Again they fell silent. He wondered at her unfriendliness but knew it could have many sources, so he decided to wait patiently, reasonably comfortable with the silence and her company. They were nearly at the bottom of the bowl when she suddenly broke her silence.
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
“What?”
As if a dam had broken, she suddenly became loquacious. “I’m about to explode! I haven’t had a good fuck since I got here!”
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh, I guess it’s been four or five weeks. I came from the city.” She jerked her head in the direction of the highway that led into Breslau. “I had a good setup there. Reasonable work, no beatings—at least not many—and a closet to myself.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, they suspected their stupid son was getting romantically involved with me. Hah!” she snorted. “I mean, I was fucking him, okay, but involved? Christ! He’s a kid! Fourteen!”
“Fourteen?”
“Yeah. The brat. Though I must admit, he wasn’t bad in bed once I taught him what to do.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she announced proudly. “So, they cleared me out quietly before there could be any scandal, and here I am! Exiled to nowhere!”
“Where are you from?”
“Weren’t you listening?”
“No, I mean originally.”
“Oh, that . . . I was told Forino.” At his blank look, she explained without patience, “It’s supposed to be near Napoli.”
“Naples? You’re Italian? I thought you were allies. I thought they left you alone.”
She shrugged disinterestedly; the world was what it was. “So you wanna do it?”
“Maybe after I get to know you a bit first.”
She rolled her eyes in disgust, then scrunching her face up so she could see the details of his shoulder patch, she said suddenly, “English?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh! Do you prefer boys?”
“No!” he answered, too surprised to be anything other than amused.
“What’s the green mean?”
“Criminal,” he stated dryly.
“Oh.” She seemed refreshingly unperturbed.
“Maria!” a harsh voice bellowed from within.
“Got to go,” she said, getting to her feet. “If you want to see me, come back at midnight. I’ll meet you over there.” She pointed to the stand of glass cases that displayed the day’s newspaper and, grabbing her bowls, disappeared through the door.
Peter came at midnight, but she did not show up. He returned the following night. She appeared within ten minutes. When she did not say anything, he suggested they take a stroll. He was hoping to get her to talk. It was odd, but his intellectual needs, his hunger for friendship, quite overwhelmed any other desire. As they walked, he looked at her and tried to work up something like lust for her. It wasn’t easy: she was not particularly attractive to him.
“Sorry I couldn’t make it last night.”
He knew by her tone that she was lying: clearly she thought she needed to tease his interest. Perhaps she was right. If he had been fifteen or sixteen, well, at that time of his life, almost any human female was enough to provoke urgent physical needs. Later, as he matured, he began to enjoy having relationships, and then after that came genuine love. Once he had sex coupled with love, he was not so sure he could so easily drop back to mindless physical pleasure. Plus there was the other consideration—his enforced abstinence of the past years had left him doubting that he could simply jump into bed with the first woman who came along. Perhaps if he had felt that Maria would have shown any degree of patience, he might have been willing to try, but he knew instinctively that she would be merciless in humiliating him if things did not go as planned, so he hesitated.
“So, you want to have sex tonight? It’s a good night. I’m safe,” she broke into his thoughts.
By safe, he knew she meant that she was unlikely to get pregnant. It was the only form of birth control accessible to them: a mix of abstinence, rhythm, and withdrawal. Since Zwangsarbeiter were forbidden by law to have intercourse, they obviously had no need for contraceptives, and since Germans were supposed to produce as many children as possible, they obviously had no need for any either. The situation was quite different in England; there the government was all too happy to discourage births, but since the state could never organize efficient distribution of contraceptive pills or condoms, the populace had to rely on the freely provided sterilizations and abortions.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Not right now.”
In the dark it was hard to see, but he knew she had wrinkled her nose in a mixture of disbelief and exasperation. “Do you have any cigarettes?” she asked suddenly.
“No. But if you like, I’ll try and get you some.”
“Yeah. I’d like that.”
“It’ll cost you,” he warned.
“Huh? Look, just pick the place and I’m all yours!”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I want you to tell me about yourself. About what you think and feel and about your history.”
“What, are you an informer?” Maria asked suspiciously.
“No, just curious,” he answered, trying not to laugh.
“Man, you’re weird.”
“Maybe, but indulge me.”
So she did. She chatted amiably enough about her life but did not seem to offer much in the way of thoughts or philosophy. It had never really occurred to her to question the status quo, and for that she was a happier person than he could ever be. She did not seem to have any interest in his history or his opinions, and he did not bother to offer up anything unsolicited. She only seemed interested in one piece of information.
“Do you have a girlfriend already?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Just be patient for a day or two. Okay?” He kissed her affectionately on the forehead and they parted.
They met the following night and he gave her the cigarettes—whole cigarettes, not just ends—that he had acquired from Frau Reusch. Her delight was genuinely charming and he felt some of his reserve slip a bit. Still, it was not so much chatting to her—her conversation was limited and already rather repetitive—as his thoughts during the day that let him warm to the idea of having sex with her. He really wanted to establish some contact with the world independent of the Reusches, and he wanted to experience something like normal life again. Yet, it was not easy to be enthusiastic about sex with a woman whom he did not love, hardly even liked, and who was not particularly physically attractive to him either.
It was, in the end, her own desires that swayed him. If nothing else, it would clearly give her pleasure; so, he allowed himself to daydream, to desire, to anticipate, and by their third meeting he was ready to end her interminable abstinence. They returned to his room and he made love to her. And it was lovemaking, for the entire time his mind was elsewhere, with someone else. He knew that she would not notice, or if she did, she would not mind for she had made it abundantly clear that she longed for the physical act, not impossible emotional complications.
Afterward she smoked one of the cigarettes he had given her and surprised him by saying, “I knew you’d be good.”
He allowed himself to enjoy the compliment—she may even have meant it seriously. He murmured something appropriately complimentary to her in return.
“What’s her name?” she asked suddenly.
He looked up at her, startled by the question. Then he realized she was not accusing him of having another girlfriend, she just wanted to know whom he was thinking about. “Allison,” he replied.
“She’s dead?”
“Yeah. Some years now. How’d you know?”
“Oh, you’re not the sort to cheat.”
He felt a sudden tightening in his chest. If
only you knew, he thought.
She finished the cigarette and with it, her afterglow. She allowed herself to notice her surroundings. “Gee, you’ve got it good here.”
“I guess so.”
“I’d kill for a place like this.”
He smiled noncommittally.
“Do they hit you much?” she asked while playing with the controls on the television.
“Not at all.”
“Shit. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
“I guess not.”
“Can you get me more cigarettes?” she asked, still enamored with the television.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Why don’t you just take them from the shop?” she suggested, obviously convinced he was too simple to have thought of such a solution himself.
He shook his head without bothering to explain.
Over the weeks that followed, they met fairly regularly. Maria was virtually insatiable and he had no real problem with keeping their relationship almost entirely sexual—for one thing, when they were fucking, he had no need to think about how tedious her company was otherwise. He tried on numerous occasions to get her to talk about anything that required thought, but she brushed off his attempts with an air of impatient contempt. When he tried to tell her anything about his own thoughts and feelings, she would rapidly cut him off by yawning expansively or interrupting him with the single word boring drawn out in a singsong voice. So, he surrendered to the inevitable and withdrew to a level of interaction with which she could be comfortable. He satisfied her needs by providing a continuous supply of cigarettes, and she returned the favor by never commenting that he was making love to a ghost.
Usually he would meet her at night by the newspaper stand and they would stroll a bit and then return to his room. Afterward, he always insisted on walking her back home. She assumed he accompanied her because of some oldfashioned concept of chivalry, and she was, at least in part, correct. He knew that any patrolling policeman coming across a lone woman might be liable to take advantage of the situation, and he hoped his presence would deter such an ugly possibility. A more pressing motive, however, was that he wanted to prevent troublefor both of them. He felt that her careless attitude would inevitably cause her to be caught if she were to walk back alone and that she would immediately implicate him. On the other hand, if he accompanied her, he could both help prevent them from being detected and come up with reasonable excuses if they were caught.
As they returned to her residence one humid night, he wondered if she would be offended to know that he did not really trust her to handle the journey on her own. He doubted it; she seemed completely oblivious to any such subtleties. Indeed, he had to remind her repeatedly to keep her voice down as they walked along, and he noticed, even now, she was heading straight into the light of a security lamp because—as she so often explained—it was shorter than going around. Automatically, he reached for her arm to pull her back into the safety of the shadows, but it was too late—a passing patrol had noticed.
“Halt!”
He froze, his heart pounding. He felt Maria push herself up against him as if she could melt into his shadow. The patrol approached—two boys who wore the uniform of the youth league, and a man wearing the uniform of the regular district security police. The dark green of his shirt was stained with sweat under the arms.
The policeman, aware of his responsible role, was extremely businesslike. “Your papers.”
Peter and Maria handed over their documents. The policeman perused them, then handed them to the boys to look at. They scanned the papers eagerly.
“Where are your passes?”
“We have none, mein Herr,” Peter answered. Maria remained in terrified silence.
“You are not permitted out without passes. Certainly not past curfew!” the policeman scolded.
“We’re sorry, mein Herr. We just wanted to get a breath of air. It’s so hot inside.”
As if reminded of the heat, the policeman wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “You’re Reusch’s boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes, mein Herr.” Though boy was hardly appropriate given that he was older than any of them, it was, nevertheless, the accepted term.
“And you”—the policeman indicated Maria—“you work at the bakery, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“I’ve given both of you warnings before, haven’t I?” He sounded parental in his disapproval and exasperation. Since Peter had received numerous warnings while wandering around in the daytime, he presumed that the man was correct in his case, and he assumed that the same was true for Maria. Somehow, in broad daylight, the warnings had never seemed serious, and he was therefore quite surprised that the patrolman remembered such infractions. But he had, and he narrowedhis eyes and continued, “Such blatant disregard for the law cannot go unpunished.”
Peter noticed the boys had stopped looking at the papers and were staring avidly at Maria. At the promise of punishment, their faces had lit up with anticipation. He took a calculated risk, and drawing the attention of the patrolman to the two boys with his eyes, Peter then looked directly at him and said, “Please let her return home, mein Herr. She’s new here and I’ve misled her. It’s my fault, punish me.”
The policeman had not failed to notice the looks in the boys’ eyes and, with ill-disguised contempt for his young charges, agreed. “All right. Go home.”
Maria stared at him wide-eyed.
“I said scram!”
She took off at a run toward the bakery. Peter watched her disappear into the darkness, then turned his attention to his own predicament.
“Now, boy, we can lock you up and bring Herr Reusch in to bail you out in the morning. Course, can’t guarantee your safety overnight,” the policeman warned him. “Or we can deal with you tonight, unofficially.”
“I know the rules of the game,” Peter agreed, then sighing, added, “Let’s get it over with now.”
The two youths were assigned to hold his arms, and then the policeman began the attack. As it progressed and Peter folded beneath the blows, the boys released his arms to join in. They did not beat him up too badly—clearly the policeman wanted to keep his apprentices under control; they mostly pummeled his stomach and jabbed their knees into his groin for good measure. As he collapsed onto the ground, they followed up with a few halfhearted kicks and then stopped.
He lay still, as his and Maria’s papers were tossed onto the ground near him, and then the patrol left, satisfied with their dispensation of justice. After a few moments, he found the strength to rise, collect the documents, and stagger home. He let himself into his room, wiped his face with a cold, wet cloth, and then curled up into his bed to try to sleep off the effects of the justice system.
The next morning, Herr Reusch failed to notice anything was amiss, but at lunchtime, as Peter lowered himself painfully into his chair, Frau Reusch was immediately suspicious.
“What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
“What’s happened? Did you get beat up?”
He looked at her, somewhat surprised that that would be her first guess. What about stomach flu or a hangover or any other normal event? But then, beating people was normal—why should she pretend otherwise? What had started in the thirties with the public humiliation and harassment of Jews and other “enemies” had spread throughout society into a sometimes deadly, but completely normal, way of life.
In answer to her questioning look, he nodded, then looked away.
“What happened?”
“I went out for a walk at night. A patrol objected to the fact I did not have a pass.”
“Oh, my! They aren’t supposed to do that!” Frau Reusch objected. Herr Reusch maintained an interested silence.
“From my position, that’s a little difficult to explain to them,” Peter answered.
“Why were you out?” A strong implication of disapproval was in Frau Reusch’s
voice. “Was it to see your girlfriend?”
“How did you know I had a girlfriend?”
“Oh, it was obvious. After all, you weren’t smoking all those cigarettes.”
He nodded. He felt oddly embarrassed by the whole incident; somehow this society had confined him to a position not unlike that of a child, and he was helpless to prevent it.
“Look,” Herr Reusch finally spoke up, “if you need to see your lady friend at night, let me know, I’ll write some sort of pass for you.”
“That’s very kind of you,” he responded, hoping he sounded more thankful than he felt, “but you must understand how demeaning that would be for me.”
“Why?” they asked in concert.
“Whatever our political masters say, I am an independent and fully human adult. To essentially have to ask for your permission to see a woman . . .” He opened his hands. Certainly it would be clear to them now.
They were perplexed. “Whatever is the problem with having us write you a pass?” Herr Reusch asked, his voice carrying a hint of sourness at Peter’s ingratitude. He apparently had not considered the impracticalities involved: what sort of excuse would suffice after curfew, how Peter would explain Maria’s presence, and so on. Herr Reusch only wanted to know why his offer to help had been so rudely rejected.
Peter looked into the two faces of convention: good people, kind people, totally oblivious people. He felt the task was beyond him and he settled for an easy way out. “There’s no problem. Don’t mind me, I’m just a bit unnerved by what happened. Anyway, there’s no need anymore, we broke up last night.”
That was, of course, a lie. That evening Peter went to see Maria again. The relationship had grown tedious for him and he had, until his conversation with the Reusches, contemplated ending it, but now he felt more determined than ever to continue seeing her. In any case, he needed to return her papers to her before they were missed.
She saw him waiting by the newsstand and met him within a few minutes. When he handed her the documents, she breathed, “Oh, thank God!” but did not venture further comment on the night before. She tucked the documents into the pouch she wore around her neck, tucked it back under her blouse, and then began talking, too loudly, about some incident in the bakery.
The Children's War Page 13