by Paul Griner
“A bad childhood experience?” Claus asked.
She was silent longer than he’d expected, and he worried he’d touched a raw nerve. “Didn’t mean to pry.”
She shifted her arm in his. “No. It’s all right. I have had a few bad experiences in the dark, but unfortunately, they’ve all been as an adult. I didn’t want to bore you.”
“Bore away,” he said, and then, worried she might mistake his joke, squeezed her arm. “Really, you couldn’t. I’d like to know.”
She told him a bit about Hamburg after the last war, how little electricity and light they’d had, how her husband, Horst, had played the piano for them in the dark, which was usually a fine thing, a way of making them all happy, but came at last to seem futile.
“How so?”
“Well, probably because it felt so heavily metaphoric. Art against the darkness.” She laughed. “Sometimes that seemed too much to bear, but I suppose that was only on the days we hadn’t much to eat.”
“And your husband?” Claus asked, unable to wait. “What happened to him?”
The light wedge of her face dipped and he had his answer even before she spoke. “He died.” Her chin rose again. “Only a few years ago, it seems, though it’s been closer to ten.”
“I’m sorry.” He felt heat leave his body like water flowing from a balloon. Leaving him behind must have meant leaving his grave. To escape his guilt, he asked if she liked her hospital.
“Oh, yes. It’s a wonderful place. Well supplied, which is nice. It’s been years since I worked in one of those. Though it’s rather busy now, with the invasion casualties and the flying bombs. And it seems we get only the worst cases.”
“Unpleasant.”
“Strangely, no. The more intractable a patient is, the more involved you become.”
“If I get injured, I’ll do my best to be difficult,” he said.
She turned her head toward him and he wished he could make out her face, to see if she was smiling. That beautiful mouth. He leaned toward her but she walked on, hurrying ahead to pass a telephone box whose door was shaking, the dark forms inside writhing.
After a long, embarrassed pause she said, “The only lines outside buildings in Paris are Germans at brothels. And do you know the most peculiar part of it? The prostitutes are labeled ‘heavy workers’ and receive the same rations as factory hands.”
Near a cinema, its side doors blown off, bits of disembodied music floated into the warm air, the last bars of “God Save the King.” They faded out and the ALERT slide flashed on the screen, and the patrons put on their steel helmets.
“Home’s not far,” Kate said. “Let’s go.”
He imagined she did not like to be out when the buzz bombs were dropping; the unavoidable conviction that danger could hunt you out more easily in the open.
“Different than Paris, isn’t it?” he said. “You probably wish you’d stayed.”
“You know, I hate the fog, creeping in through all the windows. I’d forgotten that. I like that restaurants can charge only five shillings per meal and that I don’t need coupons, but the English can be so cold. No sense of life, of living. They’re incredibly efficient, and resolute, but they seem to have no passions, though perhaps it’s just the war sharpening their qualities, both good and bad.”
“It’s not bred in the bone,” Claus said. “You’ve changed. Perhaps they will.”
“That would be nice. And after all, being able to walk like this is better. The Parisian nights were so empty between curfews and blackouts that it seemed medieval.”
“It’s dark here too. Some stars are visible for the first time in five hundred years.”
“But without the violence. Murder, beatings, shootings.”
“Of Germans?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes of collaborators, sometimes of innocent civilians, sometimes of people who were anti-German before the war. No one’s safe from it, and no one’s allowed out after eleven.”
“Wearying, I imagine.” He found himself explaining his film, the scene where the woman is suddenly confronted with a choice between food and clothes.
“My,” she said, “that’s difficult.”
“You don’t find it realistic?”
“No,” she said, and laughed. “I do. After years of privation, who wouldn’t want something a bit better, some reminder of what once was, of what one once was?”
“Perhaps you can come when we’re filming, give pointers to the actress.”
“Only I’ve never acted.”
“Here now, love,” a woman said. “We all have.” A prostitute, who shined her flashlight over Kate’s ankles.
When they didn’t stop, she said, “Got one, have you?” though it wasn’t clear to which of them. Kate’s arm stiffened in his.
“Quite a lot of them, aren’t there?” he said.
“Yes, how the fallen are mighty.”
He laughed and they continued down the dark ravine of Piccadilly toward Green Park, the invisible taxis passing noisily, the black, beleaguered buildings looming above them. Up and down the street, cigarette lighters flashed like lightning and the pedestrians’ blue torches jiggled like swarms of summer fireflies, stopping only to inspect someone. He was happy not to be among them.
“It’s changed a lot since I was a girl. The duke of Wellington still had a great house here then. Gardens too. And the prostitutes would never have been out by day.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Some. It’s surprising. I remember walks here with my father as a young girl, on the way to his hospital.”
They passed a boisterous crowd of Scotch Guard band members, lugging their instruments back from an evening concert, then came within smelling distance of the Hyde Park piggery; the sudden odor of spring in the country, manure and mud, scents he’d always liked. The pigs grunted.
“Not Americans, I hope,” Claus said.
Kate caught the reference to soldiers and their public sex and laughed.
The great ring of antiaircraft guns in the park began firing their rockets, and the concussion of the blasts made it seem they were bouncing into the air, causing Kate and Claus to hurry; the noise and the falling shells, the blinding flashes, the rank noxious scent of burning rubber. She gripped his arm as they ran.
Nearer Curzon Street they slowed to a walk and began to talk again, Kate pointing out neighborhood landmarks, her butcher’s, smaller than the others and often more poorly supplied but whom she frequented because he didn’t cheat immigrants, the street baths, the clock over the druggist’s that hadn’t lost a minute in years despite all the bombs, but their conversation stuttered to a stop as twin doodlebugs approached. Their engine notes grew louder and progressively more cranky, and bolts of fear surged through him—like many, he had an irrational belief in the safety of his own district, an equally irrational sense of increased danger in strange ones—and they found themselves crouching and holding their breath by the stairs to her building when one engine cut completely.
“I can’t see it,” Claus said, and Kate put her finger to her lips and shook her head, as if talking might lead it to them, her eyes wide in her pale face.
It passed over them with a peculiar rustling sound, like a huge bird flapping ungainly wings, but even so the explosion a few blocks away caught them both off-guard and knocked him onto her. “Are you all right?” Kate asked, as if she’d been the one to fall on him, squeezing his shoulders and face like someone checking for wounds. Before he could answer she kissed him and before he could even think they were upstairs in her darkened rooms yanking off each other’s clothes.
After, she got up and pushed aside the blackout curtains. The moon had risen late and Claus tilted his watch into a sliver of white light.
“I suppose you’re about to say you have to go,” Kate said.
Is that the English way? Claus realized that his joke might be taken as an insult, implying that she slept with many, and didn’t say it. “Sorry. I’m not in any hurry to leav
e. No work tomorrow. If you want me to go, you’ll have to tell me.”
She reached to squeeze his hand. “Stay,” she said. “Please.”
“I’d love to.” When he rolled over, he laughed and drew his fingers across her thigh a few inches above the knee, where apparently dark skin gave way to light.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “At least I can afford the cream. ‘Stockingless Cream, by Cyclax, so he’ll never know,’” she said, quoting the ad, “or Elizabeth Arden Fin 200. The latter is harder to get, but far superior. Some girls I work with use gravy or cold cocoa.”
She patted his calf, the Spirit of ’76 tattoo. “The difference between me and you is that mine runs in the rain.”
He didn’t want to talk about that yet and said, “How come Greta had stockings tonight and you didn’t?”
“Gave her mine. I wanted her first night out to be memorable. Poor thing. I’ll bet right now that if she’s not passed out, she’s remembering it far better than she’d like.”
“Do you want to go check on her? Cure her hangover?”
“Yes, but I won’t. I want more to stay here. Wicked, aren’t I? But the older I get, the more I find that indulging myself now and then isn’t a bad thing.”
He shifted around so his head was near hers and they lay quietly on the hot, wrinkled sheets, listening to the sounds of the city drift through the open window. Claus ran his thumb over a needlework clamshell on the pillowcase.
“My industrious past,” she said, and rested her hand on it.
He thought he might have slept. Kate touched his face, lightly, and closed her eyes. After a few minutes, her fingers twitched and she murmured something in German, Trost, he thought, but he didn’t respond, and then her hand dropped away and she was sleeping profoundly.
He leaned over and whispered in her ear, to be sure. Her name, twice, which elicited only a flutter of her eyelids, and then, hardly believing it even as he said it, his own. Claus.
June 26
BERTRAM DIDN’T PUT DOWN the newspaper when Claus came in. “Bloody Irish.” He shook his head. “Couldn’t trust them at the end of the last war either. As ungrateful as the Indians. Look at this.” He tapped an article. “Blowing up power plants in Belfast. Bad enough that we have to deal with the renewed destruction of London by the Germans. Now this in our rear.”
Claus never felt more Irish than when Bertram attacked them. “Perhaps that’s just it,” he said. “They’re hoping you’ll deal with them once the war’s over.”
“Not bloody likely, if they keep this up. If that’s what they want, they should help us.”
“They tried, for several hundred years. And especially during the last war.”
“Listen to you. You’re not even Irish.”
“Half,” Claus said. Normally they didn’t talk politics, but at times like these Claus couldn’t hold his tongue. “Which isn’t how you framed it when you first contacted me.”
Bertram put the paper aside and glanced ostentatiously at the cuckoo clock.
“You’re late.”
In a previous existence, Bertram must have been one of the lesser gods of time. “Sorry.” To forestall further complaints, Claus held out his hand. “I do have a reason.”
“Haven’t you always?”
Claus didn’t want to talk about hurrying home from Kate’s to change before coming here—doing so seemed a type of betrayal, though earlier in the war she’d have been a godsend, someone he could use in letters and broadcasts to Germany, a woman with torn loyalties—but he couldn’t avoid her completely. Bertram was bound to find out about her. “A damsel in distress.”
He sat down, crossed his ankles, and told Bertram about Kate’s argument with the Hyde Park speaker, her claim that the French would have been better off losing the last war, leaving aside the intervening days and the fact that he’d slept with her the night before.
“Interesting. And you stopped to listen? This morning? You look good. Younger. The rest of London is exhausted and you look like you’ve had a month’s rest. Remarkable.”
Claus didn’t pause long, as Bertram might begin to suspect him, and he decided to ignore the second part of his comments. “I stopped to save her. The crowd was getting ugly. I thought a few of the Frenchmen might rough her up, though she seemed convinced that the French, gentlemen to the end, would do nothing of the sort.”
Bertram snorted. “She was right about that, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. The French wouldn’t fight from a deep-seated inferiority complex. Deserved, I might add. The Almighty in His infinite wisdom didn’t see fit to make Frenchmen in our image.” He sat behind the desk. “Let’s get on, shall we? I have other appointments.”
The backfiring-engine sound of a buzz bomb came briefly through the window and Bertram said, “Don’t worry, it’s the first ten years that are the hardest.”
A line from the Blitz. “I should think after the Guards’ chapel, buzz bombs wouldn’t be a topic of humor,” Claus said.
Bertram paled. “The Guards’ chapel was exaggerated.”
“Please. I saw it.”
“The bomb itself?” Bertram seemed surprised.
“The aftermath.” Most of London had made a pilgrimage to the site, scene of a Sunday-morning massacre. The walls were standing, a portico, but aside from the bishop—presiding from the protected altar—nearly everyone else, all holding open their purple hymnals and singing dutifully during the morning Mass, had been crushed by the collapsing roof. Children and their parents, some of the army’s best officers.
“Well, many of the tales you’ve heard are exaggerated. I’d think you’d have realized that by now. My God, your job is propaganda.”
“This isn’t propaganda, Bertram. The destruction is real.”
“Yes, but the deaths aren’t. Eight hundred, the latest rumor was. If you’ve seen the chapel, you know it held no more than two.”
“No more than two,” Claus said, but did not go on; saying it once was sufficient comment on Bertram’s callousness. “Can I pass along the figure of eight hundred dead?”
“Certainly. Give the Germans the higher count. Another mark in your favor.”
“How about the bombs themselves?”
“What about them?”
Claus uncrossed his ankles and leaned forward. “My suggestion to move the landing points?” Madrid and Hamburg were asking for information about where the bombs were landing, and Claus had proposed giving them incorrect coordinates, saying they were landing a bit north of where they actually were so the Germans would correct south. Soon, they’d be landing in the country. If that wasn’t possible, he’d suggested he ask about upcoming targets, so they could move people. The night before, lying awake next to Kate, catching a whiff of her blackberry-scented skin while listening to the bombs buzz across the sky, he’d felt a greater urgency. Not just because of her, of course, it was Winifred and millions of other Londoners, but suddenly it had become more personal.
Bertram moved to the window, its panes crosshatched with tape. A bus passed by with few passengers on the roof, common these days. Only a month earlier it would have been jammed despite the cold, people’s arms thrust between the crowd to grab a railing, but London’s human tide was ebbing again.
A caravan of American jeeps followed the bus. Bertram counted them and turned back. “Fourteen,” he said. “Present company excluded, I fear you Americans are going to be insufferable in the years to come.”
So now he was American. When Bertram needed Claus to do something, he was German or Irish. Bertram had recruited Claus—if a form of blackmail could be counted as recruitment—by telling him that if his Irish ancestry was suspect, his German lineage was more so, and he’d made it clear that the only way Claus could avoid being deported to Canada or interned for the war’s duration was to work for them. The master manipulator. Though that wasn’t quite fair; Claus had allowed himself to be manipulated. Part of him wanted to be useful and prove that he was loyal.
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��Americans insufferable?” he said. “How?”
“Saint-Mihiel and Château-Thierry in the last war, and now Normandy.” Bertram opened both his hands. “You’ll have won the war again, you see, just like the last one. Of course, that again disregards the years we fought before you were even in.”
“And what has that to do with my suggestion?”
“Nothing. Trying to avoid it.” He turned to the window again and clasped his hands behind his back. “On the issue of redirecting the bombs, you should know that high command agrees with you. As do I. We brought it up at a cabinet meeting.”
Claus kept his voice neutral; if he appeared eager, Bertram would grow suspicious. “Then we can do it?”
Bertram opened his hands behind his back. “No. The cabinet didn’t like the idea.”
“Politicians.”
Bertram glanced at him; Claus’s voice had been surprisingly bitter. “Yes, you have much to complain of them, American ones, at least.” He straightened the photographs on his wall, Churchill above the king. “But Churchill doesn’t like the idea, and not because of politics. He won’t play God.”
“But why not? We do all the time, determining what information to give the Germans. Besides, the war is nearly over. What better time to do it?”
“Normandy isn’t a sure thing, even now. Could be another Dunkirk, if the Germans release the mechanized units from around Calais.”
He sat and swiveled the chair to straighten his bad left leg. “I understand your desire. But to be fair to the politicians, how would you like to explain to one of your Sussex constituents that you’d allowed her mother or child to be killed instead of an office worker in Westminster or a widower in Southwark?”
“It’s common sense. Bombs in the country are far less likely to hit anyone. In the city it’s a certainty.”
“Less likely, more.” Bertram waved his hand back and forth as if turning pages. “Neither is certain. If the bombs fall on a farm and destroy a husband and wife, their family won’t think it kind, or fair. Nor would you, I suspect.” He sat back. “You know, you’re not choosing where the bombs land, you’re only reporting locations and times, information the Germans might also get from other sources.”