“We won’t talk about that now.”
Later that night, I woke to sticky heat on the sheets, felt wetness between my legs, under me. I didn’t move, tried to think of what to do. It was only blood, a regular part of each month and a fortunate one for me, really, yet I wouldn’t leave rust of my body staining the sheets. I got out of bed gingerly, looked at the mark I’d left. It was the first night, the heaviest. I folded the top sheet away. In the bathroom, I took off my nightgown and rinsed it in cold water, rolled and twisted it until the sink ran clean. In the darkened bedroom I scrubbed lightly, rhythmically, in hopes that the constancy of the movement wouldn’t disturb Hermann’s sleep. I worked steadily and quietly until the sheets were no longer deep red but light pink.
I was crouched, naked, beside the bed when he turned from his back to his side, arm falling over the damp spot. I stopped for a moment, breath blocked in my throat. When I thought he was still asleep, I began to stand and he said, “What on earth are you doing?”
I didn’t move, looked at him, his eyes closed, watched a small smile play on his lips.
“Hmm, my Jüül, my love?” He said my name with the English pronunciation: jewel.
I stood motionless, didn’t respond. For a moment, neither of us moved or said anything more, and then Hermann stretched and reached for me, his eyes closed. He opened them when he pulled me on top of him. “Had a bit of an accident, then? Made a bit of a mess?” He looked at me, every part of his face smiling. “Marie, you don’t have to clean this up. We don’t have to keep any secrets between us, do we?” Between us, perhaps not, but my blood on his sheets would mean that the meagre staff would know where I’d slept. Hermann didn’t seem to care. Should I?
His hand on my back, the other hooked under my legs, he flipped me over with one smooth movement onto the damp, cool sheets. “Besides, we’ll just make a mess of them again.”
I twisted out from under him, spun and jostled Hermann until I was on top, his back against the soiled bed. “We will.” My thighs clamped around his hips. I squeezed each of his earlobes between thumb and forefinger, and then moved my hands along his collarbone, his chest, pinched his nipples, kept moving downward. Hermann pushed up, toward me, but I hooked my feet around his shins, braced my legs against him and rose farther. I placed my hands between his torso and my legs and found his hips, held them, then found him, slipped him inside and moved against him until he was bloody with me.
When we were lying, spent, slicked in my blood and both of our sweat, he turned to me. “It was never anything like this.”
“What wasn’t?”
“I left Klitmøller because I knew that I’d get trapped there in charge of ailing, old fishing vessels if I didn’t. I wanted something more, somewhere else, somewhere bigger – you can understand.”
I could.
“I went to Frederikshavn, figuring, if nothing else, I could still find work as a fisherman for a bigger fleet. Instead, I got work at the munitions factory. Ingeborg worked for her father in the office. I won’t say I wasn’t drawn to her, but it was how stiffly she held herself, how cool. A woman who worked, who was my superior. I wanted to breach that haughtiness.”
“And so, you did – Hermann, I don’t want to hear about that.”
“It was never like this, though.”
“She was a conquest, was that it?”
“I suppose. And I got her pregnant. If I married her, she’d maintain her virtue. I could work under her father, learn how to run the company abroad.”
“You both got what you wanted.”
“I thought so, at one time. There’s Sven – I cannot imagine my life without my son.”
And yet there we were, living without him, month after month.
“But it was never like this – never.”
It hadn’t been for me either, but I wouldn’t say it. Instead, I told him, “I’ve had a child before.”
Hermann shifted so he was propped on one arm, his eyes from one of mine to the other.
“You said we didn’t have to keep secrets from each other. That’s my secret.” If he was going to think of me as something other, a safe place, I wanted him to know I wasn’t unsullied.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, brushed the hair from my face, traced my eyebrows, lips, jaw, then laid his hand on my chest, between my breasts. “I wish it could have been mine.”
I looked up at him. Breath wound around my ribs. I pushed it up, and air sputtered out of my throat as a sob while Hermann held me, bloodied and damp.
Thirty-Five
During the war, Onkel came to Cairo more often and stayed with us at the villa. We would go out together evenings, the attention deflected from me being alone with Hermann. Without much household or kitchen staff, we most often ate out, either at Italian or French restaurants or, as the war droned on, at the consulates or official residences of the diplomats who remained. Hermann brought me delicate glasses gleaming with wine. He caught my eye across rooms as he talked with politicians and diplomats. He didn’t need to wink. I knew that flicker, that warmth. Other women spun me around. We tipped back glasses and held each other’s waists, even danced. The world was at war and we were in fortified villas in Cairo, pretending to be different, pretending none of it mattered, at the same time we were terrified our lives would never be the same. They wouldn’t be, of course, and I believe we knew that then. The ways in which I thought mine would change were so very different from what would happen, though.
There were times when we could leave Cairo. Hermann had business in Alexandria, and it was there where I felt most comfortable. The heat didn’t inhabit me so heavily on the coast. I was responsible for organizing nothing beyond our train bookings. Once there, I was alone with two men, but it didn’t feel like I was in anyone else’s home. After a couple of days of work, the men would be free. Mornings, we rode horses; afternoons, we read; evenings, we dined. Nothing could be simpler, nothing more luxurious. The world was at war, the fighting not far from where we were, and yet these were our days, ones of privilege.
I see us at the apartment in Alexandria, the nights when I licked the heat of whisky off my lips. Onkel tried, he did, to have me develop a taste for it. I did it for them, Hermann and his brother – for their goading and their laughter – I tried the whisky and every time made faces and grabbed my throat. Later, it would be sweet H with his hands along my neck, fingers lacing my sternum. He and I knotted in white sheets, the curtains full of salt air. Mornings, we took out the horses. I could still ride bareback if I wanted, and sometimes I did. “Jüüly, slow down,” Hermann would call behind me. “You’re scaring me!”
The middle of the war, a foreign country, a married man. I felt so safe.
* * *
Hermann had to return to Cairo early. “You stay with Onkel. He likes your company. Stay here while the heat is so bad in Cairo. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks – you’ll be all right without me for that long?”
We were lying in bed. I was on my side and he slid his hand along my back, down my buttock, then gave me a little slap. “Barely. You know that.” He burrowed his face into my neck.
After he left early that morning, I rolled over and slept more. When I woke, I put on my riding clothes, but Onkel didn’t want to take out the horses without his brother. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t feel entirely safe, out there with fighting so close.”
“You know that there’s no fighting right around Alexandria.”
“I don’t want to risk anything. Not with you. My brother’s the brave one.”
“Yes, but you’re the brash one. And I’ll be fine. I go out walking on my own in Cairo. Hermann knows that.”
“For as much as my brother wants to protect you, he also believes you’re stronger than you are.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Petite is not the same thing as fragile.”
“Of course not.”
He’d brought me a coffee in a small silver cup. I perched on the edge of one of the chairs so low and deep that if I sat back, my feet wouldn’t touch the ground.
“She’s coming back, you know.” He walked toward the window, his back to me.
I watched him. “Who?”
He turned, took a drink of his own coffee. “Mrs. Brandt. She and the boy.”
I blinked at him. “Yes, of course they are.”
“Soon.”
I nodded, took another sip of coffee as though for a reason to swallow.
“He’s told you, then?” Onkel must have known that his brother had told me nothing.
“Hermann? Of course he’s told me,” I lied. “He’s excited to see Sven.”
“What else has he told you?”
I lowered the tiny cup to my lap, watched my hand wrap around it.
When I didn’t say anything, Onkel continued. “There’s a chance she’ll find out – if she hasn’t already. Our friends at the consulates aren’t the souls of discretion. I know this.” He laced the word friends with derision. I thought of the women in their gowns, me in my own, how we put our arms around each other’s waists and laughed.
I took a long gulp of coffee, felt its heat down my throat, then put the cup down. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“I thought you should know.”
I stood and walked toward the doors to the balcony. “And what is it that I am supposed to know?”
“When she finds out about you, Marie, you’ll have to go.”
“Go where?” I struggled with the door handle, my palms itchy with sweat, heat prickling over every part of me. Onkel put one hand on my arm and I stopped.
“I don’t know. Somewhere that isn’t their household – isn’t her home.”
I was still holding the handle. My voice was low, nearly a whisper. “It’s hardly her home, you know that.”
“No, but it’s certainly not yours and she can lay claim to it.” He took my hand off and opened the door, salt air pushing into the room.
She could lay claim to so much. What was mine? Even less than I had once thought.
* * *
Onkel and I were on our own in Alexandria. Marta had returned to Portugal when the war started, and the Egyptian staff came only once a week. We went out to eat or ordered meals from the hotel next door, left the dishes in the hall of the apartment until the next delivery. I tidied the apartment but told myself I would not do much. I was not in this apartment to be a housekeeper. Who was I to be?
Evenings, I read. Sometimes, Onkel would stay in with me, but he couldn’t sit still for long. “Is this really what you do together, you and my brother, lie around and read?” I looked up from my book, raised an eyebrow, and he laughed. “Of course,” he said. “Well, I’m going out.” The first night he announced this, I thought he might invite me along. After a couple of evenings of him returning to the apartment late, his skin rosy, a warmth still rising off him, I realized that he was going to the baths.
One night, Onkel didn’t return. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed before he came back, but that night when I woke hours after falling asleep, it seemed darker than usual, the quiet thicker. When I got out of bed, a shiver kicked through me though it wasn’t cold at all. I walked through the apartment, the furniture looming larger in the dark than it did during the day. I had closed all the windows and patio doors before going to bed, and the drapes stood tall and motionless. It was too quiet, too still in the apartment. I walked in and out of each room before I stood in front of the door to Onkel’s bedroom. I felt movement, heard a noise from within, a faint knocking. I opened the door and the noise built. It took me a moment to realize it was the panicked whirring of large insects hurtling themselves around the room, hitting furniture, the walls. I closed the door quickly.
Onkel must have left the window open, the insects drawn in by a source of light. I stood in the hall for a couple of minutes, then sucked in a deep breath and opened the door, arm held up in front of my face. A large mirror leaned against the wall opposite the open window and reflected the lights of the harbour. Scarab beetles were flying headlong into the reflection of light, then ricocheting around the room. I reached the bundle of bedclothes piled at the end of the bed and threw a dark blanket over the mirror, batting scarabs away as I did, then opened wide the door to the patio. I lit a gas lantern outside and waited until I thought I’d drawn most of the insects out of the room before going in, closing the patio door. I could still hear a few beetles crashing about.
In my own bed, I couldn’t sleep, waited for morning to colour the curtains, thought of what to do next. I had no hold over Onkel, he none over me. We were friends living like family, though we weren’t that. Where he went and what he did were his own. Nothing was quite my own, but he didn’t ask many questions of me. I spent the day in the apartment, wondering what to do next. When he didn’t return by early evening, I went out, crossed a thin lane to the hotel. I would ask after Onkel and perhaps order a meal for myself. I hadn’t eaten much that day, just pieces of fruit and bread. A slight nausea hollowed my stomach, growing like hunger, but without the desire for food.
“Ma’am?” The concierge came up to me as soon as I entered the lobby.
“I’m sorry,” I began, though for what was I sorry? “I’m from next door, staff of Mr. Brandt?”
“Yes.”
“Have you,” I began. “Have you seen Mr. Brandt at all in the last day? Has he been into the restaurant, perhaps?”
“One moment please, miss.” The concierge went to the front desk, and he and the man there spoke in low tones, their foreheads close together, neither looking directly at the other. It was the man from the front desk who came back. He nodded and reached toward me as though to take me by the arm, but he didn’t. “Will you come this way, miss?” He inclined his chin toward the side of the lobby.
“Yes.” I followed him.
The man looked around before he spoke. “Miss?” Was he looking for my name? I wouldn’t say, nodded for him to continue instead. “There were raids at the baths last night.”
“Raids?”
“A number of men were apprehended.”
“Apprehended? For what?”
“I’m afraid I cannot say.”
“Does this have something to do with, with the war? The Allied forces? I’m not sure what –”
He held his hand between us. “Not the war specifically, miss.” I waited for more. “The clerics believe the country’s morals are being corrupted by foreigners, some here because of the war, some not.” I nodded as though I understood. “Decency laws.” And then I did.
“What did they – Where did they take those, those apprehended?”
“I can’t tell you because I do not know, miss.”
* * *
Onkel didn’t return to the apartment the next night, either, and I began to feel ill. It started as heaviness in my stomach, lightness in my head. I thought it was worry. I couldn’t stay there alone with no one to speak to, no clear idea of what my role was or what I was supposed to do. I packed my small bag, closed all the windows and drapes in the apartment and walked to the train station. There, crowds of Egyptians were going in as regiments of Allied soldiers came out, one after another – British, Canadian, Australian. A soldier stopped me, his hat removed. “Ma’am?” he began, but I didn’t want to hear more, didn’t want him questioning me, who I was, where I’d come from and why I was alone. I turned and jostled through the crowds, continued to push until I’d purchased my ticket and boarded the train.
The feeling of unease in my stomach grew as the heat barrelled in, rolled through the train. I could feel sweat break out on my forehead and cheeks, unde
r my clothing. I clasped my hands in my lap, gripped and released, tried to bring my mind back to them tightening and loosening, then pulled out a handkerchief, ran it along my forehead and held it over my mouth. I thought I might be sick; I couldn’t be sick, not now. I remembered the last time I had felt that kind of nausea, in the bakery in Zealand, a lifetime ago. No, it wasn’t that, couldn’t be that, not then. But of course, it could.
Thirty-Six
We’d always had cars waiting to take us from the station to the Brandt villa. This time, I hired my own and directed it. When I arrived, the gates at the end of the drive were closed and I didn’t know the man who approached the car.
“I am Miss Jüül,” I told him. “I work here.”
He had his chin raised, and though he seemed to be looking directly at my face, it seemed as if he couldn’t see me. I sat in silence until he said, “Wait here.” I paid the driver, took my bag and got out of the car.
The guard hadn’t returned and I gave the gate a nudge, discovered he’d left it unlatched. No harm going in. I walked the length of the drive around the fountain, dry of water, and wondered if I should go to the front door or around the side, through the courtyard. I went in through the front. It was quiet and cool in the marble foyer, the smell so familiar but one I couldn’t name – faintly of irises and cigar smoke, something honeyed, something else like dust or incense. I stood, bag in one hand, the other on my throat, trying to identify the scent, when Hermann came into the foyer. I recognized his step, though it was quicker than usual, and turned to smile at him. His brow was lowered and behind him was an older woman I didn’t recognize.
“Hermann!”
He came toward me and I was about to reach for him, but he took me by the forearms and pulled me into an antechamber off the foyer.
“Hermann? Who’s that?” He let me go and I dropped my bag. He looked confused for a moment, so I looked around him at the woman. “I’m Miss Jüül.” The woman smiled slightly and nodded. “Hermann?”
Little Fortress Page 20