Franziska’s laugh ceased.
She leaned toward him, took his cap off and put her hand around the back of his neck.
Her lips just barely grazed his own, but her mouth was ready to be crushed.
She stayed at that intimate distance. Michael didn’t try to breech the gap; he didn’t yet have her permission, and he respected that.
When she kissed him, it was soft. It was the blue sky of May, the warmth of a sun-lit morning. It was distant music playing in a park. It was boats on a lake, young men in their best courting suits and young women with their parasols. It was a kiss that belonged to another world.
He kissed her back, just as softly. Their lips met and held, and some trick of friction or cold air made them tingle together, and when Franziska pulled her head back and looked at him she said, “Oh,” very quietly, as if he’d made a statement that required an answer yet she didn’t know how to give one.
“We’d better get off this road,” Michael told her, which was what he’d intended to say before the air attack. When she still hesitated he had a bad instant in which he couldn’t decide whether he’d spoken in German, Russian or English. Then she nodded, answered “Ja, haben Sie Recht,” and she started them off once more toward the city.
Seven
I Loved A Man Who Died
The damage to the BMW wasn’t so bad. Besides the broken windshield, various dents to the bodywork, a single bullet hole in the spare tire mounted on the trunk and the groove across the passenger side where a ricocheting slug had passed, it was perfectly able to race another day.
The damage to the bed in Franziska’s studio apartment on Wittelsbacherstrasse was more substantial. Sometime during the afternoon’s storm that swept through, the bed capsized on one side like a freighter struck by a U-Boat torpedo and its occupants, still wrapped up in each other, tumbled off to the floor where they finished what they’d started.
They lay on a pile of pillows beneath the window, as the afternoon light began to fade. Franziska had her head on his shoulder, and she suddenly woke up from her sweet slumber and stretched so hard Michael heard her joints pop.
“If you give me one more orgasm,” she said into his ear, “you’re going to have to take up permanent residence in my pussy.”
“What more could a man ask for but a warm, snug place to call home?” he asked.
She began to lick in slow circles around his nipples, her tongue flicking this way and that.
“You’re tempting fate,” he warned. Though one very important part of his body had come to the end of its usefulness for awhile, he still could flip her over and dive in headfirst, and before his own tongue and lips were through he would make her scream all the framed photographs off the walls.
She put her chin on his chest and stared up at him. “Are you married?”
An instant after she’d posed the question, she pressed her hand to her mouth. The gray eyes widened. “Oh my God! Oh Christ, I didn’t mean to ask that! Forget it, all right?”
“All right,” Michael answered. Better, perhaps, to make her think he was married?
“That’s a stupid question,” she went on after a short pause. She snuggled up in the crook of his right arm. “It’s unsophisticated.”
“It’s not unsophisticated to be curious.”
“Yes it is.” She didn’t speak again for a while, and he didn’t either. He could feel her heart beating under his hand. They’d gone to lunch at a small cafe after the incident on the Reichsautobahn, and then Franziska had brought him here to take the photographs. After about half-an-hour of posing before a Nazi flag tacked to the wall, Michael had had enough of being told what to move and what not to move, especially when Franziska took off her clothes and informed him from behind the chrome-bodied Leica Standard that she just needed a few more shots.
“When the war’s over,” Franziska said quietly, “it will all have been worth it.”
Michael said nothing.
“You know what I’m saying. When the trash and the undesirables are removed from society. When Germany takes its rightful place. You know.”
“Yes,” Michael had to say, because she was waiting for his reply.
“I’ve seen some of the sketches for the buildings. Berlin is going to be the most beautiful city in the world. The parks will be majestic. The Reichsautobahn will connect every city in Europe, the trains will be back as they were, but even faster, and the ocean liners will even be bringing the American tourists over. And everyone will be flying in their own personal autogyros. You wait and see.”
“I’m just concerned with the next few months.”
“Oh, I understand that!” She rolled over so she could see his face in the shadowy light. “You don’t have to grasp the big picture right now, but you’re going to be part of it. All good Germans will be part of it. Those who fought and died, they’ll be part of it too. The war memorials are going to be the envy of the world. Showing them all how we stood against the Bolsheviks. How we were the wall they couldn’t break through. How we won the battle the British and Americans didn’t have the courage to fight.” She nodded, to emphasize her own certainty. “If the Fuhrer says it’s so, it will be so.”
“Yes,” Michael agreed. He had to stare at the ceiling. He’d already noticed many cracks up there. This building on the outside was untouched by the bombing, yet here was the damage from distant explosions, creeping along walls and ceilings from cellar to attic, weakening the structure by millimeters of brick dust and plaster, a slow destruction, a death counted in sheared-off nailheads and popped rivets, until the sick center could not hold.
“Horst, you’re going to live to see all this.” Franziska put a hand on his chest, over his British and Russian heart. “God will not let a man like you be lost to the future. I know this like I know my own soul.”
Michael made some kind of noise of assent, he wasn’t sure what.
She stretched out upon him, her arms going around his body and her ear pressed down as if to count the heartbeats of such a noble beast. “You’ve seen so much death, I know,” she said. “I can feel that in you. I think you’ve known very much pain. But you hide it from the world. You see, we’re alike in this way. My parents were too busy for me, too busy adventuring. I was raised by a succession of nannies and thrown out of a succession of schools. I loved a man who died. In a racing accident, right in front of me. We were going to be married, but…you know, such things happen. I was a girl.” An element in her voice was quickly effervescent, and then gone. “I think…maybe all of me never came back from that. I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, “I wasn’t meaning to talk so much about myself.”
Michael’s right hand had moved to poise over the black waves of her hair. He let his hand drift upon her head. He stroked his fingers gently through her hair and down along the back of her neck. “I like to listen,” he invited.
She didn’t speak for a length of time. The light faded more and more, to less and less.
When Franziska did speak, it was in a quiet voice that was tight with emotion. “Sometimes I feel…as if no one knows me, or can ever know me. I feel as if…no one hears music as I do, or sees color, or appreciates…just living, every day. I feel… I’m in a world of shadows, and where are the real people? Am I the sleepwalker, or are they? Because if I learned anything from watching Kurt die, it was that one must be prepared to die, at any moment. But that doesn’t mean being afraid, or locking yourself into a room and sealing off the world. Oh, no…it’s the opposite. It means going out with courage into what you fear the most, and looking it right in the face. And if you live, you laugh, because you have won the fight for another day. That is how you prepare for death. By embracing life, not hiding from it. Oh, listen to me!” She glanced quickly up at him and then returned her head to the position it had been in. Michael knew she was enjoying having her head and neck rubbed. “Lecturing about life and death to a soldier!”