And by the light of the candle, she recognized him: a tank corpsman, sunburned, with a scar across his jaw and unruly, fireflecked hair. He was holding his helmet between large coppery hands.
“I’m the one who brought you the letters from…”
“What letters? There’s no one to write to me anymore.”
He repeated uneasily, “Well, I… it was me.”
“Of course it was. I was waiting for you. Sit down.”
The only place to sit was this schoolgirl bed. He hesitated.
“You are Fraülein Brigitte W —?”
“Leave me alone. I don’t know. I’m Brigitte.”
He nodded slowly. Strident whistles slashed the darkness around them.
“I was his friend,” he said in a muffled voice. “He was my only friend.”
“Who was?”
He showed a flash of strong teeth. His breath felt good.
“I beg your pardon. I’ll go. Please excuse me for…”
“Don’t be silly,” said Brigitte, and gripped his arm. “Stay. I was waiting. I haven’t changed. I’ve been so frightened, if only you knew… Sit down, I say. Are you hungry?”
Bed and floor sagged under the visitor’s weight. Brigitte, thin, her blouse splashed with embroidered flowers like flowers of blood, smiled at him serenely. “Listen to me, Fraülein. I was his friend. I came back to this city, from the eastern front to the western front… if fronts still exist… I looked for you. The house has gone, but they directed me here…”
“It’s all gone,” Brigitte said. “And no wonder. Do I exist? Do you?”
He hung his head.
“I didn’t know where to go… Our company disbanded. The barracks burned down. Did you know they’re fighting very close to here? The city’s about to fall…”
“Fall where?”
Those peculiar queries — “Do I exist? Do you?” — had broken slowly through the man’s fatigue and he registered them. He peered around the room in desperation. There was no safety in here. Outside were the patrols, bent on making examples of all and sundry. What good are examples? It’s total madness. They’re all stark staring mad at the rear. I must get out. Spend the night in a hole somewhere. Tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. The death throes. All our tanks wiped out. “Please try to understand, Brigitte. I have to leave. Goodbye.”
His hand was on the doorknob when a small noise grated the silence. The sound a famished rat would make, gnawing rabidly on a bone. He turned. Brigitte’s teeth were chattering. She was shaking from head to foot. “Don’t leave me again, I’ve waited so long. I always knew that you existed. I know your letters by heart. I’m scared.” He pulled her toward him. A heavy arm cradled Brigitte’s shoulders, warm breath enfolded her. “Shush, it’s all right. Nothing to be afraid of… We’ve no more to fear.” Ecstatically she repeated, “No more to fear…” The noise of a rat in a tomb stopped. “You’re warming me,” Brigitte murmured, “down to my soul. It’s my soul that was shivering…” She quieted, with both hands laid against the man’s chest and her cheek pressed against her hands. Like a fluid, fear seeped from her into him. Günther gazed without blinking at the tremulous flame of the candle. Such a tiny fire! Was it really fire at all? Real fire is what erupts from the ravaged earth in black, blinding spouts. It vaporizes the men, the trees, it reduces the machine to a mass of twisted metal…
(It happened like this: the torpedo made a noise like a hurricane — earsplitting — the men threw themselves flat on the ground; a fat beetle was zigzagging down the road, its back striped green and gray… The torpedo must have blown up within a few yards of the car; by the time the men ran through a hot, buffeting wind-storm, puffs of steam were gathering above the chassis of the overturned machine… Not a trace left of windows or tires or the three officers they had just encountered. It was such a puzzle that a squad was detailed to sift through the ground, pounded into chalky dust… Death disappeared: no more danse macabre! The crater was a great oval wound gouged into the field, and no living thing subsisted in this earth cleansed by fire; not a worm, not a root, not a blade of grass… Günther tried to remember the general’s face: a tight-ass engineer in a high collar, insignia, splendid kepi… The troops feared him, for he was a stickler in hopeless situations. His gloveless hand was like a hook: the inexorable claw of a ghoul dragging whole regiments to counterattack in retreat, and on down to the underworld of butchered armies and peoples… The general’s remains would be sorely missed by the disciplined multitudes in limbo… Günther did not think all of this, but he relived it in the stillness of the moment. “There are no warriors anymore: only poor bastards facing exploding volcanoes. The cosmos has gone berserk… THIS CAN NEVER STOP…”)
Strange to have a silent young woman against one’s chest as if asleep. And this carcass of a city, barer even than Warsaw, laid out dead in the first warmth of spring! He, Günther, was alive, living under the cold light of a huge, dark, sulfurous star: the sun of destruction.
“Talk to me,” whispered Brigitte cajolingly. “You’re alive.”
“Apparently,” he snickered to himself. Wasn’t the calm night going to explode? If it didn’t explode, it wouldn’t make sense.
“You’re real. You’re not a hallucination, are you? Sometimes I thought I was going mad.”
He answered, lying eagerly, “No, I’m not a hallucination,” because not one of those seconds was really real to him. What double of himself was speaking?
“Brigitte. I feel great tenderness for you.”
“I know. Tell me again.”
He could not say the words again. He could not make a move or the spell would be broken. Indestructible, this immobility, more joyful perhaps than fearful. But NOTHING IS INDESTRUCTIBLE, EVERYTHING WILL BE DESTROYED. Günther asked, “Do you feel better now?”
“I feel fine.”
He was thinking: I’m nearly as disoriented as this young woman, me, the strong, rational one. Strong, what a laughable idea. You wish you were made of bronze, cast by Krupp! You end up foolishly believing that you are, in spite of your melting innards and your foggy brain…
“Brigitte, you ought to rest.”
“I’m yours, don’t you see, why do you talk to me like a stranger?”
The young woman’s fragility eventually communicated to him an animal thirst with which he was all too familiar. All soldiers know it. Slacking off or overworked, their sole virtues are those of beasts. Where was it? A shapely pair of female legs, frozen in an upside-down dance step, tipped with high-heeled patent pumps, poking out from beneath a fall of rocks; they were only just beginning to turn blue. The gang made dirty jokes. It occurred to me that this would make a good photograph to hang beside the one of the carbonized head, still imperiously erect, that I saw on a burned-out turret. The diptych could be called A Match Made in Heaven. He felt hot, thirsty, he wanted the woman, he wanted sleep more than anything. I really should kill you, out of kindness. The only forgivable murder, and the hardest to commit. Brigitte, do you know that the odious time of rape has arrived? All rutting armies fall upon all women cornered in vacated cities, roofless barns, woods sheared by fire. The peasant women of Poland, Russia, or Serbia know it, they run from the armed man, but only a little way; then they stop, turned in on themselves, with watchful, frightened eyes, and quickly lift the skirts under which they keep only their bodies; they glance about for the couch of dead leaves, grass, straw, stones, any good place to get it over with quickly, to pay for their lives. They know all about the blood-thirsty brutes who strangle or eviscerate you afterward — the young women talk about it when they sit up late, after reading love letters from the front to each other; they also know that the stranglers and slashers are a minority, whereas plenty of soldiers reward you with a cigarette, a piece of chocolate, a tin of Spam, a few small coins, a stolen trinket if you’re lucky. Most don’t give a woman anything, but sneer contemptuously when they’re through, or cringe in sudden, stupid shame. And it may be that some of those who kill do it to kill the shame. Do you suppose, poor mad Brigitte, that I’m any different from the others? Elementarily, we’re all the same. And you’re like every other female caught up in the banality of destruction. And the victors who will be storming in next week, if not before, they’re the same. They will shove your legs open and fall roughly on top of you. A resurgence of our primate ancestors. Wouldn’t I truly be doing better if I put my hands around your neck and squeezed a little, a little harder, like this? Next I could kill myself, and you would have delivered me… Not that way, the world will deal with me, I want to see it through, the strong one. Usually, you don’t see anything or know anything or feel anything… Enough.