When I went to her finally she had put out all the lights except the one beside the bed, and she was lying on the bed, naked. She opened her arms wide and said, "Come, Walter." And after that everything was so simple, so good, and so right. It was as if I had never loved before. We made love again and again, and I was in ecstasy, so was she. That which I had dreaded was wonderful, the most wonderful experience of my life. Once, as I ejaculated, I
had the feeling that all life was flowing from me, and I thought that I would have liked to die now, like this. But that wouldn't do—we had a child.
In the end Irina fell asleep in my arms. I lay awake for a long time in the dark and was happy. Then I must have fallen asleep because I felt something move. I opened my eyes. The clock read three. Irina was sitting up in bed beside me, her hands folded. I asked, "What is it, darling? Aren't you feeling well?"
"I feel wonderful," she said.
I sat up, too. The city lights lit up the window. The curtains weren't drawn, and I could see little white snowflakes drifting down. "What are you doing?" I asked, my arm across her shoulders.
"I was praying," she said, and added quickly, "but I don't know what for."
"No. Of course not."
We were silent for a while, then Irina said, "It isn't true."
"What isn't true?"
"What you said in Hamburg. That there's nothing but meanness on this earth."
"Did I say that?"
"Yes. And it isn't true. There are also such things as friendship and decency and love. No... don't say anything!" And then she whispered, "Because if there was nothing but meanness on this earth, there wouldn't be any people on it. Not one. And there are so many people—"
After that we were silent. My arm was around her shoulders and we looked at the window and watched the snow falling outside, silently, inexhaustibly.
"Herr Roland!" Fraulein Louise greeted me with a smile. "How good of you to come! I've missed you."
"I couldn't come earlier. I was ill for a few days."
"111?"
"Nothing serious. But after that I had such a lot to do, or I'd have come earlier."
526
I was sitting at a table, opposite FrSulein Louise, in a large room. She was wearing an old gray suit and bedroom slippers. A thin, hard crust of snow lay on the branches of the chestnut trees in the yard. It was too cold to snow again. "Hasn't anyone from the camp visited you in the meantime?" I asked.
"Oh, yes. Herr Pastor Demel and Herr Kuschke, the bus driver—they were here. Once. Each of them. They brought me some of my clothes. So nice of them. But they couldn't stay long. I was sorry about that. I'm lonely here. Nobody really cares for me, and I have no relatives, and no friends." I looked at her sharply as she said the last word, but her face expressed no emotion. She had undoubtedly said it without the meaning it had had for her before. "And that's why I'm glad you're here." She laid her little old hand on mine and smiled.
"How are you feeling, Fraulein Louise?"
"Oh, I'm very well. I really am." And she did look well, and rested. "And I'm so happy to be so well taken care of." She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a confidential tone. "Although things here are not all they seem to be."
This was in the afternoon, on December 9, a Monday. Bertie had let me use his car and I had driven to Bremen in it. I had really been very busy the last few days. First Irina and I had gone to the registry office, where we were told we could marry only after Irina had declared before a notary that she had never been married before and after she had presented an Eheftlhigkeits-zeugniSy or Marriage Fitness Certificate. Since this was a document she could not produce under present circumstances, we had to go to the Provincial Court to fill out the form for an exemption. We were told it would take a month before we could expect an answer to our request.
It turned out that Hem knew someone at the court, and he asked the man to put in a word for us to hasten the reply to our petition. Hem was crazy about Irina. In the evening they sat together, telling each other stories, or Hem played the cello or the stereo for her; Schoeck, of course. He showed her color prints of madonnas, paintings, and sculptures in his voluminous art books. He did this, he said, so that Irina's child might be as beautiful as the Christ Child on the Madonna's lap. He seemed to believe that it would have that effect.
Meanwhile, Irina was working from nine to six for a child psychologist as a sort of Girl Friday. He couldn't employ her as a full assistant, but he needed help for his paper work and he paid well. Irina had declared she wanted to work. When the child
came, she would stop for a while; after that she would like to complete her studies. "But right now we need every mark," she said, "until you get a job."
It didn't look as if I was going to get a job. I didn't hear from a soul. Herford and company had done a thorough job. As far as the press was concerned, I was a dead man. But I wasn't dead. On the contrary, I was very much alive. I was writing my story like someone possessed, every day from morning to night. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but something impelled me to get it down on paper as fast as I could. I had my photocopied notes and the tapes Bertie had duplicated. The recorder stood beside my typewriter on a big table in front of the window, the tapes piled high on it. Whenever Bertie had time, he came and sat with me and read what I had written, filled in when necessary, and edited it according to his experiences and memories. It became routine.
The first number of Blitz, with "Total Man" in it, was on the stands on December 5, with the picture of Max with a removable band over his dschonni. Herford had ordered an extra printing of a hundred thousand copies, and it was sold out the first morning. They printed another fifty thousand. The article was a sensation. Lester had hastily bought three American standard works and one Swedish book on the subject. Four authors—two men and two women—had formed a team and were writing the series under the byline "Olaf Kingstrom." Hem told me they copied whole pages—choosing the most lascivious references they could find—and they used every suitable picture they could get from the library's archives.
"The article is the greatest shit we've ever printed," said Hem. "Pieced together, some of it miserably translated from the English. The Swedish stuff's even worse. The transitional passages and the parts the team has written are infantile. But what can you do? The women's conference adored it, our readers evidently do, too. It only proves how right I was when I said style doesn't count. A thing can be written abysmally—if the content is popular, nothing else matters." And the whole thing reminded me of something I'd said once: "Nobody is indispensable."
The picture of Max naturally stirred up a lot of excitement in his circles. He told me that since Friday, the day the issue had come out, the telephone had never stopped ringing. He'd heard from people all over Germany, even from some he hadn't seen in 528
years. There were telegrams, too. He was being congratulated constantly on his new profession.
"Tutti keeps havin* to cry," he said. "She says she never thought she'd be living with anybody famous. But she don't want me to be getting any big ideas when the women come running in droves and the movies want me, and what-else-all! But she don't know her Max. This ain't gonna ruffle me! I ain't gonna lose my cool! No. I can't help it that my dschonni's so big. I didn't do nuthin' to make it that big. It's just a gift from God, that's what it is. Ain't that so?"
As I wrote, I was coming closer all the time to what Fr&ulein Louise had experienced. I had already left blank spaces to be filled in later, but now I simply had to see her and find out more, if I could. And what I heard was this strange sentence, 'Things here are not all what they seem—"
"What do you mean?" I asked. "Is it the nursing care? Or the doctors? Aren't they nice to you?"
Fraulein Louise said, "Shh... yes, they're nice to me. To me. But during the last days I've noticed that the nurses and orderlies don't speak very nicely about their patients. Who knows, perhaps about me, too, only I just don't happen to hear it."
&nb
sp; "I can't believe it," I said, whispering too.
"Who knows? Who knows?" Fraulein Louise shook her white head slowly. "And another thing I've noticed, Herr Roland: There's no real friendship between these people. And they don't know anything about the laws of the other life. They're just people of our earth," she shrugged sadly.
"Of our miserable little earth," I said.
She nodded.
"Yes. Alas. But," she whispered, "there's something else going on, Herr Roland."
"There is?" And: Oh, God, I thought, it's starting again!
"Yes, yes," she whispered eagerly. "Last night I could hear a loud murmuring among the employees out in the hall. And then, in the night, some of them were talking in their little lounge. I could hear them through the wall. I got up and crept out into the hall and listened at the door. I know that wasn't right, but I simply had to know what they were being so secretive about."
"And what were they talking about?"
"About Dr. Erkner," whispered Fraulein Louise, looking troubled. "Always about Dr. Erkner."
"What about him?"
"Well," she said hesitantly, "some of them said that Dr. Erkner was not a real psychiatrist, that he isn't the real Dr. Erkner."
"But that's—what else?"
"I couldn't understand anything else, but I'm sure it wasn't good. I think Dr. Erkner is in great danger."
"Oh, no!" I said.
"Oh, yes," said Fraulein Louise. "And Sister Veronica said the same thing this morning. I couldn't stand it any longer, so I spoke to her about it. She's my favorite. I told her what I'd overheard and what I was afraid of."
"And-?"
"She said, 'Oh, no!' Just like you, Herr Roland. But then she said something else."
"What?"
"She said I wasn't to tell Dr. Erkner anything about it because that would only make matters worse. Now I'm asking you, what did she mean, 'make matters worse'? So Herr Doktor Erkner must be in some sort of danger."
The whole thing depressed me. I had hoped to find Fraulein Louise in better condition. "I'm sure you're wrong, Fraulein Louise," I said. "You didn't hear right."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes. You haven't mentioned any of this to the doctor, have your
"No. I-I didn't dare."
Thank God, I thought. And Sister Veronica must have thought the same thing. She probably wanted to prevent Fr&ulein Louise from having to stay here endlessly, even if she had chosen a strange way to do it.
"No. I only told you," said Fraulein Louise. "Because I know I can trust you. You won't betray me. And you're right. I may have got things wrong. But there's something I know I'm not wrong about."
"And what is that?"
"That the people here have no idea whatsoever of the higher things in life. You can't shake me on that." She nodded emphatically, and there was silence. Finally I decided to try again, without much hope. "And my work, the story I'm writing—that doesn't interest you anymore, Fraulein Louise?"
Still immersed in her worries, she made a tired gesture with her hand. "Oh... your story "
"Yes."
"That happened so long ago, Heir Roland. All that has sunk down into eternity. The relationship between things that happen—we'll never really grasp them, not as long as we're on this earth. I mean, what all these things portend. That's why I think it isn't such a good thing to occupy oneself with things that have happened and are over and done with. Don't you think so too?"
"Yes. You may be right."
Nothing to be got out of her anymore. I chatted with her a while longer, about trivial things, then I got up to leave. "But you'll come again, Herr Roland, won't you? Please come again!"
I felt sorry for her, so I nodded.
"When, Herr Roland? Soon? Come soon, please. I may have something new and interesting to tell you."
I doubted it, and with that was quite wrong.
10
He lived in a big villa in Kftnigstein, not very far out of the city. There were many elegant villas here, standing in parklike gardens. A section for the very rich. Joachim Vandenberg evidendy had more money than I had thought. As I got out of the car, the front door opened and a man in a blue suit appeared—tall, heavyset, with black hair, a prominent nose, and shifty eyes. "Herr Roland! I'm so glad yc came. Please come in." We shook hands. "Nobody followed you, I hope?"
"No, Herr Vandenberg. I watched. I didn't notice anything." "Good. Everybody doesn't have to know about our meeting, do they? That's why I asked you to come to my home, and so late. The servants have already left." He walked into the villa ahead of me. He didn't seem to have a wife—anyway, he didn't mention one—and no children.
The villa was full of treasures: wonderful furniture, carpets, paintings, Gobelins, vases and buddhas. Vandenberg evidently collected buddhas. He led me into a large room with a great many buddhas and a fireplace. A fire was burning in it, the
curtains were drawn, lamps with silk shades shed a gentle light. We sat down in front of the fireplace in big leather club chairs.
Vandenberg rolled a little cart with bottles out of a wall closet that seemed to be the bar. "You drink Chivas, don't you?" he said.
"How do you know?"
He laughed. "Things like that get around."
"Well, in this case something wrong got around," I said. "I don't drink Chivas. In fact, I don't drink at all."
He looked astonished and slightly suspicious, then he shrugged and asked what I'd like to drink. I told him soda, and he gave it to me. He drank Chivas, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. He offered me Havana cigars, lit mine for me, and waited until it was burning properly and I'd drunk some of the soda, all the time watching me intently. An amber-colored cat came strolling out of a corner and jumped on his lap. During our entire conversation, he scratched the animal behind the ear and it purred softly. He said, "You have left Blitz.* 9
"So that's got around, too."
"Naturally. Although why you left Blitz hasn't reached me yet."
"It will."
"No," he said, stroking the cat, "I don't think it will."
"But you know?"
"Yes, I know." He laughed again. "I'm sure you haven't forgotten Herr Seerose."
"What about him?"
"He lived in Konigstein, too," Vandenberg said amiably. "Not far from here. We were friends—at least, I thought we were," he added quickly. "Actually I knew nothing about him. That he's gone, for reasons both of us know... well, I had no idea. I would have laughed at anyone who told me Seerose was an agent for the East. An absolutely absurd idea."
I said nothing.
"You find it absurd, too, I'm sure. But then, who can look into the heart of a human being?" And who can look into yours? I thought.
"Seerose and I played golf together, even in November when—when you were in Hamburg. Seerose implied that you were onto something very important." I didn't believe him, but next minute I had to. "The plans of the Warsaw Pack Nations in case of war. It was going to be the biggest story in the history of Blitzr
"He told you that?"
"Yes. He trusted me. I told you we were friends, and for so many years—neighbors. He gave me Frankie."
"Frankie?"
"My cat. My darling."
"Aha."
"Herr Roland, listen to me. I was Seerose's friend. I am horrified, naturally, by what he did, but I don't pass judgment on my fellow men. I never liked your publisher, after the way he tried to ruin my publishing house so that he could buy it cheap."
"Why?"
"Because he wanted to publish books."
That was true, only I hadn't know that it was Vandenberg's publishing house that Herford wanted.
"Today I'm much too big," said Vandenberg. "He can't touch me. But there were times when his good lawyer, Rotaug, had me by the throat. Right after the currency reforms. He hasn't forgotten that." Suddenly Vandenberg seemed to have no lips. "I haven't forgotten it either. I'm still not a friend of Herr Herford. I live according to t
he principle, 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' You understand?"
"Yes," I said, and took a sip of the soda water. The fire crackled.
"To make a long story short, I have heard—don't ask me how, because I can't tell you—that you are still writing the story. Am I right?" He exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.
"Yes." I puffed on my Havana. "I am. So?"
"Don't be so touchy, Herr Roland. I'm not going to do you any harm. What's the matter with you? Are you nervous?"
"A little," I said. "I don't like it when there are things people can't tell me."
That made him laugh. "Now look here, you shrinking violet. You're not writing for the wastepaper basket, are you? You want to see your story in print, don't you?"
"Right now I'm writing it because I feel impelled to put down what happened. I haven't thought beyond that."
"But I have," said Vandenberg. "I want to see the story published. Do you want to write a book for me?"
"I—you want me to—"
"Yes. For our fall '69 list. I'd like to come out early with it—let's say in August. Can you be done in time?"
"If I go on writing the way I'm writing now, I could have a first draft in two months."
"Fine. And then we'll work on the final draft. I know your
books. IVe kept an eye on what you've done for Blitz. You're a hellishly talented fellow. I have confidence in you. Of course, the whole thing must remain absolutely secret, as long as possible. I don't even want any of my colleagues to know about it. An explosion—that's what I'd like it to be. Time enough when you give us the manuscript to sign the contract and publicize the thing."
"Oh, I see."
He laughed again. He seemed to like to laugh. "You don't think I'm serious? You think I'm stringing you along?. Well, I'm not. The contract is just a formality. We'll discuss the terms now and I'll give them to you in writing. And the advance... since it's you, let's say twenty thousand marks now and another twenty thousand when you hand in the manuscript. Is that all right with you?"
The Traitor Blitz Page 58