A Soldier's Tale

by M. K. Joseph

  He had to call the boy, who came reluctantly and brought his coffee, and stood near him, obviously eager to take the cup as soon as it seemed to be empty. No one spoke, dominoes clicked on the marble; the urns hissed. The patron watched him silently over the counter, slowly polishing the zinc top.

  He put on the old coat and galoshes and went home. When he tried to tell Belle about it—it happened to be a night when she was at home—he was neither hurt nor angry, only immensely astonished and shivering with cold. She left him sitting by the small gas-heater while she went into the kitchen to make him a good tisane of herbs. There was a sound like a dry cough and something fell. Hurrying back to the sitting-room she found him huddled against the side of his tall chair, the arrogant head sunk, the face drawn down at one side in a fixed, mechanical sneer.

  Luckily the stroke was a light one; the job went, of course, but soon he could limp around the apartment with a stick. Belle could still get out; she was good at her job and she could claim (sometimes with truth) that she was working overtime. A near neighbour, a widow who had liked her father, could come in and sit with him—Belle thought that perhaps she knew what had happened at the café, but she came all the same. Belle herself began to get some odd looks around the quartier, in the shops, at the market. But the women were more cautious than the men; after all, some of them had daughters too, and in any case who would want to offend someone with a powerful German friend? Papa’s income was missed, but Gustav was kind and generous, and gave her thoughtful presents—delicacies, good winter clothing, some discreet jewellery.

  He had always been very considerate, dropping the girls off far enough from their homes, but in time to catch one of the late trams. Late snow came, and moonlight. One afternoon she met Gustav alone; Karl was on duty, so Marie had stayed sulkily at home. Because they were alone they were especially loving to each other. Afternoon merged with early winter dusk, and later, when she awoke from a light sleep beside him, it was nearly nine. They dressed and hurried out to the car and she settled down beside him, relaxed but a little breathless, as the car streamed through the night back to the city in the bright moonlight, with a powdering of snow on the bare fields, while below the horizon the searchlights danced over England.

  Because it was so late, because with the moonlight, the cold, the wine and the love they were very lightly and ethereally drunk, they forgot the usual discretion and stopped right by the entrance that led into the courtyard of Belle’s apartment house. She kissed him standing there in the bright moonlight, and waved after him as the Mercedes roared away.

  Inside the house it was all dark. Letting herself in with her key, she tapped on her father’s bedroom door and called quietly to him in case he was still awake, but there was no answer, so she went to bed and dreamed that she was having tea with her father in the teashop in the Rue de l’Horloge.

  Next morning, huddled in her dressing-gown, she got up to make the coffee. The way to the kitchenette lay through the little salon, and when she opened the door she saw at once the crumpled figure lying on the floor by the window. The curtains were parted, and a long narrow streak of pale snow-reflected light lay across the room and the fallen body like a ruler. He must have put out the light and opened the curtains when he heard the Mercedes draw up outside, and everything must have been very bright and sharp in the moonlight, framed in the entrance to the courtyard.

  It was also the last time she saw Gustav. Marie heard from Karl that he was missing over England, then reported wounded, a prisoner. After a while she went back to work, but didn’t go out much for months. She lost touch with Marie and Karl, but she thought that they had been going together until Karl was sent east for Operation Barbarossa in the summer of ’forty-one.

  Now again I’ve been recreating what Saul understood of what she’d remembered and told him, refining and reinforcing and enhancing those fogged photographs from the past. And all the time the room darkened around them in the summer twilight and she made more coffee and outside the German bombers swept in over the distant bay and the slow silent streams of incandescent tracer seemed to float up into the dark sky.

  When she finished they tried the electricity but as usual it was off, so she drew the curtains and lit a candle. They opened the grate of the stove and they sat staring into the dying red glow, smoking and saying little. He watched her unmoving profile. In the oblique light from the fire the early hidden signs of age developed like a photographic plate—the wrinkles moulded around the eyes, the set lines of the upper lip, the beginnings of heaviness under the chin. Presently she yawned and went off to the bedroom, taking the candle; he finished his cigarette and followed her.

  After what had passed between them in the orchard that afternoon it might seem she would be cold to him, even not want him at all. But he could be a patient and wise listener when he wished to be, and he had listened to her story with only the kind of interruptions that showed interest and concern. Talking of her first German lover had eased her, and she was responsive enough to rouse him at once when he blew out the candle and stripped and lay down beside her in the big bed in the dark.

  Why do you put out the light? she said. Am I ugly? Do you not wish to see me?

  You’re all right, he said, I mean really all right. I like to see you in the daylight.

  My face, my hands. Not my body. Is my body ugly?

  She was teasing him, but it struck on an obscure nerve, and he began to lose his potency.

  It’s not you, he said awkwardly, it’s something else. It just doesn’t seem right, to look on a woman’s nakedness, to uncover a man’s parts. It’s not right, that’s all.

  Uh, you English are hypocrites, Puritans.

  What about you French?

  The same. I know.

  What about the Germans?

  She turned sharply away from him and he heard her breath catch.

  Gustav loved to look at me, she said, in the bedroom at the inn. The light came in from the garden. The leaves made shadows on the bed. He said that love should be made out of doors—in nature. By the light of the sun, he said, the eye of Apollo, or the light of the full moon, the eye of Diana.

  And did you?

  How could we, with all those spying people? But he was so beautiful, Apollo’s son. He too fell out of the sky, you know.

  The classical talk bored and puzzled him, and he lay on his back staring at the darkness. She turned back to him with one of her sudden changes of mood.

  Not like you, she said. You are dark and cruel, you belong to the darkness.

  She beat her fist gently against the flat hard muscles on his chest.

  You go in the dark, she said, to kill, to steal, to make love.

  That’s right, he said in surprise. I’ve always liked night-time. I grew up in the country, without street lamps. I like to hide and watch. That’s why I was a good hunter.

  Then things began to go right again, as he turned towards her and drew her close. When he readied himself and went into her it was (in his own words) like a torchlight procession with brass bands. As they separated again, getting their breath, there was a sudden flurry of gunfire not far away, answered by a distant one from the Germans and followed by the muffled noise of incoming shells. It went on for some time, perhaps a counter-battery exercise, perhaps a luckless patrol caught in the open between the lines and hammered.

  He slept deeply and struggled up out of a confused dream in which his granny was showing him the big Pilgrim’s Progress book with the pictures. They came to the one she always passed over quickly, but this time he held her hand and made her stay. It was the page where Christian was shown in the Valley of the Shadow, twined in struggle with Apollyon—Christian in his armour, scaly Apollyon bat-winged and fiery-eyed. The picture filled him with an old fear and he struggled with it formlessly and awoke to find that it was Belle who was groaning and throwing herself about like a sick animal in its throes. He pulled her against him and held her close. It was some time before she knew where she was
, coming out of a kind of delirium into the warmth of the bed, and still panting, with sweat on her body, as if she had been running desperately away from some terror.

  He talked to her all the while as he might to a frightened horse or dog.

  There now, girl, there’s a good girl now, there’s nothing to fear, I’ve got you, old Saul’s got you, ah there’s a sorry girl to cry out so, don’t cry now. Saul’s got you, you’ll come to no harm, that’s a pretty girl, be quiet now, don’t carry on so, there’s nothing to fear.

  On and on, while she sweated and trembled against him and her breathing grew calmer until she heaved a deep sigh and was quiet.

  That was a bad one, wasn’t it? he said, and she nodded her head in the dark.

  Yes, she said, oh yes.

  What were you dreaming of, girl? Tell me now and get rid of it. Then you’ll sleep.

  I dreamed, she said, about the prison in Rouen where they put Jeanne d’Arc. It is like a prison cell, but open all round. There were soldiers there all the time, she was never to herself, imagine, she could not even cover herself to go to the pissoire. Imagine that, like an animal. Then she was burned.

  She stopped and he prompted her.

  So you were Joan of Arc, in the dream? he said.

  No, she hesitated, no, but like. I was in a cell but like a hospital room and with windows all round. Men watching me, Gestapo. And I was to be taken and burned. I thought how it would hurt me, and then I thought, it is like the dentist, a time shall be when it shall be finished, no more pain. If I could reach that time—but first there will be the pain of the fire.

  She was silent again.

  Go on, he said gently.

  But that was the dream.

  Oh sure, but that’s not all, is it? Why do you dream about the Gestapo?

  Everyone in France has dreamed about the Gestapo, from time to time.

  Why you specially? What have they done to you, girl?

  Nothing.

  But they threatened you or something, didn’t they? And it joins up with them blokes under the tree, don’t it? Come on, tell me, girl. You’ll feel better.

  Saul’s rough and ready psychoanalysis was genuine enough, and a man versed in country matters could know that the mind too has need of its purges. But he was also curious, in a detached way, and again he felt, despite himself, a sense of involvement and, uncomfortably, jealousy.

  So she told him. After Gustav had gone and her father had died she had lived very much to herself for a while. A good-looking girl could always pick up another German soldier, but she had not wished to. Instead, she began going around with French youngsters of her own generation—some distant cousins, people she had known at school, friends of theirs. They hadn’t known about her German lover, or had forgotten, or didn’t care. One she came to know well—he had a beautiful name, ‘Balthazar’. Soon they became lovers, and they would meet in a little hotel by the docks where sailors took their women, renting rooms by the hour. Balthazar seemed to be on good terms with the heavy dark woman who owned it—he called her ‘tante’, and she might have been his real aunt, for all Belle knew. They could always get a room there. She liked it because it was full of dark corridors and strange smells of spices and toilets. Some of the foreign sailors smoked hashish, even in wartime—she tried it once and was sick. Dirty half-dressed girls stood in half-opened doorways, with glimpses of towsled heads behind them and tattooed men buckling on their trousers. There was always noise in the corridors—whispering, laughter, singing, sometimes cries and screams. A huge one-eyed old man with a terrible seamed face acted as bouncer and two small boys in dirty white coats scurried about the corridors on endless errands, bringing water and towels and cups of coffee, bottles of wine and crusty sandwiches from the bistro next door. It excited her because it was dark and strange and louche, and she liked Balthazar because he was at home there.

  One spring evening when they met, he took her arm and steered her into the bistro instead of into the entrance to the hotel. They sat over their coffees in the little bar, silent and ill at ease.

  There was something he must tell her, he did not wish it, please understand. He did not know—had she had German friends, a lover perhaps?

  Yes, it was true, but why—

  Then I must not—we must not meet again.

  But why—it is all over now. He is a prisoner in England. Please—

  No, do not think it is my feelings. I am not the jealous type, one should be above such things. (He was a boy who said things like that.) If it was up to me—

  Why then—who told you? Who is making you?

  Please, Belle, do not meet me again. Forget me, forget this place, everything. Believe me, it is really dangerous.

  They went out into the chilly spring evening and he walked with her in silence to the tram. They parted with a coldly formal handshake.

  Then she met this girl Thérèse who came in to share the apartment, and she had a lover in the SS and he had a friend, and that was how Belle met her SS lover who told her about the reprisals in Poland. By this time the Germans had invaded Russia. At first there had been the same excited feeling as in the previous summer. The SS, Hitler’s supermen, were a very special breed, and being accepted as one of their women drafted her into a kind of club, where she shared in a small way the mystique, the confidence, the triumph.

  Winter came. Nothing was actually said, but they knew something was wrong, because all the beautiful young Germans began to be posted away to the eastern front, and their places were taken by older and grimmer men. She became the mistress of a big grey powerful man, a colonel in some kind of staff job, not a field-officer. She feared him but felt safe with him, a secure immovable man who seemed to embody for her all the power of the Reich. His name was Emil Winterhalter but she referred to him always as Winterhalter. Yet he was kind to her, was proud of her beauty and bought her good clothes and enjoyed showing her off at parties.

  One day in early spring, again, she had driven with him into the country. It was still very cold, and on the way back he told the driver to pull up at a café so that they could go in for a hot grog. As she sat down and loosened the tall fur collar of her winter coat—one of his presents—she looked up and found the waiter staring at her over Winterhalter’s shoulder. For a moment she did not recognize him; it was Balthazar, looking gaunt and older. He put his fingers to his lips in a fumbling please-keep-silence gesture, which he covered by pretending to cough. He hurried away, and his place was taken by an older man who served their orders. Winterhalter seemed not to have noticed, but he watched her thoughtfully, almost tenderly, from his hooded grey eyes as she drank her grog. Before they left, he politely excused himself and made a phone call.

  On their way back through the twilit streets, he said: I should like to stop here and introduce you to an old friend of mine. Do not worry, it will not take long.

  They drew up by a house with a courtyard. If it had been full daylight she might have recognized it, for it was well known, but in near-darkness all she could think was that it reminded her of home, the apartment overlooking a cobbled yard and grey buildings. But here, instead of a concierge in black with a shawl, they were carefully covered with Schmeissers and inspected before Colonel Winterhalter was recognized and saluted and the car passed through the gateway.

  He guided her, not through the main door, but down stone steps and through a kitchen-basement entrance at the side of the yard. There was a long whitewashed corridor and two men lounging by a stove. They straightened up as Winterhalter came in and one of them spoke to him, pointing to a telephone.

  Excuse me, my dear, he said, a small task I must attend to. Follow this man, he will take you to the reception-room.

  And he nodded to one of them, a short thick man in a leather jacket, and with a broad face cratered with old acne scars. She followed him along the corridor and round a corner. He flung open a metal-sheathed door and she entered, expecting to find herself in a service-lift. Instead, she was standing at
the entrance to a small windowless high-ceilinged room lit by an unshaded bulb. It was strangely decorated with what at first sight appeared to be a light buff wallpaper speckled all over in red-brown. In the middle of the opposite wall a rough outline of a human body with upstretched arms seemed to be silhouetted in buff with streaks of brown.

  The man pushed her urgently in the back and she stumbled three steps into the room. The light swayed, and she saw the manacles hanging from ring-bolts high up on the wall, and all the whitewashed walls of the dirty room streaked and speckled with dried blood.

  The light swung faster and faster, there was a roaring whisper in her ears and she felt the vomit rising in her throat. Before she could fall, Colonel Winterhalter was there, gently supporting her, leading her out of the dreadful little room, shouting something not very angry at the stocky man who slouched off grinning.

  Forgive me, my dear, he said soothingly, a most terrible mistake. I reproach myself—the man is stupid and new here—I meant him to take you to my friend’s reception-room upstairs.

  And this time it was the service-lift, from which they stepped out again on to soft carpets and through a panelled door into a warm rich softly-lit room that smelled of woodfires and coffee and good cigars. The man who rose from the polished desk to greet them was tall and thin and old, dressed in soft grey tweeds. He spoke to them gently, like a nice old professor, as Colonel Winterhalter explained about the unpleasant mistake, and the old man offered her a glass of good brandy and settled her comfortably in a leather chair beside the desk.

  Gently, diffidently, he pushed forward a photograph which lay in the circle of lamp-light on the desk. She stared at it stupidly. It was a snapshot taken somewhere on the boulevards and probably by a concealed camera. Against the blurred background, it showed quite clearly three young men walking along together. One she did not know; one she vaguely remembered; the third was Balthazar.