The Passage of Love

by Alex Miller

  ‘And seeing into their souls, to see into my own soul.’ Martin flicked the ash from his cigarette towards the ashtray. ‘I sat with those young men in their barrack rooms and in factory yards, or in the backrooms of taverns where they were known. I was one of them. I was as impressed as you are by history. We were all young men. For the first half-hour or so we talked of our official union business and of how I might support them from Breslau. I have often tried to remember, but without success, how I judged my moment to disclose that the true purpose of my visit was not the affairs of the union but to recruit them into a resistance movement against the National Socialists. Once that purpose was even hinted at, there was no going back. As soon as I mentioned my membership of the group, I placed my life in the hands of the young man I was talking to, a young man I scarcely knew and whom I was usually meeting for only the first or second time.’ Martin stopped speaking and looked at Robert. He might have been trying to decide if this was the moment for him to disclose his true purpose in befriending Robert.

  ‘When I entrusted a young man with my true purpose, it was always a moment of great emotion for both of us.’ He waited, staring now into the unlit gas fire. ‘Our thoughts raced and our pulses quickened. It was the moment when the stranger became my executioner or my comrade. It was always a shock, to both of us. We at once assumed with each other an entirely artificial coldness, knowing that now we must defend ourselves from the contagion of emotion. Few were able to disguise their fear. I watched for that fear and saw it cross their features before they had a chance to mask it. And they knew I had seen it. When I told him what I expected of him, the young man was flattered to have been chosen, and terrified of the consequences. If he had a wife and child he was also terrified for his family. Some had dreamed of being entrusted with just such a mission. For these the weight of responsibility darkened their eyes and aged their features in an instant. They were no longer the person they had been a moment before. I had trusted them with my life, and had asked for their life to be entrusted to me in return.’

  Martin stood up and walked over to the curtained windows. He pulled the curtain aside and stood looking out into the darkening garden where the rhododendrons were like a black forest. Without turning back into the room he said, ‘In those days we had no way of knowing who was operating with the Gestapo. The Gestapo itself was a new organisation. I could have been setting a trap. Some of the young people I recruited had long dreaded a call such as mine, and had also believed it to be their right and their destiny to receive such a call. These young men, the ones who had dreamed dreams of themselves, accepted their new role gravely and in silence. They were the ones who knew in their hearts that they would not turn back, no matter what. They had passed through a gate, and the gate had closed behind them, and at once they knew themselves to be more alone than they had ever been before in their lives. They no longer belonged to the easygoing world of family life and work but had entered into the deep conspiratorial world of the resistance. To leave and seek safety abroad was no longer an option for them.’ Martin paused. ‘There was a kind of purity in our situation at that moment that was beautiful and which was also wholly unnatural.’

  He turned from the window and looked at Robert. For Robert he was a dark silhouette, the figure of a stranger at the window.

  ‘In the silence that followed my disclosure, I saw that the young man asked himself if he would be able to withstand torture or if he would crack and betray his comrades. Everyone asked himself this question and none knew the answer to it. The question haunted them. They didn’t really know yet what torture entailed: the final humiliation of one individual by another individual. Few of these young men—and there were a few women too—few of them were so fortunate as to never discover the answer to this question. We had informants within the Gestapo, but generally once one of our members was arrested they went into the silence alone and we heard no more of them.’

  Martin came back and sat down in his chair again. He leaned forward and carefully butted his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Then, with great deliberation, he lit another one, as if the first one had become distasteful to him. He drew deeply on the cigarette.

  ‘Our strategy was flawed,’ he said. ‘We believed it was imperative for us to build a national network of cells among the workers, who would then align themselves with our movement. It was our dream to unite the working class and the intellectuals in a common resistance against the National Socialists. For this strategy to work the ring of secrecy had to remain inviolate. Maintaining complete secrecy is a human problem, not an intellectual one, and of course we failed at it. When the ring of secrecy was broken in one place, the Gestapo swept through town after town arresting everyone connected to our group, and our carefully constructed network was destroyed. Most of us who survived the purge began again, and slowly the ring was rebuilt and sealed once again, until it was again broken.’

  Martin sat very still for a long time, his cigarette forgotten between his fingers, gazing emptily into the shadows of the room. ‘Because of our mistaken strategy,’ he said, ‘most of those young men and women were murdered.’ He turned to Robert. ‘Our resistance was futile. We should have fled.’

  In the silence that followed Martin’s confession, Robert was imagining the vast shadowland of Martin’s past standing behind him. He knew now that for his friend that dark past, and his feelings of futility, remained an unfinished story within him. He looked at Martin and he couldn’t think of anything to say that would do justice to his feelings for the older man, his gratitude that Martin had entrusted him with such a confession.

  Martin said, ‘I’ve kept you late. Lena will be wondering where you’ve got to.’

  Both men stood, facing each other, neither speaking. Then suddenly they embraced.

  22

  Driving home to Red Bluff through the evening traffic, Robert was thinking of Martin for the first time as a man wounded in his soul, like his own father; both of them men who’d somehow survived the very worst. For himself, the unimaginable. He parked the Renault in the garage and went around to the front porch and let himself in. Lena was practising the piano. She stopped playing when he came through the front door. There was the smell of cooking. Mrs Soren did everything for them. She was happy. They were her purpose. Lena came out into the hall. ‘How was Martin?’ she said.

  ‘Fine. Birte sends her love.’

  They went down the hall and into her old bedroom, which they were using as a private sitting room these days. She’d had his red chalk drawing of the fighting man mounted and framed and had hung it on the wall above her writing table, where her books and papers were spread about. An open notebook, her writing forward-leaning, small and neat. He began to read her notes. She reached past him and closed the notebook and said, in a slightly annoyed voice, ‘I can’t understand why you don’t just start writing.’

  He stood looking at her in amazement. She had the frowning, troubled expression that he had come to know whenever she was in the mood for a fight.

  She held the notebook and sat down at the desk. ‘I don’t know why you think you need to do all this study,’ she said. ‘You should be writing your stories.’

  He said, ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this. You know I’m not ready to write yet.’

  She looked up at him. ‘I’ve always thought you’d just start writing your stories. If you really want to write, you should be doing it, shouldn’t you? You’ve got the time.’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t be very impressed if I got distracted from my degree at this stage.’

  ‘I hope you’re not doing it for Mum, for God’s sake.’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘You do exactly what she wants,’ he said.

  ‘She’s my mother, not yours.’

  They stared at each other. He said truthfully, ‘I might write Martin’s story one day. He should be recognised.’

  She snorted. ‘What nonsense. You’d have to learn German.’

  ‘And I might j
ust do that.’ He felt indignant at her attack on him. ‘Why do you do this sort of thing? I don’t know where you’re coming from sometimes.’

  She opened her notebook and sat looking at it. In an abstracted voice, she said, ‘Maybe you’re not really going to be a writer after all.’

  He said, ‘Fuck you! I’ll go and talk to your mother.’

  She looked up at him and smiled. She seemed to be delighted that she was having an effect on him. ‘When we first met I thought you were exciting. I wondered what was going to happen. You were the only really free person I’d ever met. I thought you were going to be unpredictable. I thought of you as my cowboy.’ She gave a short laugh and kept looking at him.

  He said, ‘So I’ve disappointed you.’

  She said quietly, ‘I expected you to go on being you.’

  ‘I am being me.’

  ‘No you’re not.’ She picked up her pen and began writing in the notebook.

  He stood looking down at the back of her head. He said again quietly, ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘You’re trying to turn yourself into one of us,’ she said. She didn’t look up.

  He grabbed her shoulder and roughly turned her towards him. She smiled at him. His heart was thumping. He let go of her shoulder. ‘I’m just trying to become educated,’ he said. ‘I can’t just flick a fucking switch. I’ll never be one of your lot.’

  She turned back to her notebook and went on writing.

  Mrs Soren called from the kitchen, ‘Dinner’s on the table, you two.’

  Lena closed her notebook and stood up. ‘I love it when you’re angry,’ she said. ‘Did you think of hitting me then?’

  He said, ‘I thought of killing you.’

  23

  Lena’s breathing was reduced to the tiniest gasps. She was already wheezing when she got home from work. It was the middle of winter, the weather grey and raw. Robert heard a cry and went out into the sitting room. She lay on the couch like a broken bird, sipping water, her eyes filled with panic, begging him for his help. Mrs Soren came into the room white with fear. ‘I’ve called the ambulance,’ she said.

  He was sitting on the couch beside Lena, holding her hand. ‘Shouldn’t we call the doctor?’

  ‘She needs the ambulance.’

  The ambulance men gave her oxygen but it didn’t help; the oxygen mask even seemed to suffocate her. Robert went in the ambulance with her to St Vincent’s, where she was known. The instant she saw the doctor walking towards her along the corridor her breathing eased. It was like magic. The throttling grip on her throat relaxed the moment the doctor took her hand in his, the colour flowing back into her bleached skin, her eyes filling with tears of gratitude and love. She gripped the doctor’s hand and thanked him. She called him David and he leaned down and kissed her forehead. The doctor went along with the trolley, holding her hand, and Robert brought up the rear. He felt useless.

  That night he dreamed he was wearing his leggings and boots and spurs. He couldn’t find his horse. He woke in the night thinking of his old room and smelled the mustiness of disuse, the damp under the peeling wallpaper, heard the elm copse swaying in the breeze out the window. The scene of his struggle with the fighting man and his lovemaking with Wendy, and those first months of his life as a student. The narrow bed in the corner. The mood of those days vivid in him as he lay there in bed beside Lena in the blue room. He felt as if he had left behind him something precious. Had abandoned it without thinking. And he felt again the quality of the freedom he’d forfeited. It seemed to him as he lay in bed thinking of these things, the possums dancing in the roof cavity above, that if he really wanted to he could pick up his old life again. Find once again that troubled freedom he had known without knowing it.

  24

  It was August. Robert was in his third year. He came home from the university that afternoon and from the hall saw the Reverend Dr Eady sitting on the couch in the front room, holding a cup and saucer. He turned and looked at Robert. Lena was sitting opposite him, a tea tray on the table between them. They both looked at Robert as he came into the room.

  Lena said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘She’s dead.’ That was all. And she smiled. It was the secretive smile of a child who has misbehaved. She might have said, It’s over! It’s finished! She didn’t want to hear his condolences.

  Robert had never experienced grief before. The thought of Mrs Soren dead. She’d had a massive stroke while shelling peas into the colander at the kitchen table, Mozart on the radio. She had died instantly. It did not seem possible. Robert said, ‘Sorry.’ He was weeping. He went out to the blue room and sat on the bed and wept. He was still sitting there when, a few minutes later, he heard their voices and then the sound of the front door closing.

  Lena came in and stood by the open door. He looked up at her. She said, ‘I’m fucking free!’

  He stood up. The fierceness of it went through him like a knife; the exultation, her pain, the shock. She bent double and laughed hysterically, her weird laughter ringing through the empty house.

  He said, ‘You’re crazy!’

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I suppose I am. She’s gone!’

  In the weeks after Mrs Soren’s funeral, Robert and Lena lived in the strange emptiness of the house as if they were waiting for her to come back and things to return to normal. They were like squatters; a feeling of intense impermanence, a sense of trespass and disquiet. Mrs Soren had done everything for them: shopping, cooking, washing their clothes, ironing, cleaning the house. Neither Lena nor Robert took over. They let things slide. Clothes lay on the floor of the bedroom, dirty dishes were piled in the sink, the fridge was empty. The vacuum cleaner never came out of its cupboard.

  He was getting the wood in for the fire one cool October evening when he looked in through the side window and saw Lena dancing in the sitting room, her skirt whirling out around her, her bare legs and bare arms, her mouth open, an ecstatic expression on her face, her wildly erotic dance. She had never looked so beautiful or more solitary to him. He ached with lust for her. He didn’t know what was going on. Without her mother’s boundaries, Lena seemed no longer to know who she was.

  Later that night he was in Keith’s study, struggling with his medieval history essay, which had something to do with the twelfth-century philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard. The house was deeply silent when he was startled by the sense that someone was standing in the open doorway to the hall.

  He looked up. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Lena was naked. She was pressing her palms to the sides of her face and massaging her lower jaw with her thumbs, staring at him as if something awful had happened that she could barely dare to tell him about.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  She went on massaging her lower jaw. ‘Do you think my face is getting fatter?’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘How can your face get fat? You know you’re gorgeous.’

  She continued to stand there holding her face. ‘Just tell me the truth.’ There were tears in her eyes. She turned and walked away. He jumped up and ran after her along the hall. ‘Hey!’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘It’s all right. Nothing’s wrong.’

  She began to sob, her body shuddering. She was like a child. He was bewildered. Was she really crying because she thought her face was getting fat? It was absurd. ‘Your strong jaw is one of your most striking and attractive features.’ Lena’s face was a pleasure to look at. Her thoughts and emotions were always active in her features, shadows of delight or anxiety or dreaming, the pleasure of her secrets like light and shade passing over her. Lena’s features were never blank. She was a beautiful woman, whose deepest thoughts and fears were never shared, but were nevertheless visible in the quality of her presence. She gave him the impression of moving within her own complicated and elaborate place. He thought of it as her city of the mind.

  She eventually stopped crying. ‘I’m being a nuisance,’ she said, snuffling and wiping at her nose with the bac
k of her hand. ‘You have to get that essay done. I’m just mucking things up for you.’

  He gave her his handkerchief. She looked at it. ‘Is it clean?’

  ‘Probably not,’ he said. They both laughed.

  She blew her nose a couple of times and handed it back.

  He said, ‘You can keep it.’

  She said, ‘I’m cold.’

  He led her along the hall to the blue room and she climbed back into bed and pulled the clothes up under her chin. She stared at him. ‘What are we going to do?’ She sounded helpless and slightly panicky.

  ‘About what?’ he said. ‘Everything’s going along just fine, isn’t it? I’ll get the vacuum out tomorrow and we can go to the market together and stock up. And, truly, your face isn’t getting fat.’

  It was as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I’m never going to be relaxed enough about music to play just for pleasure, and I’m never going to be good enough to play the way Leonard expects me to play.’