The Other Side of Love (58 page)

3V3

The shrill belligerant voice rushed on.

“My husband was an important man! Let me tell you, a very big man. He was commended by Reich Marshall Himmler for his efficiency. The Fiihrer himself invited us to the Chancellery - the proudest day of my life. And you know why?”

“Frau Detten,”

Aubrey soothed,

“we aren’t here to”

“Oh, Reinhard put on his Fragebogen that he worked on railway timetables, and they were too stupid, the Amis, to ask exactly what he did.”

She sucked in a breath.

“He was in charge of routing every one of the trains that rid the Reich of Jewish vermin.”

“God,”

Rathe whispered.

“He did his duty as a good German! Not like some of these concentrationcamp scum who run things today. And believe you me, Reinhard gave us a fine life. Big house. Fine car. Three servants to help me. Lithuanian girls. Ach, how our little Erich teased them, wild little rascal that he was!”

The sentences streamed from the moving white scar that was Frau Detten’s mouth.

“Reinhard and I had to hide from the scamp how proud we were, but the minute he was out of the way we would laugh until the tears came. Some of the clever pranks he played on those Lithuanians!”

“I’m sorry for your loss,”

Aubrey said stiffly. He reached in his pocket for Occupation Marks.

Frau Detten snatched the bills, hurling them on to the snow, spitting.

“You aren’t going to pay me off for my husband and baby! May God in heaven damn you for ever, murderer! And your whore, too! I lay my Reinhard and my Erich’s death at your feet!”

The woman’s expression was unrelenting and hard as she watched the Tommi officer tighten his grasp on the blonde and draw her into the blackness of the path. Waiting a minute, she retrieved the bills, wiping them against her coat before folding them into her handbag with the four packs of American Chesterfields, which were worth more than the money.

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i

Their breath clouding the inside of the windows, rime forming on the outside and darkness surrounding them, they were encapsulated in the car. Kathe slumped as if a huge fist had mashed her. Aubrey, respecting the initial blow of her grief, had maintained a tactful silence, but she was shivering.

“Kathe, we’ll need to put up here in Darmstadt,”

he said.

“There’s a hotel near the Luisenplatz.”

W”

When she said nothing, he started th engine.

American officers clamoured impatiently around the desk, and Aubrey had ample opportunity to memorize the typed sign:

We regret that owing to lack of sufficient quarters of any nature in Darmstadt we have orders not to billet transients more than one night. The Commanding General of this area forbids the use of this hotel for immoral purposes.

When it was finally Aubrey’s turn, the clerk, a technical sergeant whose heavy jaw showed a blue gleam of five o’clock shadow, inspected their papers and in a Brooklyn accent so undiluted that it might have been a parody explained that there was only one room

“% secretary’s just received word of a loss in the family,”

Aubrey responded.

“I prefer not leaving her.”

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One glance at the dazed ashen face convinced the sergeant that, although Miss Osmond was a knockout, the Limey couple wasn’t registering for immoral purposes.

“Kingsmith?”

he asked.

“Any relation to the big store on Fifth Avenue?”

“It belongs to my grandfather.”

“Me and the wife, we exchanged a wedding present there. You’d have thought we was Rockefellers buying up the joint, the way we was treated. They got real class, Kingsmith’s. Tell you what, Captain, the lady ain’t exactly in shape to face the crowd in the diningroom. We don’t got room service, but I’ll arrange for room service.”

Bless you, Aunt Rossie, Aubrey thought, and drew Kathe through the kaleidoscope of American uniforms.

The small high-ceilinged room with the narrow twin beds was by postwar German standards tropically hot. Kathe stood by the door until Aubrey helped her off with her coat and jacket, undoing the buttons as he had when she was a toddler on her first holiday at Quarles. Dinner arrived promptly.

“Do eat something,”

he coaxed.

Obediently Kathe took a nibble of butter-drenched baked potato, then set down her knife and fork.

“I can’t, Aubrey. I just can’t.”

Encouraged by this, her first remark, he said:

“What about the sweet? You always loved ice-cream.”

She shook her head, sighing.

“Would it help to talk?”

he asked.

Kathe shook her head again.

After Aubrey had finished and put the tray in the corridor, Kathe slid off her shoes and stretched on one of the neatly turned down beds. Her face was lax, her eyes closed. Assuming her to be dozing, Aubrey took a notepad from his valise he had returned to his prewar habit of keeping a journal each evening.

“She was awful, wasn’t she?”

Aubrey looked up from his description of Darmstadt.

“Frau Detten you mean? God, rather!”

“You’d be surprised how many there are like her at Ober Tappenburg. The women who talk about Hitler as if he were the Second Coming. He built the concentrationcamps, they say, to re-educate the criminals and the sex offenders and the usurers and the blackmarket profiteers. They’re positive nobody was harmed; the photographs and newsreels, they say, are cleverly doctored propaganda put out by the American Jews. It’s another article of faith with them that Poland attacked us, then England and France joined in. The Fuhrer, they say, never wanted the war and did everything in his

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I

power to avoid it. All he wanted was to reunite the Volk. What we need to put us back on our feet, they say, is another strong Leader.”

“People never learn, do they?”

“Did you see how her mouth puckered when she spat at your money? Like a venomous snake.”

Aubrey slipped his notepad back in the valise, letting Kathe ramble on about Frau Detten, the Lithuanian servants, Reinhard Detten’s career of despatching the death-trains. She never mentioned Erich. Although she talked for several hours, she never once mentioned Erich. Her voice grew hoarse. In the middle of a sentence she fell asleep.

Aubrey pulled the quilt over her, and turned out the light. He didn’t change to his nightclothes but stretched out with his coat over him.

He awoke to the sound of muffled sobbing.

Moving to the other bed, he put his arms around the fragile quivering body and murmured wordless consolation. Kathe turned to face him, pressing her hot wet cheek against his.

“Ah, Aubrey, Aubrey … why do I hurt so much?”

“Darling, it’s just happened.”

“But I haven’t seen him since he was a day old.”

“You’re having a perfectly natural reaction.”

“I only held him once.”

“He was yours.”

“Yes, mine. What kept me going was knowing I’d find him.”

“You’ve been through so much.”

w”

“And to miss by a few days. If only I’d’een cleverer, quicker

“Don’t blame yourself, darling. Blame me. I should have insisted on your release, no matter what. Hush, hush.”

He traced the fragile knobs of her spine.

Kathe pushed aside the quilt that separated them, putting her arms around his waist, clinging to him. Thinking of the kiss at Novikov’s billet, and the mournful tenderness of her rejection, Aubrey made no move to tighten his grasp, but contented himself with resting his chin on her hair. He had no idea how long the embrace lasted: in the darkness time could be measured only by the rough beating °f his heart.

It was she who took his hand, moulding the fingers around the nrm warmth of her breast. When he kissed her mouth, it was her lips that parted first, her tongue that first touched his. He understood that for Kathe this wasn’t desire or even affection although certainly she cared for him a great deal - but a complex need to escape, however briefly, from the cataclysm that had blotted

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out her family and now her son. She had lost her past and her future; she was frantically scrabbling for some connection to life.

As she caressed his erection, a magnetic charge travelled along the neurological paths of his body. This isn’t Oxford. Stop intellectualizing, he told himself. He had always loved Rathe, he always would love her; and, if she wanted him, why should he analyse the chemistry of her bereavement? He wasn’t taking advantage of her susceptibility; he was responding to her wordless request for solace in its most elemental form.

A church bell tolled high on the dark hill of ruins that once had been Darmstadt. He pushed up the soft wool sweater, caressing the tracery of slick tissue on her back with the same tender homage that he paid to her breasts. Her flesh was softer, warmer, smoother than the flesh of the other women with whom he’d had minimal affairs. Except for the striations, her skin was like warm chiffon. She murmured an erotic plea, and he moved on top of her. For an anxious jealous beat of his heart he wondered: How will I measure up to Wyatt? Then he thought no more, heard nothing of the outside world

- heard only Kathe’s gasping and small wordless cries. Because of her ethereal quality, he had imagined she would be a delicately compliant partner; he had never considered that she might be passionate. Yet her caresses were explicit, her responses ardent, and her murmured suggestions of nuances, variations and positions drove him berserk. He held back as long as he could, and when he came, gasping, sweating, shaking, he imagined himself utterly hollowed out. Yet as her kisses trailed down his throat he was ready again.

In a life not unrewarded with love and worldly applause, Aubrey Kingsmith cherished above his other earthly hours this night with his cousin Kathe in a ruined German town.

IV

A rumbling convoy of military trucks shattered his sleep. It was after eight, and a streak of grey morning light showed between the curtains. The arm under Kathe’s neck felt numb.

“Kathe?”

he whispered.

“Awake?”

“I never dropped off.”

He drew her closer.

“About last night. Unless you want, it needn’t count.”

“Are you jilting me?”

Her attempt at archness failed.

“Never, darling, never.”

Reaching for his glasses, he sat up.

Kathe didn’t move from the tangle of bedclothes. It seemed impossible to Aubrey that this could be the passionate maenad of the darkness. With her pale blue jumper ruckled up, her eyes rimmed with shadows, her complexion haggard, the delicate features twisted, she was the embodiment of grief.

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He smoothed back her moist tangled hair.

“I can’t send you back to that place,”

he said in a low humble voice.

“There’s no choice.”

“We could go somewhere like Switzerland or South America.”

“Desert? You?”

“The war’s over. I’m sick to death of sneaking about in this underhanded game. We’ll make a new life.”

“Yes, but later.”

“Why should you wait for an interrogation? They’ve got millions of other Germans in detention to interrogate.”

“I never meant to get Wyatt in hot water,”

she said.

“What’s the difference where I am?”

“It matters to me. And, though you can’t believe it now, once the pain numbs a bit you won’t enjoy being locked up, either.”

“All through the war I’ve been planning how I’d find him and snatch him away from those awful people. I knew they’d be like the Dettens.”

She closed her eyes.

“You have no idea the silly details I dreamed up. The way he’d drum on the kitchen table while I cooked us both cocoa. As if anybody but black-marketeers have cocoa! I would buy him a tricycle and hold the saddle while he learned to ride it. We’d play Snakes and Ladders. Isn’t this ridiculous? I had the idea that once we were together the sadness and horrors would be over. All those millions had died in the camps, Sigi had been tortured to death, Mother left to rot, but having Erich with me would somehow wipe the slate clean, and I’d be the same as before the war. As though anything could ever wipe away these terrible pangs.”

“You of all people shouldn’t feel guilty

Her grimace repudiated his remark. SWwas right, of course. Only Kathe could absolve herself. He sensed mat she never would.

“My daydreams are even more humiliating,”

he said, hoping to distract her.

“Straight from a Dorothy Lamour film. You and I are on some tropical island living in a lean-to artistically draped with palm fronds. I’m typing away on some great masterpiece that will make the entire world sit up and take notice. And whenever I look out of the window I can see you sunning yourself on the sand or bathing in the azure water. Sometimes you bring me a pineapple.”

She was staring up at the cracked ceiling.

Kissing her forehead, he got up. As he adjusted his uniform, he said:

“I’ll call Lear and tell him you found me and turned yourself ln-That should count for something.”

She nodded absently.

You’ll be released from Ober Tappenburg soon,”

he said. The hesitancy that had afflicted his voice during the earlier conversation had vanished, and he spoke in a hard level tone.