by Craig Nova
Felix slobbered and gasped as he lay in the dust and gray bricks, his bad leg twitching now and then so that diminutive clouds, like dust devils, rose from his shoe and then drifted away. He said, “I’m thirsty.”
“That always makes me horny,” said one of the boyish Russians. He nodded at Felix.
“Yes,” said the other young one.
“She put down the pistol,” said the first young one.
“Yeah,” said the other. “She did.” He turned to the older Russian. “We aren’t going to need the potatoes.”
“No,” said the older Russian. He swayed like a wheat stalk in the wind. “I guess not.”
“You aren’t interested in her?” said the first young one.
“No,” said the older one. “I didn’t say that.”
The pistol sat in the dust like something that had been buried and was now just emerging, the diamonds of the grip already filled with gray dirt. Armina stepped toward it, but the first young Russian, with a speed that was like a trap being sprung, picked it up.
“You,” he said. “Woman. Over here.”
Armina stepped backward, keeping her eyes on the Russian with the pistol. It seemed to her that as long as she could keep her eyes on his they wouldn’t begin. She stepped backward into the rubble. Felix made that harsh, guttural breathing, like he was trying to cough up something he had been choking on for hours and the effort of it had left him exhausted and at the point where he was going to give up. His heels worked in the ashy dust, the puffs of it like doll-size ghosts.
The second young Russian took Armina by the arm.
“You have white skin,” he said.
“Redheads are like that,” said the older Russian.
“Yeah,” said the first young Russian.
“You think it’s red, too,” said the second young Russian.
He lighted a cigarette, the scratch of the match on the abrasive strip of the box making small stars. She thought of those nicotine-stained butts in the park before the war, and of those nights in New York when she had considered them, the memory somewhere, at 3 A.M., between accusation and terror. Now, the little sparks from the lighted match left the smell of sulfur. The first young Russian said, “Over here.”
He slowly lifted the hem of her skirt until her white skin, a garter, and the top of her stockings showed. The cool breeze washed over her skin.
“No,” she said. “I’m a police officer. You don’t want to touch me.”
“What did she say?” said the young Russian. “What’s that? Police?”
“Yes,” said the second young Russian.
“Have you ever heard that one?” said the first young Russian.
“No,” said the older one. “I’ve heard a lot of other ones.”
The first young one put his finger under the stocking top and pulled it down with a yank, and the fabric ran in a ladder down her leg. He ripped the other one. Behind her Felix said, “Some fun,” and then gurgled and made one last shape of dust before he lay perfectly still. In the squeak of the Russians’ leather belts, in the clink of their equipment, the light breeze blew across the landscape in a slow, feathery hush.
“Leave me alone,” said Armina.
“Let me finish my cigarette,” said the second young Russian.
“I guess that one’s gone,” said the older Russian, as he pointed with his elbow to Felix.
“Yeah,” said the first young Russian. “I guess.”
“Let’s forget this,” said Armina to the older Russian. “Nothing happened. We can just go home.”
“No,” said the first young Russian.
“What’s the rush?” said the older Russian.
“We’re just getting started. Don’t you like Russians?”
“Sure,” said Armina. “They’re fine.”
“Russians are the best,” said the first young one. “We’ll show you.”
“I believe you,” said Armina.
“Seeing is believing,” said the second young Russian.
“Show her,” said the first young Russian.
The three Russians had their eyes on the distance, as though looking at the horizon beyond the chop of the ocean. Armina thought of those nights in New York, when she went through the things she had tried to make sense of. The torn stockings. The cigarette butts. The marks. Then she went back to looking at the older Russian, trying to catch his eye, to stare at him. That would slow things down. And as she went on looking into his blue eyes, the first young Russian dropped her skirt. She thought, that was my only pair of stockings.
“What’s that?” said the older Russian.
“Let’s not wait,” said the first young Russian. “Come on. She’s here. What are we waiting around for?”
“Someone’s coming,” said the older Russian.
“So what?” said the first young Russian. “They can join in.”
The trail of dust, like smoke, appeared on the avenue that ran through the piles of bricks.
Felix was still and yet appeared ancient, like a figure from the ruins of Pompeii, the gray skin seeming to have been preserved for thousands of years: it made him anonymous and yet eternal, too.
Armina stepped back.
“She’s going to get away,” said the first young Russian. “What did we wait for? Now look what’s going to happen.”
“The British,” said the older Russian. “That’s who they are.”
The older Russian took Armina’s arm, touched her blouse, and said, “There are other fish in the sea.”
An army jeep came along the mounds, its slow, constant passage marked by the green paint of it, which looked like a leaf in a desert. Two men sat in front, one hanging onto the dashboard, one at the wheel. The one at the wheel had a little mustache and wore glasses. Frieda sat in the back, her dress rustling in the breeze of the Jeep’s locomotion, her arm seeming even more pipelike and thin as she pointed, with a sort of desperate attempt to make herself understood, at Armina and the Russians.
“All right,” said the older Russian. “We’ll look for someone else.”
“Nothing works out,” said the first young Russian.
“Oh,” said the older Russian. “I don’t know.”
The Russians stepped back, the younger ones shouldering their rifles, the sheen of the bluing and the polish of the slings showing as streaks of silver. They walked with a slow, constant march, not tired, not enthusiastic, just a frank attempt to get through the brick and the dust. Only once did one of the young ones look back at Armina, as though she were something seen from the window of a train, momentarily appearing and then vanishing forever, reduced now to something less than a memory. Just a woman standing in the dust and then not worth looking at anymore.
The jeep stopped in a cloud. The man with the little mustache and glasses said, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No,” said Armina.
“Did anything happen here?” he said.
“No,” said Armina.
“Well,” said the man. “You were lucky. You can thank your friend here.”
He gestured to Frieda.
“Made quite a scene,” he said. “Threw rocks at us.”
“Near brained me,” said the other man in the front. “To get our attention. Why, I’m going to be all-over lumps for a week.” He rubbed his head.
“Well,” said the man with the mustache, “get in. We’ll give you a lift.”
Felix lay behind a low mound and his dusty shape disappeared into the rubble, like a stone thrown into the cobbles of a stony beach. No one in the jeep noticed he was there. The sky, which was a whitish blue, the color of gin in a bottle, was streaked with black where the birds flew in a widening circle. They flew around and around, as though the sky were an enormous glass bowl from which they couldn’t escape. Armina put her fingers together, each one trembling, as though she had been standing next to a train track where an enormous engine had gone by at eighty miles an hour: the trembling ran from her fingers into her arms, torso,
and stomach, down into her legs and knees. She tried to make it stop, but instead she got into the jeep with a shaky, trembling stumble, and when she sat down, she knew that Frieda felt it when they touched, a constant, vibrant twitching that wouldn’t go away. Frieda felt it and closed her eyes and shook her head, as though she didn’t want to be reminded of it, or of anything associated with that shaking. She shook her head and bit her lip, and when Armina tried to thank her, she shook her head even harder. They sat side by side as the jeep went around the piles of brick, over the holes in the road, and every time they touched, Frieda pulled away and shook her head.
“I’ll get out here,” she said.
Then she climbed over the side of the jeep and got down, glancing at Armina only once and then turning away, dismissing this moment with a sad acceptance and an obvious hope that this was another thing that could be forgotten. The jeep left Armina off, too, about a few blocks from the house where she had her room.
“Mind yourself,” said the man with the mustache.
On the street women worked with an unstoppable insistence as they picked up the bricks as though solving an enormous puzzle, which, if just assembled correctly, would allow them to live again. Armina went by them, toward a wider, more cleared avenue, and when she turned into it, she hesitated and stood on the corner with her eyes closed: she could see those black birds, quivering in the air, swooping around in an enormous circle, and then settling down again to feed on the last glittering insects.
The trembling in her legs was more noticeable when she climbed the stairs to her room. It was not only constant but also left her with a sense of weakness, too, as though she had been sick and in bed for a month and was now standing for the first time. She found a place in the middle of the room, as far from the walls as possible, since there, at least, she had no possibility of being touched. Her fingers, against her lips, felt like the flutter of a moth’s wings.
She took off her clothes and put them on her single bed. The stockings were run in long ladders, from the tops to the knees. She balled them up and put them in the trash and then piled some waste paper on top and pushed it down. She wet a washcloth from the jug of drinking water and tried to wash herself, but the dampness only made her feel cold in the room. Then she toweled, powdered herself, and put on some clothes so she could go downstairs and empty her waste basket, with the stockings included, into a bin where old and useless things were discarded. She dropped the stockings in as though she could get rid of the memory this way and then went back upstairs, angry now at the trembling weakness but not able to do anything about it.
She waited for the light to fade in her room. Maybe as it became dim, as the sun set, as that time came in the evening when the first bulbs filled the buildings with a golden light of the domestic, the trembling would stop. It lingered, though, like a note played in a church that left all of the wood—the timbers and beams and pews—vibrating with that last emotional intent: the touch of the young Russian’s fingers as he tore her stockings, the smell of the cigarette, the sparks at the head of the match on the abrasive surface of the matchbox, contained in memory, even more than at the moment, the frank, ill-meaning atmosphere of the men in the rubble. It was the realization of the essence, in the most personal way, of those actions she had tried to resist those years before the war in Berlin and that haunted the city as though nothing had happened at all, as though some things are eternal.
She hoped the electric lamp in the corner would make the room warmer, not in temperature but in mood, and as she pulled the small chain on the light fixture, a man knocked at the door.
He gave her an envelope. It had obviously been carried in a pocket and had gotten wet in tropical rain, soaked enough so the ink of her name had run, just as it had probably been held in a hand so covered with dirt as to look like skin with a speckled and gray birthmark.
Dear Armina,
Of course I have been thinking of you. This thinking of you is a part of me, and I don’t even notice anymore that I try to imagine what you are thinking and how you are feeling, to remember the scent of your skin and hair, to remember your eyes when you make a joke. It is like breathing, and how often during the day do you stop to say, I’m breathing.
How can I describe what it is like to miss you? When we were together it was as though an invisible film covered the two of us so perfectly that we didn’t notice it, but now your part, the part that went over you, is empty, and I can feel it dragging on the ground behind me, its tug and its airy weight. It is a delicate thing, but it carries an enormous impact. And what could a small sound convey? Imagine, for an instant, the tick of the trap beneath the condemned man. It is like that. When I concentrate on this empty thing I drag around it is both a sound and a sensation, like leaves in the wind. But now, of course, this hush, this rustle, this susurrus is a reminder of how, without you, I am incomplete. And when I am aware of this, when I put it into words, I have the terror of almost dissolving, of being on the edge of vanishing.
This has been the most difficult part. I am one way when I am with you, but a different man when we are apart, and this sense of losing myself, combined with your absence, makes that rustling, dragging sensation a validation of how alone I am. Well, this is hopelessly romantic, but if I can’t feel that after what happened on Truk and Palau and other places, if I can’t admit how diminished I am without you, then I am less of a man than I would like to be. My job is not to be reduced by horror, but made more knowledgeable of what is precious.
But the subject I want to discuss with you is what do I have to offer you after what we have been through? I am convinced that you had moments in which you were left with an animal existence, just eating, enduring, living in the moment of the endless or dreary present. Or maybe not so dreary. Maybe terrifying.
So, I come to you on this basis: what can I do in the face of the life we have lived over the last years? Perhaps the answer is so deep that I can’t articulate it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. So I want to invoke a memory from a long time ago when we exchanged presents and when these gifts revealed an attachment and understanding so deep that we were in the midst of it without being able to say what it was. How can I convey that understanding when, in the touch of your lips, in that warm, full pressure, the certainty of attachment runs into me like a shock of recognition. Like something already known and just noticed when we are together? And whatever this quality is, it binds us together and makes us better people than when we are apart. I am much less of a man when I am separated from you. So it is this mysterious presence I am offering you, this quality I can’t name but which is there and which makes itself known by its pleasures, its gifts, its potential. It is what we have, and, you know, it isn’t small. It is everything.
I think of the perfume of your hair, of the trembling in our fingers when the fireflies in the woods glowed with that warm, greenish light. Can you remember that color, that yellow verdant glow, which in its delicacy suggested the unseen, the only felt and suspected, but which in our case is quite real? And this unseen quality is the most keen sense of not being alone. We have had enough ofthat, of existing in that interior discomfort, that turmoil in the darkness when we close our eyes.
Here a new sheet had been added.
Does this give you any idea of how I feel and what it means that I have now crossed the Pacific and am mailing this letter from San Francisco? It is as though I am approaching the shore of myself. Or of us.
And I want to say this is not only theoretical. We are practical people, and I want to take some action that is more than words on paper. And what I have done shows the power of beauty, although that may be overstating the case. I went into the jungle on some of the islands in the Pacific with a general, a man who was interested in orchids, and I showed him some he had never seen before (chains of purple blossoms, cascades of petals that look like butterflies with an icy sheen on their wings). This botany, this searching for hidden beauty, was a small thing that helped us both after some
of the worst moments.
When we returned to San Francisco, the general asked if he could do me a favor. Should we go out to dinner, to the top of a hotel with a view of the Pacific (which would have reminded me of you), but I said no. I only wanted one thing. And what was that? he said. I asked if he could arrange air transportation for you to meet me in New York. And, after some maneuvering and a bribe or more than one bribe, and some promises of one sort or another, it is arranged. You will receive a letter in a day or two with a ticket and the necessary paperwork, which of course is sent with what you must know is love, if that word can possibly sum up the feelings that attend this note, Rainer. P.S. I also want to say that no matter what we have seen, or how dreary we feel, no matter how appalled we may be, our sense of beauty returns, like a surprise hidden in the depths. This is what makes us human and gives us hope, and that is what I want to leave with you.
The light in the room was now golden from the electric lamp, and Armina hoped the power might last a little longer than usual and that the sense of the domestic would linger. She put the letter on her bed, one sheet of paper stained and running with ink, the other crisp and neat. Her fingers seemed odd, somehow more precise, her gestures untroubled. She realized that the trembling had stopped. The suitcase was under the bed, and she dragged it out with a jerk, opened it, and started to put in her clothes, her few skirts and blouses, an extra pair of shoes, a few books, the package of letters that she had tied together with a piece of string. Outside, when the dark came, the lights pierced it with a steady, warm glow.
Author’s Note
The author wishes to express his gratitude for information obtained from Hsi-Huey Liang’s The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
About the Author
Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, and on Craignova.com. He is the Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
