“I like him fat. Gives me something to bounce around on.”
“How’s garrison life?”
“Can’t complain. It’s good for the boys seeing another part of the world. Kind of feel bad about how hard things are for those folks in Berlin.”
“They can’t expect any better.”
“I’m having tea with some of the ladies from the British garrison tomorrow. We’re going to have us a forum on the problems of raising kids in the occupation. How about that?”
In the few months that Lil and the kids had been in Berlin they had become like old friends. Sean gave up his cottage to them, a neat little wooded place in a development once belonging to SS people. He took a flat in Dahlem large enough to suit him.
“Sean. You’re sure not yourself, tonight.”
“It’s all this damned preparation for the Foreign Ministers’ Conference.”
“That’s not all that’s bothering you.”
Sean rolled his cognac glass in the palm of his hand.
“You’re sure wonderful around the kids,” Lil went on. “Any man who gives up all his off-duty time to coach them ought to have a couple of his own.”
“Hell, you women are all alike. None of you can stand a happy bachelor.”
“You’re talking to Lil, honey. You’re not happy.”
“I didn’t know I set off a signal.”
“Any man who works as hard as you do for the privilege of coming home to an empty room can’t be happy. Things aren’t made that way.”
“About once every three months I get to wondering about the bargain I made to come to Berlin, but it always passes.”
“Time is passing, too, buster.”
“Lil. I never got this blue until the American families came.” Then, on an impulse he said, “Are you my very good friend?”
“You bet I am.”
“Seems like I’ve got a penchant for going for the wrong woman. I think I’ve got it down to a science.”
“Getting mixed up with a German girl?”
“Not exactly. I know I want to see her again and I know I shouldn’t feel that way.”
“She encouraging you?”
“All I’ve gotten from her was a rap in the mouth.”
“The way you think about Germans you probably had it coming.”
“Maybe. Lil, am I a blind, arrogant Prussian?”
“My, my. Sounds like that girl said a mouthful.”
“She did. I guess there was enough truth in it to bother me.”
“Tell her what a nice girl she is. It’s not going to kill you.”
“I can’t. Not to a German girl. Besides, I guess I owe her an apology.”
“Sean ... there’s something human in the worst German who ever lived.” Lil picked up the knitting-instruction book, pulled out a number of stitches, counted carefully. “Did Bless ever tell you about us?”
“No.”
“I spent my first fourteen years on a dirt farm, the kind you read about in Tobacco Road. Ran away from home at the age of fifteen, pregnant. I lost that baby. Ended up in Harper, Tennessee, the county seat of Hook County.”
Lil set her knitting down, lit a cigarette, and poured herself a drink from the bourbon bottle. “I wasn’t much good for anything but hanging around roadhouses, but at least I was able to learn to read and write, have a dress on my back, have a room of my own with a light, a radio, plumbing.
“When I first met Bless he had been voted sheriff of Hook. Bless didn’t bother the girls so long as they didn’t steal. Matter of fact, he helped a lot of them out of trouble. Bless was always sweet on me, but he was too busy or too shy to do much about it.
“One night he pulled a raid on a place running a big game. I was caught in the roundup. I was pretty drunk, noisy, and seeing me hurt him inside. He roughed me up so bad I ended up in the hospital. Hell of a romance, huh, Sean?
“There was never a minute in my life like the next morning when that fat, wonderful man bumbled into my hospital room and asked to be forgiven. A man can look big in his own eyes and in the eyes of other men when he shoves people around. A man really looks big in a woman’s eyes when he is humble enough to say he is sorry.”
“Mind if I come in?”
Ernestine looked up from her desk as Sean closed the door behind him. She was too surprised to speak, but showed that she was unforgiving.
“I had some documents to deliver to Judge Cohen,” he said, referring to one of the American jurists in military government. “I thought I might drop in. So, this is where you work.”
The office was a clutter of law texts. Ernestine was working on translations of British and American volumes dealing with lower-court appeals.
“As a matter of fact,” Sean continued, “I am glad this opportunity came up, because I’ve been wanting to speak to you about our last meeting. Fraulein, my choice of words showed a lot of bad manners and bad taste.”
Ernestine watched his discomfort, but even his attempt to apologize was being carefully phrased. The colonel did not say he was sorry, had spoken untruthfully, or that he had changed his mind.
“What I should have said was that your uncle came back to Berlin out of choice and knowing how great his chore would be. But a long time before that he had made up his mind that the things he believed in were far more important than his own being. I believe that if you attempted to dissuade him from what he knows he must do, he would reject your plea.”
“You are right, Colonel O’Sullivan. He has rejected my plea.”
“I am sorry for your sake because I understand how much you love him.”
“It is kind of you to make this gesture.”
“As for my other remarks ...”
“You need not try to apologize. It is quite true that my fiancé was involved in the Babi-Yar Massacre and God knows what else. I am aware of what we Germans have done to the human race. I am not in the position to atone my shame and guilt, nor are you in a position to grant me forgiveness. Now please leave my office ... and please leave me alone.”
Chapter Thirty-two
A FEW DAYS BEFORE the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Berlin the Truman Doctrine was declared stating that any further attempt to expand communism would be met with force.
From the end of the war there had been innumerable meetings of heads of state and their deputies in Washington and London, Moscow and Paris.
Conferences were directed now to easing the growing antagonism between the Soviet Union and her former allies. Now it came Berlin’s time as the site to attempt to determine a settlement for Germany.
“Mrs. Hansen is on the phone. General.” Sean said.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Andrew. I just received another of those calls. Some terrible things were said about you.”
Agnes sounded shaky. He was tied up with preconference work until very late. Tomorrow dignitaries would start arriving. All the members of his staff and their wives were receiving anonymous telephone calls at all hours promising death if the Americans did not get out of Berlin.
General Hansen and Colonel Hazzard were both sleeping with pistols at their bedstands after refusing to put guards on their homes.
“Mother,” Hansen said, “I’ll send a car for you. See if Claire Hazzard will go to the movies with you. Go to the Staff Club afterward and I’ll fetch you on the way home.”
“I’ll do that, dear. I am sorry to have bothered you.”
Sean dispatched a car for Mrs. Hansen. “Those calls are damned hard on some of the women,” he said. “Don’t you think you’d better put a guard on your house for Mrs. Hansen’s sake?”
“Hell no. When you think about it, Sean, it must be terrible for defenseless people behind the Iron Curtain to be subjected to such naked terror with no way for them to fight back. I guess the Russians must be real successful there.”