These were some of the half-formulated thoughts and sensations that passed through the soldier’s mind as the squat staff car lunged north and east along the dunes where the sea sighed among its summer calms and the sand lilies showed their pretty summer flowers; he had, by making some specious excuses, achieved an unheard-of luxury – twenty-four hours of leave – at a time when everything, every stitch of armour, every man, was grouped upon the borders of Poland. With so much impending he wanted to bid his mother goodbye – for who knew where the decisions of the Führer might send them? The telephone had been under blackout for some days now, except for army messages, but he had managed to signal her by asking a colleague in a northern unit to detach a motor cycle despatch rider to warn her. So she would be there, waiting for him as always at the end of the long green salon, her fingers upon a book, smiling. It was her invariable pose when it came to one of his visits – it tried to suggest that all was well, life was calm, and everything to do with the property taken care of. The Polish maid who never spoke would open the door to him and curtsy silently with that shy, downcast smile on her swarthy face. Well, but … they had much to discuss. Things were moving so fast that everyone felt out of his depth; they had been outstripped by the speed of events. Peace was not yet mortally stricken – but it was like a patient unconscious on a table, bleeding to death.
The summer had been exceptionally hot; warm rain in August, if you please! Everything was steaming; and now the real harvest weather had come, stilly blue with appropriate sunlight. (Ideal for a campaign in the Polish marches.) Von Esslin frowned and touched the edges of his short moustache as he watched the house come into view at the end of a long winding road lined with gracious lindens. This was his home – he repeated the phrase in his mind, but it evoked no pang of pleasure, simply the dutiful anxiety and affection which he had kept for his mother. They were very close in a way, and yet a mortal shyness ruled over their behaviour; to hear the tone in which they talked you might imagine them to be mere acquaintances, so without animation and lustre was it. It had grown, the shyness, since they were left more together, following upon the death of his twin sister Constanza, and of his father, the General. The old man had worshipped Constanza, and he never really recovered from her death; he had pined away like an old mastiff, filling the salons with photographs of her as a young woman before the slow wasting M.S. – sclerosis – had declared itself. How beautiful she had been; Egon himself had been stricken down with despair at so cruel a fate. They never discussed it, or seldom, and then gruffly.
It was different when they were separated, for then he permitted his warmth of feeling to evoke his childish attachment for her; in letters she became Katzen-Mutter, and as he wrote the words he felt the picture of her rise in his heart as a benign cat-mother, always with a great Siamese rippling at her side. They were still there, the cats; they were a passion with her.
The staff car drew up at last before the culvert covering the moat, and then gingerly crossed the plank bridge to arrive at the tall oak door behind which the Polish maid stood already waiting for his ring. She heard the driver open the door and heel-click, and then the voice of the Major General telling him to take his dressing-case inside and to be prepared to move off on the morrow at first light. This brief, barking exchange was succeeded by the jangle of the bellrope. The Polish maid opened and muttered something guttural as always; she bowed her head and sank into a half-curtsy. Von Esslin grunted something which bore a vague resemblance to a greeting and walked past her to place his cap upon the marble table and turn aside to where already the girl had opened the door into the green salon where his mother rose to greet him with a little cry of pleasure. “I did not quite believe it,” she said, with her brief scentless embrace. “But how wonderful.” He stepped back a pace to take her hands and kiss them with a suggestion of affectionate homage. “I haven’t very long,” he said, and then cleared his throat harshly as he added, “We are on the edge of war.” She nodded swiftly, a bird-like nod. “But how brown you have got,” she said. “It makes your scar look whiter than ever.” He smiled, the joke was an old one. Once a horse had run away with him into a wood and he had cut his cheeks open by riding into a coil of barbed wire which for some unknown reason had been tied upon a tree. The wounds were clean and he did not think to have them dressed or stitched – the result being the neatest simulacrum of duelling scars you might imagine. Despite his explanations his mess refused to believe that he had not in secret indulged in the old samurai-style duelling match which had been for many a year banned in the army, but which from time to time tempted young officers to practise it in secret. The more he denied this, the less he was believed. Was he not a Prussian? Such cases were rare but they did occur, just as from time to time someone had to be court-martialled for fighting a duel. The scars remained, grew whiter as his skin browned in summer. He was rather proud of the implication in a childish way; and at the same time ashamed. They were like stigmata to which one was not entitled but which could not at the same time be expunged. They laughed together at the absurdity.
“Come and sit beside me,” she said, “and tell me what is happening. Here we know nothing, the wireless is broken.”
He obeyed her and sat himself down on the sofa, sighing as he did so. “Things move so fast,” he said, “that I risk being out of date. That is why I must be at my post tomorrow. The Führer is making lightning decisions.”
The Polish maid came in with a tray of drinks and a silence of lead fell between them as the girl crossed the room. Usually when she was present they spoke in a wooden and stilted French for the sake of privacy. So his mother said now, “The Czech contracts for the clay have lapsed, but I think we have found another buyer closer at home. I am waiting now for a response.” He nodded and replied, frowning, “It was bound to happen, events being what they are.” As the door closed silently behind the servant his mother said, “She asked for leave to visit her parents. I thought she would not come back. I was surprised that she did.” He expostulated, “Ach why, she has always been with us, even if she has never learned a word of German. She must feel more at home than in some Polish hovel – her parents are farm labourers, no?”
The fate of Poland cast a momentary shadow over their conversation; both hastened to inter the subject along with the sentiment of regret – it would have been too much to call it shame. He became hearty and sentimental. “It’s good to feel the country flexing its muscles, facing up to its detractors. Germany has been patient for too long, the Führer is right about that. Too long.”
In sympathy with the mood she altered her expression to one of suitable sternness; she bowed her beautiful heart-shaped head a little and allowed her mouth to settle into its cat-form. It was straight and hard – the expression of a soldier’s wife used to confronting bereavement and sudden loss with courage, if not with a resigned equanimity. He liked this in her, this expression of indomitability. There was much left unsaid behind this façade of normality, much that as Germans they could not say. There were paradoxes – for example the German expansion into Austria had put the music festival so dear to her temporarily out of reach. The festivals went on, yes, but she felt inhibited about visiting her beloved Salzburg and Vienna as a member of a master race.… It was awkward; happily the Führer had shared no such feeling of inhibition. He had consecrated a whole day to the convulsions of Wagner’s music, and solemnly had himself photographed with the Wagner children for the benefit of the press. He apparently wished it to be clear that the intellectual and emotional foundations of the present German postures and actions were to be traced to the artist. The spiritual justifications of the new faith were there.
And then of course there were other matters upon which they could not smear self-justificatory conversation like a salve; matters too dark, too floating in ambiguities, to form a substance upon which they might base talk not hedged with reservations. “You realise, mother, we must be positive now.” He had a special plosive way of expressing the wo
rd, accompanying it with a short gesture, as of a man driving a nail into a door. Positive. His thoughts turned with schoolboyish pleasure to those dark tanks of his, now so peacefully browsing in the fields and pastures, the rolling lands which led towards the border. Some might have seen them as obscene steel beetles manned by men dressed in helmets shaped like ugly turnips of the same steel. But no, for him the thought of them and of their crews was one of joy unredeemed by any reservation. The 10th Brigade, the 7th Panzers – this vast grouping of steel was breathtaking in its battle-power, its beetle-power. The slither of mesh as the caterpillars cackled across the asphalt of major highways, the roar and slither of the engines – all this was a Wagnerian paeon of malevolent power which would soon be unlocked. His heart rose at the thought and yet he felt somehow tearful inside. He repeated the word “positive” again, giving it a touch of grim relish. So they sat staring unhappily into their drinks.
When he got to his room to change for dinner he found that the girl had already set out his dress uniform on the bed and had passed an iron over the braided trousers. A little touch of formality was suitable to his first evening at home with his mother. It had always been so. The silver-backed brushes and the phials of cologne had been taken from their leather slipcases and disposed in the bathroom against the shave which he always gave himself on such occasions. How well this spindly Polish girl knew the routines of his life. It was curious to think of her as soon to be formally declared a slave.… He thought about it, frowning, as he lay in the hot water. Then he dressed and went downstairs again to the picture gallery where he would wait for his mother to join him. The tall windows, the little bow window at the far end with just room for a sofa and a grand piano, gave it intimacy. There were a few indifferent portraits of the various members of the family, one fine Klimt, and a few glass-covered cases which held various family relics deemed worthy of exhibition. There was some vague relation by marriage on his father’s side to the Kleists, and in some mysterious manner they had inherited a couple of his love letters and a manuscript copy of a play. This was perhaps the most important exhibit, apart from a couple of letters from Hindenberg to his father about military affairs. The Kleist archive was rather an ambiguous trophy, despite the poet’s admitted genius. But … he had, after all, insulted Goethe in the most rabid fashion; and then his suicide (after all he was of a military family) … that was also somewhat awkward, in a way. Von Esslin had quite a vivid picture of the handsome couple setting off for the fatal picnic with their hamper full of cakes and fruit. Underneath nestled the loaded pistol, waiting like Cleopatra’s asp. He closed his eyes the better to visualise the lake scene with its sunshine and drifting swans; he heard the sharp crack of the discharge upon the sunny silence, he saw her fall sideways upon the bench, folding down into the poet’s encircling arms … No, one could not help but feel distaste.
When dressing he had extracted the coveted order called Pour le mérite and pinned it beside his own Iron Cross and the other service marks which his brother officers always referred to as “confetti”. The Pour le mérite (which was the German Victoria Cross) had been won by his father at the end of the First World War. Naturally he treasured the medal, and since he could not wear it in public he always pinned it on the inside of his breast pocket, reserving the outside for his own more modest prizes. It gave him pleasure and a certain confidence – as a sort of talisman. He knew she would notice with pleasure though she would make no allusion to it. He poured himself a drink and, sitting down at the piano, forced his fingers to play a few airs from Strauss. How stiff they had become! He always longed to be somewhere within reach of a piano; but it was ages now since he had had the chance to play. When his mother arrived he took her arm and led her in to dine without preamble. He did not wish to make a late night of it for the morrow promised him exceptional fatigues. They dined by candlelight and spoke in low tones so that there was no chance that their conversation would be listened to – despite the firm conviction of the Pole’s total illiteracy. His mother told him of the visit of a young security officer from a local unit who had asked if he might wire a microphone into the kitchen. Von Esslin was at first incredulous, and then overtaken by laughter at such block-headed service behaviour. They were so far away from the Polish border.…
“That is what I told him, and after a time he went away. He had not been told who you were, either.”
“So!”
They talked on until the clocks chimed ten, and then she bade him rise and prepared herself for bed. It was goodbye, for she would not be up on the morrow when he left. They embraced. “Please take care,” she said, and he promised that he would as he saw her to the door before turning out the lights and following her up the old-fashioned staircase. He looked round him slowly, a little mournfully. In his room the bedside light was on and the covers were turned back.
He undressed and got into bed, thinking that he might read a few pages of the detective story he had brought with him, but he found his mind wandering back to his men and machines and all the excitement associated with this entirely new form of warfare: the use of aircraft as artillery, the concentrated masses of armour. Such force could not help but burst apart any enemy by its sheer concentrated impact. How had the democracies not seen it – for apparently they had not produced a shadow of tactical reorganisation to meet the threat? It was rugby against tennis, a powerful toboggan against a fiacre.… He sighed and laid down his book to stare at the wallpaper. And then the total secrecy of command offered by the astonishing scrambler coding machine they called Enigma. No, nothing could miscarry, despite the cautious saying of his old father, namely that on the battlefield chance always ruled. Chance!
He lay quietly breathing, allowing these vagrant thoughts to pass through his mind until they slackened speed, dimmed. He fell asleep lightly now. He had just enough self-possession to turn off the light.
When he awoke it was around one o’clock; it was as if a hand had been placed upon his shoulder in a gesture at once soft and confiding. The hand of a woman. At once he rose, one might say obediently, for it was in response to a wordless call like that of some animal or some bird. The gesture was quite unformulated; he walked down the corridor like a sleepwalker and then climbed an inner staircase which led to the maid’s room. It had been like this for years now, since around his fortieth birthday. No word was exchanged. She lay with her face to the wall, but with her eyes open – she did not even pretend she was asleep. He stripped naked and climbed softly into bed beside her, lightly touching her flanks with his fingers, giving the signal which repetition had made customary. And she turned slowly round, quietly but ravenously arching her skinny body to accommodate his own sturdier, taller one. They were locked in silent combat now, like two experienced wrestlers, and he felt in the spider-like grip of her thin thighs and arms a kind of helplessness, an agony of submission and sexual abasement. She bowed before him as if she desired only one thing: to be trampled, to be spurned. Yet it was only a ruse, for she felt his mounting excitement as he trod her with ever-increasing violence, with a powerful, determined passion which mounted towards a climax which would sweep them both breathlessly away into the marvellous amnesia of their double lust. With no word said, no gesture of complicity offered on either side. They were like insects answering a rhythm, a wave-length of light or a sound. Her eyes were closed in the death-mask of her little dark face with its helmet of hair – so dark as almost to suggest the hair of a Japanese doll. The sort of tresses which grow on Eastern corpses after death. Her face was pretty but terribly emaciated, terribly thin. It was the head of an adder, though the details which made it human were quite fine, good eyes and teeth. When younger she might have made the impression of being a petit rat de l’Opéra.
She was his, she submitted, and the thought excited his cupidity; he overwhelmed her as his army would soon overwhelm her country and people, raping it, wading in its blood. At last the climax came and in his muddled exhaustion he fell asleep on her breast to dream o
f his big, playful tanks nosing about like sheepdogs in the dust and clutter of the farms they had knocked down, pushing their squat steel noses through walls and hedges as they fanned out into the attack. She lay as if dead, though her lips moved as always at this moment. But he could never catch what she whispered so very tenderly while she cradled his head. It was not in German that she spoke.
Two storeys above them his mother lay with open eyes, staring into the darkness and thinking as she listened with furious concentration to the silence which from time to time blurred into the small sounds of congress which they made. A chimney-flue conveyed whatever sound there was up to her room; but that was little enough, so she must supplement it with guesswork to imagine clearly what she had already imagined so often in the last years of his father. Then silence came.
It must have been just before light when the girl woke him with a touch, herself sliding out from the circle of his sleeping embrace and into a wrap. He took no formal leave of her, simply rose in heavy silence and made his way back to his room. He took a hot shower and dressed with circumspection. Then, taking up the locked briefcase, he walked downstairs once more to where, on a sidetable in the dining-room, a coffee-pot steamed over a bud of alcohol flame and some buns of brown oatmeal lay warming in a chafing dish. He helped himself and sat down, knowing that while he ate the servant would be packing his affairs at lightning speed into the two suitcases, and then bringing them down to await the chauffeur in the hall. After that she would no longer manifest herself unless there was any precise need – she would wait behind the green baize door until the front door closed behind him. It was a time-honoured routine.
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