Endurance

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  During the summer of his second year there, Mittermeier had returned home from the dormitory after a long absence to learn that his family had increased in number by one. A girl distantly related to his mother had lost her father in the war and come to live with them.

  This girl of twelve, Evangeline, had cream-colored hair, violet eyes, and rosy cheeks, and while she may not have been an incomparable beauty, her smile never faded as she went busily about her work, lively and brisk. Whenever she trotted off somewhere, she would leave a feeling of lightness and cheer in the air behind her, like when a swallow soars through a spring sky.

  “Michél, Michél, Michél. Stehe auf—es ist heller lichter Tag.”

  The sound of her singing had resounded pleasantly in Mittermeier’s ears: Michél, Michél, Michél. Wake up—the weather’s bright and clear …;

  “She’s such a cheerful, honest girl, isn’t she, Wolf?”

  The academy cadet had replied to his mother in perfunctory monosyllables, as if he indeed had not the slightest interest in this newcomer. From that point on, however, he had started to make a lot of trips home when he had leave, which gave his parents a clear window straight down to the bottom of his heart.

  At last, Mittermeier graduated from the academy and was made an ensign. His parents and Evangeline saw him off when he departed to the battlefield. As a soldier, this swift and courageous youth had clearly found his vocation. In very short order, he managed to distinguish himself enough to rise within the hierarchy. But although he was decisive and swift to act in every other matter, he agonized over that violet-eyed girl for seven years before he made up his mind to seek her hand in marriage.

  That day, Mittermeier had taken leave and headed off into the city. Looking this way and that, he ran between surprised pedestrians who wondered what in the world he was up to, and then, for the first time in his life, he pushed against the door of a flower shop. When the shopkeeper saw a young man in uniform come barging into her store, she feared for a moment that she was going to have a heart attack. A soldier, red in the face, jumping frantically into one’s shop was hardly considered an auspicious portent.

  “Flowers! Flowers! Give me flowers! Don’t care what kind—no, that isn’t right—I need really, really pretty ones, flowers a young girl will be happy to get.”

  The shop owner, relieved that he hadn’t come to impose some inspection or put down a riot, recommended yellow roses. Mittermeier bought half the yellow roses in the store, had them made into a bouquet, and then headed over to a confectioner’s shop, where he bought chocolates and a Frankfurt crown cake made with rum. When he passed in front of the jewelers, he thought about buying a ring, but he soon gave up the notion, figuring that that would in any case be getting ahead of himself. Most importantly, his wallet was almost empty by that point.

  Mittermeier arrived at his parents’ house carrying the bouquet of flowers and the box containing the cake. Evangeline had been in the garden trimming the lawn, and when she looked up to see the young officer standing there all stiff and formal, she rose to her feet in surprise.

  “Wol—Master Wolf?”

  “Eva, take these, please.”

  The tension he had felt in battle had been nothing compared to that moment.

  “For me? Thank you very much.”

  To Mittermeier, the gleam of her smile was almost blinding.

  “Evangeline—”

  “Yes, Master Wolf …;?”

  Mittermeier had concocted all manner of clever lines for wooing, but at the sight of the girl’s violet eyes, all his literary and rhetorical flourishes flew a hundred light-years off into the distance, and all he was able to think of was what a fool he was.

  Mittermeier’s father clucked his tongue, watching from off in the distance. “Whaddaya think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Get ahold of yourself, ya big good-for-nothing!” He had never seen how his son fought on the battlefield, so he had been endlessly frustrated by the indecisiveness of a son who took seven years to propose. As he looked on with hedge clippers in hand, his son, gesticulating all the while, spoke to her in faltering, incoherent ramblings, while the girl, looking downward, listened without moving a muscle. Then, suddenly, the landscaper’s son threw his arms around the girl, pulled her near, and summoned up all his courage to clumsily kiss her.

  “Well, he actually went and did it,” his father murmured with satisfaction.

  That day, the young, blond-haired officer had fully understood that there was something in the world more precious to him than himself. Moreover, she was right there in his arms.

  A modest wedding ceremony had been held. Wolfgang Mittermeier had been twenty-four, and Evangeline nineteen. Six years had passed since that day. They remained childless, but that didn’t put so much as a scratch on their happiness.

  Unlike the late Siegfried Kircheis, Oskar von Reuentahl had never made any woman the idol of his heart’s temple. Unlike his colleague Wolfgang Mittermeier, he had never had a proper romance with any lovely young girl.

  Ever since his boyhood, von Reuentahl had drawn the attention of women. Something about his noble features and heterochromatic eyes—black like a deeply sunken well, blue like the keen gleam of a knife—gave an almost mystical impression that drew sighs from young girls and middle-aged ladies alike.

  In recent years, this young man had come to be called a great admiral of the Galactic Empire, who combined both wisdom and courage. But even before he had become feared as a soldier for his ruthlessness in dealing with the enemy, he had been known among his acquaintances for his coldness toward women. They would fall for him one-sidedly, and once relations were consummated, he would cast them aside.

  Within a few years of graduating from the Imperial Armed Forces Academy, he and Wolfgang Mittermeier had gotten to know each other and fought side by side in many battles. Despite their differing backgrounds and personalities, they took an odd liking to each other and came to be quite close. During that period, Mittermeier married Evangeline and began a happy home life, while von Reuentahl remain single, continuing a string of dalliances that to onlookers looked like nothing more than indiscriminate womanizing.

  “You shouldn’t treat them so heartlessly.” Mittermeier, unable to simply watch what he did in silence, had cautioned him about this, and not just once or twice. To this, von Reuentahl had always nodded his head and then done nothing in the way of heeding his advice or reforming his behavior. As for Mittermeier, it had finally hit him that something was fundamentally twisted in von Reuentahl’s personality, and eventually he stopped bringing the matter up.

  In Imperial Year 484, both had participated in the fighting on Planet Kapczelanka. In that dreadful environment of bitter cold, high gravity, and mercury-laced atmosphere, a horrific ground battle had unfolded in which von Reuentahl and Mittermeier, both of them still at the rank of commander, had fought an uphill battle amid chaos and confusion, with even the whereabouts of the front line uncertain. They had fired their particle-beam rifles until the energy capsules ran dry, then, gripping their guns like clubs, had beaten alliance soldiers down into the subfreezing mud. The swings of tomahawks had split the icy air in which fountains of blood had flash frozen, unfurling crimson blossoms in that colorless world of bitter cold.

  “Hey, you still alive over there?” Mittermeier had asked.

  “Somehow, I seem to be,” von Reuentahl had replied. “How many did you get?”

  “No idea. What about you?”

  “Don’t know. I counted as far as ten, but after that …;”

  Surrounded by the enemy, tomahawks lost, blood-splattered rifles bent so badly that they were useless even as clubs, the two men had braced themselves for an early death. They had fought so bravely, so fiercely, and had inflicted such extraordinary losses on the enemy that mercy had seemed unlikely, even if they threw down their arms. Mittermeier had whispered a farewell to his wife in his
heart. That, however, was when an imperial airborne fighter had swooped down low with a thunderous roar and fired a missile into the midst of the closing FPA troops. Dirt and ice were blasted high into the air, completely blocking out the weak sunlight. Radar was confused, one corner of the encirclement collapsed, and the pair finally managed to escape in the darkness and confusion.

  That night, in a bar on post, they had raised a toast to their safe return. Perfumed showers had washed the blood from their bodies, but nothing beat alcohol for washing the blood from their minds. They were drinking as they wished, exceeding all moderation, and then suddenly von Reuentahl had sat up straight and stared at his friend. Something more than mere drunkenness had been lurking in his mismatched eyes.

  “All right, Mittermeier, you listen here—you may have gotten married, but women …; women are creatures born to stab men in the back.”

  “No need to jump to that conclusion,” Mittermeier had said, offering restrained disagreement as Evangeline’s face appeared in his mind’s eye.

  His heterochromiac friend had shaken his head fiercely, however. “No, it’s true. My mother’s a prime example, and I’m gonna tell you all about her. My father was lowborn—aristocracy in name only—but my mother …; she came from a count’s family …;”

  Von Reuentahl’s father had graduated from university and become an official in the Ministry of Finance, but very early on, his prospects within that enclosed and very class-conscious bureaucracy had run up against a wall. Afterward, he had invested in niobium and platinum mines, enjoyed five years of success, and built up a fortune that, while not exactly boundless, would have fed a family through his grandchildren’s generation.

  He had remained single until he was almost forty, then purchased reliable bonds and real estate with the money he had saved. It was only when he was fully secure in life that he thought of taking a bride and raising a family. He was thinking of finding someone of average fortune and average lineage, but the arrangement his acquaintances found for him was with Leonora, third daughter of Count von Marbach.

  In the Galactic Empire, distinguished noble families were taken very good care of in both political and economic terms, but that still couldn’t prevent every family from getting into trouble. The von Marbachs had produced debauchers as clan heads for two consecutive generations. Not only had they been forced to part with all of their spacious manor houses and villas—to stabilize their livelihood, they had even had to sell off the high-interest bonds received from the von Goldenbaum family.

  When von Reuentahl’s sensible and calculating father had seen a soligraph of Leonora in all her beauty, he had been dumbstruck. After paying off the von Marbach family’s debts, he had moved into a brand-new house with a beautiful bride twenty years his junior.

  The marriage had brought grief to husband and wife alike—even though the problem had been nothing more than a temporal gap. The husband felt inferior because of his age and birth, and had tried to make up for those shortcomings materially. That, most likely, had been a crucial mistake, but it was his wife who encouraged it. Again and again, she had nagged her husband for expensive gifts, only to lose interest in them as soon as they were given to her.

  As was occasionally the case with women in the closed-off world of high society, von Reuentahl’s mother had put her faith not in science, but in fortune-telling and the study of destiny. She had blue eyes, and when a heterochromiac child was born to her and her blue-eyed husband, it wasn’t genetic probability that occupied her mind, but rather the face of the dark-eyed man she had been having an affair with.

  Believing that the gods meant to destroy her, she had been overcome with terror. It had been her husband’s finances that allowed her to live in luxury—and also to have her lovers. Although she was beautiful, she lacked the skills needed to live on her own; what would happen if she were to be cast out into the world, together with that young man presently living a life of leisure thanks to her secret financial support? It was certain that in the end she would lose not only her material stability, but her lover as well.

  “… And that’s how I nearly had my right eye gouged out by my own mother. I was a newborn, just starting to open my eyes, and my father hadn’t seen them yet.”

  A twisted little smile had played about the corner of von Reuentahl’s lips as he told the story. Mittermeier had stared at his friend, not saying a word.

  One scene had been floating in the back of von Reuentahl’s mind:

  A young, graceful woman sits up in bed. Her delicate features stiffen, and flames dance in her eyes as she tries to stick the point of a fruit knife into the right eye of the infant she is clutching at her breast. The door opens, and a maid arrives, bringing warm milk for her mistress. She gives a piercing cry. Milk splashes onto the carpet. Shards of a broken cup scatter across the floor. People charge into the room. The woman’s fair-skinned hand loses hold of the knife. It falls to the floor, and the baby cries out, ripping the muffled air apart …;

  It was a scene he could not have possibly remembered, and yet it was burned into his retinas and his heart, and had all the substance of something he could reach out and touch. That image had put deep roots down in the topsoil of his mind, from which had sprung his deep distrust toward all women.

  Mittermeier had learned for the first time what lay behind his friend’s casual womanizing. Unable to find the right words, he took a sip of black beer. Assaulted on both flanks by sympathy toward his friend and a desire to mount a defense of women for his wife’s sake, he had looked away. At a moment like this, intellect and education were no help at all in deciding how to respond. Mittermeier had been happy in his own life, and in that moment, that had made him feel small.

  “Listen, von Reuentahl, this is just me thinking, but …;”

  Mittermeier had closed his mouth, though, when he turned back toward his fried. The young officer with the mismatched eyes was slumped facedown on the counter, having surrendered himself at last to the sweet caress of Hypnos.

  The next day, the hungover pair had sought out one another in the officers’ mess. Mittermeier, who still hadn’t felt like eating, had been poking at his potatoes and bacon with the tip of his fork when his sullen-looking friend spoke.

  “Last night the booze got the better of me. I said some things I shouldn’t have. Please forget about it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mittermeier had said. “I can’t remember a thing.”

  “Hmm. Is that so? Well, in that case, it’s for the best.”

  There was an irony in von Reuentahl’s smile. Whether it was a wry grin directed at Mittermeier’s transparent lie or a scornful one aimed at his own inebriated confession, von Reuentahl wasn’t quite sure himself. In either case, though, from that day forward, neither of them ever brought up the matter again.

  That was how it was between the two of them.

  V

  Siegfried Kircheis had long served as Reinhard’s top aide, and when he had departed to command an independent regiment of his own, a number of officers had tried to fill the vacancy he had left at Reinhard’s side. None of them, however, had lasted very long in the job. No one else in all the universe had shared Reinhard’s heart the way Kircheis had, and furthermore, the officers themselves had often been hesitant. They had lacked that mental synergy with Reinhard, and the job had a tendency to become nothing more than receiving and relaying his one-sided orders.

  Back when Kircheis had been alive and well, Reinhard, in search of staff officers, had taken on Paul von Oberstein. Now he would be glad to find a top aide with even one ten-thousandth the talent and fidelity of Kircheis.

  One day, Arthur von Streit came to see him.

  Von Streit had served under Duke von Braunschweig, the head of the boyar aristocrat confederacy, and had come to him with a bold proposal: “Instead of causing a large-scale civil war that would plunge the whole empire into chaos, we should
resolve this problem by assassinating Reinhard alone.” For this, he had incurred his master’s wrath and been cast out. When he had later fallen into Reinhard’s hands, the young imperial marshal had taken a liking to the man for his confident attitude and set him free.

  Reinhard was extremely sensitive to the beauty or ugliness of people’s actions, and he wouldn’t hesitate to praise a man like von Streit, even if he were an enemy.

  In September of the previous year, when he had lost the one who to him had been closer than a brother, the shock and the sorrow had been such that he’d almost crumbled. Oddly, though, Reinhard had felt no hatred toward Ansbach, the man who had killed Siegfried Kircheis. His own feelings of guilt had been far too deep and far too wide, and at the same time, he had found beauty in the actions of Ansbach, who had thrown away his own life in an attempt to avenge his lord.

  On the other hand, it was anger mingled with contempt that he felt toward his late enemy, Duke von Braunschweig. Unable to put capable subordinates like Ansbach and von Streit to good use, he had been a contemptible man whose vanity and pride had led him to a miserable death.

  “He was a man doomed to perish. I didn’t deliberately set out to bring about his ruin.” Reinhard believed that. In that matter, he felt not the slightest twinge of conscience.

  One day, von Streit came to see Reinhard. One of his relatives had begged him to do so, and since he had owed a favor to that individual, he couldn’t overlook the fact that he and his family were out on the streets, their assets having been confiscated.

  “If you bow your head to Reinhard, he’s sure to leave something for us—maybe not everything, but at least some of our assets.”

  Von Streit, having promised to do what he would never do again, swallowed his embarrassment and bowed before his former enemy.

  After hearing him out, Reinhard smiled faintly and nodded. “Very well. I’ll not do ill by him.”

  “I’m very grateful.”