by Ian Mcewan
Rather than tolerate more silence, he settled after all for small talk and began to ask, “Have you lived here long?”
But all in a rush she spoke over him, saying, “How do you look without your glasses? Show me, please.” This last word she elongated beyond what any native speaker would have considered reasonable, unfurling a delicate, papery thrill through Leonard’s stomach. He snatched the glasses from his face and blinked at her. He could see quite well up to three feet, and her features had only partially dissolved. “And so,” she said quietly. “It is how I thought. Your eyes are beautiful, and all the time they are hidden. Has no one told you how they are beautiful?”
Leonard’s mother used to say something of the sort when he was fifteen and he had his first pair, but that was hardly relevant. He had the sensation of rising gently through the room.
She took the glasses and folded down the sides and put them by the cactus.
His voice sounded strangled in his ears. “No, no one has said that”
“Not other girls?”
He shook his head.
“Then I am the first to discover you?” There was humor, but no mockery, in her look.
It made him feel foolish, immature, to be grinning so openly at her compliment, but he could do nothing about it.
She said, “And your smile.”
She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her. Instead he took her hand as it completed its movement and they sat in silence for a minute or two, as they had at their first meeting. She interlocked her fingers with his, and it was at this moment, rather than later in the bedroom, or later still when they talked of themselves with greater freedom, that Leonard felt irrevocably bound to her. Their hands fitted well, the grip was intricate, unbreakable, there were so many points of contact. In this poor light, and without his glasses, he could not see which fingers were his own. Sitting in the darkening, chilly room in his raincoat, holding on to her hand, he felt he was throwing away his life. The abandonment was delicious. Something was pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was spreading back up his arm, across his chest, constricting his throat. His only thought was a repetition: so this is it, it’s like this, so this is it …
Finally she pulled her hand away and folded her arms and looked at him expectantly. For no good reason other than the seriousness of her look, he began to explain himself. “I should have come sooner,” he said, “but I’ve been working all hours of the day and night. And actually, I didn’t know if you’d want to see me, or if you’d even recognize me.”
“Do you have another friend in Berlin?”
“Oh no, nothing like that.” He did not question her right to ask this question.
“And did you have many girlfriends in England?”
“Not many, no.”
“How many?”
He hesitated before making a lunge at the truth. “Well, actually, none.”
“You’ve never had one?”
“No.”
Maria leaned forward. “You mean, you’ve never—”
He could not bear to hear whatever term she was about to use. “No, I never have.”
She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yelp of laughter. It was not so extraordinary a thing in 1955 for a man of Leonard’s background and temperament to have had no sexual experience by the end of his twenty-fifth year. But it was a remarkable thing for a man to confess. He regretted it immediately. She had the laughter under control, but now she was blushing. It was the interlocking fingers that had made him think he could get away with speaking without pretense. In this bare little room with its pile of assorted shoes belonging to a woman who lived alone and did not fuss with milk jugs or doilies on tea trays, it should have been possible to deal in unadorned truths.
And in fact it was. Maria’s blushes were brought on by shame at the laughter she knew Leonard would misunderstand. For hers was the laughter of nervous relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of being physically abused had receded. She would not be obliged to do anything she did not want. She was free, they both were free, to invent their own terms. They could be partners in invention. And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze and the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in solitude. At the time they erupted in the single hoot of relief and hilarity which she had suppressed to a yelp.
Leonard took a long pull of his tea, set down the mug and said ah in a hearty, unconvincing way. He put his glasses on and stood up. After the handclasp, nothing seemed bleaker than setting off back down Adalbertstrasse, descending into the U-Bahn and arriving at his apartment in the early evening darkness to find the breakfast coffee cup and the drafts of his foolish letter all over the floor. He saw it all before him as he adjusted the belt of his coat, but he knew that with his confession he had made a humiliating tactical error and he had to go. That Maria should blush for him made her all the sweeter, and hinted at the scale of his blunder.
She had stood too and was blocking his path to the door.
“I really ought to be getting back now,” Leonard explained, “what with work and everything.” The worse he felt, the lighter his tone became. He was stepping around her as he said, “You make a terrific cup of tea.”
Maria said, “I want you to stay longer.”
It was all he wanted to hear, but by now he was too low to enact a change of heart, too drawn to his own defeat. He was on his way to the door. “I have to meet someone at six.” The lie was a hopeless commitment to his anguish. Even as it was happening, he was amazed by himself. He wanted to stay, she wanted him to stay, and here he was, insisting on leaving. It was the behavior of a stranger, and he could do nothing, he could not steer himself in the direction of his own interests. Self-pity had obliterated his habitual and meticulous good sense, he was in a tunnel whose only end was his own fascinating annihilation.
He was fumbling with the unfamiliar lock and Maria was right at his back. Though it still surprised her, she was to some extent familiar with the delicacy of masculine pride. Despite a surface assurance, men were easily offended. Their moods could swing wildly. Caught in the turbulence of unacknowledged emotions, they tended to mask their uncertainty with aggression. She was thirty; her experience was not vast, and she was thinking mostly of her husband and one or two violent soldiers she had known. The man scrabbling to leave by her front door was less like the men she had known and more like herself. She knew just how it felt. When you felt sorry for yourself, you wanted to make things worse. She was touching his back lightly, but he was not aware of it through his coat. He thought he had made his plausible excuses and was free to depart with his misery. To Maria, who had the liberation of Berlin and her marriage to Otto Eckdorf behind her, a display of vulnerability of any kind in a man suggested an approachable personality.
He opened the door at last and turned to say his goodbyes. Did he really believe that she was fooled by his politeness and the invented appointment, or that his desperation was invisible? He was telling her he was sorry he had to dash off, and expressing gratitude for the tea again, and offering his hand—a handshake!—when she reached up and lifted his glasses clear of his face and strode back into her living room with them. Before he had even started to follow her, she had slipped them under a chair cushion.
“Look here,” he said, and, letting the door close behind him, took one step, then another, into the apartment. And that was it; he was back in. He had wanted to stay; now he had to. “I really do have to be going.” He stood in the center of the tiny room, irresolute, still attempting to fake his hesitant English form of outrage.
She stood close so he could see her clearly. How wonderful
it was, not to be frightened of a man. It gave her a chance to like him, to have desires that were not simply reactions to his. She took his hands in hers. “But I haven’t finished looking at your eyes.” Then, with the Berlin girl’s forthrightness that Russell had praised, she added, “Du Dummer! Wenn es für dich das erste Mal ist, bin ich sehr glücklich. If this is your first time, then I am a very lucky girl.”
It was her “this” that held Leonard. He was back with “this.” What they were doing here was all part of “this,” his first time. He looked down at her face, that disk, tipped way back to accommodate the seven-inch difference in their heights. From the top third of the neat oval, the baby hair fell back in loose curls and straggles. She was not the first young woman he had kissed, but she was the first who seemed to like it. Encouraged, he pushed his tongue into her mouth, the way, he had gathered, one was supposed to.
She drew her face back an inch or so. She said, “Langsam. Plenty of time.” So they kissed with a teasing lightness. The very tips of their tongues just touched, and it was a greater pleasure. Then Maria stepped round him and pulled out from among the heap of shoes an electric heater. “There is time,” she repeated. “We can pass a week with our arms just so.” She embraced herself to show him.
“That’s right,” he said. “We could do that.” His voice sounded high-pitched. He followed her into the bedroom.
It was larger than the room they had left. There was a double mattress on the floor—another novelty. One wall was taken up with a gloomy wardrobe of polished wood. By the window was a painted chest of drawers and a linen chest. He sat on the linen chest and watched her plug in the heater.
“It is too cold to be undressed. We go in like this.” It was true, you could see the vapor on your breath. She kicked off her slippers; he untied his laces and took off his coat. They got under the eiderdown and lay with their arms round each other in the way she had prescribed, and kissed again.
It was not a week but several hours, just after midnight, before Leonard was able to define himself in strictest terms as an initiate, a truly mature adult at last. However, the line that divided innocence from knowledge was vague, and rapturously so. As the bed, and to a far lesser extent the room, warmed up, they set about helping each other undress. As the pile on the floor grew—sweaters, thick shirts, woolen underwear and football socks—so the bed, and time itself, grew more spacious. Maria, luxuriating in the possibility of shaping the event to her needs, said this was just the right moment for her to be kissed and licked all over, from the toes upward. This was how Leonard, halfway through a characteristically meticulous job, came to enter her first with his tongue. That surely was the dividing line in his life. But so too was the moment half an hour later when she took him into her mouth and licked and sucked and did something with her teeth. In terms of mere physical sensation, this was the high point of the six hours, and perhaps of his life.
There was a long interlude when they lay still, and in answer to her questions he told her about his school, his parents and his lonely three years at Birmingham University. She talked more reticently about her work, the cycling club and the amorous treasurer, and her ex-husband, Otto, who had been a sergeant in the army and was now a drunk. Two months before he had appeared after a year’s absence and had hit her around the head twice with an open hand and demanded money. This was not the first time he had intimidated her, but the local police would do nothing. Sometimes they even bought him drinks. Otto had persuaded them he was a war hero.
This story temporarily erased desire. Gallantly, Leonard got dressed and went down to Oranienstrasse to buy a bottle of wine. People and traffic circulated, oblivious of the great changes. When he returned she was standing at the stove in a man’s dressing gown and her football socks, cooking a potato and mushroom omelette. They ate it in bed with black bread. The Mosel was sugary and rough. They drank it in the tea mugs and insisted it was good. Whenever he put a piece of bread in his mouth, he smelled her on his fingers. She had brought in the candle in the bottle, and now she lit it. The cosy squalor of clothes and greasy plates receded into the shadows. The sulfur smell of the match hung in the air and mixed with the smell on his fingers. He tried to recall and recount in an amusing way a sermon he had once heard at school about the devil and temptation and a woman’s body. But Maria misunderstood, or saw no reason why he should be telling her this or finding it funny, and she became cross and silent. They lay propped on their elbows in the gloom, sipping from their mugs. After a while he touched the back of her hand and said, “Sorry. A stupid story.” She forgave him by turning her hand and squeezing his fingers.
She curled up on his arm and slept for half an hour. During that time he lay back, feeling proud. He studied her face—how scant her eyebrows were, how her lower lip swelled in sleep—and he thought what it would be to have a child, a daughter who might sleep on him like this. When she woke up she was fresh. She wanted him to lie on her. He cuddled up and sucked her nipples. They kissed, and it was acceptable this time when he was free with his tongue. They poured out the rest of the wine and she chinked his mug.
Of what followed he remembered only two things. The first was that it was rather like going to see a film that everybody else had been talking about: difficult to imagine in advance, but once there, installed, partly recognition, partly surprises. The encompassing slippery smoothness, for example, was much as he had hoped—even better, in fact—while nothing in his extensive reading had prepared him for the crinkly sensation of having another’s pubic hair pressed against his own. The second was awkward. He had read all about premature ejaculation and wondered if he would suffer, and now it seemed he might. It was not movement that threatened to bring him on. It was when he looked at her face. She was lying on her back, for they were what she had taught him to call auf Altdeutsch. Sweat had restyled her hair into snaky coils and her arms were thrown up behind her head, with the palms spread, like a comic-book representation of surrender. At the same time she was looking up at him in a knowing, kindly way. It was just this combination of abandonment and loving attention that was too good to be looked at, too perfect for him, and he had to avert his eyes, or close them, and think of … of, yes, a circuit diagram, a particularly intricate and lovely one he had committed to memory during the fitting of signal activation units to the Ampex machines.
Seven
It took four weeks to test all the tape recorders and fit the signal activation units. Leonard was content working in his windowless room. The very repetitiveness of his routine absorbed him. When another ten machines were ready, a young serviceman came and loaded them onto a rubber-wheeled cart and took them along the corridor to the recording room. Already more people were working in there, some of them from England. But Leonard had not been introduced, and he avoided them. In his spare moments he liked to doze, and in the canteen he always took an empty table. Glass came by once or twice a week, always in a hurry. Like all the other Americans he chewed gum, but with a frenzy that was all his own. This and the livid semicircles under his eyes gave him the appearance of an anxious nocturnal rodent. There were no gray hairs in his beard, but it looked less black. It was dried out and shapeless.
His manner, though, was unchanged. “We’re running on schedule, Leonard,” he would say from the doorway, too busy to step in. “We’re almost to the far side of the Schönefelder Chaussee. We got new people arriving every day. The place is humming!” And he would be gone before Leonard had time to put down his soldering iron.
It was true—after mid-February it became harder to find an unoccupied table in the canteen. In the noise of voices around him he could make out English accents. When he asked for his steak now, he was automatically handed a cup of tea into which three or four spoonfuls of sugar had already been stirred. For the benefit of the Vopos with their binoculars, many of the Englishmen wore American Army uniforms bearing the insignia of the Army Signal Corps. The vertical diggers had arrived, the specialists who knew how to tunnel upward to
the telephone cables through soft earth without bringing the roof down on their heads. So too had men from the Royal Signals, who were to install the amplifiers near the head of the tunnel. There were faces Leonard recognized from Dolus Hill. A couple of these fellows nodded in his direction, but did not approach. It was possible they were being scrupulous about security, but it was more likely they considered a technical assistant beneath them. They had never spoken to him in London.
And security in the canteen was not tight. As the numbers eating there rose, so did the din of conversation. Glass would have been outraged. Small groups from all over the building talked shop in closed huddles. Leonard, eating alone, enfolded with his thoughts of Maria, still amazed at the changes that had come over his life, was sometimes drawn against his will into a story at a nearby table. His world had contracted to a windowless room and the bed he shared with Maria. Elsewhere in her apartment it was simply too cold. He had made himself an outsider here, and now he was becoming a reluctant eavesdropper, a spy.
He heard two vertical diggers at the next table reminisce with suppressed hilarity in front of their American colleagues. It appeared that the tunnel had a predecessor in Vienna. It had been dug in 1949 by MI6 and ran from a private house in the Schwechat suburb seventy feet out under a road, where it picked up the cables linking the headquarters of the Soviet occupation forces in the Imperial Hotel with the Soviet command in Moscow. “They needed a cover, see,” one of the diggers said. A companion laid a hand on his arm, and the first man continued quietly, so that Leonard had to concentrate. “They needed a cover for all the coming and going while they installed the tap. So they opened up a Harris tweed import shop. They reckoned no one in Vienna would be too interested in that kind of thing. And what happened? The locals couldn’t get enough Harris tweed. They were queuing up for it, and the first shipment was sold out in days. So there were these poor buggers filling out order forms all day and answering the phone instead of getting on with their business. They had to turn customers away and close the place down.”
