by Irwin Shaw
Christian went back to the boarding house and tried to sleep, but he kept thinking of the morning and sleep would not come. He shaved and changed his clothes and went out. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, still light, and Christian walked slowly down Friedrichstrasse, smiling as he listened to the bustling snatches of German spoken on all sides. He shook his head gently when he was approached by whores on the corners. The whores, he noticed, were spectacularly well-dressed, real fur-pieces and smartly designed coats. The conquest of France, he thought, has had a beneficial effect on one profession, at least.
As he walked pleasantly among the crowds, Christian had a stronger feeling than ever before that the war was going to be won. The city, which at other times had appeared so drab and weary, now seemed gay, energetic and invulnerable. The streets of London this afternoon, he thought, and the streets of Moscow, are probably very different from this. Every soldier, he thought, should be sent back on leave to Berlin. It would have a tonic effect on the entire Army. Of course, and he grinned inwardly as he thought it, it would be advisable for every soldier to be supplied with a Mrs. Hardenburg when he got off the train, and a half-bottle of vodka. A new problem for the quartermaster.
He bought a newspaper and went into a café and ordered a beer.
He read the newspaper. It was like listening to a brass band. There were triumphant stories about thousands of Russians being taken, stories of companies that had defeated battalions in the North, stories of armored elements that lived off the land and the foe, and made week-long sorties, without communications of any kind with the main body of the Army, slashing and disrupting the enemy’s crumbling rear. There was a careful analysis by a retired Major General who cautioned against over-optimism. Russia would not capitulate, he said, in less than three months, and the wild talk of imminent collapse was harmful to morale at home and at the front. There was an editorial that warned Turkey and the United States in the same paragraph, and a confident assertion that, despite the frantic activities of the Jews, the people of America would refuse to be drawn into a war that they saw very clearly was none of their business. There was a story from Russia about how German soldiers had been tortured and burned by Soviet troops. Christian hurried through it, reading only the first line in each paragraph. He was on leave now, and he did not want to think about things like that for the next two weeks.
He sipped at his beer, a little disappointed because it seemed watery, but enjoying himself, with his body weary and satisfied, his eyes occasionally leaving the paper to look across the room at the chatting, bright couples. There was a Luftwaffe pilot in the café, with a pretty girl, and two good ribbons on his chest. Christian had a fleeting moment of regret, thinking, how much dearer this place and this holiday must seem to a man who had come down from the embattled skies than to himself, who had merely come from the police barracks, the double bed of Corinne’s corporal, from the sharp tongue of Lieutenant Hardenburg. I must go and talk to Colonel Meister in the War Office, he thought, without conviction, about the possibilities of being transferred to a unit in Russia. Perhaps later in the week, when things are more settled …
Christian turned the page of the newspaper to the section devoted to music. There were four concerts scheduled for that night and he saw, with a nostalgic twinge of amusement, that the Mozart clarinet quintet was being played. I’ll go, he thought, it’s a perfect way to wait for midnight.
The attendant downstairs in the foyer of the Hardenburg building had a message for him. “The lady said to let you in. She hasn’t returned yet.”
They went up in the elevator together, both of them with grave, composed faces. The attendant said, “Good night, Sergeant,” matter-of-factly, after he had opened the apartment door with a passkey.
Christian went in slowly. One light had been left burning and the blinds were drawn. The room had been arranged since he had left it, and looked quite handsome in an angular, modern way. Looking at Hardenburg, Christian thought, you’d never think he’d live in a place like this. Somehow you’d imagine high, dark old furniture, stiff chairs, plush and polished walnut.
Christian lay down on the sofa. He was tired. The music had bored him. The hall had been top warm, and crowded. After the first few moments of pleasure he had had to struggle to keep from dozing. Mozart had seemed tame and without flavor and as he half-closed his eyes in the warm hall, visions of Mrs. Hardenburg, long and naked, had kept swimming between him and the music. He stretched luxuriously on the couch, and fell asleep.
He was awakened by the sound of voices. He opened his eyes and looked up, squinting in the light. Mrs. Hardenburg and another woman were standing over him, looking down at him, smiling.
“Lo, the weary Sergeant,” Mrs. Hardenburg was saying. She bent down and kissed him. She had on a heavy fur coat, and her breath smelled strongly of liquor. The pupils of her eyes were dark and large in controlled drunkenness. She put her head next to his. “I’ve brought a friend, darling. Sergeant Diestl, Eloise.”
Eloise smiled at him. Her eyes were shining, too, in a vague, swimming way. She sat down suddenly in a big chair, without taking her coat off.
“Eloise lives too far away to go home tonight,” Mrs. Hardenburg said. “She’s going to stay with us. You’ll love Eloise and she’ll love you. She knows all about you.” She stood up and held her arms out, the soft wide sleeves of her coat falling back from her wrists. “How do you like it, Sergeant?” she asked. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Christian sat up. “Beautiful,” he said. He felt confused. He couldn’t help staring at Eloise stretched out in the chair. Eloise was blonde, too, but soft and fat blonde.
“Hello, Sergeant,” Eloise said. “Pretty Sergeant.”
Christian rubbed his hand over his eyes. I’d better get out of here, he thought, this is no place for me.
“You don’t know the trouble I had,” Mrs. Hardenburg giggled, “keeping that Colonel out of here.”
“Next trip back from Russia,” Eloise said, “I get a fur coat, too.”
“What time is it?” Christian asked.
“Two, three,” Mrs. Hardenburg said.
“Four,” said Eloise, looking at her watch. ‘Time to go to bed.”
“I think,” said Christian warily, “I’d better leave …”
“Sergeant …” Mrs. Hardenburg looked at him reproachfully and threw her arms around him, the fur silky against his neck. “You can’t do this to us. And after what we went through with the Colonel. He’s going to make you a Lieutenant.”
“Major,” said Eloise. “I thought he was going to make him a Major.”
“Lieutenant,” Mrs. Hardenburg said with dignity. “And have you attached to the General Staff here. All arranged.”
“He’s crazy about Gretchen,” Eloise said. “Do anything for her.”
Gretchen, Christian thought, that’s her name.
“What we need,” Gretchen said, “is one drink. Darling, we’re on brandy. You know where the closet is.” Suddenly she seemed completely sober. Her speech was cool and careful. She brushed the hair back from her eyes and stood very tall in the magnificent coat and a long white evening dress in the center of the room. Christian couldn’t help staring at her hungrily.
“There …” Gretchen smiled briefly and touched his lips casually with her fingertips, “that’s the way to look at a woman. The closet, darling.”
Well, one drink, Christian thought. He walked into the other room to the closet with the brandy in it.
A blaze of light on his closed eyelids woke him. He opened his eyes. The sun was streaming in through the large window. He turned his head slowly. He was alone in the disheveled bed. The smell of perfume made him swallow dryly. He was thirsty and his head began to ache. The night came back to him in sodden globs of memory. The coat, the two girls, the Colonel who was going to make him a Lieutenant, the jumble of twisting, perfumed bodies … He closed his eyes painfully. He had heard stories of women like that, and he remembered the rumors about depr
aved Berlin after the last war, but it was different when it happened to yourself …
The door from the bathroom opened and Gretchen came in. She was fully dressed, in a black suit, and her hair was bound by a black ribbon, girlishly. Her eyes were clear and shining. She looked fresh and brand-new in the bright morning sunlight. She smiled at Christian and came over to him and sat on the bed.
“Good morning,” she said. Her voice was pleasant and reserved.
“Hello.” Christian managed to smile. Gretchen’s shining neatness made him feel shabby and ill. “Where’s the other lady?”
“Eloise?” Gretchen absently stroked his hand. “Oh, she had to go to work. She likes you.”
She likes me, Christian thought grimly, and she likes you and she likes any other man or woman or beast of the field she can lay her hands on. “What’re you doing all dressed?” Christian asked.
“I’ve got to go to work, too,” Gretchen said. “You didn’t think I was an idle woman, did you?” she asked, grinning. “In the middle of a war?”
“What do you work at?”
“In the Ministry of Propaganda.” Gretchen’s face became very serious, with a devoted, earnest expression Christian hadn’t seen there before. “The Women’s Division.”
Christian blinked. “What do you do for them?”
“Oh,” said Gretchen. “I write speeches, talk on the radio. Right now, we’re conducting a campaign. A lot of girls, you’d be surprised how many, sleep with the foreigners.”
“What foreigners?” Christian asked puzzledly.
“The ones we import to work. In the factories. On the farms. I’m not supposed to talk about it, especially to soldiers …”
“That’s all right,” Christian said, grinning. “I have no illusions.”
“But rumors get around, and it’s very bad for the morale of the men at the front.” She spoke like a bright little schoolgirl reciting her lessons for the day. “We get long secret reports from Rosenberg on it. It’s very important.”
“What do you tell them?” By now Christian was really interested in this new facet of Gretchen’s character.
“Oh, the ordinary thing.” Gretchen shrugged. “There’s nothing much new you can say any more. The purity of the German bloodstock. The theory of racial characteristics. The position of the Poles and Hungarians and Russians in European history. The worst thing is trying to handle the French. The girls have a weakness for the French.”
“What do you do about them?”
“Venereal disease. We quote statistics showing the incidence of syphilis in Paris, and stuff like that”
“Does it work?”
“Not much.” Gretchen smiled.
“What are you going to do today?”
“I have a radio interview today,” she said, “with a woman who just had her tenth baby. We’ve got a Major General to give her the bonus over the air.” Gretchen looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go now.” She stood up.
“Will I see you tonight?” Christian asked.
“Sorry, darling.” She was in front of a mirror giving final, subtle touches to her hair. “I’m busy tonight.”
“Break it.” Christian hated it, but there was a bare note of pleading in his voice.
“Sorry, darling. It’s an old friend. A Colonel just back from Africa. It would break his heart.”
“Later. After you’re through with him …”
“Sorry,” Gretchen said briskly. “It’s going to be terribly late. It’s a big party.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
Gretchen looked consideringly over at him, then smiled. “You’re awfully anxious, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Christian said.
“Have a good time last night?” She went back to pushing at her hair as she stared in the mirror.
“Yes.”
“You’re a nice man. That’s a nice little pin you got me.” She came over and leaned down and kissed him lightly. “Not a bad little pin at all. There’s a pretty little pair of earrings that go with it in the same shop …”
“I’ll have them for you,” Christian said coldly, despising himself for the bribe. “Tomorrow night.”
Gretchen touched his lips with her fingertips in her characteristic gesture. “Very nice man indeed.” Christian wanted to put up his arms and pull her down to him, but he knew better than to try. “Should I bring Eloise?” Gretchen asked, smiling.
Christian closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the violent and drunken happenings of the night before. It was sickly and perverse and in ordinary times he would be ashamed of himself for it, but, now …“Yes,” he said slowly. “Why not?”
Gretchen giggled. “Now I have to run.” She started for the door. She stopped there. “You need a shave,” she said. “There’s a razor in the medicine cabinet and some American shaving soap.” She smiled. “The Lieutenant’s. I know you won’t mind using it.” She waved at him and went through the door, on her way to the Major General and the woman who had successfully delivered herself of her tenth child.
The next week passed in a riotous haze for Christian. The city around him, the millions going to and fro, the clang of trolley car and bus, the placards outside the newspaper offices, the Generals and politicians in their gleaming uniforms who sped by him in the long armored cars in the street the shifting hordes of soldiers on leave and on duty, the bulletins on the radio of miles gained and men killed in Russia—all seemed to him shadowy and remote. Only the apartment on Tiergarten Strasse, only the wild pale body of Lieutenant Hardenburg’s wife seemed substantial and real. He bought her the earrings, sent home for more money and-bought her a gold chain bracelet, and a sweater from a soldier who had carried it back from Amsterdam.
She had gotten into the habit of calling him demandingly at any hour of the day or night at the boarding house where he was living, and he forsook the avenues and the theatres and merely lay on his bed, waiting for the phone to ring downstairs in the grimy hall, waiting to rush through the streets to her.
Her home became for him the one fixed place in a shadowy, reeling world. At times when she left him alone, waiting for her in her apartment, he roamed restlessly through the rooms, opening closets and desk-drawers, peering at mail, looking at photographs hidden between books. He had always been a private man and one who had a deep sense of others’ privacy, but it was different with her. He wanted to devour her and all her thoughts, possessions, vices, desires.
The apartment was crammed with loot. A student of economics could have pieced together the story of German conquest in Europe and Africa merely from the stores tucked away carelessly in Gretchen’s apartment, brought there by the procession of rigid, shining-booted, be-ribboned officers whom Christian occasionally saw delivering Gretchen in heavy official cars as he peered jealously out the window to the main door below. Aside from the rich profusion of bottles that he had seen the first day, there were cheeses from Holland, sixty-five pairs of French silk stockings, quarts of perfume, jeweled clasps and ceremonial daggers from all parts of the Balkans, brocaded slippers from Morocco, baskets of grapes and nectarines flown from Algiers, three fur coats from Russia, a small Titian sketch from Rome, two sides of smoked Danish bacon hanging in the pantry behind the kitchen, a whole shelf of Paris hats, although he had never seen Gretchen wear a hat, an exquisite worked-silver coffee urn from Belgrade, a heavy leather desk that an enterprising Lieutenant had somehow shipped from a captured villa in Norway.
The letters, negligently dropped on the floor or slipped under magazines on the tables, were from the farthest reaches of the new German Empire, and although written in the widest variety of literary styles, from delicate and lyric poems from young scholars on duty in Helsinski to stiff, pornographic memorials from aging professional military men serving under Rommel in the Western desert, they all bore the same burden of longing and gratitude. Each letter, too, bore promises … a bolt of green silk bought in Orleans, a ring found in a shop in Budapest, a locket with a sapphire stone
picked up in Tripoli.… Eloise was mentioned in some of the letters, and other girls, sometimes half-humorously, sometimes with a wondering echo of past sensuality. Christian had come to recognize Eloise and the other girls as almost normal … or at least normal for Gretchen. She was beyond the bounds of ordinary behavior, put there by her extraordinary beauty, her appetite, her superhuman energy. It was true that in the morning she often took Benzedrine and other drugs to restore the violent flame of her energy which she squandered so light-heartedly. Also, sometimes in the morning she gave herself huge injections with a hypodermic needle of Vitamin B, which, she said, cured her immediately of hangovers.
The amazing thing about her was that only three years before she had been a demure young schoolteacher in Baden, instructing ten-year-old children in geography and arithmetic. She had been shy, she told Christian. Hardenburg had been the first man she had ever slept with, and she had refused him until he married her. But when he brought her to Berlin, just before the beginning of the war, a woman photographer had seen her in a night club and had asked to take her picture for some posters she was doing for the Propaganda Ministry. The photographer had seduced her, in addition to making her face and figure quite famous as a model for a typical German girl, who, in the series of photographs, worked extra hours in munitions factories, attended party meetings regularly, gave to the Winter Fund, cleverly prepared attractive menus in the kitchen with ersatz foods. Since that time she had risen dizzily in the wartime Berlin social world. Hardenburg had been sent off to a regiment early in his wife’s career. Now that he had seen the situation at home, Christian understood better why Hardenburg was considered so valuable in Rennes and found it so difficult to get leave to return home. Gretchen was invited to all the important parties and had met Hitler twice and was on terms of intimacy with Rosenberg, although she assured Christian it did not include the final, or what was for Gretchen the semi-final one.
Christian refused to make a judgment on Gretchen’s morality. From time to time, as he lay in his darkened room in the boarding house, waiting for the ring of the telephone below, he had reflected upon what his mother would call Gretchen’s mortal sin. Although he had left the church early, remnants of his mother’s bitter religious morality would occasionally rear up through the flood of the years in Christian’s mind, and at times like that he would find himself reflecting harshly on Gretchen’s activities. But he put those random, half-begun judgments from him. Gretchen was above ordinary morality, beyond it. A person of such vitality, such appetite, such raging energy, could not be fettered by the niggling considerations of what was, after all, a dying and outworn code. To judge Gretchen by the word of Jesus was to judge a bird by a snail, a tank captain by a village traffic regulation, a general by the civil laws against manslaughter.