“Jitka, please! Look at me.”
Her eyelids were scrunched up in pain, and she shook her head.
“But we both wanted… we both want it, Jitka.”
“It’s always the woman, though. I really only wanted it because I was worried about you.”
“Well, so?”
“I should have been thinking of the child. It’s so defenseless.”
He managed at least to turn her toward him. Even in their mutual solitude he whispered to her.
“It’s in the safest possible place: inside you. And I’m right here.”
“But what if one day you’re not? Look how useless I am.”
“It’ll be over soon. You read our mothers’ letters: they were sick up till the third month, then it vanished. Remember?”
She was not comforted; instead she turned away from him and her heaving shoulders told him she was crying. He was at a loss.
“Come on, Jitka! Please?”
“No, Jan… This is no world to bring a child into….”
It was the first time their thoughts and feelings had diverged, and the change was sudden and dramatic. Stubbornly he sought the words that would convince her.
“It never has been a good world. The pages of your family Bible testify to that. But it’s been better, and it will be again. Who would have believed three years ago that truth would win out? And now we can almost touch it. It may be a few more months, but the Reich will collapse, it’s in the air, as inevitable as spring; even Roosevelt’s death can’t change that. Peace will come, freedom will return, and our child will live in both of them.”
She said something; he didn’t immediately understand.
“What?”
“But so will that monster! Catch him, Jan! He frightens me more than Hitler does….”
Grete stepped into the bathroom as Buback began his soak in the tub. He had not heard her arrive over the din of the water and was all the happier to see her. Buback never knew for sure when and if she would come. After his first night with her, the longing to be back with her had never abated, despite his fatigue. He felt sure he had never had and could never have a better lover. However, a nagging feeling of impropriety held him back: Meckerle had entrusted her to him, counting on Buback to behave decently. But did that extend to covering up Meckerle’s infidelities…?
Just before midnight, his body had resolved his debate with his heart. Resolutely he left the German House bar and set off to see her. When he rang the bell he did not even have the chance to say his name before her voice broke in: “Where are you?”
This time she was wrapped in the white bath towel he had worn the day before; it emphasized the length of her arms and legs.
“What have you come to tell me?” she asked before he could speak. “That you betrayed his confidence? Or even mine?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just that it was pure rapture with you.”
“Aha. .. So then, Buback,” she said, addressing him as a man would, dispensing, as he would soon find out, once and for all with his Christian name, “if you want to keep me, then grant me three wishes, as the old custom goes. One: no watches. It’s bad enough that I have to be on time once a day. Two: I want to tell you the truth. I’ve been lying my whole life, playing a role, and before I die — which these days might be anytime — I’d like to find out what in me is real and what’s a lie. And the third one you can discover on your own, since you’re something of a detective.”
Then she opened the white material like a curtain.
Encouraged by the way she gave herself to him again, he tried afterward to draw her closer as he used to with Hilde. However, the intensity of her resistance contradicted the passion preceding it. Although he owned her completely when she was in his embrace, he lost her entirely the moment she was dressed. Her estrangement took place with miraculous speed. She hardened like plaster of paris, he thought, and mentioned it to her: did she push him out of her mind before he even left her sight?
She hated good-byes, she explained, and had decided that sorrow and disappointment would never rule her again; she’d seen too much of them already, finito! At the best possible moment, she would snap down the shade and hold it there until she was sure the joy would stay with her. How did she know? he asked. The way a bat knows, she laughed; she had learned to sense unhappiness and deception even in the dark, and to veer around them.
“Space, Buback! I hate walls; I have to feel space around me.”
He understood that freedom was fresh air for her. Without it she would choke; she fought for it fiercely, like a drowning woman. Did she want to see him tomorrow? And how could he find out today? Maybe he should stop watching his watch and find out for himself when the time came! Would she take his extra set of keys? Why not, unless he needed them for another woman….
Her “truth telling” was even more disconcerting. Soon she began to lay out her life story for him, loading one cigarette after another into her holder like ammunition clips. Her first lover at fifteen, a dancer only three years older, who held on for over ten years; it was a long, happy young love, Hansel and Gretchen, that would have lived on into friendship in old age, except for Martin Siegel. Like the actor? Buback asked, surprised. Yes, the very one.
Siegel, the darling of Hamburg’s female stars, suddenly fixed his gaze upon her, a novice. Hans shook with rage. On his twenty-fifth birthday she did not have a present for him. “I’ll cut Seigel off,” she promised, as a consolation prize. The oldest trick in the book, she now laughed; the famous thespian behaved just as Meckerle would years later. Instead of consoling himself with the next in line, he would not let go.
Siegel rewarded her coldness with heightened attention; in a short while it changed to outright wooing. Passionate poems soon accompanied the flowers; he found her slenderness captivating. Bemused, she read them to Hans and was surprised to see how jealous they made him. Why was he so upset? she objected; Siegel was thirty years her senior, an old man. But if it bothered him that much, she realized, then why didn’t Hans marry her? They’d send the artist a wedding announcement and if he still wouldn’t leave her alone, Hans could challenge him to a duel.
Hastily conceived, eagerly accepted by Hans and carried through by both of them with youthful verve. True, an insultingly extravagant bouquet arrived from Martin Siegel, but with a disarming note. He apologized for pestering her; now he knew her true feelings, and he wished the couple a long and happy life together. At once, she admitted, she felt disappointed that the game was over: it was she who had been defeated. When, two years later, the film weekly Ufy gave detailed coverage of Siegel’s spectacular marriage to a beautiful young Berlin actress, envy entered the fray as well. Now she knew for sure that her Hans needed precisely those thirty extra years to treat her the way a man should. Her love for him was no longer young or happy; in fact, it wasn’t even love anymore. It was then she began to deceive him.
Over the years, many men had vied for her favor; now their time had come. She found a new game: men, she learned, fell head over heels in love with her. She managed to convince each of them that he was her chosen lover, while his competitors were no more than a pretext. If she had learned anything perfectly, it was how to pretend passion and to lie. Let Buback beware! For none of these men had been able to give her the pleasure she faked so expertly.
Then she met Martin again.
This time he came to Hamburg on tour, and she fretted over how to behave. Avoid him? Confront him? He solved the problem for her. When he spotted her, he came over and greeted her affably, as if they were close friends. He asked if he could invite the two of them to dinner. And she lied to him, saying Hans was not in town, but she would gladly join him. Martin was staying, of course, in the luxurious Hotel Atlantic; they feasted on lobsters with French wine, and then he returned to their old story. He hadn’t been able to accept her refusal at the time; he could laugh at it now, but she had been the first woman to turn him down at fifty. For two years he was devastated, until fortunately he met Ursula. She was Grete’s age, and that helped him get over it.