At the count of sixty she opened her eyes and saw the light being cast from Lubert’s room through the main window. She set off, climbing the stairs carefully, keeping her feet on the carpet and avoiding the exposed and noisy wooden edges, mindful of the creak, the spying maid, the unsleeping child. As well as cunning and stealth, an adultery seemed to require all the innocent daring and invention of a child. Was that what this now was? Adultery? It didn’t feel as though it was. But did any adulterer feel that? What defined it? Was a mere thought enough? A kiss? Or would she officially become an adulterer when she gave the rest of herself to Lubert?
She passed the open door of her own bedroom. At the foot of the second staircase, she glanced at Edmund’s room. She stepped on to the first step, listening out for the slightest sound. Everything was heightened, and slowing. She was noticing new detail: the embossed heads of stair-rods; a high-pitched ringing in her ears; the warmer air at the top of the house. The door to Lubert’s bedroom was a fraction ajar, emitting an isosceles of light. She put one foot in it. She saw her shoe, the same shoe that had walked her, guilt-free, to all manner of rooms to perform perfunctory domestic actions; it did not look like the shoe of an adulterer. She pushed his mercifully uncreaking door open and stepped into the new country.
Lubert was standing at the window with his back to her. She closed the door and leant back against it, keeping her hands on the handle and the questions shut out behind her. The handle pressed into the small of her back. Lubert turned, the anticipation of pleasure – or was it perhaps trepidation? – distorting his features; for a moment it looked as if he wasn’t sure, as if he might call it all off. Then he took a single stride towards her and kissed her, and as they kissed they started to undress. No sensible removing of clothes; they came off in a farcical ballet. She had to reach back to unzip herself; he tore his shirt when he pulled it off inside out and it became caught at the cuffs. When they were naked he seemed to want to stop to take her in, but she led him to the bed.
At first, she barely noticed him, his smell, his taste, the difference of him; she did not want his particularity, and she avoided looking into his eyes, or opening her own. She did not want tenderness. She did not want kindness. At the peak of it she cried out louder than she knew, loud enough to obliterate his ecstasies. Loud enough for him to put a silencing hand over her mouth.
‘They’ll hear us.’
She didn’t care.
She lay there, inhaling the smell of the act, feeling its evidence inside her, spreading out from her middle and radiating to her extremities.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I imagined you this way. So … fierce.’
She didn’t answer. She lay there with her eyes open now. They held hands, their forearms and thighs sticking to each other. She felt highly receptive to the detail of the moment, to him and to the room: a birthmark the size of a sixpence on his side, her pulse visible in the rising and falling of her stomach, the boniness of his hips, the tiny blue veins around his chest. Naked, Lubert seemed longer and slimmer, and his skin was pale white, several tones lighter than hers.
The plain facts of the makeshift room began to develop. She took in the furnishings, hastily removed from the rooms below and stored here to accommodate her: his architect’s desk and drawing utensils; books stacked on the floor. And, leaning against the wall, unhung and facing away, a large painting. Its dimensions were the same as the stain in the hall.
Lubert started to caress her shoulder.
‘Is that the picture?’ she asked.
Lubert didn’t answer.
‘Stefan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Am I allowed to see it now?’
His reticence only made her want to see it more.
‘Go on,’ he said, eventually.
Rachael swung her legs to the floor, pulling off the counterpane and wrapping it around herself, more for warmth than modesty. She knelt on the floor and turned the painting around. She knew, without asking, who it was. Her own speculative picture was not so far off, and the familial similarities too pronounced for it not to be.
‘Claudia.’
Lubert nodded.
‘She is striking. I see Frieda in her. Why did you take her down?’
‘I didn’t want her watching me any more. Rachael. Come back.’ He patted the bed, not wanting to dwell on this subject.
Her curiosity overrode his discomfort. ‘Why didn’t you tell me – when I accused you? That it was her?’
Lubert looked conflicted. ‘Because … I have been trying to forget. And because, if I had told you, I might not have kissed you. And then you would feel sorry for me. And think that I was still in love with my wife.’
‘Are you?’
‘Please. Turn it around.’
‘But are you?’
‘I can’t be in love with a memory. I want more than this.’
Rachael looked at the portrait one more time then turned it back to face the wall and returned to Lubert’s bed.
Lewis was hunkered down behind the protective blast-wall with Ursula and the three delegates from the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency, awaiting the first controlled explosion of their dismantling tour. The Russian delegate, Colonel Kutov, was yelling something, but Lewis couldn’t hear a word. He removed his ear mufflers and turned to Ursula.
‘What did he say?’
‘Something about sending the wheat to your zone.’
Lewis put his mufflers back on. ‘The bastard’s enjoying it.’
He reflected on the absurd logic of the equation: they blow up a soap factory which employed two thousand Germans, made something everyone needed and had no military value whatsoever and, in return, the Russians sent the Germans bread. It was like balancing Hell’s ledger.
The handful of protesters gathered at the gates of the Henkel Soap plant were easily being contained by a dozen black-caped German police. The general was right: Christmas was an ideal time for demolition work.
The agency had calculated that the explosion would be heard thirty to fifty miles away. The detonation, when it came, was unviolent and oddly beautiful: the smoke billowed symmetrically either side of the building and then, like a man collapsing to his knees but trying to maintain his dignity by keeping his back upright, the whole structure crumpled to the ground and disappeared in a nimbus of rubble smoke that flowed out in a radiating cauliflower of dust, almost reaching the blast-shield and enveloping the delegates. The wump of falling masonry would be felt far away, mistaken for massive stacked thunder or the nearby passing of a great train. Perhaps some would think it the final ghost-wave of lost squadrons coming to finish what they had started.
The collapsing of a tall chimney provided the coup de grâce, after which Kutov stood and applauded the razing as though he were at a private fireworks display. He was right to be impressed, it had been technically superb: the Royal Engineers were getting very good at these controlled explosions. Jean Bolon, the French member of the delegation, and Lieutenant Colonel Ziegel, the American, stood up and clapped, too.
As Lewis watched the dust disperse, revealing the pile of masonry and rubble beneath, he suddenly saw Michael, trapped beneath the beams, mud and clay of the Narberth house. Even though Rachael had described the scene to him, he’d never permitted himself to visualize it fully, constructing instead a picture he could live with – one that consisted only of a neat pile of masonry, not unlike the one that lay before him at this moment, and never included his son’s body.
Kutov started yelling something else at the delegates, repeating it over and over and pointing to his watch.
; ‘What is he saying now?’ Lewis asked.
‘It’s midnight,’ Ursula said. ‘He says “Happy Christmas” – in Russian.’
The delegation was billeted at a small hotel on the road to Cuxhaven. It was one in the morning by the time they arrived, but Kutov was treating this trip as a holiday and he was not going to allow them to get to bed lightly. The five of them went to the bar to toast the day’s successfully completed operation and the saviour of mankind. The general produced a bottle of vodka.
‘The drink that won the war,’ Kutov said, raising the pure spirit. ‘You English have your gin,’ Kutov said, turning to Lewis.
‘The drink that helped us forget the war,’ Lewis said.
‘And you, Monsieur?’
‘Pastis,’ Bolon offered. ‘The drink for those avoiding the war.’
‘But we have the drink that will win the peace,’ Ziegel suggested. ‘Martini: the greatest of all American inventions. Don’t underestimate it. I can handle two,’ he said. ‘Three, and I’m under the table. Four, I’m under the hostess. This stuff, though – well.’ He held the shot glass of vodka. ‘I don’t seem to notice it.’
‘What about you, Frau Paulus?’ asked Kutov. ‘What drink can your country offer?’
Ursula had been quietly observing things, and Lewis sensed she was having some kind of allergic reaction to the Russian.
‘I would say beer, Colonel. But you have taken our hops and wheat.’
Ursula stared at Kutov, giving no indication that this had been intended as a joke. Kutov stared back, his eyes beady and threatening. Ursula held his gaze, staring him down. And then Kutov slammed his hand on the table and laughed like a man utterly incapable of being offended. He was thick-set, without a neck, and strong. The whole table shook when he struck it.
‘You have humour, Frau Paulus. I like this. And you have reminded me of a drinking game we used to play in the Red Army.’
The game involved trying not to blink for as long as possible while someone clapped their hands in front of your eyes. Kutov played chief clapper, eliminating Bolon after ten seconds, Ziegel after thirty. Lewis almost survived the minute, but this was more from fatigue than skill; the game was easily won by Ursula, who blinked only after three minutes, when Kutov resorted suddenly to yelling ‘Ha!’ at her.
Kutov then sang a plaintive Russian folk song, and Lewis was unable to decide whether he was a sensitive soul or an ugly sentimentalist. Lewis was all ready to turn in when Ziegel suggested another game.
‘When we were killing time before the landings we used to play this game called But for the War. It helped us get to know the new recruits. You know this game? It’s easy. You just have to say what you would be doing now if there had been no war. Good things, bad things, it doesn’t matter. But it needs to be true. The others can interrupt you and challenge you if they don’t believe you or want to know more.’
Kutov hammered the table in approval. ‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘I do not know this game but I like it already very much!’
Lewis caught Ursula’s eye. He widened his in mock-alarm. He was ready to retire, but a sense of obligation and a certain curiosity kept him in his chair.
Ziegel continued: ‘I have the bottle in front of me to indicate that I am speaking. We pass to my left. I’ll start. Nice and easy. Okay. But for the war, I … would still be selling life insurance in Philadelphia. But for the war, I would never have seen the Eiffel Tower. But for the war, I would probably have four kids instead of two by now. But for the war, I’d be a few pounds heavier than I am. There. That’ll do for now. You can pass the bottle whenever you want. Keep your powder dry.’
He passed the bottle to Kutov.
Kutov took it in his hand. The Russian’s fingers were thick and covered in cuts. He stroked the bottle with his other hand and solemnity came upon the room. ‘If not war,’ he said in a mournful voice, then he paused for several seconds. The others braced themselves for an atrocity-laden tale; for reminders of how Russians bore the greatest human cost of the war. ‘If not war, then this night I would be in Leningrad with my wife.’ Another silence. No one was sure what to make of this. He looked forlorn, almost broken; he breathed in histrionically through his flaring nostrils.
‘I’m sorry, Vasily,’ Ziegel said, and he reached to touch the brute hands.
Kutov suddenly beamed. A broad, conniving grin cracked his egghead. ‘And every day I thank the stars I am not with that bitch!’
Relief made the laughter louder.
‘So. If not war’ – Kutov thought some more – ‘if not war, I still be with wife, and three children: my Masha, my Sonya and my Piotr. I would be a bad father shouting. I would be working at the Bureau for Communications. I would be fishing in the ice holes on weekends. And, if not war, I would have no excuse.’ He paused again.
‘Excuse?’ Bolon asked.
Kutov shot another vodka and refilled his glass. He then stood up abruptly. ‘If not war …’ He lifted his shirt to reveal a barrel chest; his belly was pocked with black scars.
‘This for stealing cow. A farmer in Polzin.’
‘And where is this farmer now?’ Bolon asked.
Kutov pointed to the ground.
‘Moo!’ Ziegel said. ‘Good share, Colonel! Good share.’
Kutov then passed the bottle to Bolon.
Lewis could not place the Frenchman at all. He was certainly no soldier. A civil servant? An academic perhaps?
‘But for the war … I would not be enjoying this international experience of comradeship …’ he began.
Kutov approved of this choice of word, and he demanded four chinks and cheers from each delegate. ‘Comrades!’
‘But for the war …’ Bolon continued, ‘I would not be here, of course, but working still in Beaune. But for the war, I would have gone on to finish my doctorate. But for the war, I would … still be with Angèle. But for the war, I would never have met my wife.’
‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,’ Ziegel said.
‘What about this girl, Angèle?’ Kutov asked.
‘I was in Paris when the Germans invaded. I could not get back to Beaune. Angèle was a secretary at the department. She had nowhere to stay …’
‘We get the picture, Jean … we get the picture,’ Ziegel said.
Ziegel was by far the most obviously drunk, but Lewis was himself feeling it; sure that if he moved he would fall over. Despite this, he accepted another shot from the Russian. It was proving effective at keeping the tide at bay.
‘And where is this Angèle now?’ Kutov wanted to know.
‘She was arrested. My professor denounced her to the German authorities. She was Jewish. I left the university after that. But … I met my wife, Juliette. And so. Comme ça … enough for now.’
Bolon passed the bottle to Lewis. ‘Colonel Morgan. I see stories in you.’
Oh yes. Lewis was full of stories – his life as coloured by war’s consequences as any – but he was not ready to tell them. Not at this or any table. He had no stomach for comparing scars. For the last hour, he had been smoking practically in a fugue, trying to hide himself behind a smokescreen fog.
‘Colonel?’
He passed the bottle to Ursula. ‘Sorry. I’m drawing a blank. You have a go, Fräulein.’
‘You must say one thing, Colonel. Anything.’
‘Come back to me,’ he said. ‘You go.’
Ursula put a hand around the bottle.
‘But for the war … I would still be married,’ she said. ‘I might have had children. And I would have liked to have four. I would still be teaching in Rügen. I would not have lost a brother to … the re
gime. But for the war, I would never have walked across a frozen sea.’
‘You were escaping from us?’ Kutov cut in.
Ursula nodded.
He laughed. ‘You thought these English would treat you better!’
Ursula looked at the Russian. ‘Yes.’
‘They did not have to face what we faced,’ he replied. It had taken until now, but the pride of one who had suffered more was finally surfacing.
‘There are some things war cannot excuse, Colonel. Whatever you’ve faced.’
‘Continue, Miss Paulus,’ Ziegel said.
‘But for the war … I would not have walked from Rügen to Hamburg. And seen … along the way how cruel man can be. And how … kind.’
‘Detail, Fräulein! Detail!’ Kutov demanded.
Ursula stared hard at the Russian. He had tested her all day and night. He seemed almost proud of winning her indignation.
‘But for the war, I would not have seen the cruelty of Russian soldiers raping an old lady then beating her to death. But for the war, I would not have seen the kindness of their leader, persuading his men to spare me and let me go.’
Kutov immediately waved this off. ‘Count yourself lucky.’
There was another staring competition between Ursula and Kutov, which Kutov won by smiling at her then laughing heartily. But this time the others didn’t laugh with him. Lewis was glad he’d recommended Ursula for a London posting and that she had accepted. If she and Kutov were in such close proximity for a month together, there would surely be an international incident.
Ziegel tried to move things on. ‘So, Colonel, you have an unfair advantage over all of us now. We know nothing about you.’
Lewis tapped out a drum roll on the table with his fingers. ‘I’d like to turn in. We have an early start.’
‘Come on. How bad can it be, Colonel?’ Ziegel coaxed.
‘This isn’t my kind of game, gentlemen.’
The Aftermath Page 24