by Per Wahlöö
‘Tonight you’ve admitted three offences already. Wherever will this end?’
He put his hand down behind his chair and lifted up the water-jug. Then he got up and walked round the desk, just as elegant an unmoved as before. Willi Mohr drank and was given a cigarette and a light. The other man returned to his place.
‘The electricity really is poor,’ he said, looking at the bulb, which had again begun to flicker.
Then he sat in silence for a while, looking at the man on the bench.
‘You should have a family,’ he said, pointing with his middle finger at the three photographs in the leather frame. ‘It’s very important for a man to have a family. It gives him a wholly different anchorage in life. I well remember after all those years as a soldier, what a change it meant. Perhaps you don’t really appreciate it to the full until you have children of your own. You ought to get married. Then you have two essential things to live for, your work and your family. The family makes your work more worth while, even if as in my case, you sometimes don’t see all that much of them. You get a more definite understanding of what you’re working for, evidence that your aims really correspond to the work you do to achieve them.’
Willi Mohr was not listening. His cigarette had gone out and he was holding it between his fingers, staring at the portrait. It seemed to him that the Caudillo’s lips were moving, like the last time, and he did not like it.
‘Have you a fiancée in Germany perhaps?’ said Sergeant Tornilla.
‘No.’
‘Not even before either?’
‘Yes, perhaps, in a way. Once.’
‘A long time ago?’
‘During the war.’
‘You were in Poland in the war, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, in Gotenhafen.’
‘Was it a nice town?’
‘No, not especially. Rather small, wide streets and small, square houses. A very large harbour. Full of army people.’
‘I was in Poland once or twice too. My impression of the Poles was not particularly favourable. They seemed very hostile, almost irreconcilably. Like the Russians.’
‘They had good reason to be. It was an unjust war.’
‘That’s right. But why? Well, because it was lost. Even here that’s thought to be a historical truth now, although it’s admitted that the opposite result would have been better. The war became unjust the moment it was lost. And the result might well have been different.’
‘Don’t talk about the war,’ said Willi Mohr, crushing his cigarette-end out in the ash-tray.
Sergeant Tornilla pushed the packet of cigarettes across the desk and followed up with his lighter. Then he sat in silence and waited.
‘Gotenhafen was a dreadful town,’ said Willi Mohr. ‘I was there for a year, from February forty-four to January forty-five. Second Submarine Cadet Division. More than two thousand men, jammed into an ex-luxury liner which had been painted grey. Everything was grey, except the snow, and that turned grey too, as soon as it reached the ground. It was always windy and the whole of your damned war went through the town like an endless grey snake. Stores and tractors and hospital ships and grey boats which came and went and grey voices bawling out lies from a grey loudspeaker. And every night one lay in terror that they’d bomb the place and the ship would heel over and drown you. It did in the end, and drowned five thousand people, mostly women and children. And almost half of the Second Submarine Cadet Division.’
He fell silent.
‘What happened?’
‘The Russians torpedoed it, a Russian submarine.’
‘I’ve read about that. During the evacuation, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ruthless.’
‘Not at all. That’s your war, just as it should be. Anyhow, what d’you think one can see in a bloody great storm in the middle of the night? Woman and children? Huh.’
‘And what happened to you yourself?’
‘Nothing. Nothing happened to me. I never saw the enemy, not until the war was over, and then there weren’t any enemies any longer, were there? That’s the rules. I just saw thousands of grey people with grey faces. They came from somewhere or other and stood on the quays and waited in their tens of thousands. In snowstorms. Some died, I suppose. There were air-raids sometimes, so they say. But no bombs ever fell where I was, and I saw nothing. And the boat I was on got through. That was a liner painted grey too, but an older one. And it didn’t drown me.’
Unfortunately, thought Willi Mohr. And the next second he thought about himself talking like this with great surprise. He must pull himself together.
‘But you had a fiancée there?’
‘Yes, if you can call her that.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Barbara.’
‘German?’
‘Yes.’
‘Born in Gotenhafen?’
‘Posted there. Women’s Naval Corps.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Did she disappear after the torpedoing?’
‘I don’t know which boat she was on. Most got through. We were soldiers. Never knew anything about anything.’
‘You never met her again?’
‘No.’
‘Did you look for her?’
‘Everybody was looking for someone. But there was no one looking for everyone.’
‘And you loved each other?’
‘We made love.’
‘Do you mind talking about it?’
‘Not at all. But it’s not worth it.’
‘No, perhaps not,’ said Sergeant Tornilla.
He picked up a photograph and handed it over.
‘Do you recognize this man?’
A thin, ordinary Spanish face. Like a road-labourer’s, perhaps a little more lively.
‘No,’ said Willi Mohr.
‘Well then, so you sailed with Ramon Alemany for almost three weeks, nineteen days to be exact?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘No.’
Answer in monosyllables, thought Willi Mohr. Don’t let him get you talking again.
‘Let’s talk a little about the trip to Corsica. Was the weather good?’
‘I’m tired,’ said Willi Mohr. ‘I need some sleep.’
‘Naturally. I should have thought of that before. You can sleep here. Or would you rather go home?’
‘Yes.’
‘You want to go home?’
‘Yes.’
Sergeant Tornilla got up, smiled and held out his hand.
Willi Mohr swayed as he got up. He was drenched with sweat and everything blurred in front of his eyes. The other man looked exactly as he had done when he had got up from the armchair the first time, an eternity ago.
‘I’m sorry I’ve had to wear you out,’ he said. ‘And now, until the next time.’
He threw his hands out apologetically. Smiling.
Then he walked to the door and opened it politely.
Reprieve, thought Willi Mohr as he stood out in the porch. The dawn light hurt his eyes.
The sun had just risen behind the ridges on the sea side and the mountainside was bathed in its clear white light. A little of the cool of the night remained and although it was already hot, the heat had not yet become oppressive. The long, low, yellow stone building of the guard-post appeared empty and dead, and the silence lay like a hood over the countryside. Willi Mohr stood quite still in the great dusty stillness and looked at the buildings which rose in a jumble beyond the olive-trees. This was the town up in the mountains. Here lived a number of priests and a doctor and some officers and policemen and naturally someone who owned the sheep and most of the land, and three thousand people too, simple and poor and happy over the miracle that they were allowed to create new families for this community. Most of them had fought for three years in the war to avoid experiencing this miracle.
He had lived here for more than a year, su
fficiently long to get to know the milieu without breaking through or carrying out systematic studies. Now he was standing there, waiting for the town to wake, rise and cry out, not in revolt, but in an agony of death and despair.
He was beyond fatigue now, and could not control his thoughts, which had broken through the barriers and become impulsive and irrational.
Willi Mohr shrugged and began to walk along the road between the olive-groves. It was still straight and smooth but the rains of the last few months had crumbled the edges and washed away most of the gravel.
He looked straight ahead and walked through the town with long strides, calmly and mechanically. The only people he saw were two civil guards standing in the middle of a cross-roads staring out to the east. They were smoking and had leant their carbines against the low wall along the edge of the road.
He went into the house in Barrio Son Jofre and shut the door behind him without locking it. Dimly, he was aware that such details would no longer change or even influence his situation. He poured water into the bowl for the dog and gulped down what was left in the jar. Before he left the kitchen, he glanced at his watch. Nearly six o’clock. The interrogation had not been especially long, at the most three or four hours.
He did not bother to wash, but went back into the room and lay down on his back on the mattress, his straw hat over his face, without undressing or taking off his sandals.
Thirty seconds later it struck him that they were going to kill him, presumably without telling him why and without giving him another opportunity to kill Santiago Alemany. But that did not matter any longer. He just wanted to sleep.
Just as he was about to fall asleep he thought once again about Barbara Heinemann.
9
In December 1944, Barbara Heinemann was just twenty-one and two years older than Willi Mohr. She was five-foot-eight, weighed ten stone and had fairish hair drawn into a small knot at the back of her neck. Dressed, she seemed plump, but that was largely due to her thick stockings and ill-fitting uniform. She did not have any special physical advantages, apart from her youth, but together with Willi Mohr she was undeniably beautiful. Once, when he had pointed this out to her, she looked in the spotted mirror on the wardrobe door and said: ‘Why, you’re quite right. I can even see it myself.’
The room was small and shabby and they had scrounged together three rolls of adhesive tape and an unwarrantable number of emergency rations to be able to rent it.
He slept with her sixteen times and before that he had had only a few misleading experiences from field-brothels, where the exhausted whores were shaved for hygienic reasons and usually refused to take off much more than their woollen bloomers.
Barbara was the first woman he had seen naked, and with astonishingly photographic clarity he could remember what she looked like, especially from behind.
It was snowing outside and the room was full of a greyish soft light. She was standing on the bare floorboards some way away from the bed, calm and relaxed, her head bowed and her arms hanging loosely at her sides. Her feet were slightly apart and she had lifted her right heel a few inches off the floor so that her knee was slightly bent and her weight was resting on her toes and the front part of her foot. Her legs were not slim and nor were they exactly shapely, but they were quite long, with well-rounded calves and the muscles ran in soft ridges at the back of her knees. Although the distance between her heels was no more than an inch or so, her legs touched each other in one place only, a few inches below her crotch where two slight bulges caused the insides of her thighs to meet. Above this point he could see the daylight between her thighs and a few curly hairs outlined against the light background. Although her hips looked firm and reassuring, her backside was small and her buttocks firm and well-shaped, a horizontal crease below the left one making them look uneven in size and shape. The narrow cleft between them opened out into a diffuse cavity, soft and kindly, and farther up, on each side of the small of her back, were two dimples, irrationally placed with the left one higher and a little farther away from her spine. Her hips had no even curve, but ran in an irregular line which was both beautiful and inviolable and beyond all geometrical definition. Her shoulders were a little broader than her hips and the contour from armpit to waist was soft and pure and simple. Her shoulder-blades were like resting wings under the soft skin, and a little farther down, shadows gathered in a shallow hollow down her spine. Her arms looked loose and relaxed, and he could not see her hands as they were resting against the front of her thighs, just below her loins. Neither could he see her breasts, but he knew they were small with pale brown, quite circular nipples. She was standing quite still with her head bent forward and her eyes directed at some point on the floor, just in front of her and a little to the left.
He could never decide whether he had seen her stand in this way just once or whether it had been repeated every time they were together.
Anyhow that was their starting-point. Then she turned round, swiftly and softly, and came over to the bed with her blue eyes shining with confidence and expectation.
Later on, he had on numerous occasions found that she was a steady and well-made girl, but that she would probably have grown fat on a diet containing high-quality nourishment. And that her eyes were shining because she wanted him, which she undoubtedly did. But that made no difference.
She was by no means a virgin when they met, but he persuaded himself that she changed with him and showed the same tendencies to awakening and liberation as he did himself. Naturally he was quite right, even if he did not know whether he wanted it.
They made love quite uninhibitedly, in every way they could think of and with a persistence and systematic eagerness that even they themselves found surprising, at least at first.
He remembered this part of their life very well and found he usually remembered her from behind.
Lying on her stomach with her cheeks against the coarse grey pillow-case, her thighs apart as she thrust away with her elbows and knees to try to get in a better position. She whimpered and whined, her tongue running over her lower lip and beneath him her body thrashing about with wild uninhibited frenzy. During her orgasm, she kicked out desperately with her legs and threw her head from side to side, biting the dirty pillow.
He had a whole gallery of memories of her, mostly in various attitudes of abandonment.
She was sitting astride him, panting wildly, her mouth open and her eyes glazed, riding him until her shoulders and breasts grew shiny with sweat, and as it came for her, she bit her lower lip and beat him on the chest with her fists.
Or she was lying on her side along the wall with her head towards the end of the bed, her knees wide apart and the soles of her feet together so that her loins were wide open to him. He caressed her, lightly but methodically and inexorably over one single spot, tenderly extending her until she broke and collapsed, sobbing and helpless in total surrender.
That happened one of the last times, when they had already discovered most of each other’s nerve-points, late one January evening, with refugees seething round the quays and the thunder from the front a dimly distant sound beyond the banks of fog and driving snow.
There were other memories too, less photographically and coldly registered, but he had managed to make a chrysalis of those a long time ago, and they appeared only seldom, mostly when he was ill or totally exhausted.
Her hands on his body, for instance, and the times he had woken with his head on her shoulder, enveloped in her soft, safe warmth.
Barbara reminded him of Hugo Spohler in one way. She possessed a capacity for reacting normally under abnormal circumstances, and for finding simple positive ways out of apparently hopeless situations. And she was a great fixer. She found it easy to tackle things and considered a problem something to be solved. It was she who arranged for the attic room, and if she had not taken the initiative it was doubtful that they would ever have found a mutual bed to lie in. It was she who got fuel for the cracked tiled stove in the corner be
hind the wardrobe, and it was she who began to undress the moment she had slammed the door shut and put on the hook. It was she, too, who got hold of contraceptives the first time, though they did not bother to use them later.
It was she who had stood naked a little way away from him, her head bowed and one heel raised off the floor, staring at something, before turning round and looking at him with eyes shining with happy expectation.
She was not a nymphomaniac, which otherwise would have been a cheap explanation and later could have been an evasion. On the contrary, she was, as far as he could make out, a perfectly normal young woman with normal sexual reactions. After their meeting she was happy and content, but pale with exhaustion, occasionally finding difficulty in walking.
The very first time, she had known more than he had done, but only a little of what they both knew when they parted. He was quite certain of that.
But she wanted to use her hands and her lips, her mouth and her tongue, her tenderness and her body for something which all those were meant to be used for. Before it was too late. As he did. And they did not have much time.
This in itself was banal. Many other people behaved in just the same way at that time and naturally there too, even if most of them had to make do with tin shacks and empty goods-wagons. But that did not make any difference either.
At first he often thought about how they had met and made love to each other on sixteen different occasions, mostly with two or three days in between, because of the difficulties of arranging leave at the same time. The first time was a Sunday and they did not use contraceptives. It was in the middle of the day and quite light in the attic room and they were naked and he lay over her on the bed. When it began to fire in his loins and the paralysis began to spread, he was seized with his old uncertainty and thought of stopping. But she noticed it at once and drew her legs high up and grasped his testicles and forced him to spurt his hot fluid seed deep into her. She did not let go until his convulsions had stopped and his organ had begun to soften. Then he lay in her arms and she held him as if he had been a toy teddy-bear or a doll. After that neither of them had hesitated, not on any occasion, and this gave him cause for thought. Even ten years later.