by Peter Watson
In it she admitted tacitly that there might be something of the masochist in her, that she thought she had always been destined for just such a tragic relationship as theirs had become. I cannot remember the exact words, of course, but she had concluded along these lines:
So you see, Bruno darling, you have arrived at the emotional state I have been in since we met; one in which you fiercely love the person you cannot have completely. At last we are, in a strange way, equal. We can be together but we can never be married. We may never have children.
It was the worst letter she ever wrote. At least the worst one that I read. Konstanze was a Catholic, brought up to her own brand of interesting but futile melancholia. She could not betray her religion. Bruno was a Protestant who wanted to make a fresh start. He now loved Konstanze wholeheartedly, but for him the natural culmination of that love was, ironically, the same as the Catholic Church’s: he wanted children.
After she had written the letter, Konstanze had gone away. She had met friends through her job who lived in Bernkastel. She closed up the flat and left no forwarding address. Bruno called there, and at her office; he even paid a visit to her parents’ house, but no one knew where she was.
She was gone two weeks, and it was while she was away that Bruno was killed.
At the end of April, Bruno and two friends who had been with him in the box at the concert when he had first met Konstanze, had finally been awarded their “wings” and had graduated to full-pilot status within their unit. They thus joined a military elite who were the pride and joy of mothers up and down Germany, the envy of almost every schoolboy and the heroes of many young women.
The official ceremony for the graduation was a parade at which the “wings” badge was awarded, followed by a cocktail party given by the unit’s commanding officer. Bruno never mentioned it in his letters, but it occurred to me that he would have attended the party, the peak of his flying career to date, without either his wife or Konstanze. Despite the fact that they were little short of gods, Bruno was probably the only young pilot at the ceremony without a woman.
However, besides the official graduation ceremony, there was an unofficial one, quite different from the commander’s cocktail party. It was, in fact, a highly dangerous affair but, because the Luftwaffe was such an elite organization, and carried with it such an enviable reputation, a blind eye was turned. It was also a ceremony that was not without its poignancy as far as Bruno was concerned.
To the south of Munich, near where Konstanze and he had bicycled on their early rides, where they had watched the motor cruiser slip through those white lock gates, there were three bridges across the river Isar. Two were railway bridges, high iron cobwebs, red with rust in places. The third was a road bridge, a small but elegant suspension bridge with wires spraying out from each support like an enormous coxcomb. At some point in the days that followed the official ceremony—for obvious reasons the exact time was kept secret—new pilots from the Luftwaffe’s Munich squadron were expected to take off and fly their planes under the two railway bridges and, most dangerous of all, through the suspension bridge, above the roadway and between the two sets of wires.
Each time the stunt was tried there was a hullabaloo, from the local bishops, the newspapers, and the sensible citizens, but nothing was ever done. Indeed, as I was to learn from later letters, there had only been two accidents in the seven years the Luftwaffe squadron had been stationed in Munich.
Bruno and his colleagues had made their attempt in the late afternoon of the first Wednesday in May. As sometimes happens in Europe in May or June, there was a heat wave and that may have been part of the trouble, for the air was very unstable. Another problem may have been the sun, which was setting at the time the three pilots embarked on their victory flight. Where the three bridges cross the river, the waters of the Isar flow east to west—into the setting sun—for a few miles before turning south.
The valley and the river are wide, for the most part, and so, in good conditions, for a pilot who keeps his nerve, the bridges present no real problem. But on a hot May evening, with an inexperienced, possibly emotional, pilot it is another matter.
As the youngest of the three pilots, Bruno went last. They approached the first of the bridges shortly after six o’clock. There was hardly anyone to watch as they swooped under the railway line, the twin exhausts of their early Messerschmidts rattling the metal webbing in a prolonged echo. But a passenger train was just crossing the second bridge as the three aircraft approached. The train was bound for Basle and the passengers in the dining car were just beginning to enjoy a predinner drink when, all at the same time, they noticed with horrified fascination the three black shapes shooting toward them a few feet below. In no time, however, the aircraft had come and gone, out the other side, leaving nothing but curdled air reeling like thunder under the bridge.
Then it was on to the third and final bridge.
It may have been that Bruno was flying too close to the aircraft in front of him. Perhaps he was slicing through air that had already been clotted by his colleagues in front. We will never know, but, in any event, the starboard wing of Bruno’s plane clipped the outermost wire on the third—the suspension—bridge.
The wire had carved Bruno’s wing in a neat way, slicing about two feet off. This meant that the forward thrust of the aircraft had scarcely been checked at all and that the bridge, save for that solitary wire, was left intact and the people on it safe. The attitude of the plane, however, had changed drastically; it wheeled and rolled downward, to its right.
Had Bruno plunged straight into the river, less of a disaster might have occurred. As it was, the Messerschmidt curled around and, almost deliberately it seemed, aimed itself, still moving at 150 knots, into a riverside gas station—the kind reserved for the refueling of barges.
The explosion occurred on impact. Bruno must have been killed instantly for his body was never found. The fire defied control for more than a day with the gas station and the Messerschmidt roasted out of recognition.
The letters did not reveal how or when Konstanze found out about Bruno’s death, whether she was told privately by a friend from the base or whether she read about it in the newspaper; nor did the letters say whether she cried.
She did not go to the memorial service held in his honor—his wife would have been there. But she was sent the hymn sheet, from which she learned that his favorite had been sung, the one based on the last psalm, about praising God with music.
If Konstanze had suffered an emotional battering while Bruno was alive, it was nothing as compared with her grief now. Naturally, she blamed herself. If she had not gone away, if he had just had his mind on flying, not on her, if she hadn’t been so stubborn, forcing him back to his wife; if she hadn’t been so quick in leaving Munich. The tragedy—even though it fulfilled the expectations for herself that she had always held—overwhelmed her.
Her grief was crushing. It might have been even worse than that except that she discovered for herself the one prop, the one psychological device that kept her going.
Her letters to Bruno continued for a whole year after his death. Once a week, on Sunday, she sat down to write to him. She never posted the letters but she did keep them. She must have been very lonely.
His death alone may have prompted this behavior on her part but, it seemed to me, it was as likely that the return of all Konstanze’s letters to Bruno, a day or so after the crash, by a fellow officer from his base, might have caused her to continue the correspondence. Presumably the letters were returned to avoid embarrassment for Bruno’s widow, who had taken his other things.
It was now that Konstanze began to go over her initial meetings with Bruno, and, with this new insight, I was able to construct a full picture of their relationship and its development. She talked to him as though he were still alive. She was conversational, as intimate as ever—even, on occasion, erotic, as when she reminisced about some aspect of their lovemaking.
In these lette
rs I found out things that at the time seemed inconsequential but later on became all-important. Things like her favorite color, her birthday, her favorite cigarettes, her shoe size, the fact that she adored asphodel—the yellow variety, not the white—mosaics, omelets and nougat. I discovered that she was a romantic about dates. She invariably remembered birthdays and anniversaries and would often know, on any particular day, what she had been doing on that date a year, two years, five years before. I found out that she was meticulous and proud about her clothes. Her parents had never been really interested in her appearance and so she had not been given many good dresses. She, for her part, was fanatical about looking clean and well-turned-out. She kept everything she had in excellent repair. She was a sentimental hoarder of things too. She kept photographs, theater programs, pressed flowers, empty perfume bottles, railway tickets. Finally, I learned that she had a secret fancy, a fetish almost, for pens. She loved new pens and could browse in stationery shops for whole afternoons without getting bored.
This was all in passing. Her letters to Bruno were far more discursive. There was, after all, no hurry now. She told him about the new things in her life that year: she was promoted in her music publishing company and in her new capacity as the editor responsible for opera she had met the famous composer Richard Strauss. His opera The Woman Without a Shadow was new to her and it had a profound effect, given her own situation. The opera tells of a woman who, in order to have a child, is instructed by the devil to steal another woman’s shadow. This she refuses to do since it would spark tragedy for the second woman’s husband. I could see why Konstanze was affected by the opera—the parallels with her own situation were all too close.
For nearly a year Konstanze kept Bruno alive, describing the concerts she had heard, the music she was publishing. She became an expert on the Luftwaffe and wrote to him of all the new details and developments she could find from the newspapers and the radio. She followed his unit, which had moved from Munich to Hamburg, and she gave him news of that. Her letters of this time were quite long, four or five pages, and must have taken an hour or more to compose. Konstanze can have done very little else on Sunday nights for nearly a year.
In fact, I had begun to wonder whether, at this stage, she could properly be called well. Everyone should grieve, but a year writing to someone who is no longer alive? She had started subscribing to aircraft magazines and described to Bruno all the refinements that were taking place.
The more the year wore on, I noticed, the more Konstanze looked back.
“Yesterday, I cycled south along the river Amper. It was a gray day, and the clouds were dirty, like the exhausts you get from trucks. There were swans on the river, very proud and lofty but they, too, were grayer than usual. The only color came from a tribe of house martins, blue-black as ink, with dashes of lemon and very, very busy. Being near the Amper reminded me that it will be two years next Wednesday since we, or rather you, discovered that inn called The Watermill—by the bridge where they had such delicious radishes and cheese. I remember we got very merry and that you fell off your bicycle into a ditch. Very undignified for such an elite pilot! The swans I met yesterday would not have approved.”
To my untutored way of thinking, her condition seemed to be deteriorating.
What saved her, I think, was that she met Rudolf. The first thing I noticed was a gap in the letters, almost ten months. After the first encounter there came a point when she stopped writing to Bruno.
When she met Rudolf there was no question that Konstanze was still in love with Bruno, or with his memory. Once again, from the later letters I was able to deduce that she didn’t grow to love Rudolf for some time. He was very different from the young pilot, about whom Konstanze never told him. In no way could he be described as the kind of elitist god that Bruno, as a Luftwaffe pilot, had been. Rudolf was five or six years older than Konstanze, already a major in the Army, a professional. He was the quiet type, authoritative, serious, but not without a dry wit. He did not actively seek the company of women, as Bruno had done, and so could not be considered a ladies’ man in any way.
They met through friends. Konstanze had been invited back for the weekend to Bernkastel. Rudolf had also been a guest for the weekend and the couple had, inadvertently and unexpectedly, been a great success. This was all because their host’s idea of fun was to have endless games. Before dinner on the Saturday, the man had organized a wine tasting of German wines. Rudolf, who, as I already knew, was a self-taught expert on wine, romped home the clear winner. After dinner the quiz game was devoted to music. The host played tunes on his piano and the others had to guess the composer. Here, of course, Konstanze had an advantage. The host played ten tunes and Konstanze correctly identified eight of them. No one got near her, though Rudolf came second with four. The host was delighted at the success of his games and everyone applauded Konstanze.
Her prize—more a forfeit really—was to play the piano for everyone. She chose Strauss’s Piano Sonata in B and it was after the applause had died down that Rudolf went up to her. They chatted. Rudolf complimented her, saying that she knew far more about music than he did about wine. She countered, saying that he knew more about music than she did about wine. He laughed, and she always remembered that. She had never made Bruno laugh and it was a new, and pleasant, sensation for her. Relaxed, and emboldened by her success, she said how much she would like to know more about wine, that it had always fascinated her but that she had never mastered its mysteries.
“There are no mysteries,” Rudolf had said. “Only hard work … and”—he added with a jot of mischief in his eyes—“lots of practice.”
Now it was her turn to smile.
Just then the butler brought them a late-night glass of champagne and, still smiling, they toasted one another.
“Do you really want to learn about wine?” asked Rudolf as they finished sipping. “Or was that just polite conversation, Munich-style?”
She registered the fact that he knew she came from Munich. Interesting. “But of course,” she said. “I feel … well, I feel that it’s a whole area of pleasure that is passing me by. As rich as music and, probably, as varied. But I know music and I miss not knowing about wine.”
“May I teach you?”
Careful. She thought of Bruno. There would be so much to tell him in this week’s letter. And, she acknowledged with a shiver, so much to leave out.
Something like that must have gone through her mind, for she had answered, “Well—yes … if you really want to.”
“Good,” he said, finishing his champagne. “Meet me on the bridge, tomorrow, at eleven.” He drifted away then, being polite and careful not to monopolize any one of the party for too long. She had gone to bed feeling more buoyed up than she had for some time and, in the morning, changed her habit and wrote to Bruno. She had later confessed that, by writing that letter early in the day, what she wrote would be less deceitful. That’s how bad her condition was at the time.
When she stepped onto the bridge a few minutes after eleven, Rudolf was already there. They shook hands formally.
“It is such a golden day,” she said. “Why are you in that stuffy uniform?”
“I have been to Mass,” he said apologetically. “There wasn’t time to change afterward.”
He was a Catholic too. Konstanze was composed. “I went early,” she said. Then, in case she sounded a little too holy: “I couldn’t sleep. Too much champagne.”
He looked surprised, but pleased of course, that she was a Catholic also. “Let’s walk by the river. That leads to Braunes, it’s as good a place as any to start.”
I shifted on the bed. Noises in the street told me that the working day was starting and my stomach told me that breakfast was not too far off.
Rudolf had led the way down the steps at the end of the bridge. It seemed to Konstanze as if all the wildlife in the valley had rolled down the slopes and collected at the bottom along the river. Yellow hammers and jays wheeled and dipped, moorhen
s—little black tugs—shunted about on the river, and sedge, in wet, clotted swags, glinted beneath the surface of the water. Looking up, it seemed as though the whole valley was swept with a green-gold wash as the sun glazed the vines.
They walked for perhaps a mile until they were well away from the town. Rudolf talked when the absence of wildlife gave him the chance. He was affectionate about their host and about his village and, I was most interested to read, said that he admired very much the local wines of Bernkastel. In a perfect world, he had sighed, he would be a wine man, not a soldier.
Why was he a soldier then? Konstanze had asked.
He shrugged. “My father, my grandfather. The usual reason. It runs in the family, I’m afraid, like twins or red hair. And about as useful.”
She laughed again. “And where are you stationed?”
He looked at her. “Didn’t you know? Munich.”
It was silly but Konstanze blushed. Not only was the man single and a Catholic but he lived in the same city as she did. She blushed because she was pleased when he told her that and pleasure was for her at that time something of a novelty, and so something to feel guilty about.
He stopped on the path near a stile. “I don’t know why we never met before, Konstanze … but I hope that from now on we shall meet often.”
It was the first time anyone had said anything like that to her for a very long time. The blushes started again. She searched for a few words.
“I … I don’t know much about … uniforms, army uniforms. Are you a captain, or a lieutenant … a general?” She trailed off.
“Major. But, now that you know my secret, forget it. Rudolf was good enough for two emperors and it’s good enough for me.” He led the way across the stile into the vineyard and turned back to help Konstanze. “This way.”
That morning the couple visited three vineyards. Besides Braunes, they went to Schlossberg and to Doktor, so named because a Prince Bishop of Trier once believed that he was cured of an illness by the wine. In later years Konstanze would say that this wine, her first tasting of it, marked the beginning of her own recovery from the death of Bruno. Certainly, from what I could make out, the letter she wrote that weekend was one of the last she ever devoted to him.