Sure enough, I didn’t.
The face looking up at me was my Gerda’s, and the look on her face told me the whole thing before she said one word. “Oh, hon,” she said, tone sad, remorseful—and firm. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this. You know my great-uncle Gerhart?” I didn’t. “The rich one? The one with the dacha outside of Moscow?”
That began to register. I did recall that Gerda had once said something about a Russian summer home somewhere in the family. But then she went on with her news bulletin, and it was bad. “Sweetie, he died. Left the dacha to me, would you believe it? Only the thing is I have to get up there to take possession of it. There’s a lot of legal stuff.” She bit her lip, and I could almost see the beginnings of a tear in her eye. “Oh, hell. I hate having to go away from you like this, dear Brad. The good thing is, just imagine what kind of good times you and I are going to have in the dacha after I get all the law nonsense straightened away. And, hon, I give you my word, I’ll be back just as soon as I can. A day or two. Three at the most. And then—” Her expression changed. “Oh, damn it, there’s the taxi, and if I’m going to make it to the zep I can’t wait. See you soon!”
And that was the end of the message, and just about the end of all the good feelings that the city of Pompeii had for me.
9
WORLD WITHOUT GERDA
Well, it wasn’t a day or two that she was gone. Naturally.
It wasn’t four days, either, or five. It wasn’t even six days, because when the seventh day came along she still hadn’t come back. Hadn’t even called. And there was a great big hole in my world where Gerda should have been, and wasn’t.
I’d got used to having Gerda in my life. It wasn’t as much fun without her. It wasn’t even as interesting. The things that I would have treasured, and told Gerda about as soon as I saw her, and chuckled over with her—well, they had lost their savor and there was nothing about them to treasure now. Like the troop of Bengali Girl Scouts that came charging down the via looking for God knew what, only to be turned back by the virt Roman legions at the ropes. Or like the (I guess) gay lovers who were snapping at each other all the way down from the Stabian Baths, looked at my wine list and turned up their noses, paid Cedric for a tour of his make-believe whorehouse and came out looking appalled. And then went back toward the baths, now holding hands. Or like the Saudi nuns with burkas over the veils of their habits, or any of the couple of dozen other things that passed by my wineshop and that I certainly would have shared with Gerda. And the two of us would surely have talked over the fact that those sick Puteoli girls—there were seven of them now, and one was expected to die quite soon—had been visitors to the Jubilee. At their local Catholic junior high fifteen of them had baked cookies, mowed lawns, washed cars, baby-sat, and done just about everything they could think of to do to get money to pay for a bus charter to take them to the Jubilee. They’d had a great time (one of the uninfected ones wailed, dabbing the tears from her eyes). But they hadn’t expected the additional bill to come due that they could pay only with gobbets of their flesh.
And Gerda wasn’t there to share any of that with.
So I trudged along my dull and solitary life and I did my stupid job. And then, the seventh morning, I reported to the Bastard’s dispatch room, wearing my slave smock and slave sandals because he’d said he wanted to inspect me before I went off to peddle my wine, and, hey, guess what, Maury Tesch was standing next to the Bastard’s desk, wearing the exact same outfit as mine and almost looking as though he was enjoying it. “Right,” the Bastard said, looking us over. “You’ll do. What’s the matter, Sheridan? Don’t like your new partner? I thought Tesch was a pal of yours.”
“Well, of course he is,” I said, because why would I say anything else with him standing right there? “But what’s he doing here? He works for the water department.”
“What he’s doing here is helping you out, Sheridan,” the Bastard said, talking to me as though I were a somewhat handicapped four-year-old. “There’re going to be crowds today, you know. Everybody that can be spared is on show duty today. Or have you forgotten what day it is?”
Indeed I had. Why shouldn’t I? I didn’t really care what day it was, for the same reason that I didn’t care much about anything else, either. Still it did occur to me that taking a high-ranking waterworks technician like Maury and assigning him to help at a low-ranking job like mine must mean something special was happening. Maury came to my rescue. “It’s the twenty-fourth, Brad,” he said helpfully. “You know? The two thousandth anniversary of the death of Vespasian and the ascent of Titus to the throne? With a big celebration and fireworks and a sky show? Remember?”
By then I did remember, and by the time the wine bar had been open an hour I was glad to have Maury there. The Jubilee people had figured it right. Business was terrific. There were at least half a dozen customers busily lapping up my lousy wine all that morning, from the moment we opened. Throngs filled the via. There was even a waiting line in front of Cedric’s whorehouse, for heaven’s sake. And the promised sky show was as good as had been promised, and the best of it was repeated every hour on the hour, all day long.
I didn’t really ever get a chance to watch the show straight through. Too many customers, too many interruptions. But by the third or fourth time it was on I had just about seen the whole thing, and it was worth looking at.
All that emplacing and fine-tuning the projectors had paid off. The show started with a flock of immense Roman gods—Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, the whole kit and caboodle of them—rolling across the sky in golden virt chariots, pulled by ten-meter-long white virt stallions. Five-meter-tall vestal virgins marched in procession from one horizon to the other—more virts, of course. Over the foothills to the north of the city a pyramid of immense logs erected itself, with wads of giant dried leaves and huge dead branches stuffed into the lowest tier for kindling. An immense human figure, silent, white-clad and majestic, lay in state on the topmost layer.
There weren’t any subtitles. There didn’t need to be. You didn’t have to be told that what you were looking at was the Emperor Vespasian’s funeral pyre.
Then torch-bearing arms reached out to the lowest level of wood. Flames danced up the sides. They merged. They grew. In a matter of moments towering masses of virt flames licked at the sun itself.
No heat came from those flames, of course. On the other hand, you couldn’t look at them without rising a thirst … so, as I say, business was great.
The Bastard had been right. I had needed a helper that day. The two of us were kept busy filling the cups and taking the fake ancient Roman money and washing—well, rinsing, it was all we had time to do—the cups for the next customer.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’d forgotten about Gerda. That never happened. It’s true, though, that she wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind on that particular day … and then, much sooner than I would have guessed, it was quitting time, and our relief wine sellers were waiting to take over and the supply slaves who had driven up in a three-wheeled cart were refilling our vats from the mule-driven cart.
“Well,” Maury said, giving me a smile that was only a little bit tentative, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I cocked one eye at the head supply slave. He knew what I wanted to know. “Looks like about sixty, sixty-five liters gone,” he called. “Pretty good day.”
He could have made that a lot stronger. Sixty liters was nearly double what I sold on an average day, and I really had needed an extra pair of hands to deal with the customers. So I said, “Thanks, Maury,” and the smile he gave me was twenty-four-karat happy.
And then there was a funny thing. He blinked, and the smile disappeared. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, either. He looked as though there was something really nasty in his field of vision.
He was just standing there, so I thought it was only polite to say something. “Think we’ll ever have another day this big?” I offered. “Like maybe
on the anniversary of the actual eruption?”
His expression froze again, then he gave me a little laugh. “Who knows?” he asked. “How do we know if we’ll even be alive then?” And then, when he saw the look on my face, he gave me a quick apology. “I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I’ve had a lot of disappointments in my life. Makes me worry about the future. Anyway—” quick change of subject—“want to get something to eat now, Brad?” he said, all but lolling his tongue out and wagging his tail. So I said sure, and all the way to our changing rooms he was chattering away as though he had never had a somber thought in his life. We were sharing laughs at the expense of our morning’s customers—the couple with the four kids, all of whom kept begging to go to some other place where they sold something besides wine, and the old Turkestani who had ordered one glass of each kind, set them in a row on the counter and worked his way through the varieties, one sip at a time. And the Taiwanese family who spoke no English or Italian or anything else either Maury or I could understand, but kept giving us taste verdicts on the wine by how tightly they held their noses.
So then we were dressed and trying to figure out where to go to eat lunch. “There’s always the refectory,” Maury said—back in the happy mood again. “Or, do you like Mexican? There’s a new place outside the gate. Or there are lots of Italian places, only I know you don’t like much garlic.” He tipped me a wink, having touched on his usual garlic joke. “Which reminds me,” he said. “My sausages are okay, right? Your roommate hasn’t been getting into them, has he?”
“Well,” I said, “there’s not much chance of that. He hasn’t been here all week. Called in sick on, let me think, I guess it was Tuesday.”
He stopped plugging his ear-cups into their proper places. He studied my face. “Sick?” he said considerately, more concerned than I would have expected. “Sick with what?”
I told him I had no idea, but he could check with the payroll machine. He nodded briskly at that, but his expression was abstracted again. “Good idea,” he said. “Listen, come to think of it I’m not all that hungry right now. Give me a rain check?” And before I said I would he was gone.
I was only a little annoyed—hardly any, in fact, because I’d been getting tired of Maury’s company, especially when the company I really desired wasn’t around.
Then things looked up, and I forgot about Maury’s changing moods.
I was just picking up a tray to get in line at the refectory when one of the cleanup people put her hand on my arm. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Go out in the kitchen, why don’t you?”
I looked at her. “Why would I do that?”
“Oh, hell,” she said impatiently, “why don’t you just do it, and then you’ll see why for yourself.”
So I did, and there she was. Gerda. Sitting at a little table out of everybody’s way, looking healthy and well rested as she picked at some fruit salad the kitchen staff had made up for her.
I didn’t say a word. I just stopped short, staring at her. She didn’t say anything right away, either, just jumped up and grabbed me in a monstrous hug. Then she stepped back, studying me. “Everything all right with you, Brad?” she asked, sounding anxious. “Want some pineapple?”
Since it was offered I took some. I chewed for a moment before I answered the question. “I’m fine, Gerda,” I said. “A little confused, maybe, about why my girl takes off for a week without warning.”
She nodded seriously. “Hon,” she said, “sometimes you just can’t help it. Want to go for a walk?”
That wouldn’t have been my first choice. There were about a million things I wanted to say to her, or ask her—or, maybe, just yell at her—but of them all the one I picked to say out loud was, “Why not?”
“Fine,” she said, standing up and flashing me an affectionate grin, “only I haven’t checked in yet, so let’s go by the Bastard’s office first.”
And again, rejecting all the other things I might have chosen to say, I said, “Why not?” She took my hand and gave it a fond squeeze, and held on to it as we walked, the very image of a loving couple, out of the refectory and past the building that held the changing rooms and the lockers and right up to the Welsh Bastard’s office. Where I got to sit in the anteroom and listen to the shouting from inside when Gerda showed her face.
The shouting was pretty loud for a moment, but it didn’t last. Then for a while I couldn’t hear anything at all from inside. Then the door opened. Gerda was looking repentant. The Bastard was grinning a rueful grin. “Oh, hell,” he said to her, “what’s the use? You damn volunteers are more trouble than you’re worth. Just make sure you show up for work tomorrow, okay?” And he gave her a friendly little pat on the behind and let her go.
We went for our walk.
See, what bothered me wasn’t so much seeing the Bastard patting my girl’s ass as though he had a right to. Naturally I didn’t like it. Who would? And, naturally, it got me sort of wondering again about some things I had wondered quite a lot about before. For instance, one—how come the Bastard let Gerda get away with so much when he let hardly anybody else get away with anything at all?
Well, of course I didn’t have to think real hard to think of a reason for that. All right, maybe he and Gerda had once had an affair. Why shouldn’t they? Gerda certainly hadn’t been a virgin when she and I got together, and what business of mine was it who she had slept with in the days before she was my girl? Answer: no business at all.
That was assuming that any such events had taken place before, but not during, the time when she was my girl.
I was, I had to admit to myself, getting pretty tangled up in the kind of suspicions I didn’t really want to admit I had.
So I didn’t talk much as we walked, still hand in hand. Gerda did the talking for both of us. “The dacha? Well, that’s kind of a long story. But, hon, I have to say that that was a great trip. Those zeps are really something, and the places I saw were, wow, spectacular! Like Moscow, hon. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a whole damn city of statuary and monuments, only the monuments are the buildings people actually go to work in. And Prague—you’ve never been there, have you?—is like some really beautiful old cuckoo clock. And then there’s that wonderful old city in what used to be Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik? And then, when you’re heading for home and you’re crossing the Adriatic Sea at night—”
“Sounds like you had a great time,” I said, counting up in my head what a five-thousand-kilometer cruise in one of those enormous Chinese zeppelins would cost.
I guess I put more into my tone of voice than I had intended. Gerda gave me a look, then sighed and shook her head. “Oh, Brad,” she said, “you need some hugs, don’t you? Let’s find a place where we can sit down with a drink.”
We were both too wise to drink any of the pseudo-Roman cat urine from any of the Jubilee’s wineshops. Even the higher-class ones around the Forums. Gerda had her own resources, though. We found some seats behind that never-finished Temple of Isis that the Pompeiians hadn’t quite got built when Vesuvius finished things for them. She pulled out of her bellybag a couple of tiny bottles of a passably good brandy, obviously out of one of the zep’s bars. They weren’t the only ones she was carrying, either. By about the third bottle I was feeling quite a lot more relaxed, and the images inside my head began to slip and slide into new shapes. Well, sure, let’s admit it. Into one particular new shape.
See, I hadn’t forgotten how lousy the past week had been, or how pissed off at her I had every right to be.
But I kept seeing the Bastard’s hand giving a friendly pat to a part of Gerda that I had wanted to think was all mine. So I opened my mouth to ask if it was true that the Bastard got paid in sack time for special favors to good-looking women. Only I didn’t ask her if Maury Tesch had told me the truth. I said, “What I’ve been wondering about, why does everybody call him ‘Bastard’?”
I didn’t get the same answer as from Maury. What I got was a mildly annoyed look, as though I was giving
her a kind of annoyance she hadn’t expected and didn’t much want, followed by a clear, consistent answer. “Because that’s what he is. Didn’t you know? His dad knocked his mother up and took off for calmer waters. What’s the matter, he giving you trouble?”
That was a perfectly good answer, if not the one Maury Tesch had offered. I was inclined to accept it and change the subject because, all of a sudden, there was a growing pressure between my thighs. That, and the smell of her. And the fact that, well, hell, what I wanted most at that time wasn’t conversation, it was just to get laid.
But there was one big thing in the way. I put my finger over Gerda’s lips. “Honey,” I said—without noticing the transition I was back to calling her “honey”—“I need to ask you a question. Are we in a monogamous relationship?”
She abandoned, in the middle of a sentence, her description of what eating was like on a zep—“Eight or nine different restaurants, Brad, plus if you call room service they’ll make you pretty near anything you ever heard of—” and regarded me in silence for a moment. Then she sighed. “You know I have to get to class in about twenty minutes, don’t you?”
Well, yes, I had known that that was the case, although her terrorism class schedule had been a long way from the principal subject on my mind. “Are we?” I asked.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “Sometimes you ask really hard questions, Brad.”
“So give me a hard answer.”
“Well—Here’s the thing,” she said. “Don’t rush me on this. It’s a big step for me.” She was silent for a moment, then, “There is one thing I can tell you, though. You’re the very first man I’ve ever thought I might make that kind of promise to.” And she gave me a quick kiss and was gone.
My own class, due to the Bastard’s bastardly scheduling, was in the other direction from Gerda’s and an hour and a half later. I spent the time in the refectory. For the first time in a week I had an appetite.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 12
