At nine o’clock he dressed and went out. When he was going through the kitchen he turned aside suddenly and went to look down the cellar stairs. All was darkness down there — since the boarding-up of the shattered area. He stood at the top of the stairs: without warning he was seized by nausea. It seemed as if his entrails wanted to leave him. After some minutes, weak, shuddering, he crawled back to his room, and lay there wondering if he were dying — or what was the matter?
Insensibly he fell asleep. In the instant he woke, in a room crossed by one bar of sunlight, he knew that he must tell people about the murder. This was the first time he had even thought of it as murder. Until now, he had been calling it “the trial”, or “the sentence”, and since his breakdown in Leist’s room he had been almost calm.
He realised that he was going to confess and ruin himself. Until he did that, the dead man would lie in his stomach, tormenting him whenever he felt like it. He got up, feebly. When he reached the kitchen again, he crossed himself and said aloud, in a young weak voice,
“Forgive me, I’m going out now to tell them.”
Then hurried outside. He walked about the streets for nearly five hours. At one moment the sickness came back, and he ran to the gaping window-frame of a house and leaned over the stinking torrent of rubble inside. After this he was too tired to walk, and sat down on a pile of rubbish near a woman with bare feet, who was offering for sale two cupless saucers and a small piece of lace. By the time he had made up his mind, really made it up, and was asking, at his office, for Renn, he was in a state of quivering eagerness to talk — to tell everything. Everything.
He was put to wait in a dark little room where he had waited before. It opened, he knew, into Renn’s own room. He was feverishly excited, almost happy. In a short time, a few minutes, the bomb he was going to drop in this dingy office would explode, he would be stared at, questioned, seized, perhaps tortured. Who knew what fun and games went on in this house? In his hysterical longing for relief, he was anxious to be hurt. He sat turning over in his mind the phrases he had prepared. To see their faces! he thought, repressing a fit of laughter. Only one thing worried him — the idea that, when he once began talking, he would tell them also everything he knew about Kalb. And it was a mean story — a low mean ugly little story, his own share in it as mean as the rest. Why spoil a stupendous confession with a little nasty one? But he would do it — he knew bitterly that he would do it. As in his nausea, he would spill the last grain.
A young officer came into the room and glanced at him, with indifference. He walked through into the other room and closed the door after him. Gerlach heard what must be his voice, low, drawling, resonant, he could not hear what was said, and he did not hear Renn answer.
He was beginning to be irritated by the long wait. Damn these Englishmen, with their preposterous voices and their slovenly ties. A frightful doubt seized him. Suppose they knew everything already, and had kept him waiting to laugh at him? He became rigid. At this moment the door of the inner room opened, a clerk looked at him, and beckoned him to come.
Stupefied, he saw that Renn was not in the room. There were only the sergeant-clerk and the young officer — now that he saw him clearly, a thin good-looking boy, with heavily drooping eyelids. They it was gave him his air of indifference and arrogance. He said politely,
“Well? What is it you want?”
Gerlach answered coldly. When he heard that Renn was not in Berlin, he felt furiously that he had been deceived, tricked. Confess to this smooth young ass! Impossible, entirely impossible and indecent. Controlling himself with difficulty, he said,
“Thanks, I’ll wait for him to return.”
“As you like.”
He stood for a moment, scarcely knowing what he was doing, or what was happening to him.
“Well, what is it? Why are you waiting?”
The courteous voice, very slightly raised, filled him with such loathing that he became giddy and almost fell as he turned to go. He recovered at once. Outside, he felt an overwhelming relief. It was over, he was free; he had not confessed, but he was relieved, free, saved. He walked rapidly towards the Kurfürstendamm, and sat down in the first café. He had not been there five minutes before he had a vision of his uncle in the moment between the first and second shot, lying on the floor, his neck the colour of a wound. A sob knotted together the nerves of his chest. He rested his face in his hands, struggling to breathe calmly, to be calm.
A woman’s voice asked,
“Are you ill? Can I help you?”
He glanced up. A young woman, very young. She looked like a peasant, and spoke with the accent of East Berlin. Very attractive, with her smooth sunburned skin, blue eyes like a kitten’s, and wide smiling mouth. She had magnificent teeth.
He stood up. “Please sit down,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure you’re ill.”
“If you’ll sit down, too,” he answered.
He asked her what she would like to drink, and was thankful and a little surprised when she chose the so-called coffee. He ordered it, and said,
“When you spoke to me, I was feeling at the last.”
“Why? What’s the matter? Nothing is so terrible as that, you know.”
Her voice, the voice of a factory-girl, was pleasant. She was thin, but he thought that if she were well-fed she would be a big woman; she had the bones of a worker. An air of gaiety and good-humour. And healthy, yes, healthy. Everything he was not. He had a sudden wish to lie with his head between the scarcely formed breasts he saw under her blouse.
“Some things are worse than that. Incurable.”
“Oh, come, nonsense,” she said, laughing, “nothing at all is incurable except dying.”
“Exactly.”
Opening her eyes widely, she asked,
“Oh, were you going to kill yourself? Really seriously?”
He did not answer. The idea had not entered his head. But if she liked to believe it, it was her fantasy, not his, and no more fantastic than anything else. Leaning across the table, he took her hand, surprisingly slender and very clean.
“What’s your name?”
“Barbe. What is yours?”
He hesitated, not about giving her his name, but tempted to add another coil to the fantasy.
“Helmuth. Helmuth von Trotha.”
“With a name like that I wouldn’t kill myself,” she said, smiling. “I should be proud and tell people: Make room for me, here I come, Count von Trotha, make way, make way! And of course no one would make way. Names matter so little now, nothing matters except to do something —” she rolled the words, with an emphasis half serious half comical — “real, splendid, exciting.”
“Well, what shall I do? You tell me.”
She laughed at him again — she had the frank laugh of a little girl.
“I can’t, I don’t know anything about you.”
If he could afford it, he would give her dinner. You got an excellent dinner, served by a head waiter in correct dress, under the ruins of the Adlon. But for the moment he was penniless.
He looked at her with a touching anxiety.
“Come home with me. I really need you very much, Barbe.”
She hesitated for less than a minute, and said gaily,
“Well, why not? Where do you live? Do you live alone?”
The stairs, shakier since the first rains, did not frighten her, but she was disgusted by the filth of the two rooms, seldom enough cleaned by Marie and not touched after she left. “If I stay here, I shall scrub the place out, and throw away a lot of this rubbish,” she told him. “Pouh, who could live in such a pigstye? I see you need someone to look after you. But don’t think I’ll do it unless you work, too. I’m not going to break my back for a lazy devil — an aristocrat ought to work harder than other people now, to get us out of this mess we’re in. If you don’t, what use are you?”
A real Prussian, a drill-sergeant, he thought, amused. In the same breath, he had an impulse to throw himself and his
disorderly life into her hands, let her make something of them — why not? She was sound to her strong bones, disciplined, sane. And her plebeian looks would wear.
He made her sit down, and he sat on the floor at her feet, leaning his head against her sharp knees.
“Splendid,” he said, in a dry voice, “and what shall I do, where shall I begin? I’ve never done anything in my life except learn to ride, climb, shoot, jump out of an aeroplane, kill people, give orders, drink. Which of these tricks shall I use?”
“Well, none. You can become an engineer. I know someone, a foreman, who can get you into a works which is not going to be destroyed.” She laughed. “Just imagine. They want to punish us, so instead of working us to death, they leave us idle. They’re mad, lunatics, crazy.”
“An engineer? You must have noticed that I have only one hand,” he said bitterly.
“Well, you can find something,” she said, with smiling energy. “You mustn’t be sorry for yourself. That’s ridiculous and childish. In a year or two, everyone will want us as workmen. All the other countries. We work harder than anyone, they know it, and they’ll send for us. I swear.”
“After this war?”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t they want us?” She stretched out her arms, as thin and muscular as a boy’s. “We mustn’t cry about the past, we Germans, we must laugh and look forward. It’s so simple — the past is wiped out, we have no past, only the future. Our future.”
She ran a finger down the length of his scar, gently.
“How brave you must be!” she said, smiling.
Before she would get into Ida’s bed she took off all the things, shook them, leaning out of the jagged window in the room at the back, in the night air, and re-made it. Her own clothes she folded neatly and laid on a chair she first dusted. She would not touch the floor with her bare feet; she walked about naked except for her shoes, proud of her thin body, as smooth and flat as an archaic statue.
In the darkest hour of the night, Gerlach woke out of a nightmare of dragging Lucius Gerlach’s body across the cellar to tumble it into the flooded underground: instead of letting itself be dragged, it resisted, and he had to use all his force. He opened his eyes in the darkness feeling that a heavy decayed mass had pressed itself against them; his eyelids had to lift this to open. He screamed with horror. Barbe took him in her arms, scolding him in a warm gentle voice. . .“ What is it, my little one? Don’t be afraid. I’m here, I shall always be here, you need never be frightened. Sleep, go to sleep.” Trusting himself to her, he went to sleep again, and slept late.
He was completely refreshed when he woke. The girl was already up and dressed. She had searched the other room for something to make breakfast with, but there was nothing. Seeing him awake, she ordered him to get up.
“If you have no money,” she said gaily, “I’ll lend you some of mine, and you must go and buy us some coffee. And how do you get water? Is there a tap outside somewhere?”
Gerlach had no wish to move: he was comfortable, he had nothing to get up for, since the only thing he meant to do today was to sell a ring his uncle had given him, and it was too early for that. Lying on his back, he smiled mockingly at Barbe.
“We’ll go out later. Come here.”
She stood beside him, half vexed, radiant.
“No, you must get up. Today you’re going to find work. We’ll see my friend when he comes out, at twelve, he’ll tell us what you can do, then we can make our plans. I love you very much, but you must get up now.”
All this chatter of hers about work had begun to bore him. If she were going to stay here — and why not? she would be very useful — he could not keep up this nonsense. She was a charming amusing creature, he wanted her to stay, but enthusiasm, at this hour in the morning, must be discouraged.
“My dear child,” he said, “my dear romantic Barbe, you talk as if we were living in a world which was just going to right itself after a few months of disturbance. What a hope! We’re going down and the rest of Europe with us; after a time we shall be taken over by Russia, then the Americans will make war on us, then, one way or another, I shall fight. Until then, we must live as we can — I have my schemes. But don’t think that uncertainty and danger are like whooping-cough, something we shall get rid of. They’ve become the rule, and the only way to live is to enjoy them. . . Take your clothes off again. I want to look at you in daylight.”
She had stepped back, and was looking at him with a severe face, hard and contemptuous. Her eyes sparkled; her lifted eyebrows were less surprised than mocking.
“Do you mean all that?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She was silent. After a moment,
“You’re no good. I ought to have known it. I shall go.”
Hardly believing her, he said,
“Where are you going? What time shall you be back?”
“That’s my business. Never.”
She pulled on a shabby little jacket, and walked quickly to the door. A thrill of fear passed through him; he felt opening beneath him again the abyss of loneliness and nightmares. He sat up in bed, and felt the air cold on his naked body.
“Don’t go. I need you, I don’t know what to do without you — for God’s sake, stay.”
A hand on the door, she turned to him with the same severity. Strangely, it made her look even younger, she might be a schoolgirl, implacable because ignorant and singleminded. Yet only a few hours ago she had comforted him like a young gently loving mother.
“Only if you do as I tell you.”
His nerves betrayed him. He shouted at her, called her a filthy name, implored her. She listened silently, with an air of curiosity and grief. When he was quiet she said in a low voice,
“I should never burden myself with such a creature as you. I’m sorry for you, but I won’t turn myself into a nursemaid — neither for you nor anyone. I have my life to live. I shall live it. Of course I shall live it.”
She hesitated: the clear blue of her eyes clouded, an ironical smile touched the corners of her mouth.
“As if any good came of pitying oneself. We weren’t thrown into the world to do that.”
She was opening the door as she spoke, and the next moment she had gone.
Chapter Thirty-one
Late in the afternoon of this day, Gary telephoned for the second time to the office of his chief legal adviser (in civil life), Brigadier Patterson in Lübbecke. The brigadier was still away: he might be back within the hour. He left a message asking Patterson to ring him up. Only then — twenty minutes after being told he was in the hall — he told a servant to bring Baron von Rechberg to the library.
He watched Rechberg come into the room, limping more slowly than usual, his eyes, sorrowful and uneasy, staring blankly in his pallid face.
“My dear fellow, you look ill.”
“It’s nothing. I am very well — except for sleeplessness . . . I came to thank you for my release. I’m sure it’s you I must thank.”
“No,” Gary said coldly, “you released yourself — by convincing General Lowerby of your —” he hesitated, and said — “integrity.”
Rechberg did not look up. He was sitting, as he usually did, his short legs dangling like the legs of a stuffed doll, hands crossed in his lap. At last he said gently,
“I need your advice — as a friend.”
He hesitated for so long that Gary asked himself what worm was moving along the blind passages behind his eyes. He recalled a moment when, a child, he had been staring into a dry ditch, and with a start of terror, found that he was being stared back at by a lizard the colour of the ground. He thought, too, of those smooth polished heads, without features, of a modern sculptor.
If Rechberg had been hoping he would speak, he now gave up hope, sighed, said, with the same gentleness,
“A personal problem.”
He was silent, tried to go on, failed, began again.
“I must tell you that I have not been frank with the English au
thorities in a — a minor detail. This miserable fellow Kalb told them that he left Lucius’s house — let us call it a house — with me that evening, that we walked as far as the Kurfürstendamm together — where he joined a Dr Leist. . .”
Refolding his hands,
“I denied his story. It was a perfectly true account.” He hopes I’ll make light of it, thought Gary. He felt an intense curiosity.
“Why?”
“Why did I deny it? . . . I didn’t care to be mixed up in so sordid a case.”
Now he has begun lying. . . With an obscure feeling — conviction — that this was the right moment, he asked, abruptly,
“Where is Lucius? ”
Rechberg’s eyelids fluttered.
“Isn’t he in his room? ”
“He wasn’t there yesterday. He’s not there today.”
“He may have gone into the country; be spoke to me about going.”
No, that I don’t believe. . . Rechberg’s uneasy gaze had not wavered, but Gary felt, very strongly, that he knew something about Lucius, did not like what he knew, and was lying.
“I’ll have him looked for,” he said quietly.
Staring at him Rechberg said,
“Why? You don’t really want to find him.”
Gary looked down at his own hands, with the sense, absurd, that they had been flicked open to the nerves. Controlling himself, he said in a light voice,
“I’ve wondered lately why you detest Lucius?”
Rechberg was silent. . . At some time or other he must have treated Lucius very badly — it’s the only explanation . . . He went on coldly,
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