No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.
Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir," and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after a while, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian's benefit, as though now, in this enforced holiday, he was taking an inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiral, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sick-room became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, muffled trumpets in a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the sunny, blue harbour was real, important.
"Gretchen will be very valuable to me," Hardenburg was saying, "after the war. Gretchen, that's the name of my wife."
"Yes, Sir," said Christian, "I know."
"How do you know? Oh, yes, I sent you to deliver a package."
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"She is quite handsome, Gretchen, isn't she?"
"Yes, Sir. Quite handsome."
"Very important," said Hardenburg. "You would be amazed at the number of careers that have been ruined in the Army by dowdy wives. She is also very capable. She has the knack of handling people…"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"Did you have an opportunity to talk to her?"
"For about ten minutes. She questioned me about you."
"She is very devoted," said Hardenburg.
"Yes, Sir."
"I plan to see her in eighteen months. My face will be well enough by then. I do not wish to shock her unnecessarily. Very valuable. She has a knack of being at home wherever she finds herself, of being at ease, saying the correct thing…"
"Yes, Sir."
"To tell you the truth, I was not in love with her when I married her. I was very much attached to an older woman. Divorced. With two children. Very attached. I nearly married her. It would have ruined me. Her father was a workman in a metal factory and she herself had a tendency to fat. In ten years she will be monstrous. I had to keep reminding myself that in ten years I expected to have Ministers and Generals as guests in my home and that my wife would have to serve as hostess. She had a vulgar streak, too, and the children were impossible. Still, even now, thinking of her, I feel a sinking, weak sensation. Have you ever been like that about a woman?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"It would have been ruinous," said the voice behind the bandages. "A woman is the most common trap. A man must be sensible in that department as in anything else. I despise a man who will sacrifice himself for a woman. It is the most sickly form of self-indulgence. If it were up to me, I would have all the novels burned, too, all of them, along with Das Kapital and the poems of Heine."
The doctor was a grey-haired man. He looked seventy years old. He had pouches under his eyes of wrinkled purple skin, like the flesh of swamp flowers, and his hands shook as he poked at Christian's knee. He was a Colonel and he looked too old even for a Colonel. There was brandy on his breath and the small, watery spurts of his eyes suspiciously searched Christian's scarred leg and Christian's face for the malingering and deception the doctor had found so often in thirty years of examining ailing soldiers of the Army of the Kaiser, the Army of the Social Democrats, and the Army of the Third Reich. Only the doctor's breath, Christian thought, has remained the same over the thirty years. The generals have changed, the sergeants have died, the philosophers have veered from north to south, but the Colonel's breath bears the same rich freight by a dark bottle out of Bordeaux that it did when Emperor Franz Josef stood beside his brother monarch in Vienna to review the first Saxony Guards on their way into Serbia.
"You'll do," said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian's card. "Excellent. It doesn't look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometres a day and never feel it. Eh?"
"I did not say anything, Colonel," said Christian.
"Full field duty," the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. "Eh?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. "Roll down your trousers, Sergeant," he said. He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. "What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?"
"I was a skiing instructor, Sir."
"Eh?" The Colonel glared at Christian as though he had just insulted him. "What was that?"
"Skiing, Sir."
"Eh," said the Colonel flatly. "You will not ski with that knee any more. It is for children anyway." He turned away from Christian and washed his hands, with meticulous thoroughness, as though Christian's bare pale flesh had been unutterably filthy.
"Also, from time to time, you will find yourself limping. Eh, why not? Why shouldn't a man limp?" He laughed, showing yellow false teeth. "How will people know you have been in the war otherwise?"
He scrubbed busily at his hands in the large enamel sink that smelled so strongly of disinfectant as Christian went out of the room.
"You will kindly get me a bayonet," Hardenburg said. Christian was sitting at his side, looking at his leg, stretched, still stiff and dubious, out in front of him. In the next bed the Burn lay, lost as always in his silent Antarctic of bandage and his tropical and horrible smell. Christian had just told Hardenburg that he was leaving the next day for the front. Hardenburg had said nothing, but had merely lain still and rigid, his smooth, swathed head like a frightening and morbid egg on the pillow. Christian had waited for a moment and then had decided that Hardenburg had not heard him.
"I said, Lieutenant," he repeated, "that I was leaving tomorrow."
"I heard you," Hardenburg said. "You will kindly get me a bayonet."
"What was that, Sir?" Christian asked, thinking: It only sounds like bayonet because of the bandages.
"I said I want a bayonet, Bring it to me tomorrow."
"I am leaving at two o'clock in the afternoon," Christian said.
"Bring it in the morning."
Christian looked at the overlapping, thin lines where the bandage crossed over itself on the round, smooth surface, but there was no expression there, of course, to give him a clue to what Hardenburg was thinking, and as usual, nothing was to be learned from the everlasting, even tone of the hidden voice. "I don't have a bayonet, Sir," he said.
"Steal one tonight. There is no complication there. You can steal one, can't you?"
"Yes, Sir."
"I don't want the scabbard. Just bring me the knife."
"Lieutenant," said Christian, "I am very grateful to you and I would like to be of service to you in every way I can, but if you are going to…" He hesitated. "If you are going to kill yourself, I cannot bring myself to…"
"I am not going to kill myself," the even, muffled voice said.