by Craig Nova
“So why did you do that?” said Armina.
Felix shrugged.
“I wanted to make it look like the others. That I read about in the newspaper,” said Felix. “If you’re smart, you’re going to let this go. I’ve got one word to say to you.”
“What’s that?” she said.
“Hauptmann,” he said. “He’s my friend.”
“But Gaelle was your friend, too,” said Armina.
“It’s done,” he said. “There’s nothing to say.”
The typing was louder on the floor of the political section. Armina and Felix came through the door from the stairwell and into the room where the typists worked: two rows of five, all women in black dresses with skin so pale it looked like desert sand at dusk. They had long hair, but each one had pulled it back into the same tight bun. They worked with a steady, frank clicking, and threw the carriage back at the end of a line—then they went back to typing until a small bell rang when they came to the end. It was a small sound, like a child’s triangle. The motion of shoving the carriage back was as though they were all trying to hit something, an insect, say, and that they always did so from the left. They didn’t look up as Armina and Felix walked to Ritter’s office, where Armina pushed the door open without knocking.
Ritter sat at his desk, jacket off, pen in hand, a sheet of paper in front of him illuminated by his lamp. He smoked a cigarette, the tip of it newly lighted and crisp as a small red button. He drew on it and made it even brighter as he considered the spectacle in front of him, Armina in her dirty clothes, some blood on her hands, her hair in disarray, Felix next to her, stunted, face scared with acne, his eyes going around the room as though he were looking for something to steal. Ritter instinctively looked down, at Armina’s leg, at her shoes, and the seeping trickle that made a shape on the floor, like a small red country on a map.
“This is Felix,” she said.
He raised a brow.
“Felix?” he said.
She shook Felix’s arm again. He winced and pulled away.
“Leave me alone,” said Felix. “Stop pulling on me.”
“So?” said Ritter. “What’s this?”
“He’s got something to tell you,” said Armina. She shoved Felix forward. “No lies.”
“Maybe I could work this off,” said Felix.
Ritter drew on his cigarette and watched Felix. The two of them had the same faraway expression.
“Work it off?” said Ritter.
“He killed Gaelle,” said Armina. “Didn’t you?”
“I’d rather work it off,” said Felix to Ritter.
Ritter sat back, flicked the ashes of his cigarette into a black onyx tray. He pushed around some of the things on his desk, a cigarette case, a small rattling box of matches, a pen. Then he inhaled again and sighed, so that the smoke came out in a pale display of uncertainty. Women typed beyond the door.
“Go on,” said Armina.
“It just sort of happened,” said Felix.
“But you did it, didn’t you?” said Armina.
“We’re going to want to know how,” said Ritter. “Details. Will you give them?”
“I’d rather work this off,” said Felix.
“Tell him about Hauptmann,” said Armina.
“Hauptmann?” said Ritter. “Hauptmann?”
Felix looked from one of them to the other. A red crescent of blood ran from the door to the place where Armina stood on the gray linoleum. The blood had gotten into her shoes, leaked over the back of the heel, and some of it ran toward her toe, but before it got there it dripped to the floor, and when the typing stopped, the blood made an almost audible sound, a slight tick tick tick. Felix sat down in the chair in front of Ritter’s desk, head forward, as though exhausted, but every so often he looked up at Ritter with an air of recognition. Then he went back to his inventory of the desk: maybe he could pick something up.
“You’re hurt,” said Ritter. “You need to have that looked at.”
“Here he is,” said Armina. “And he’s going to tell us all kinds of things. He isn’t going to work it off, either. He’s going to tell us. Hauptmann paid him.”
Armina stood there, the tickling on the back of her thigh diminished now. Ritter pushed a button on his desk. Almost instantly a member of the Schutzpolice came into the room, his buttons shiny, his visor bright with Vaseline, his expression as blank as a stone.
“Take him downstairs,” said Ritter. “Hold him.”
“Come on,” said the Schutzpoliceman.
Felix stared at Ritter.
“It’s nice to meet a gentleman,” he said. “I know what a gentleman likes, see?”
“Take him downstairs,” said Ritter.
The door shut, and as it closed, the sensation of the two of them being alone seeped into the room like a gas.
“You’ve got to get yourself looked after,” said Ritter. “Do you need a ride? I’ll have a car downstairs for you.”
“He’s going to tell us what we need to know.”
“All right. All right,” said Ritter. “Whatever you say. But right now you need to get yourself looked after.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” she said.
“Good work,” said Ritter.
Aksel stood on Unter den Linden with the other members of his group, each dressed in brown pants, white shirts, their hair neatly combed. They rested and looked one way and another, and then they started walking down the avenue past the Soviet embassy, where they stopped for a moment and milled around. After a while, Aksel said, “Come on. Let’s get going.”
The main university building had a courtyard, just behind the gate, and a wing was on each side. Students carried books through the gate and smiled and nodded at Aksel’s group.
“Do you see him?” said Aksel.
“Not yet,” said a tall boy with red hair.
“There’s a few I’d like to talk to,” said another member of the group. “Professors my ass.”
Rainer thought of Armina as he came out of the main building and went across the cobblestones of the courtyard. It was a warm day, and he carried just one book, which he had been reading in his office. It had nothing to do with botany, the chemistry of orchid reproduction, the complications of breeding new species, the fragrances that had an impact on survival (drawing in insects, for instance, to orchids that fed on them). Rainer read for pleasure from time to time, and this was a book by Stefan Zweig. A clever and delicate book about a particular moment in a woman’s life. Then he looked up. There were eight or ten of them.
Rainer tried to look from one face to another, as though if he could reach them one by one, he might have a chance. They stared back. Up the avenue the trees stretched away like an illustration in a book about perspective. Then he started walking.
“What are you reading?” said Aksel.
“What business of it of yours?” said Rainer. No, he thought, no. That is the wrong tone.
“There are writers who aren’t worth reading anymore,” said one of the young men. “From the past. Dead. They are the wrong race.
With ideas we don’t like. That have nothing to do with us.”
“With Germany,” said another.
“What would you know about Germany?” said Rainer.
“We know how it’s going to be,” said Aksel.
“No you don’t,” said Rainer.
He turned and went up the avenue, into those converging lines of perspective. It was like looking up some railroad tracks that fused into one distant spot, which, he guessed, was like the future, so far away and so confined. Then he thought, You aren’t doing yourself any good, thinking that way.
The young men came with him, not too far behind, but not so close as to allow him to talk to them without having to raise his voice. There were other people on the avenue, polite-looking men and women, dressed in dark clothes, some of the women carrying parasols against the sun. The men wore dark ties and stiff collars and the women wore stockings and sh
oes with heels. Rainer looked back over his shoulder. The young men were still there.
Maybe they would go all the way down to the Brandenburg Gate, and if he went into the park, they would follow him, and he wished that he hadn’t gone this way. Still, he had to get home, and that would take him close to the park. Was he going to let himself be pushed around, just like that?
The young men came closer, one on one side and one on the other, and as they began to surround him, just coming up next to him, he picked up his pace a little. They did, too. The other people on the street glanced at him and went on walking. No one wanted any trouble, and when he looked back, over his shoulder, he saw one of his fellow professors come out of the university gate, glance once in Rainer’s direction, and then turn the other way.
He turned to face the young men. They stopped and formed a circle around him while he stood with his back against an iron fence. The beauty and precision of the world of the book that he carried seemed to exist right here, as though the object were not a thing, but alive or at least part of an imaginative world. So he stood there, looking at the young men. They looked back.
The heavy pants the young men wore, their white shirts, the buildings behind them, the cars in the street, the bright and clingy dresses that the women with parasols wore all had an extra clarity, as though everything were preserved in glass.
“What’s that you’re reading?” one of them said.
“What’s it to you?” said Rainer.
They grabbed the book and threw it on the ground and one of them kicked it so that it fluttered along the stone gutter. Rainer was struck by how much it looked like a dead bird, wings out, animated only by the kick. Rainer stepped down and went after the book, and when they kicked it again, he continued walking. As it slid along it seemed not to be just the object that was skittering this way, not the printed paper, but the entire world of the book that was being kicked. Rainer apprehended this as a physical sensation, although it was hard to distinguish it from a fury that made him nauseated.
They let him come up to the book. And as he reached down to pick it up, one of them began to kick it again, and as he did, Rainer said, “I wouldn’t do that. I really wouldn’t.”
The young men thought it over.
A group of young men from the Red Front Fighters crossed the street, and when they approached, the members of Aksel’s group stepped back a little, their eyes turning as one toward the young men in rougher clothes, with their caps and scarred faces. They didn’t retreat so much as spread out a little farther down the street, so as to be able to fight better. Before they left, Aksel said to Rainer, “Maybe some other time.”
The men in brown pants moved back where they would have a little cover at their back. When the young men from the Red Front Fighters came up to Rainer, they looked at him with a quiet fury, and one of them said, “We should have let them take this one.”
“It’s all right,” said another. “His time is coming. We have a new literature based on science. On the inevitable.” He looked at Rainer. “Your time is over. We will obliterate you.”
“I teach science,” Rainer said stupidly.
“We have new science, too,” said the young man.
Then they went in the opposite direction, as though some mutual truce had been negotiated between the two groups. They slipped away, moving up the sidewalk in a mass, and made people cross the street or step into the gutter. Rainer turned and walked away, up Unter den Linden until he came to the Hotel Aldon, where he went into the bar and asked for a brandy.
Everything here was ordinary, elegant, shiny. The chandelier was bright, and people moved with a quiet gait over the heavy carpet, the sound of their feet subdued and soothing, but when he glanced down, he saw his fingers were shaking. It was nothing, really, he thought as the brandy lifted his mood. Nothing at all. Everyone had difficulties, and this was his. So what?
He wanted to call Armina, but what could he say? He wanted the expectation of her arrival, the experience of being together, as though they touched when their eyes met. That moment, when their eyes met, was the one he craved: it was the sense of one mind touching another.
In the morning her leg was stiff and a bandage left Armina with the sensation of a lump at the back of her leg, like awkwardness itself. The cotton pad was covered with the tarlike color of iodine. She sat at the side of the bed and looked at her feet, the veins blue just beneath the skin, and after a while she stood up and waited for a moment in the gray shadows of the apartment. The silence existed like something she could almost hear, like the pitch of a whistle for a dog.
She took a taxi to the Inspectorate, and as she climbed the steps to the front door, in a burst of pigeons like a feathery explosion, Linz came out.
“Armina,” he said. “Got a minute?”
“Sure, she said.
“Let’s go next door,” he said. “Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
The café had marble counters, small chairs made of heavy-gauge wire, round tables with marble tops, too, and it smelled of strudel and cinnamon, coffee and tobacco smoke, which hung like a blue cloud.
“You remember that night I came to your apartment,” said Linz.
“I remember,” said Armina.
“What a missed chance that night,” said Linz.
The waiter arrived in his brown apron and white shirt. They asked for coffee.
“It would have been a mistake,” said Armina.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I wish we’d had a chance. I’m not such a bad guy. I can be nice. Considerate in bed.”
“I know,” said Armina.
The waiter put down the bitter coffee—just like the coffee in Vienna. Armina moved her leg one way and then another. Her thigh stopped hurting right after she moved it, but then instantly it started again, a cold sensation that ran through her leg as though the pain were a liquid that wanted to drain itself into the ground.
“It would have made it easier to talk,” said Linz.
“Would it?” she said. She smiled and put a hand to her red hair. “Maybe we wouldn’t be talking at all. That’s the usual thing.”
“I’d like to think we’d still be talking,” he said. He took a sip of the coffee. “And that you’d trust me.”
“I trust you,” she said.
“And there’s no chance for us?” he said.
She shook her head and tasted the coffee. Just like Vienna.
“Well,” he said.
“Is that it?” she said.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got to trust me.”
“About what?”
“Ritter let your boy go,” he said.
“Felix?” said Armina.
“Ritter thought Felix would be better as an informant.”
“Did he?” said Armina. The throbbing came in the same cadence as her heart.
“Yes,” said Linz.
She reached for her handbag, but Linz stopped her.
“No,” he said. “Just wait a minute. Don’t go up there.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Don’t go up there angry,” said Linz.
“And how should I go up there?” she said.
“Trust me,” said Linz. “Can’t you trust me? He’ll get rid of you. Don’t you see? He’s playing you like a drum. He’ll get you angry and you’ll make a scene….”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’ll make a scene.”
The room was filled with the silver clink of the spoons, the click of a coffee cup against the marble, the sound of the cars in the street. Armina shifted her weight, but she couldn’t get away from that throb that ran down to the sole of her foot.
“I just wish we’d had a chance in your apartment,” said Linz. “It would have been nice.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Armina. “Give it a rest.”
She stood up. Linz had the keen, silly expression of regret.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said.
She
picked up her bag.
“I’ll get this,” he said. “I’ll pay for the coffee.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
She took a bill from her bag and slapped it on the table: the sound was like a fish dropped on a bed of ice.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, think about it,” he said.
She went into the street and looked down the avenue. The lines disappeared into the distant clutter, horses, cars, exhaust, clouds like an ill-meaning ghost. She tried to walk, to escape, to think, but she was left with that throb. It was cold, inescapable, like the memory of being hurt in the snow. She took a taxi home and waited for Rainer.
“WHEN YOU FEEL this way, there’s only one thing to do,” said Rainer. “Let’s go out. Have a good time. Come on.”
Rainer wore a new jacket, a white shirt, a silk tie, and his hair was brushed back. He walked with a slight swagger, which Armina understood as a variety of defiance, just a small detail that was evidence of the desire to make a decision, no matter how difficult. They went up the avenue and walked along the lights from the cars, which coalesced into a bright stream. The restaurants they passed filled the street with fragrance, and Armina and Rainer played a game: what made such a delicious aroma, pheasant in wine with morels served with buttered peas? She could imagine the green circles of peas, the sheen of butter, the texture of the morels. Or maybe it was a roast of beef with horseradish sauce, served with thin, crisp potatoes. Fresh bread with a crust as delicate as eggshell, desserts, like strudel, with apples and cinnamon. The collection of scents seemed like vitality itself.
At the corner a movie theater showed All Quiet on the Western Front. A mob of Brownshirts was in the street, and they waved signs that said PACIFIST PROPAGANDA. Their white faces, so pasty in the lights of the marquee, all turned in the same direction, like stalks of wheat in a breeze. Armina and Rainer came to the edge of the mob and then crossed the street and went along that same stream from the headlights of the cars. Then they turned into a side street to take a shortcut to the cabaret they wanted to go to, and as they turned off the avenue the shouts from the men in front of the theater diminished, like a repeating echo.
