by Dan Vyleta
“Putain,” he mouthed. “German whore.”
The schoolboy heard it and jumped to his feet.
“You mustn’t call her names!” he shouted, more in reproach than anger, then stumbled forward as the train entered upon a curve. He fell to one knee and collided head to groin with the soldier at the door. The man took hold of a fist-load of his hair and shoved him back contemptuously into his seat. He spat once more, turned, and left the door open as he followed his comrades back down the corridor towards the second-class section of the train.
“Gentlemen, he’s led you on,” the woman called after them, her voice gently mocking. “Il est bien possible qu’il soit mon fils.—Perhaps he is my son after all.”
She blocked with a stare the boy’s attempt to run and give chase. The next instant they entered a tunnel. Darkness swallowed them, sang back the screech of the train’s rapid journey. When they emerged, the boy had shed his anger. He was laughing.
“You speak French,” he laughed, “and so much better than I. Mais vous n’avez rien dit!”
She felt it would be churlish not to join him in his laughter. It took them some minutes to calm down.
“Is it true, though?” the boy asked at last. “Your husband is a soldier?”
“Was,” she said, and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. “An officer in the medical corps.”
“He wasn’t killed, was he?”
“No. He lived. He was taken prisoner.”
“By the Russians.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“And now?” She paused, smiled, studied the face of this strange boy across. There was no malice there, just good-natured curiosity, and a guileless wonder at the world. One had to search out his eye—the one that lay broken in its socket—to remind oneself that he too must have some knowledge of pain, however vague.
“As a matter of fact he’s just been released. I’m on my way to meet him.”
The boy made to ask more, leaning forward in his eagerness to learn, but she quickly interrupted him.
“Does it hurt?” she asked. “Your eye, I mean. It looks like the bones weren’t set properly.”
She reached out and touched him, to the left of his brow. He blushed under her touch. It pleased her to see it. He really was a very pretty young man. She allowed her fingers to linger, then settled herself back in her seat. It took him some moments to recover and answer her question.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “Only sometimes—”
“Yes?”
All at once his voice took on the urgency of confidence. It was as though he thought himself back in the dormitory, swapping secrets across a linen sheet.
“It’s stupid. But when I look in the mirror sometimes, in the morning you see, when I’m still sleepy (I’m not a good riser—not that I’m lazy, mind, I try not to be, but in the morning I find it hard to find my feet, I even get dizzy sometimes), I catch sight of the eye, hanging there in the mirror, and, well, for a moment I myself don’t know what to do with it. I mean, it doesn’t look right.”
He gesticulated, bit his lip in frustration at his inability to explain himself.
“It’s even a bit spooky. I stare in the mirror, and the eye stares right back. It’s as though it belongs to someone else.
“My father is dead,” he added after a pause, carried away by a chain of associations she found hard to reconstruct. “He died when I was still a little boy. I wonder sometimes—but it’s too stupid to say it out loud.” He looked up then, stared at her shyly past his coal-black lashes. “Is it very ugly?”
She laughed, brushed away the question with a wave of her hand. “Your mother remarried?”
“Yes. A Herr Seidel. He insisted that I take his name. To be honest, I hardly know him at all. We’d only lived with him for a short while when I was sent away to school. And with the war and all … In short, I’ve not seen him in years. Nor mother.”
“What was your father’s name?”
“Teuben,” the boy said, gratified that she had asked. “Maybe you have heard of him. He was a famous detective.”
The woman nodded blankly. The name was unknown to her.
She stood up and excused herself, went to the toilet.
3.
When she returned, the boy was standing on his seat, digging around in his knapsack. He produced a bottle of milk that had evidently leaked: the top inch of liquid was missing and the bottle sticky with its spilled contents. He took a swig, then offered it to her like a workman passing around a cigarette. She declined. The milk clung to the down on his upper lip. She laughed, and he looked at her confused until she raised her finger to her own mouth and ran it lightly along its curve. His hand mirrored the gesture, shook loose some pearls of milk. Embarrassed, yet smiling all the same, he began to wipe at his lips with his sleeve and the back of his hand. She offered him a handkerchief and he took it, then decided it was too precious or too clean to be put to the profane use of wiping his mug. He sat there with the silk hanky in one fist and the milk bottle in the other, a sheepish smile upon his face.
The train hissed, rolled to a stop. All at once the electricity failed both in the corridor and in the compartment itself. They sat in total darkness. She could hear the boy’s breathing. A cone of light lit up the corridor outside the compartment, ran shakily along the carpet, the windows, the ceiling. She expected the conductor to show, torch in hand, and explain the latest breakdown, but the light flickered and disappeared without anyone entering the compartment. The rain grew stronger, beat patterns on the windowpane. The boy across kept shifting in his seat: the creak of leather underneath his skinny bum. She reached out into the darkness, found his knee, then his hand. They linked fingers, very lightly. Minutes slipped past. She raised her left wrist to her eyes but could not make out her watch. It must have been gone midnight. In her right hand the boy’s fingers beat an urgent pulse into her own.
She broke the silence.
“Before,” she said, “when we weren’t yet talking. You took out a sketchpad, then put it away again. You wanted to draw me.”
“Yes,” he answered, though it hadn’t been a question. “But it seemed rude, drawing a stranger. And besides—you would have asked to see the picture.”
In the darkness she could hear him lean his face against the pane.
“I’m not very good, you see.”
“What is it about me you wanted to draw?”
He answered her without the slightest hesitation, as though he had waited for her to ask him precisely this. As before, when he’d told her about his eye, his voice took on a special sort of quality, at once secretive and earnest. A child might make its confession in a voice like this: shuffling its feet, slyly proud at the wit of its new sin.
“I wanted to draw your face,” he said. “Your lips, actually. You have a long upper lip. It curves, a little lopsided, and there’s almost no dip at the centre. Under the nose, I mean. I’ve read about it in novels but have never really seen one. ‘A cruel upper lip.’ That, and your hands are very large.”
“That doesn’t sound very appealing.”
“But it is!” he protested, almost yanking free of her grasp. “It’s true, you know. What the soldier said before.”
“That I am beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“I’m old,” she sighed, gratified, and let go of his hand.
For a half-hour or so neither of them spoke. She pulled her legs up onto the seat next to her and willed herself asleep. In her head an image formed, of her husband’s face with sunken cheeks. His eye was broken, and he hadn’t shaved. In his mouth there stuck a cigarette. The smoke kept stinging her eyes.
A sudden tremor ran through the train, tossed her out of her half-formed dream. It was followed by first a screech, then a long and rasping whinny. She sat up, alarmed, still enveloped in darkness. The train jerked, struggled, lay silent; raindrops pelting the windowpane with the force of a proper storm. A flash of lightning off in the
distance gave them a moment’s illumination. She saw the boy’s face, artless and smiling, glad to be trapped in the storm with his milk bottle, his knapsack, and her. Then, in the renewed darkness, a thought must have come to him. He soon put it into words.
“How long has it been?” he asked. “Since you last saw your husband?”
She yawned then stretched, took her time with the answer. “Nine years.”
He whistled in his schoolboy manner, did the maths. “But that’s longer than—I mean, unless he was in the army even before—Or perhaps it’s been eight and a half—”
“Nine years,” she repeated. “Since the spring of ’39. He wasn’t conscripted until March 1940.”
She paused, gave the boy time to formulate a theory.
“He left you,” he said at last. “And now he wants you back.”
She laughed out loud, listened to herself. A cruel laugh, she thought, to go with my cruel upper lip.
“I left him,” she said. “He was having an affair.”
“Oh no!” said the boarding school boy.
“Oh yes,” she said, her voice gently mocking. “And you? How long has it been since you saw your good mother?”
“Five years, ten months. I wanted to go after the war finished, but there was a problem with the paperwork. And then Herr Seidel wrote to say I should stay and finish school.”
“Let me guess.” She lowered her voice to lend authority to the phrase. “A young man is nothing without a good education.”
“Yes, something like that. He even wanted me to stay the rest of the summer, saying that it was hard to get proper food in Vienna, and that the streets were full of riff-raff. But then I got another letter. This one came from Mother.”
He paused for effect. She obliged him. “What did it say?”
“That Herr Seidel had fallen out the window. He almost broke his neck.”
“He fell?” She tried not to laugh. “Just like that?”
“Yes. Only maybe he was pushed.”
In the darkness she heard him lean forward, until she could feel his breath upon her face. The thought occurred to her that he had decided to kiss her. But he continued to talk instead.
“There’s a family secret,” he whispered, playfully and yet in earnest, clearly tickled by the thought. “It all started when my stepbrother disappeared. After the war. And now Herr Seidel! Mother thinks the maid … But she never spelled it out, you see.”
“The maid? Your family is rich.”
“Very.” He said it with enthusiasm but no pride, as though it were a remarkable item of trivia that in no way affected his life. “Herr Seidel owns a factory.”
“Then I’m sure everything will turn out just fine.”
He was about to reply when all of a sudden the overhead lamp came alive and flooded the compartment with its bright yellow light. It found them in an odd position, him leaning forward, with his arms thrown out for balance, his bottom perched on the very edge of his seat; his face so close to hers that she could count his freckles. As for herself, she was sprawled awkwardly across a seat and a half; sat broad-lapped, her thighs spread, her silk shift showing at the hem of her skirt. The boy recoiled as though stung and pressed himself back into his seat, fingers busy straightening his tie. His eyes followed her legs as they crossed themselves in front of her. The milk bottle, she noticed, lay discarded on the floor. He had drained it, and only a white film clung to the inside of the glass, trembling now, as slowly, by increments, life returned to the engine. It was as though one could feel it will itself into a state of deep inner tension: a bass line throbbing underneath their feet and buttocks and their thighs. Tentatively, unsure of its own strength, the train eased into motion, inched forward along the tracks. She checked her watch and was surprised to find it was no later than two. There was still time to make it to Vienna by dawn.
4.
They did not speak again until they were almost at the station. For much of the time she drifted in and out of sleep. Her mouth was parched and she found herself wishing the conductor would stop by with his kettle of tea. The boy too dozed off, murmured gently in his dreams; once he kicked her as he pushed his legs out in front of him. At four-thirty a sudden hunger overcame him, and he fetched an apple down from his knapsack and sat chewing it with great noise. When the conductor came to advise them that they should arrive within the hour, he was a different man and did not carry tea. She accepted a swig from the boy’s hiking flask and was amused to discover it contained some sort of cordial diluted with water. They each reached up to their bags, made sure everything was packed. The boy sat with satchel and hat box piled upon his lap. At the city limits there was another inspection of their papers: a whole committee of men in rumpled uniforms. When the border guards had left them, the boy stood up, stretched, rubbed his shoulders, neck, and face.
“Almost home,” he said.
“Almost.”
“How will it be, you think? Seeing your husband after all this time?” He asked with great simplicity, from curiosity, and compassion, and because he felt he was her friend. She remembered holding his hand in the course of the night. It was hard now to reconstruct what had brought them to that juncture. She flashed him that fleeting, empty smile that she knew men found so beguiling.
“Nice,” she said. “I’m sure it will be nice.”
“You’ll take him back? Despite the—you know.”
“Yes. Despite. Though we’ll have to wait and see, of course.” Her voice turned mocking. “You think I shouldn’t?”
The boy did not answer. He was busy with a different thought.
“How did you find out?” he asked. “Did you find a letter? Or perhaps you came home one afternoon and they—”
He flushed, gestured, fell silent: a boy like a puppy, clumsy, foolish, a constant quiver to his tail. It was an effort to summon the anger required by propriety.
“You’re being a boor,” she said. “You would do well to remember that you are no longer in the schoolyard, or the dormitory.”
He bit his lip and launched into apology. She cut him short. She had told the story before, always with the same omissions.
“I followed him. I suspected, and I followed him. He entered a building and went up to a flat. I waited twenty minutes then rang at the door.” She paused, mimed the gesture, one slender finger pressing down on the bell.
“You saw her?”
“Yes.”
He stared at her, gaily, simply, without malice, yearning to learn and not to judge, the down on his lip twitching with excitement.
“Was she very beautiful?”
In her mind’s eye she relived the scene, saw the door swing open and a young man standing there, dressed in his shirt sleeves and trousers, a silver cross around his neck. He wasn’t painted or perfumed or even particularly clean. One of his buttons was undone.
She’d pretended she had mistaken the door.
“Beautiful?” she answered at last. “It’s hard for me to judge. I should not have thought so, no. It wasn’t how I expected. A woman in garters. That’s what I had pictured. Someone who’d thrown on a dressing gown just before she opened the door. Charming, pretty, a sort of gentleman’s whore. But I see that I shock you.”
The boy had indeed blushed a deep crimson, but he quickly composed himself and shook his head.
“No. It’s how I pictured her myself just now. I mean, something like that. Not that I know about …”
“Garters? Or whores?”
“Neither,” the boy managed, and fell silent.
Outside, dawn broke as they rolled into the station.
He carried her bags for her. Once on the platform she was surprised by the crowd of men, women, and children that spilled out of the second- and third-class compartments. It was as though, all of a sudden, they had entered the bustle of the city. Some tired relatives stood freezing near the barrier gates. They had waited all night to greet the husbands, wives, sons, and daughters now threading down the platform. Above
them gaped the bombed-out roof.
A porter approached her, loaded her things onto a cart. The boy walked by her side, scanning the faces in the crowd. There was nobody there to welcome either one of them, just the morning light and the broken cobbles of Vienna. Out on the street a taxi driver accosted them and the boy insisted she should take it. They pressed hands briefly, and the boy bowed as though he wished to kiss the back of her hand (the tennis racket that stuck out of his knapsack nearly whacked her on the head). In the end his courage left him and he let go of her, mumbling that it had been a “deep pleasure.”
Through the rear window of the taxi she watched him turn away from her to gather up his luggage. Behind the boy a vagrant shuffled, restless in his Wehrmacht coat, and a child sat selling nuts and berries from a handdrawn cart. At length the woman too turned, ahead to where her husband would be waiting in whatever might be left of their apartment.
“You come from abroad?” the driver asked, studying her clothes across one burly shoulder.
“Just drive,” she said, and dug in her handbag for makeup and mirror, intending to paint new life upon her fading lips.
Two
1.
As they disembarked from the train and left the station, there stood amongst the crowd a man neither tall nor particularly short, and self-effacing of manner, if wrapped somewhat conspicuously in a dyed army coat and a red woollen scarf of better quality than the rest of his appearance would lead one to expect. He scanned the emerging crowd with the curiosity of someone who hoped to find a familiar face. It was not long before his eyes settled on the woman in something more than homage to her beauty. In fact he crossed himself and muttered some few silent words; started forward then stopped, and was soon pushed aside in the press of the crowd.
Some years previously, at school, Robert Seidel had read a story by an American writer in which the protagonist, his nerves still strained from recent illness, was able to discern the profession and indeed the biography of passersby simply by studying their dress, their gait, the lines inscribed by life upon their faces, and who was distraught to find amongst the evening crowd a man who resisted his attempts at interpretation and was, in fact, illegible. Had Robert noticed the stranger, it might have struck him that the man posed a similar riddle to observers: his face obscured by scarf and low-drawn cap; his old man’s gait ill matched by his still-youthful hands; his gestures acquired both in drawing room and barracks. All that could be said with any certainty was that there clung to the man—as he pushed through the crowd with a slinking kind of grace, never quite touching those who surrounded them—an anxious, timid quality, as though he were awaiting the answer to some fateful question that he himself had asked.