The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  Hubbard laughed. Lori, seated on her broken stone, seemed to be pleased that she had made him do so. In the dim atmosphere of the forest, her prettiness, intensified by the amusement in her face, gave off a kind of light.

  “Your ancestor wasn’t a very good politician,” Hubbard said.

  “Not a very good politician? What a commentary.”

  “You don’t believe in politics?”

  “No. Don’t tell me you do.”

  “I don’t,” Hubbard said. “You’re quite safe with me. What are these stones?”

  “In olden times, this was a temple to a pagan goddess called Hertha. Waldemar, the king of Denmark, scattered the stones when he conquered Rügen in 1169 A.D. Waldemar was a Christian. Hertha is mentioned by Tacitus.”

  Lori leaped to her feet and strode off among the beeches once again. Hubbard fell behind, so as to gaze without embarrassment at her moving body. He had no lustful motive. Hubbard loved—had always loved —the prettiness of women and their gracefulness. He hadn’t the knack of imagining them naked when they were clothed; the sight of Lori in her tweed skirt and leather jacket, russet hair bouncing and opening like a fan at every firm step, was pleasure enough for him.

  They walked on. The forest grew thinner. Lori, a few steps ahead, passed out of the trees and stopped. Her skirt billowed in the wind. Beyond the edge of the wood, Hubbard glimpsed the sea, frothy with whitecaps in the fading light. It was the same color as the bark on the beeches. He lengthened his stride and, lost in the beauty of this observation, walked out of the forest. He saw where he was just in time to keep from plunging over the edge of a towering chalk cliff.

  Lori pointed downward. “One hundred twenty-eight meters,” she said, the wind thinning her voice.

  Large flakes of chalk had broken off the cliff; Lori picked up two or three and scaled them over the edge. The wind blew them back over her head like kites. She lifted her arm above her head and let it go limp. The wind moved it. She turned her solemn face toward Hubbard.

  “I think the wind is strong enough,” she said.

  “Strong enough for what?” Hubbard asked.

  “Watch.”

  Standing at the very edge of the cliff, Lori spread her arms, closed her eyes, and leaned forward into the wind. It filled her clothes, spread her hair, and suspended her slight body, as if she were soaring, more than four hundred feet above the stony beach below.

  Hubbard seized Lori’s outflung arm and pulled her back to safety. Her eyes flew open. They were filled with anger.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “You were going to fall.”

  “Why should I fall? Take your hand off my arm. Do you think I’m so stupid that I would fall off a cliff into the sea?”

  Hubbard let go of her. “Well?” she said.

  “I was just trying to protect you,” Hubbard said.

  “Protect me? Protect me?” Lori spun on her heel, put a hand on the turf, and sprang over the edge of the cliff. Hubbard leaped forward, hand outstretched, but she was gone. He looked down. Her skirt swinging, Lori was already fifty feet below, clambering down the precipice, the toes of her boots creating little clouds of dust as she slammed them into the soft chalk.

  Hubbard went after her. The cliff was not perfectly vertical and there were plenty of places to hold on. Over the centuries, the copious rain that fell on Rügen had carved furrows in the chalk, so that climbing was fairly easy.

  Hubbard was at the bottom in less than five minutes. Lori waited for him, her hand to her mouth, sucking a cut she had got on the chalk. When she took her hand away, the chalk dust left a white mustache on her upper lip.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “No other person, above all no man, will make rules for me or take precautions on my behalf. I will dispose of myself as I judge best.”

  Hubbard held up his hand, palm outward, the universal gesture of peace. Lori had never seen such a tremendously tall young man, or one who was so little interested in hiding his thoughts. She turned and walked away. The beach was a carpet of smooth round stones. They rolled under Lori’s boots and she lost her balance and fell heavily, uttering a shriek.

  Hubbard seemed to think that this was funny. He laughed loudly. Then, giving Lori a delighted smile, he walked on by, leaving her sprawled on the shingle. Lori was furious. A German boy would have given her first aid. Hubbard picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. Lying on the stone beach, rubbing her bruised hip with her wounded hand, she opened her mouth to call out for help, but then she remembered herself and struggled to her feet alone.

  Watching Hubbard as he sauntered away, such a tall careless figure, so ridiculously strange, Lori began to smile. She was angry at herself. Why was she smiling? It was inexplicable, but she could not stop. She limped after him, floundering, unable to control whatever it was that caused her to grin like a fool.

  — 3 —

  On the train to Berlin, Lori bombarded Hubbard with questions about his work.

  “Whose work does your writing resemble?” she asked.

  “Why should it resemble anyone else’s writing?”

  “You must have a model. Only geniuses are original at twenty-one. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Herman Melville, Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life.”

  “Melville was older than twenty-one when he wrote that.”

  “Twenty-seven. But he was captured by cannibals at twenty-two. Surely that was a form of writing. Experience is art; copying it down is just the last stage.”

  “Then I have the cart before the horse, writing before being captured by cannibals.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Berlin is full of cannibals—like your Russian who knows how to eat forever at Horcher’s on one twenty-dollar bill.”

  In her prim traveling clothes, Lori looked like a schoolgirl, but she had completed her formal education. She was Teutonically at home in the country of facts and figures. Like most German girls of her class and generation, she knew the history and literature of her own country by heart. Also, she was fluent in French, English, and Latin and was familiar with the literature written in those languages. Literature was her passion, especially poetry.

  “Do you write poetry?” she asked as the train passed among the blue lakes of the Mecklenburg plain.

  “I haven’t yet fallen in love,” Hubbard said.

  “Ah,” said Lori, with a laugh. Hubbard had never before met a girl who thought that love was a subject for mirth.

  Back in Berlin, Hubbard commenced a summery courtship. He took Lori to galleries and concerts and plays. They rode in the Tiergarten, boated on the lakes and canals, drank tea and danced in the afternoon at Kempinsky’s Hotel, dined at Horcher’s, lunched at outdoor restaurants.

  One Saturday noontime at the Swedischer Pavilion by the Wannsee, Hubbard watched Lori’s hands, deft and tanned with scrubbed unpainted nails, as she slit a smoked trout along its spine, butterflied it, removed the bones, picked up the first mouthful on her fork, and touched the pinkish flesh with creamed horseradish. She lifted her eyes, but not to look at Hubbard. After two weeks in his company she was used to having him stare at her and she no longer paid much attention.

  Voices were singing in the Grunewald, a great many voices. The music grew louder as the singers approached. Hubbard could not place the tune.

  “Is that the ‘Marseillaise’?” Hubbard asked. “In Berlin?”

  Lori put down her fork and composed herself. Her eyes were fixed on the edge of the woods, which ran down nearly to the edge of the lake.

  “No, not the ‘Marseillaise,’ ” she said.

  Out of the trees marched a straggling line of young people. They were carrying flowing red banners and when he saw these, Hubbard recognized the tune. The marchers were singing the “Internationale.” They wore broad red bands on their left arms and carried a thicket of placards demanding justice for the workers. They were not themselves workers: they had the pale skin, the long hair, the haunted defiant faces of i
ntellectuals. Young women pushing baby carriages trudged along beside their men, singing too; their faces were radiant with righteousness, like the exalted countenances of members of an evangelical sect singing a particularly rousing hymn.

  “The Red Front,” Lori said. “I don’t want to see this.” She kicked Hubbard under the table and he took his eyes off the marchers. “Look straight at me until they’re gone,” Lori said.

  She smiled a bright artificial smile, as if she were making conversation with a stranger at a dinner party.

  The singing stopped and the sound of angry shouting buffeted the air. The waiters ran to the railing overlooking the lake in order to watch whatever was happening on the beaches. Hubbard’s eyes wandered.

  “No,” Lori said, rapping on the table; “keep looking at me.”

  But Lori’s own eyes lifted and she frowned. Someone had come up behind Hubbard; he could feel the presence of another person at his back. A jovial hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Really, Hubbard, you must come and see this,” a male voice said in easy but accented German.

  Hubbard stood up. “Otto,” he said. “Baronesse von Buecheler, may I present Mr. Rothchild.”

  Rothchild, a wiry man impeccably dressed in an unwrinkled linen suit, inclined his head. He had the posture of a fencer.

  “You must be Hubbard’s Russian,” Lori said. “The twenty-dollar deposit at Horcher’s.”

  By the shore of the lake, a woman was screaming, one long piercing shriek after another.

  “Forgive me,” Rothchild said, “but you’re missing a rehearsal for the next war. The Stahlhelms have ambushed the Communists. Come.”

  Rothchild took Hubbard’s arm and pushed him toward the railing. He crooked his arm for Lori and gave her an inviting smile.

  Lori remained where she was, her back to the commotion. Rothchild bowed and joined Hubbard at the railing. He threw an arm around Hubbard’s waist.

  “Look,” he said, “what luck.”

  Men wearing steel helmets were fighting with the Red Front marchers. The screaming woman was holding with furious strength to the handle of a baby carriage. One of the Steel Helmets gave it a kick and the baby flew into the air and fell into the milling crowd. The woman, shrieking in terror, crawled among the stamping feet of the fighting men, reaching for her baby, who tumbled over the fine brown forest dirt like a football. Finally she seized the child and curled her body around it. Sweating and cursing and howling in pain and anger, the brawlers trampled on the woman. She stopped screaming. The fight moved away from her and down into the shallow edge of the lake. Men wrestled each other into the water. A Steel Helmet, wearing two Iron Crosses on his civilian jacket, darted into the lake, making a row of explosive splashes as his boots punched the water, and seized the weedy young man who had been at the head of the Red Front parade. He wrestled the weaker man down and held his head under the surface of the lake. Every ten seconds or so, he would pull the man up and let him breathe, shouting furiously into his face. Then he would push him under the water again. The woman lay quiet on the beach. She wore a bright green polka-dot dress; the skirt had been thrown up so that her lacy black drawers were exposed.

  “Look, black underwear,” Rothchild said. “The flag of free love.”

  The woman lay so still that Hubbard thought that she must be dead. Abruptly, the fight stopped. The Steel Helmets climbed onto the beach, fell into platoon formation, and marched off into the Grunewald, singing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The Red Front crawled out of the lake. The woman in the green polka-dot dress sat up. Her baby uttered a series of loud shrieks. The woman took out one of her breasts and fed the child as her comrades threw themselves down on the ground, groaning and cursing, among their fallen posters and red banners.

  “Lovely sight,” Rothchild said.

  Lori had disappeared. Her smoked trout lay on her plate as she had left it, the first bite still impaled on the fork.

  Hubbard found her in the car, her arms wound around her lifted knees, her face pressed against her skirt. He put a hand on her hair. She didn’t move.

  Hubbard stroked her hair. Lori lifted her face—filled, he knew, with the memory of her father’s murder. A tear ran down her cheek.

  “Those people, one side or the other, are going to kill any child I have,” Lori said. “I know it.”

  — 4 —

  Within a month, Lori and Hubbard were lovers. It was Lori who managed the seduction.

  She began her assault in a nightclub called Kaminskys Telephonbar. Each table was equipped with a telephone, so that clients and prostitutes of both sexes could call one another up. A very tall Negro with a painted face sang in English; he was naked except for a woman’s fur coat. When he lifted his arms at the end of a song, the coat opened and a slender erect penis emerged like an inquisitive brown snake.

  Hubbard blushed in deep embarrassment. “Look,” he said, “I think we’d better go. I didn’t know.”

  But Lori was delighted by the atmosphere of clownish sexuality.

  “It’s wonderful here,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

  On the dance floor, Lori put both arms around Hubbard’s neck. Actual dancing was impossible. In a space not much larger than a round dinner table, twenty couples swayed to an American song. Because Hubbard was so much taller than Lori, her body clung to his. He felt her breasts against his stomach and the warmth of her flesh through the thin cloth of her skirt. Lori knew what he felt. Laughing as she had laughed on the train, she kissed him, a sweet virginal kiss at first, but as he drew away she pulled his head back and ran her tongue over his lips, a slow warm animal lick that started at one corner of his mouth, ran over his upper lip, and then back across the lower. Grinning mischievously, she gave his lip a little nip with her white teeth, like a period.

  They stayed until dawn, dancing and drinking sparkling Mosel. As Hubbard drove her home through the empty streets, Lori, kneeling in the passenger seat, licked his ear. Hubbard tried thinking about football; it didn’t work. He tried to push her away, but she resisted and went on licking his ear. When he tried to slow down, she put her own foot on the accelerator. As they entered the Potsdamer Platz at fifty miles an hour, a taxi pulled out of the rank in front of the railroad station, into the path of their car. Hubbard slammed on the brakes. The car, rocking crazily, skidded along the streetcar tracks and spun completely around twice before Hubbard brought it under control again.

  “Really, Lori,” Hubbard said, “I think you’d better sit down.”

  Lori slid into the seat, put her knees primly together, looked into Hubbard’s face with her cat’s smile, and began speaking about his work again. The kiss in the nightclub, the tongue in Hubbard’s ear, the wild ride in the open car might never have happened. She was a scholar again. She ran her hands over her hair, which had blown wildly around her face moments before, restoring it to perfect order.

  “Are you actually writing,” she asked, “or are you merely trying to make yourself interesting?”

  Hubbard was stung by this accusation. “I’ve written a novel,” he said.

  “Good. You must read it to me.”

  “Read you my manuscript?”

  “What else? You need an opinion, intelligent criticism. You must read your book to me tomorrow. I’ll come to your rooms.”

  — 5 —

  Hubbard had taken a furnished flat in Charlottenburg, on a fashionable street. The furniture, left behind by the owners, was a mixture of uncomfortable Bauhaus and tattered Louis XV. Very good Persian carpets were spread over the floor. The walls were hung with new German painting, brutal caricatures of bourgeois life, abstractions in primary colors.

  “Not a very Bohemian flat,” Lori said, “except for the pictures. Surely they didn’t come with the place? Nobody in this neighborhood knows about this sort of German painting.”

  “Otto Rothchild helped me to find them.”

  “Ah, the valuta again. Do your friendships generally last?”

  “Yes.” />
  “I thought so. Pity. I’ll never like this Russian.”

  Hubbard had arranged his manuscript in a neat stack on the table and placed two chairs opposite one another. He indicated the chair in which Lori was to sit. Instead, she sat on the floor, curling her legs beneath her.

  Hubbard began to read. At seven o’clock the maid brought them a cold supper. Hubbard put down the manuscript.

  “No,” Lori said. “Read on to the end. Food later.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “Later.”

  “Now. I’m also thirsty. My throat is giving out.”

  The maid had placed beer on the table, a brown liter bottle with a porcelain stopper on a bail. Lori scrambled to her feet. Limping a little on cramped muscles, she went to the table and poured a full glass for Hubbard and a quarter of a glass for herself. Hubbard drank the beer.

  Hubbard filled two plates with cold ham and sour potato salad and refilled the beer glasses. Lori demolished the food. She went to the table, spread two pieces of black bread with pale butter, and put thin slices of cheese on top. Hubbard ate his with his fingers; Lori used a knife and fork.

  “Is that the way Americans eat cheese?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have very dirty napkins. Is that the way Americans are—the way you have written about them?”

  “How exactly did you imagine them?”

  “Not like the ones in your book,” she said. “Read.”

  It was past ten o’clock when Hubbard read the last word. By then he was so tired and so hungry, and so far into the region of his own imagination, that he had half forgotten that Lori had been listening to him. She rolled over onto her stomach, put her chin on the pillow, and stared into the ashes of the fire. She said absolutely nothing. Hubbard was puzzled by her silence, and took it as a sign that she was trying to find a way to tell him that she did not like his work, or did not understand it, or found it too complicated—the usual complaints people made about what he wrote.