tactful letter. I worked on it for a whole evening. I suggested he would find it uncomfortable here, he would be better taken care of in an Army hospital, at least until they did something more with his face ... although, to tell you the truth, there was nothing to be done, it was no face at all, things like that really shouldn't be permitted, but the letter was extremely tactful ..."

"Have you the picture?" Christian asked suddenly.

Gretchen looked at him strangely. She pulled the wrap closer around her. "Yes," she said, "I have it."

"I can't understand," Gretchen said, standing up and going over to the desk against the far wall, "why anyone would want to look at it." She rummaged nervously through two of the desk drawers, then brought out a small photograph. She glanced at it briefly, then handed it to Christian. "There it is," she said. "As though there aren't enough things to frighten a person these days ..."

Christian looked at the photograph. One bright, crooked eye stared coldly and imperiously out of the nameless wounded flesh, over the tight collar of the uniform.

"May I have this?" Christian asked.

"You people are getting queerer and queerer these days," Gretchen said shrilly. "Sometimes I have the feeling you all ought to be locked up, really I do."

"May I have it?" Christian repeated, staring down at it.

"I suppose so." Gretchen shrugged. "It doesn't do me any good."

"I was very attached to him," Christian said. "I owe a great deal to him. He taught me more than anyone else I ever knew. He was a giant, a true giant."

"Don't think, Sergeant," Gretchen said quickly, "that I wasn't fond of him. Because I was. Deeply fond of him. But I prefer remembering him like this ..." She picked the silver-framed photograph of Hardenburg, handsome and stern in his cap, off the table and touched it sentimentally. "This was taken the first month we were married and I think he'd want me to remember him this way."

There was the turning of a key in the door, and Gretchen twitched nervously and tied the cord around her robe more tightly. "I'm afraid, Sergeant," she said hurriedly, "that you'll have to go now. I'm busy at the moment and ..."

A large, heavy-framed woman in a black coat came into the room. She had iron-gray hair, brushed severely back from her forehead, and small, cold eyes behind steel gla.s.ses. She glanced once at Christian.

"Good evening, Gretchen," she said. "Aren't you dressed yet? You know, we're going out for dinner."

"I've had company," Gretchen said. "A Sergeant from my husband's old Company."

"Yes?" The woman's voice had a rising note of cold inquiry. She faced Christian heavily.

"Sergeant ... Sergeant ..." Gretchen's voice hesitated. "I'm terribly sorry, but I don't remember your name."

I would like to kill her, thought Christian, standing facing the middle-aged woman, the photograph of Hardenburg still in his hand. "Diestl," he said flatly. "Christian Diestl."

"Sergeant Diestl, Mademoiselle Giguet."

Christian nodded at the woman. She acknowledged the greeting with a brief downward flicker of her eyes.

"Mademoiselle Giguet is from Paris," Gretchen said nervously. "She is working for us in the Ministry. She is living with me until she can find an apartment. She's very important, aren't you, darling?" Gretchen giggled at the end of her sentence.

The woman ignored her. She began stripping her gloves off her square, powerful hands. "Forgive me," she said. "I must take a bath. Is there hot water?"

"Lukewarm," said Gretchen.

"Good enough." The square, heavy figure disappeared into the bedroom.

"She's very intellectual." Gretchen did not look at Christian. "You'd be amazed how they come to her for advice at the Ministry."

Christian picked up his cap. "I must go now," he said. "Thank you for the photograph. Good-bye."

"Good-bye," Gretchen said, pulling nervously at the collar of her wrap. "Just slam the door. The lock is automatic."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

"I SEE VISIONS," Behr was saying, as they walked slowly along the beach, toward their boots, their bare feet sinking into the cool sand. The sound of the waves, rolling mildly in from America three thousand miles away, made a springtime murmur in the still air. "I see visions of Germany one year from now." Behr stopped and lit a cigarette, his steady, workman's hands looking enormous around the frail tube of tobacco. "Ruins. Ruins everywhere. Twelve-year-old children using hand grenades to steal a kilo of flour. No young men on the streets, except the ones on crutches, because all the rest are in prison camps in Russia and France and England. Old women walking down the streets in potato sacking and suddenly dropping dead of hunger. No factories working, because they have all been bombed into the ground. No government, just military law, laid down by the Russians and the Americans. No schools, no homes, no future ..."

Behr paused and stared out to sea. It was late afternoon, amazingly warm and tender for so early in the season on the Normandy coast. The Sun was a pretty orange ball sinking peacefully into the water. The spike gra.s.s on the dunes barely moved in the quiet; the road, running in a black winding streamer along the beach, was empty and the pale stone farmhouses in the distance seemed to have been deserted a long time ago.

"No future," Behr repeated reflectively, staring out across the stretched barbed wire to the sea. "No future."

Behr was a Sergeant in Christian's new Company. He was a quiet, powerfully built man of about thirty, whose wife and two children had been killed in Berlin in January by the RAF. He had been wounded on the Russian Front in the autumn, although he refused to talk about it, and had only come to France a few weeks before Christian had arrived there after his leave in Berlin.

In the month that Christian had known him he had grown very fond of Behr. He had seemed to like Christian, too, and they had begun to spend all their spare time together, on long walks through the budding countryside, and drinking the local Calvados and hard cider in the cafe's of the village in which their battalion was based. They carried pistols in holsters at their belts when they went out because they were constantly being warned by superior officers about the activities of Maquis bands of Frenchmen. But there had been no incidents at all in that neighborhood, and Christian and Behr had agreed that the repeated warnings were merely symptoms of the growing nervousness and insecurity of the men higher up. So they wandered carelessly through the farmland and along the beaches, being polite to the French people they met, who seemed quite friendly, in their grave, reserved, country way.

What Christian liked best of all about Behr was his normality. Everyone else Christian had had anything to do with, ever since the bad night outside Alexandria, had seemed to be overwound; jumpy, bitter, hysterical, overtired ... Behr was like the countryside, cool, self-contained, orderly, healthy, and Christian had felt himself relaxing, the snapping, malarial, artillery-worn nerves being soothed into a salutary calm.

When he had first been sent to the battalion in Normandy, Christian had been bitter. Enough, he'd thought, I've had enough. I can't do it any more. In Berlin he'd felt sick and old. He had spent his leave dozing sixteen, eighteen hours a day, in bed, not even getting up when the planes came over at night. Africa, he'd thought, Italy, the torn and never-quite-mended leg, the recurrent malaria, enough. What more do they want from me? And now, obviously, they wanted him to meet the Americans when they came onto the beaches. Too much, he thought, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with sick self-pity, they have no right to demand it of me. There must be millions of others who have barely been touched. Why not use them?

But then he'd got to know Behr, and the man's quiet unapprehensive strength had slowly cured him. In the peaceful, healthy month he had put on weight and regained his color. He hadn't had a single headache, and even his bad leg seemed to have made its final adjustment to its crooked tendons.

And now Behr was walking beside him on the cool sand of the beach, and was saying, disturbingly, "No future, no future. They keep telling us the Americans will never land in Europe, Nonsense. They are whistling to keep up their spirits among the tombstones. Only it will not be their tombstones, but ours. The Americans will land because they have made up their minds to land. I do not object to dying," Behr said, "but I object to dying uselessly. They will land, regardless of what you and I do, and they will go on into Germany, and they will meet the Russians there and when that happens Germany is finished, once and for all."

They walked in silence for awhile. Christian felt the sand come up between his bare toes and it reminded him of the time when he was a small boy and had run barefoot in the summer, and what with the memory and the pretty beach and the slow, majestic, happy afternoon, it was hard to be as sober and as thoughtful as Behr was asking him to be.

"I listen to them over the radio, from Berlin," Behr said, "boasting, inviting the Americans to try to come, hinting about secret weapons, predicting that any day now the Russians will be fighting the British and the Americans, and I could beat my head against the wall and weep. You know why I could weep? Not because they are lying, but because the lies are so weak, so barefaced, so contemptuous. That is the word-contemptuous. They sit back there and they say anything that comes into their heads because they despise us, they despise all Germans, the people in Berlin, they know we are fools and believe anything anybody chooses to tell us, because they know we are always ready to die for any nonsense they cook up in an odd fifteen minutes between lunch and the first drink in the afternoon.

"Listen," Behr said, "my father fought for four years in the last war. Poland, Russia, Italy, France. He was wounded three times and he died in 1926 from the effects of the gas he took into his lungs in 1918 in the Argonne Forest. Good G.o.d, we are so stupid they even get us to fight the same battles all over again; like a continuous showing in the movies! Same songs, same uniforms, same enemies, same defeats. Only new graves. And this time, too, the end will be different. Germans may never learn anything, but the others will learn this time. And it is different this time, and it is going to be much worse to lose. Last time it was a nice, simple, European-style war. Anyone could understand it, anyone could forgive it, because they'd all been fighting the same kind of war for a thousand years. It was a war within the same culture, one body of civilized Christian gentlemen fighting another body of civilized Christian gentlemen under the same general, predictable set of rules. When the war was over last time, my father marched back to Berlin with his regiment and the girls threw flowers at them along the roads. He took off his uniform and went back to his law office and started trying cases in the civil courts as though nothing had happened. n.o.body is going to throw flowers at us this time." Behr said, "not even if there are any of us left to march back to Berlin.

"This time," he said, "this time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an a.s.sault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could only be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And now," Behr said in his low, even voice, "and, now, after that, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war. The animal is slowly being driven into his last corner, the human being is preparing his final punishment. And, now, what do you think will happen to us? I tell you, some nights I thank G.o.d my wife and my two children were killed, so that they will not have to live in Germany when this war is over. Sometimes," Behr said, staring out over the water, "I look out there and tell myself, 'Jump in! Try to swim! Swim to England, swim to America, swim five thousand miles, to get away from it.'"

They had reached their boots by now, and they stood over the heavy footgear, staring reflectively down at the dull black leather, as though the boots, hobnailed and blunt, were a symbol of their agony.

"But I cannot swim to America," Behr said. "I cannot swim to England. I must stay here. I am a German and what happens to Germany will happen to me, and that is why I am talking to you like this. You know," he said, "if you mention this to anyone, they will take me out the same night and shoot me ..."

"I will not say a word," Christian said.

"I have been watching you for a month," said Behr, "watching and measuring. If I've made a mistake about you, if you're not the sort of man I think you are, it will mean my life. I would like to have taken more time, watching you, but we do not have so much more time ..."

"Don't worry about me," Christian said.

"There is only one hope for us," Behr said, staring down at the boots in the sand. "One hope for Germany. We have to show the world that there are still human beings in Germany, not only animals. We have to show that it is possible for the human beings to act for themselves." Behr looked up from the boots and stared in his steady, healthy way at Christian and Christian knew the measuring process was still going on. He did not say anything. He was confused and he resented the necessity of listening to Behr, yet he was fascinated and knew that he had to listen.

"n.o.body," said Behr, "not the English, not the Russians, not the Americans, will sign a peace with Germany while Hitler and his people are still in power, because human beings do not sign armistices with tigers. And if anything is to be saved in Germany, we must sign an armistice now, immediately. What does that mean?" Behr asked like a lecturer. "That means that the Germans themselves must get the tigers out. Germans themselves must take the risk, must shed their blood to do it. We cannot wait for our enemies to defeat us and then give us a government as a gift, because then there will be nothing left to govern, and n.o.body who has the strength or the will to do it. It means that you and I must be ready to kill Germans to prove to the rest of the world that there is some hope for Germany." Again he stared at Christian. He is spiking me down, Christian thought resentfully, with one nail of confidence after another. Still, he could not stop Behr.

"Do not think," Behr continued, "that I am making this up myself, that I am alone. All through the Army, all through Germany, the plan is slowly being formed, people are slowly being recruited. I do not say we will succeed. I merely say that on one side there is certain death, certain ruin. On the other side ..." He shrugged. "A little hope. Also," he went on, "there is only one kind of government that can save us, and if we do it ourselves, we can set up that government. If we wait for the enemy to do it for us, we'll have a half dozen little governments, all of them meaningless, all of them useless, all of them finally, no governments at all. 1920 will seem, then, like Utopia compared to 1950. If we do it ourselves, we can set up a Communist government, and overnight we will be the center of a Communist Europe, with every other nation on the Continent committed to feeding us, keeping us strong. There is no other form of government for us, no matter what the British and the Americans say, because keeping Germans from killing each other under what the Americans call democracy, for example, would be like trying to keep wolves from the sheepfold by the honor system. You don't keep a crumbling building standing by putting a new coat of bright paint on the outside; you have to go into its walls and foundations and put in iron girders to do it. The Americans are naive and they have a lot of fat on their bones, and they can afford the luxury and the waste of democracy, and it has never occurred to an American that their system depends upon the warm layers of fat under their skin and not upon the pretty words they put in their books of law ..."

What echo is this? thought Christian vaguely. When was this said before? Then he remembered the morning on the ski slope with Margaret Freemantle long ago, and his own voice saying the same words for another reason. How confusing and tiring it was, he thought, that we always reshuffle the same arguments so that we get the different answer we require from them.

"... we can help right here," Behr was saying. "We have connections with many people in France. Frenchmen who are trying to kill us now. But, overnight, they would become our most dependable allies. And the same thing in Poland, in Russia, in Norway, in Holland, everywhere. Overnight, we would present the Americans with a single, united Europe, with Germany at the center, and they would have to accept it, whetherthey liked it or not. Otherwise ..." he shrugged. "Otherwise, merely pray that you get killed early in the game. Now," Behr said, "there are certain specific things that will have to be done right here. Can I tell my people that you will be willing to do them?"

Behr sat down suddenly in the sand and began putting on his socks. He moved with meticulous care, smoothing the wrinkles out of the socks and brushing the sand off them with detailed, unhurried movements of his hands.

Christian stared out to sea. He felt weary and baffled, weighed down by a thick, nagging anger at his friend. What choices you get to make these days! Christian thought resentfully. Between one death and another, between the rope and the rifle, the poison and the knife. If only I were fresh, he thought, if I had had a long, quiet, healthful vacation, if I had never been wounded, never been sick. Then it might be possible to look at this calmly and reasonably, say the correct word, put your hand out for the correct weapon ...

"You'd better put your boots on," Behr said. "We have to get back. You don't have to give me an answer now. Think it over."

Think it over, Christian thought, grinning sourly, the patient thinking over the cancer in his belly, the condemned man thinking over his sentence, the target thinking over the bullet that is about to smash it.

"Listen," Behr looked up thoughtfully from the sand, a boot in his hand, "if you say anything about this to anyone, you will be found with a knife in your back one morning. No matter what happens to me. I like you very much, I honestly do, but I had to protect myself, and I told my people I was going to talk to you ..."

Christian stared down at the calm, healthy, guileless face, like the face of the man who would have come to fix your radio before the war or the face of a traffic policeman helping two small children across a road on their way to school.

"I told you you don't have to worry," Christian said thickly. "I don't have to think anything over. I can tell you right now, I'll ..."

Then there was the sound, and Christian automatically hurled himself to the sand. The bullets went in with short, whacking thuds, into the sand around his head, and he felt the strange, painless shock of the iron tearing his arm. He looked up. Fifty feet above him, with the engine suddenly roaring again after the long glide down out of the sky, the Spitfire was shivering through the air, the colors of the roundel gleaming on the wings and the tail a.s.sembly bright silver in the long rays of the sun. The plane climbed loudly out over the sea, and in a moment was a small, graceful shape, no larger than a gull, climbing over the sun, climbing into the green and purple of the clear, surprising spring afternoon, climbing to join another plane that was making a wide, sparkling arc over the ocean.

Then Christian looked at Behr. He was sitting erect, looking down thoughtfully at his hands, which were crossed on his belly. There was blood oozing slowly out between the fingers. Behr took his fingers away for a second. The blood spurted in uneven, jagged streams. Behr put his hands back, as though he were satisfied with the experiment.

He looked at Christian, and later, remembering the moment, Christian believed that Behr had been smiling gently then.

"This is going to hurt a great deal," Behr said in his calm, healthy way. "Can you get me back to a doctor?"

"They glided down," Christian said stupidly, gazing at the two twinkling disappearing specks in the sky. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had a few rounds of ammunition left before going home, and they couldn't bear the thought of wasting them ..."

Behr tried to stand up. He got onto one knee, then slipped back again, to sit there in the sand once more, with the same thoughtful, remote expression on his face. "I can't move," he said. "Can you carry me?"

Christian went over to him and tried to lift him. Then he discovered that his right arm did not work. He looked at it, surprised, remembering all over again that he, too, had been hit. His sleeve was sodden with blood, and the arm was still numb, but already the wound seemed to be clotting in the cloth web of the sleeve. But he could not lift Behr with his one good arm. He got the man halfway up, and then, stopped, gasping, holding Behr under the armpit. Behr was making a curious, mechanical noise by this time, clicking and bubbling at the same time.

"I can't do it," Christian said.

"Put me down," Behr said. "Oh, please, Christ, put me down."

As gently as possible, Christian slid the wounded man back to the sand. Behr sat there, his legs stretched out, his hands back at the red leak in his middle, making his curious, bubbling, piston-like sound.

"I'll go get help," Christian said. "Somebody to carry you."

Behr tried to say something, but no words came from his mouth. He nodded. He still looked calm, relaxed, healthy, with his st.u.r.dy blond hair in a clean mat over his sunburned face. Christian sat down carefully and tried to put his boots on, but he could not manage it with his left hand. Finally he gave up. After patting Behr's shoulder with a false rea.s.suring gesture, he started, at a heavy, slow, barefooted trot, toward the road.

When he was still about fifty meters from the road, he saw the two Frenchmen on the bicycles. They were going at a good clip, in their regular, tireless pumping rhythm, casting long, fantastic shadows across the marshy fields.

Christian stopped and shouted at them, waving his good hand. "Mes amis! Camarades! Arretez!" The two bicycles slowed down and Christian could see the two men peer doubtfully at him from under their caps. "Blesse! Blesse!" Christian shouted, waving toward Behr, a small, collapsed package now, near the edge of the gleaming sea. "Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!"