“Wow,” said Jack. “Very impressive.”
He was wet, miserable, but also fascinated. This girl was serious, a true believer—a real psychotic, not just the usual Movement chick reciting this season’s radical boilerplate in the same way and for the same reasons that she wore her hair long and dressed in bib overalls and work boots, because it was what all the other girls were doing this semester.
He said, “Greta, what can I say? Good for you and your friends.”
“Don’t condescend! Our fighters have died.”
“I know. I’m impressed, but maybe you guys are a little hard on your parents—”
“Hard on them? It all begins with them! Destroy the enemy closest to you! That is the first rule.”
“Okay. Maybe I’m a little soft because I’m an orphan—”
“Then you are lucky! They died before they could fuck you up!”
She was glaring up at Jack again, water pouring off her broken umbrella. She was at least ten inches shorter than he was, he outweighed her by fifty pounds, and yet her whole posture suggested that she was the wolf, he the sheep. How could anyone so small be so ferocious?
Shivering, Jack said, “I’m beginning to understand why there are so many exclamation points in German.”
“What?”
Jack said, “Greta, you’re the one who’s full of shit. The methods you’re talking about won’t work. They just give your enemies an excuse to hunt you down and liquidate you. Just like Hitler liquidated the Communists in the thirties. They were asking for it, and so are you.”
As always, Jack’s tone was reasonable, friendly, gentle. But Greta was stung by his words. “Ach so? Then if we do not confront, what do we do?”
“You get inside the beast, capture its nerve centers, and give it orders.”
“And then it takes a laxative and shits you out. Ach, du Lieber!”
Jack laughed, a great irrepressible snort. He could not help himself; he had read this most Germanic of exclamations in so many comic books that it was deeply amusing to hear it spoken aloud by an actual German who was no less fanatical than the cartoon Krauts in G.I. Combat comics.
Greta said, “Something is funny?”
“No, of course not,” Jack said. “Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense. Blow the bastards up. It’s the interim solution.”
“You are laughing at me.”
Jack said nothing. Greta was beginning to frighten him. He thought it possible that she might pull a pistol out of the bag that had produced the Gauloises, the umbrella, the Bild Zeitung, and shoot out the windows of the luxury shops that so offended her.
“Explain me why you think it’s so funny,” Greta said, making a rare mistake in English.
“Greta, you win. It’s too fucking wet out to argue. Just show me how to get home.”
“Home? Not yet. First I’ll show you something,” Greta said.
She threw her umbrella to the ground. Then her bag. Then her jacket.
“Look at them,” she said, pointing at the ersatz Americans in their Burberry coats, standing in the doorways motionless as dummies. “They’re blind.”
Greta seized her sweater, already wet, by its hem. She peeled it off and threw it, too, onto the wet cobblestones. She stood in the rain, bare-breasted. The shoppers paid no attention.
“You laugh,” Greta said. “But where is your courage? Would you do what I am doing?”
“Not in the rain,” Jack replied.
“Why not? There is no danger. They will not see.”
She did a little dance, whirling her long scarf. Her small breasts lifted and peeped out from behind the scarf. She covered her breasts, exposed them, covered them again.
“Come on,” she cried. “Be brave, Jack!”
Cold as he was, wet and miserable as he was—and above all, for this was Jack, nervous as he was—he was aroused by the half-naked Greta, dancing in the rain. Yet what if a shopkeeper called the police? What if the fat woman came out of the store, saw Greta doing her cooch dance, and screamed? And what if, after the police came, Greta cried rape as a crazy joke, as a blow against American imperialism?
Greta whirled the scarf. Her wet skin shone as if oiled.
Snapping the scarf like a whip, she skipped across the pavement toward Jack. The scarf, heavy with water, wrapped itself around Jack’s waist. Greta ran around and around him, winding him up in the scarf and, when she was close, pressing against him, groping him with her free hand. She pinched him hard.
“My, what a big American boy,” she said in German. “Are you going to do something with that? Do you have the guts?”
Jack said, “Not here.”
“Here or not at all. Make love, not war.”
Before Jack realized what was happening, Greta unzipped his trousers and reached inside. Her fingers were cold.
Without warning she leaped, supple as a monkey, one arm around his neck, legs around his waist, her free hand guiding him below.
It all happened in an instant. She was as slippery as an open mouth. After placing him inside herself she was silent, staring, tight-lipped. She uttered a tiny Aaaah, as if a demon had escaped from her mouth to make way for Jack.
Jack could not believe what was happening to him. Fear ran through him like a current. And lust, too—a weird pornographic thrill, to have a girl take him by utter surprise, to do to him what he had done to so many girls. He responded as most of the girls had done, and submitted. Greta heaved against him as if she were the man, not speaking, but pulling aside his shirt collar with her teeth and then biting him fiercely on the neck. Over her shoulder, through a red mist of pain and fear, he could see the shoppers standing in their doorways like mannequins, faces averted, umbrellas shining.
Greta clung to him with teeth, fingers, calves, heels, more. “Aaaah,” she gasped, “aaah, aaah, aaaaaaaaaaaaaah-h-h-H.”
Then, again without a word of warning, she let go. She said, “Get my things.”
Jack did as she ordered, chasing Greta’s windblown umbrella a long way downstreet. The shoppers in the doorways ignored him.
Greta put her clothes back on. “Look at them,” she said. “I told you. They saw nothing.”
Jack said, “Are you absolutely sure of that?”
“Look at them. Where are the police? Why are they not stoning me for public fornication?”
“It’s a mystery to me.”
“Everything is a mystery to Americans,” Greta said. “But now that changes. This was your first lesson in reality, Jack. This make-believe America all these people live in is the kingdom of the blind. We can do in this kingdom of the blind anything we have the courage to do. Freely. Absolutely in the open. No one will stop us, because they cannot see us. We are the real mystery. Do you understand what I am teaching you?”
“You bet I do,” Jack said. “Now come on home with me.”
Greta, under her umbrella again, pointed. “That’s your street. Good night.”
“Come inside.”
“The experiment is over.”
Greta walked away.
4 Late the following morning, Greta woke Jack with a phone call. His body still smelled of her; her secretions were the first odors he apprehended as he turned over to reach for the phone, releasing trapped air from beneath the bedcovers.
Her throaty voice said, “It is now eleven-forty-two. Meet me at the end of your street in exactly one hour.”
The voice excited him. Jack realized that he wanted Greta again. Half awake, half remembering the bizarre encounter of the night before, he wondered what was the matter with him. Never before had he been tempted by the same woman twice. It was the act itself, the ritual of seduction, that counted for Jack. He had never been interested in performing many different sexual acts with one particular woman. The woman had to be new every time.
He said, “Which end of the street?”
“Where you raped me last night,” Greta replied.
“I raped you?”
“Turn le
ft when you go out the door,” Greta said. “One minute late and it will be the police who will be waiting for you, not me.”
She hung up. The events of the night before tumbled through Jack’s memory. What a maniac he had been! He felt the familiar symptoms of fear: shortness of breath, a tingling of the scalp at the back of his head, a wave of nausea, an impulse to curse. Through it all, he also felt desire.
As is often the case with cowards, Jack was also a hypochondriac. He feared death by disease as much as by gunfire or bayonet. In his imagination the air he breathed was dark with flights of migrating germs, all looking for a place to breed in the hidden waters of his body. In his foolishness he had got soaked by rain last night; this morning he expected to have symptoms of pneumonia. Before the mirror above the washstand he felt his forehead, expecting to be feverish; he took a deep breath, expecting chest congestion. Greta’s teeth had left a huge bruise on his neck. Had she broken the skin? He touched the bruise and flinched at the pain, but there was no abrasion. He seemed to be all right. So far, he thought. But human bites were worse than animal bites, more septic. You could die in hours.
His clothes lay in a heap on the floor. They were still wet. He put on his only spare garments, jeans and a sweatshirt, but had to wear the wet shoes. On his way downstairs he sneezed. He felt another pang of anxiety. All he needed was a cold, the flu. What would he do if he developed diarrhea? The toilet was at the end of the hall, and he had already found out that it was always occupied by an old woman who shouted angrily through the door if you asked her to hurry up, then glared when she emerged.
Outside, a pale sun shone in a milky sky. It was Sunday; the city was deserted. Church bells rang, setting up peculiar quivering echoes, as if the sound was being captured and twisted before being released again by the stones of the ancient town.
Jack’s street was closed to cars, but a large black shiny automobile with smoked windows stood in front of the jewelry store. Its motor was running and its radio turned up to the maximum. The car looked like a 1930s model, but it had up-to-date speakers. The whole vehicle throbbed with the beat of a rock song.
The moment Jack came into view, the horn blew, a long, rude blast. A window went down. Jack caught a glimpse of Greta.
Greta said, “Ah, the rapist returns. Get in.”
In the half-light inside the car, Greta looked scrubbed and combed. No eye shadow this time, only a touch of pink girlish lipstick. Amazingly, given the color of her hair, she had no freckles. She wore glasses: steel frames, round lenses, like a schoolteacher. Her mop of curls, formerly wild, was gathered in a ribbon; she wore crocodile loafers with silver buckles, a fawn-colored cashmere sweater. Her tweed blazer with leather elbow patches must have cost a thousand marks, much, much less than the gold Rolex on her fragile left wrist. The only wanton note was a pleated skirt pulled up to her thighs, revealing shiny black stockings.
Jack said, “You look different in daylight.”
Greta smiled at him with the perfectly regular, straightened teeth that had gnawed his neck black and blue the night before. It was a brilliant, fixed smile, like the one Jeanne Moreau gave her French lover before her demented character drove the car off a bridge in Jules et Jim. Years later, when Jack was forced to remember Greta—he never thought about her otherwise—he would sometimes wonder aloud why he had so often seen her in his mind’s eye as an actress. This is not, as you will soon realize, an unanswerable question, but it remained a puzzle to Jack.
The car smelled of cigar smoke, old leather, varnish, and for some reason, shoe polish. Also, surprisingly, a delicate perfume, apparently Greta’s. The front seat was drawn up close to the steering wheel so that she could reach the pedals. Jack’s knees were under his chin.
“Nice old Mercedes,” Jack said.
“It’s a Daimler. It used to belong to Göring.”
“You’re joking.”
“You think so? Then why does it have such a big backseat?”
“I’ll bite. Why?”
“Because Göring had such a big belly. To make room for it he always had midgets for drivers. Like me. Hold on.”
Shifting gears expertly, steering with one hand, Greta drove the antique car at high speed through the narrow streets, tires squealing on the cobblestones, bulbous fenders missing stone walls and pedestrians by millimeters.
“Slow down!” Jack cried, hands fluttering as he searched for something to hold on to.
Greta turned her head, stepped on the gas, and gave him another glassy smile. They crossed the Neckar River, climbed hills covered with vineyards, and arrived finally at a high iron gate that opened when Greta sounded the horn. The Daimler rolled up a drive lined with cropped plane trees. At the end they came to a large cream-colored stucco villa, aglow despite the season with flowering shrubs and bristling with chimneys. At the end of the drive, a dozen Mercedes and BMWs of the largest and most expensive models were lined up on the gravel near the door.
Greta got out. Jack followed. He saw that the flowers grew in tubs that had been sunk into the flower beds. Through the broad spotless windows of the villa, Jack could see a room filled with very tall Germans, all dressed like Greta in the best tweeds and cashmeres that Deutschemarks could buy. The men were beautifully barbered; the women wore their hair combed back from high, flawless foreheads. Jewels and precious metals glittered at their wrists, throats, and fingers. They smiled easily at one other; their lips moved in relaxed conversation.
“Come,” Greta said.
Jack said, “You want me to go in there?”
“You don’t want to meet my mom and dad?”
“Look at me.”
“Why? They won’t.”
She led him inside. Last night, Greta may have been a revolutionary practicing free love on a public street. Today, in her own house, she was a gay, smiling mignonette, a favorite of the guests. Like fond aunts and uncles they held her hands, kissed the air beside her cheeks, exclaimed over her prettiness.
Greta did not really introduce Jack, just indicated his presence as he followed along behind her by saying, in English: “This is my American friend.”
The guests shook hands with Jack, smiling and inquiring politely what brought him to Heidelberg, listening courteously to his answers. They all spoke English, too. He had just graduated from Columbia? How splendid. They had friends in New York. Did Jack know the Osborns? No? But he must; their daughter Lydia had just finished up at Barnard: beautiful girl, very musical. For all the notice they took of Jack’s jeans and sweatshirt and wet misshapen penny loafers, he might as well have been wearing one of their blazers from Savile Row and hand-stitched calfskin oxfords. Their own grown-up children dressed in rags; it was a sign of the times.
“I like your American,” said one of the women, a tall gaunt blonde like most of the others, but still a beauty. “He has a wonderful smile.”
“He’s very shy,” Greta said.
They were speaking German. Jack was looking straight at the woman, who coolly returned the gaze. “Are you quite sure?” she said.
“Mother!” said Greta.
A short curly-headed man joined them.
“My husband,” Frau Fürst said. “Bruno, this is Greta’s American.”
Herr Fürst looked up at Jack with the cold intelligent eyes of a man who has made a lot of money and plans to make a lot more. He shook hands, up-down-away. He smiled, he spoke English like all the others, but he took no interest in Jack. He asked no questions, made no pleasantries. He spoke only one word directly to Jack, when a waiter came by with a tray filled with glasses.
“Champagne?”
“No, thank you.”
“He drinks only Coca-Cola,” Greta said.
Her father turned away. So, with a final calculating look at smiling Jack, did her mother.
“You see?” Greta said. “Nothing to worry about. You’re the invisible man.”
The party was a buffet lunch. Greta filled two plates with food and, carrying them, led Jack towa
rd the back of the house, down a corridor into a room filled with soft light that fell through high narrow windows of beveled glass. The panes were so thick that, like glasses that did not fit, they distorted the magnificent view of the Neckar valley. The room was paneled in dark, carved wood; the furniture was leather; hundreds of leather-bound books stood on shelves in perfect order. Photographs in silver frames crowded the vast leather top of a library table. Jack examined them: men in German uniforms. The largest was a study of a hawk-faced officer, knight’s cross at his throat, swastika badge on his breast, one gloved hand on the collar of a large Alsatian dog.
Jack asked, “Is this a general?”
“Only a colonel. My grandfather, fallen at Kursk.”
“What’s Kursk?”
“A place in Russia where there was a tank battle. So many tanks were destroyed on both sides that Americans saw the rust spot from the moon twenty-five years later. Their usual distance from history.”
The room smelled like the inside of the Daimler, waxed, oiled, dustless, with a lingering underscent of expensive smoke. Jack traced the pattern of the rug with the toe of his ruined shoe.
“Do you know what is the name of this rug?” Greta asked.
“No.”
“You have no education. It is a Heriz. Repeat.”
Jack said, “It’s scratchy as hell.”
“Do not comment. Repeat the name.”
“Heriz.”
“Good. Now eat.”
The food was cold, unfamiliar, delicious. This time Greta ate it daintily, with a knife and fork, and drank a glass of mineral water. They ate in prim silence, Jack because he was intimidated by such a blatant display of wealth, Greta for reasons of her own.
As soon as they were finished, Greta removed her clothes, except for the black stockings. Taking him by the hand, she led him behind a huge leather sofa and fell to her knees in front of him. She pinched him in the same place as she had done the night before—hard.
Lucky Bastard Page 9
