by Sloan Wilson
“Are you comfortable now?”
“God, yes.”
“Then listen to me a little more. You’ve taught me one thing: the Germans aren’t going to win this war. There are men who can stop them. You’re going to kill all those Germans at Supportup or take them prisoner. I want to help more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I want to see it when it happens, I don’t just want to hear about it. For a change I want to see how they bleed. They walked all over my country, all over Europe, and I can’t wait to see how they do here. If you’re going to send native Greenlanders against them, no one will be able to tell me from an Eskimo woman. I’m just as strong as they are. Give me a rifle, teach me to use it and give me one of those knives the men on your ship are making. You won’t have to worry about me.”
“Brit, it’s brains, not simple ferocity, that’s going to beat these people. I have a lot to figure out. I’ll fit you in where I can.”
“You look so aloof when you say that. I don’t like you aloof.”
With a smile she threw the icy water in her glass in his face. He grabbed her, but she twisted from his arms. From a corner she picked up three slender twigs that had been tied together and he felt them sting on his shoulders until he took them from her. In the swirls of steam she turned her back to him.
“Use them on me,” she said. “It’s the custom, part of the sauna.”
“It’s not my custom.”
“It doesn’t hurt. It feels good. It brings the blood up. After this we’ll take a dive in the snow.”
“You dive in the snow, not me.”
Grabbing the twigs from him, she briskly slapped her own taut body. Suddenly she opened the side door and he saw her fling herself full length in a snowbank outside. Almost immediately she jumped up, returned with her hands full of snow and threw it on his chest. When he tried to catch her she ran outside again. He followed and for an instant they wrestled in the snow before dashing back into the sauna. After that the boiling water and the shower baths that followed made his skin tingle and every nerve respond as though he were really alive for the first time. He followed her through another door and made love to her in a big feather bed before he realized that they had entered Swanson’s house, and by then it didn’t seem to matter.
“I told you, it brings the blood up,” she said. “Love, hate and saunas—without them we might as well be dead.”
CHAPTER 46
They spent the night in that big feather bed in Swanson’s house. That did not bother him until he awoke in the morning, except there was no real morning now, only an hour or so of blurry light in the sky at noon. Staring out the frosted window into the moonlight, Paul reflected that it was one thing to lock up an old man because his beliefs made that necessary, and another thing to move into his house, drink his booze and sleep with a woman he might still regard as his in his own bed. He stirred restlessly.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t feel very comfortable here.”
“I bet I can fix that,” she said with a smile.
“Isn’t there somewhere else we can go?”
“Nowhere with a bed like this.”
She began by caressing his neck. She was impossible to resist and he did not try very hard. Never before had a woman taken the initiative and concentrated on trying to please him. He was so tired that the greatest luxury was just relaxing and allowing her to bring back his strength.
“I love you,” he heard himself murmur drowsily over and over again.
“For now,” she said.
“Why do you have to say that?”
“I don’t know. The truth is very sexy to me.”
“Would you like me to come back for you after the war?”
“I like that dream, but right now I don’t need it.”
“I love you,” he said again.
“I wonder if you really would if you knew me?”
“I think I’m getting to know you fairly well.”
“You’re still mad because I was with Swan. That’s why you don’t like this bed.”
“I can understand that you needed someone.”
“You still wonder whether I was with Peo.”
“I refuse to ask you about that.”
She gave a rueful laugh. “I used to be the kind of girl you want. I think you want me to pretend I still am.”
“No …”
“That is a very weak no. Of course I should pretend, but I have my own needs and maybe truth is one of them. Lying isn’t sexy at all for me. Telling the truth is like taking off the clothes.”
“You haven’t lied.”
“I want you to know what I am, what I’ve been through. Try to imagine Denmark when the Germans came in.”
“I can’t really.”
“My husband and my father kept saying things wouldn’t be too bad. They said we shouldn’t antagonize them.”
“In that situation …”
“But Jon loved his job. He had a record as a liberal. He used to give speeches. And my father went into his depression. He wouldn’t leave his bed. Someone had to cope.”
“You don’t have to tell me …”
“You don’t want to hear, do you?”
“I don’t like seeing you in pain.”
“The pain is in keeping it all in. Even Swan wouldn’t have understood.”
“You worked with the Germans for a while.”
“How do you think we got gas and food for the ketch? Everything was rationed and expensive. How do you think we got out of the harbor at all? Someone had to be looking the other way.”
“So you did what you had to do.”
“For the sake of my family—that excuses everything doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I told myself that, and the guilt went away, most of it. When you see people die, it’s hard to worry about sex much. You take help where you can find it and give what you must.”
“Yes.”
“The Eskimos know. They always convert everybody who comes here to convert them.”
“They sure understand necessity.”
“They understand truth. They don’t swear undying love to anyone. They think what we call fidelity must be a joke. Why should laughing together be made so complicated?”
“That wouldn’t work for me.”
She laughed. “It is working for you.”
“I guess I like the practice but can’t buy the theory. Not as a way to live forever.”
“You want me to promise to stay away from poor old Swan after you’ve left?”
“I hope you will.”
“And when Peo takes me out to teach me how to hunt seals, you want to ask him to build separate igloos for us?”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“You want me to keep myself pure for you after you’ve gone, even if I know damn well you’ll go back to your wife? Even if the war lasts years and years?”
“Well, it’s a nice thought—”
“No, it’s an ugly pretense.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to love me as I am. Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
“I guess.”
“I want to love life without having to pretty it up. Prettying it up ruins it. Can’t you love yourself without prettying yourself up?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not discovering the great love of your life that will make you leave your wife. You’re just a lonely sailor in Greenland.”
“Can’t romantic hopes be good too—?”
“As good as what we’ve got? In the long run, they’ll just make you hate to think of me. I’d like you to remember me as an honest woman.”
“That, I will.”
“So don’t ruin the laughing together with serious talk. You taught me how to hate honestly.”
“Maybe I don’t even feel so great about that.”
“I know. We’re supposed to fight wars without hating and to make laughing together
respectable we have to tell a great many lies. Don’t you get sick of it?”
“Sometimes.”
He still didn’t know how to tell her that her realistic talk left him feeling curiously empty … “Are you always going to hang onto the Eskimo idea of love?” he asked. “Will it always just be laughing together, nothing more?”
“How many couples do you know in America who have more than that? How many have less?”
“I never made a count.”
“Don’t count and let’s have no more talking. If I’ve made it hard for you to laugh, I’m sorry.”
She began to tickle him and it wasn’t long before he began to laugh. He was surprised when she quickly led him to finish the love-making and began to get dressed.
“I think I could laugh a little more with you,” he said.
“We have work to do. Don’t you want me to get the Eskimos together for you in the church?”
“How long will that take?”
“I want to visit each hut and explain a little what’s happening. Give me about an hour.”
Before leaving she fixed him a breakfast of small sea-bird eggs, smoked herring and hot chocolate, Swanson’s usual, he guessed. While waiting for her he sat in Swanson’s huge overstuffed armchair, glanced at his books, which were mostly theological discussions and anthropological studies of Eskimos, and tried to avoid picturing the old man now, huddled on the ground near the stove in one of those overcrowded sod huts. Probably the Germans, despite the atrocities they had worked on others, would be good to him, and he would be more sure than ever that all men are brothers, including murdering Germans.
When the meeting started, there was just enough daylight in the church to make the stained-glassed window, a primitive picture of Christ on the cross, glow. The stove had just been lit, and as the Eskimos filed in, their breath frosted in front of their mouths like speech balloons, and he wished they could be filled with English words. In this frigid air, the Eskimos, who could never wash their bodies in the eternal chill of their sod huts, did not smell. It was only the temperature created by white men which made them offensive, he realized. They brought many children with them, and as they crowded the benches, they looked like a furry PTA meeting. The round copper-colored faces of the full-blooded Eskimos and all the gradations of interbreeding with the whites were impassive, waiting for the next surprises from the new white men. They talked together hardly at all. The women cuddled their fur-clad babies and the men caressed the toddlers too. Paul had read that in Eskimo communities no one knew or cared who the father of a child was. The children were the sons and daughters of the whole group and were loved by all as long as there was enough food to feed them.
Paul stood next to Brit beside the lectern. She said, “I have explained that you want to talk to them about the Germans. Just speak slowly and give me time to translate each sentence.”
He tried to keep his speech as simple as possible. “The Germans are a people who look just like the Danes and the Americans, but their hearts and their minds are very different,” he began. “In Europe they have killed millions of people—”
“They don’t have a word for millions,” Brit said to him. “I’ll say, ‘The dead they left in Europe are as many as the snowflakes here.’”
The Eskimos looked incredulous.
“They have sunk an American ship just like mine,” Paul continued. “They shot all the survivors in an open boat. They have killed two of my own crew, and their bodies now wait for burial in the shadow of this church. More than a hundred Germans—”
“They don’t have a word for ‘hundred,’” Brit said, interrupting her translation. “I’ll say ‘more than ten times our fingers and toes,’ but try not to use numbers.”
“Many of them, more people than we have here, have settled at Supportup-Kangerdula,” he continued. “They will kill us if we do not kill them.”
The Eskimos again looked incredulous.
“I need your help,” he said. “I have many guns, large and small, but I need your help to get them near the Germans. I need your dog sleds and your knowledge of how to hunt in Greenland.”
While Brit translated their faces were impassive.
“I will pay for your help,” he continued. “I will give you guns and ammunition which you can keep when I go. I will give you canned meat, sugar, coffee and tea.”
Now they all smiled and he knew he had them. Somehow he felt as disappointed and guilty as he did relieved. In one respect he had lied to them—he did not think the Germans actually would kill them if they minded their own business. But without their help, he was sure that many more of his own men would die and he would rather let a few of these strangers die instead. That was the truth of it, and he had to live with it.
When Paul had finished, Brit gave a long, impassioned speech in their language. He heard her use of the word “Germans” frequently and guessed that with the fervor of a new convert, she was teaching them to hate. This seemed to be an ironic sacrilege in a church, but he reminded himself that even a prayer for victory cannot really be without hate.
“I told them what happened to my husband and son,” she said when she had finished. “And I told them that Swan was out on the island trying to teach the Germans the error of their ways. They would expect that of him. Wasn’t that a good idea?”
“Fine.”
The Eskimos now put their hands up like good pupils and asked questions. They wanted to know exactly what they should do. Paul said he would soon send men in to give them guns and explain their use. They would make plans together. Through Brit he thanked them, praised them for their understanding. Then he hurriedly left.
“What time do you have to go back to your ship?” she asked.
He glanced at his watch. “A little more than an hour.”
“How about some lunch? I can fix you a sandwich on the boat.”
She rummaged in the bottom of a locker in her little galley and came up with a small can of Danish ham which he guessed she had been saving for a special occasion. He sat down on a bunk and watched while she sliced both the ham and a homemade loaf of bread very thin.
“I’m afraid you’ll never find a woman who can do as well as the cook on your ship,” she said with a smile.
Arranging a pillow, he lay comfortably back. Her knife poised over the bread, she appeared to be studying him.
“I’m trying to imagine you in civilian clothes,” she said. “I can’t. What did you usually wear before the war?”
“Gray flannel slacks and a tweed coat.”
“You were a student?”
He found he had caught some of her desire to be loved as he was, or at least understood. He told her how he had supported himself by selling clothes, playing cards and taking out charter parties on his father’s old boat.
“You were a poor, penniless American student with a yacht?” she said with a smile.
“During the Depression we couldn’t sell her for anything like she was worth. I at least made her pay her expenses.”
“What is your wife like?” she asked, her voice so casual that it was disarming.
“That’s not fair.”
“You mean, women like me aren’t supposed to ask about wives?”
“No, it’s just a damn confusing question.”
“Is she a student?”
“No.”
“What does she do?”
“She decorates a house and she dances at the U.S.O. to improve the morale of our country’s fighting men.”
“I don’t know what that means. You sound so bitter!”
“Probably I have no right to be, but I do get angry at her sometimes. I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that. Do you think that the wife of a soldier overseas should entertain the troops at home?”
“Are you afraid she’s unfaithful to you?” Brit asked, arching one eyebrow a little.
“I’ve worried about it. She used to be sort of wild. It must be hard for a wife to be left alone for so long. The war
bitches everything up.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Not much more than two years.”
“Were you happy?”
“I don’t think I really know what that means. Things were pretty mixed up. No, damn it, I wasn’t happy. I never admitted that before either.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Don’t have any until you’re sure where you’re going. Marriage shouldn’t trap people, but children can.”
“I believe that.”
“I’m too old to dream of your coming back for me, so I’m not speaking selfishly.”
“I know.”
“I don’t read palms, but I’m not bad at reading character. You’re kind of shocked by me and by yourself with me, aren’t you?”
“Maybe a little.”
“You’ve never done anything like this before. I’m afraid I’m sort of the end of a dream for you, a terrible crack in your American idealism.”
“Am I really all that naïve?”
“I admire you for it. My husband was like that. He couldn’t imagine being unfaithful to me. He told me that often.”
“And you?”
“For a long time, but as you say, the war bitches everything up.”
“To be honest, I don’t think that Sylvia and I were headed for much happiness, even if there had been no war. I have never been able to face that.”
“What do you think was wrong?”
“I don’t know. I never felt I was satisfying her.”
“Sexually?”
He felt his face start to burn. “Among other ways.”
“She made you feel that you were no good?”
“Sometimes, and maybe I made her feel she was no good.”
“I used to be a rather difficult young girl myself, and I think I’ve learned a little about you.”
“I’m afraid to ask what.”
“All last night you kept asking me if I was satisfied. That seemed a great worry for you.”
“I’m sorry.” This time his face really was burning.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, coming to stroke his face. “That’s a rather charming worry, especially for a man so young. I meant it when I said I was fine and you’re fine. You don’t have anything to worry about.”