She jerked her foot away. ‘I don’t have bunions and you’re tickling.’
Louis watched the dim light shining on her skin as she moved. Her hair fell forward over her shoulders, her eyes were smouldering; one breast was almost revealed as her towel slipped.
He said: ‘If you think that sex is all I want from you, then you’re mistaken, Miss Soltys. I want all you can give . . . and quickly. We must be married very soon. God knows how long we’ll have together.’
She lay very still. Did he mean . . .?
‘If there was a war, would you be called up?’
‘Of course.’
Andrea pondered over this new, unwelcome threat. How strange that she had never thought about it . . . perhaps because she hadn’t wanted to think about it.
She sat up abruptly and then groaned. ‘Oh, oh, I can hardly move. I’m so bruised and stiff,’ she wailed.
‘I’ll call the masseur,’ Louis said.
‘Is the masseur a man?’
‘Oh, Andrea, drop your silly modesty. It’s old-fashioned and petty. A masseur is a masseur is a masseur . . .’
She gazed at her feet. ‘Look! They’re turning black. It’s those ghastly boots.’
‘I’ll buy you new ones.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Don’t speak for Fräulein Foot. She and I have an understanding.’
Louis took Andrea around the waist and hoisted her over his shoulder. He pushed open the door and staggered into the landing.
‘Put me down! For goodness’ sake,’ she whispered. ‘Someone might see us.’ Louis dumped her on the bed and slammed the door shut. ‘Turn on your stomach,’ he commanded. ‘Luckily for you, I’m extremely good at this.’
Apprehensively she obeyed him, shuddering as she loosened the towel from her back and folded the end of it over her buttocks.
His firm fingers began to knead her shoulder muscles and slowly, languorously, she abandoned herself to Louis’ sure touch. He worked swiftly, pummelling the stiffness out of her muscle, and, now totally relaxed, she turned over, letting the towel slip away. Louis gasped when he saw her breasts, and her delicate throat, and the angle of her square shoulders, and the vulnerable armpits, covered with soft down. Her hips flared from a narrow waist and her skin was flawless.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he gasped. He could not look away from her rampant nipples thrusting up from their circle of brown skin.
‘Louis,’ she said softly. She gazed trustingly into Louis’ eyes, which were suffused with tenderness.
‘How did a fool like me get a girl like you? Dearest, dearest Andrea.’ He traced one finger over her mouth, then he nuzzled her neck and her chin with his mouth, smoothed his hand over her hair, lifted it, stroked it, until she felt her scalp tingling. ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t stop.’ She reached up longingly and touched his chest. He was taut and sinewy. ‘You’re like a coil of steel,’ she said wonderingly. ‘You’ve always seemed so sensitive and soft.’
‘Just muscles acquired in the Military Academy,’ he said.
Her body shivered. Then she turned to him and pressed her mouth on his. Her arms coiled round his neck, and her legs wound round his thighs. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Every day I love you more.’
‘I never doubted that, my love,’ Louis said, brushing his lips over hers.
Andrea looked up at Louis and saw his eyes, brooding and solemn. There was something strange and new. Not tenderness, not love, a fierce predatory look. She shuddered and turned her head away, but his strong, firm hand moved her head back until she faced him. ‘Look at me,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t look away. Look at me.’
She wanted to close her eyes and blot out the sight of him. Part of her wanted to push him away, but she felt a strange acquiescence growing inside her, a need to be dominated. She was giving way to his will.
He pushed her legs aside and stroked her pubic hair. The sensation was shocking. Too shocking to bear, but again this strange languid sense of giving up her will prevented her from moving.
He looked haunted, as if he were in agony. He knelt between her thighs and took off his towel robe. His penis was rampant and rearing up between them, huge and glistening, as if it had a life and will of its own.
He laughed. ‘You look so shocked.’
‘I never saw . . .’ She broke off, not wishing to look so unsophisticated.
‘It’s your first time,’ he said dreamily. He bent over swiftly and thrust his mouth against her sex, and his tongue gently wooed her. New, strange, exquisite sensations tore at her . . . unbearable, yet wonderful, a series of ripplings of exquisite sensations, moving through her body to her stomach and her breasts, and then consuming all of her, so that she was only a mass of sensuous ripples. Nothing else! She hardly heard her sharp little cries and her tears, as wave after wave assaulted her psyche.
She was only dimly aware of his flesh inside hers, and his fingers massaging some magic place that had stored all these feelings, for all these years, which were now pouring out, like flood waters from a burst dam, at his coaxing.
She clung to him, her nails piercing his shoulder, her eyes half-closed with passion and her body drenched with sweat. They were together on a roller-coaster, plunging and rising, up and up, until that one brief vital moment in time when they both cried out and clutched each other and fell back, breathless and filled with wonder at their shared joy.
She felt his body slowly relax and then he eased off her and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Her body craved for him. She wanted him back there inside her forever, but he had slipped away, mentally and physically, and she pined for him.
She moved towards him, unwilling to let go. She wanted them to be joined forever by some mystical umbilical cord that took the essence of him into her. She pushed his arm up, and nuzzled her head on his shoulder, then she flung one leg over his thighs. Now she could feel his warm thigh hard up against her crotch, which felt strangely empty and abandoned. She pushed harder.
He turned and gazed at her, half-tender, half-teasing. ‘Greedy-guts,’ he said. ‘You can’t have more. There’s nothing left. I gave my all.’
‘Mmmm,’ she sighed. ‘I have it all. I feel it still vibrating inside me.’
*
For the next few days the family threw themselves in to the serious business of having fun, but to Ingrid, it seemed as if God had singled her out for special punishment as she listened to their silly shouts and hysterical laughter echoing from the mountains. What pigs they were. They never gave her a thought. Later came the thumps and bumps and giggles from Marietta’s room. She had to put her head under the pillow to muffle the sounds.
They were like moths dashing themselves against a lamp. Surely they knew that their world was over forever, that they would soon have to face their destinies. It seemed to Ingrid that there was something crazy about their joy, those last few days in Bohemia.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Marie was his, yet she was not his. She loved him, but she would not marry him. In bed, she was his passionate slave, out of it, she was a wilful, obstinate, headstrong woman. Bill loved her with all his heart, but she drove him crazy because he had no hold over her and he could not influence her. As the weeks passed, their relationship ripened into a strong, abiding love, untainted by emotional or physical dependence. They were together because they loved each other. They had to make the most of the present because there was no future.
Bill took all the spare time he could off work. Most weekends he arrived at Marie’s apartment on Friday evening. He would leave for Berlin late on Sunday afternoon and drive through the night. Whenever possible, he found Bavarian news stories so that he could stay longer.
One morning, early in February, Bill arrived unannounced at the girls’ apartment having driven overnight, to find a strange young woman sitting at the dining-room table sipping coffee. For a moment she was frozen into stillness, her shocked brown eyes stared at him over the coffee cup. He noticed the prison
pallor of her skin, how her reddish brown hair was cropped closely, how her hands shook and her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had not slept well for a long time.
‘Oh, hello! That is, good-morning,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sorry to burst in on you. Where’re the girls? I’m Bill, Marietta’s friend. Who are you?’
The woman turned even whiter. She struggled to place her cup in the saucer, using two hands. She stood up with a jerk and fled down the passage, slamming the door of the servant’s quarters.
‘She’s a fellow-student temporarily without digs,’ Marietta said, without even blushing.
‘She’s studying music,’ Andrea volunteered.
Bill had come to Munich, he explained, because the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Göbbels, was to lecture students at the University later that day and he intended to cover the event. The truth was, Bill had reckoned that Göbbels’ appearance on the campus would be as tempting to Edelweiss students as honey to a bear, and they would get into trouble, so he had come to prevent any such foolishness on their part. But Marietta seemed disinterested in Göbbels’ visit. She had decided to take the day off, she told him. He could go without her.
By noon, the streets were full of Brownshirts and Gestapo, and the buildings were decked out with swastikas, while the campus was crowded with armed SS guards. Bill had to present his Reuters’ card to get into the main lecture room, where he was shown to the press table at the back of the hall.
There was a continuous murmur of approval from the students. The seats had been packed for half an hour, but the students kept surging in: a clapping, cheering, stamping mass of exuberant youths. The adulation rose to a roar as Göbbels mounted the rostrum. Delirious with enthusiasm, the students yelled their ‘Heil Hitlers’ in unison until the hall was rocking with the sound. The sheer impact of so many voices raised in salute was terrifying. Bill felt oppressed. Then Göbbels, a slight, ineffectual figure, began to speak. Bill shuddered as he acknowledged the man’s genius for swaying the masses.
‘Life in National Socialist Germany has become more beautiful,’ he said softly into the microphone. ‘Adolf Hitler’s Germany is great and powerful as never before. Our immortal people become nobler and better from day to day.’
Göbbels waited for the applause to die down. Then his soft, insidious voice began again. ‘Soon, Aryans all over Europe will unite with us to create a wonderful new world. They will realise that we are blood brothers. We shall show them the way to a better, more moral, uplifting world . . .’
Bill felt sick, and he was still afraid that Marie might be planning something foolish. All at once Bill caught on to her plans. Marie was unconcerned at Göbbels’ visit because she had more important things to do. He left in the middle of the lecture, pushing his way through the crowds.
Back at the flat Marietta, harassed, bolt-eyed and with her hair in a mess, was about to leave. She had never looked more vulnerable to Bill as she loaded the boot with a collection of paper bags. There were five young women clustered around her; all were scared, thin, with newly shorn hair and scarves tied over their heads. They piled into Louis’ car and Marietta got into the driving seat.
‘Let me drive,’ Bill said, feeling furious with her.
Sullen eyes, downturned lips. ‘Don’t spy on me,’ she hissed. The car sped forward and moved out of sight.
*
Bill spent an anxious day until Marie returned at seven that evening. ‘Marie, what you’re doing is dangerous . . . terribly dangerous,’ he said. ‘Eric has no right to ask you to do this for him.’ He folded his arms around her and held her tightly, despite her struggles.
‘Let me go.’ She brought her elbows up hard, trying to push him away. Then she stood very still, as if shrinking away from his touch. ‘This is not your concern. You’re not German, or Austrian . . . you don’t have to feel responsible. Why can’t you understand what it means to be a part of this wicked maelstrom?’
‘I love you. That makes it my business. If you fell foul of the Gestapo I don’t know what I would do. That makes you my concern.’
‘Then let’s stop seeing each other. Love should never be used as a form of control.’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘You know you are.’
‘Maybe . . . Oh, Marie, dearest, I’m so scared for you. What are we going to do?’
Suddenly she relented. She was like that. One minute furiously angry and then, like a balloon pricked by a pin, all her fury would be spent.
‘Bill, you must understand that Andrea and I are part of the Pastor’s chain of escape, but only a very small part. Just one stop overnight and on to the next place of safety. There are so many of us, but we only know the house ahead. It’s safer that way. While they are in our area, these fugitives are our responsibility. Andrea and I take turns in driving them on. Sometimes Ingrid helps. Sometimes they are Jewish, sometimes children, or perhaps maimed or mentally retarded and therefore destined for euthanasia. We shelter them and pass them on. They are merely passing through. That’s why we had to let Frau Tross go. It wasn’t fair to involve her in this and besides, we needed her rooms. We’re a link in the Pastor’s chain. That’s all! A chain that you and Taube were all too glad to call upon.’
‘Oh God, don’t torture me. What’s happened to Taube?’
‘You’ll hear in due course.’
‘Can’t you understand I’m worried about you? Worried sick . . . that’s all. Anyway, how do you cope with them all? How do you feed them?’
‘We share our rations, or we buy on the black market. They have no ration cards, they are non-people. To the Nazis they don’t exist and have no right to any food. To send them away . . . well, I might as well shoot them, or turn them in. The result would be . . .’
‘I know . . . I know . . .’ Bill couldn’t dispel the lump in his throat. ‘I’m not exactly without feelings, but you . . . and Andrea . . . Oh God!’
*
The next time Bill arrived unexpectedly was on Valentine’s Day, a Tuesday, but he’d managed to find a local story to cover. He’d brought a hand painted scarf, and a card, plus tickets for Walt Disney’s Snow White, which was showing at a local cinema. He tried not to notice the obsequious old man who crept down the apartment passage to the bathroom every hour.
They held hands in the cinema. Bill couldn’t take his eyes off Marie. At nineteen, she had blossomed into a lovely, mature woman. She was wearing a plain blue shirt and bluish tweed skirt. She’d taken off her coat and rolled up her sleeves, but despite her rough clothes, she stood out as something altogether special. She was gazing at the screen with almost childlike attention, her eyes mirroring the sadness and the humour of the story. Her lips were slightly parted, white teeth glistening.
She turned suddenly. ‘Stop staring at me,’ she said, and squeezed his hand.
He looked back at the screen, without really watching. He’d taken enough photographs of her over the past two years to know her face by heart. He’d noticed the strange difference between the two sides of her face. Once he’d cut two pictures in half and made two images of her. In one she looked lost and appealing, lips slightly downturned, eyes sad. A lost child. In the other, she looked serene, her eyes shone with confidence, her mouth curled into a smile, a jaunty, devil-may-care expression that made him smile.
To Bill’s surprise, when the lights went up at the movie, Marie’s cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I love happy endings,’ she sobbed, clutching his hand tightly as she stumbled out of the cinema.
‘Will we have a happy ending?’ he asked that night, as she lay in his arms after making love. ‘I, too, have dreams. My favourite is of you in the paddock, breaking in a horse, with two or three kids hanging over the corral fence. They all look just like you. And you look just as you did tonight in the cinema, engrossed, happy, involved. Please, Marie, if you’ve got any heart at all, you’ll marry me and leave Germany. For God’s sake, Marie, you owe it to our future kids.’
‘Oh, but now you’r
e playing dirty, Bill. That’s not like you. I’ve told you before, you can’t set love and duty on either side of a pair of scales and say which one is the heaviest. Love is a gift. Duty is something you live by. That’s all there is to it.’
Bill cursed her blue-blooded roots and her damned aristocratic upbringing. Why couldn’t she be normal and selfish, and put her own happiness first, instead of this God-awful dedication to duty and tradition that was ruining both their lives?
*
Bill didn’t see Marie for the next few weeks. His bureau sent him to Czechoslovakia, where he covered Hitler’s triumphant entry into Prague. He wrote about the people crying as they saluted and the hissing and jeering when there were no SS troops to hear. He wrote about the deportations, about the Czechs being turned off the land and the Germans and Volksdeutsche moving into the lush farms. He wrote about the dismantling of the factories to be shipped back to the Third Reich, the arrests of the intellectuals and the starvation rations that were imposed, and the wholesale looting of anything that was moveable. Eventually he went home, feeling more despondent than he had felt in his life.
The next few weeks were busy ones for Bill. Germany was getting its house in order and preparing for war. On May 22, Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel, agreeing to support each other with full military resources. With the threat of war looming, Britain was enrolling its first military conscripts, and planning for the mass evacuation of two and a half million children from south-east England.
Bill snatched whatever time he could to see Marie, but they usually quarrelled, for he was frantic with fear for her.
His next assignment was the launch of Germany’s new Heinkel He-178, the very first fighter aircraft powered by a jet engine. Germany’s technological advance was frightening the hell out of Bill. He managed to get some first-class photographs to send over to the States.
By mid-July, it began to look as though the Baltic port of Danzig could provide the spark that would set off the long-expected European war. Bill was sent there by his bureau.
Edelweiss Page 19