Once they had conversed as follows: “Do you trust me, Tony?” “Yes.” “How do you imagine me?” (Erna avoided any references to sight.) He reflected for a moment, his features bizarrely illuminated by a smile in which the eyes played no part. “Young, very young…” (Erna felt herself aging; thank you, blind man!) “And tall and slim… with long soft tresses, all gathered up. Loyal and understanding. Straightforward.” (Erna’s frizzy hair was turning gray. Loyal, that was true, mortally so, and yet the word was like a slap. Understanding, indeed, knowing that the deepest grief is to understand. Straightforward, yes, as a string of infernal knots…) “You’re a little off the mark, Tony. No tresses, not soft hair…” But let him think that I’m young! “May I touch you?” he said, moving a translucent hand toward her. She clasped it between her own. “And I’m tough.” “One’s got to be,” the invalid said, with conviction. “So be tough, Tony, and answer me, your friend. Do you want to live — or — ” (warming these words with her voice) “would you prefer not to?” She saw the almost imperceptible tightening of his nostrils, his lips, the premature lines around his mouth. “But do you think I can live, Erna?” (No reprieve from lies and treachery!) “Yes, I do.” “Then I want to live.” And pity, which is the last form of love, must also be betrayed. The nurse knew she was lying again. “And so you will, I know you will.” She forced a tinkling laugh (the sound of laughter a lie) and added, “I’ve never been wrong before…” The ward doctor was taking a twenty-four-hour leave, she could do it then. She was sorry she’d put it off.
Tony ground his teeth while she removed the antiseptic dressings and replaced the catheters. A testicle was turning blue beneath the shrunken member. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much, Tony?” He smiled, beads of sweat under his nostrils. “Not too much. Just a little… You’re so good! I get the feeling you’re pleased, too. Are you?”
If only he didn’t ask why!
“I am, it’s true. Rest now. I’ll drop in later.”
Footsteps were running up the stairs. Someone was whimpering wretchedly. “Erna, come quickly to the operating room…” Pleased by the breakdown, the demise of an entire world, pleased! You should never say the word “good” again, Tony, it’s a meaningless word, a blind word… The old rafters of the operating room were black. White-shrouded forms were stooping and shifting around prostrate forms. The lamps created a mist of asphyxiating brightness surrounded by visceral penumbras. Scissors could be heard snipping through cloth and leather to expose wounds. Three surgeons, their faces partly masked, stoked with Benzedrine to keep them awake, worked amid raw flesh, pus, gangrene, dying flesh, hallucination. Their shining steel instruments, wondrously pure and cruel, preserved an impenetrable yet intelligent disorder from one torture to the next. Basins filled up with reddened cotton swabs mixed with scraps of flesh. In the bucket by the door, a pink, bristly male ear was resting on dark and light tufts of hair, beside some severed fingers. Rubber tubes and electric cables curved gracefully through the foggy glare… Erna, at a sign, clamped a man’s head between both hands. His throat was an open wound, and she immediately felt the death tremors through her palms. Dr. Felix put down the scalpel, gazed hypnotically into the gray face, and clicked his tongue: “Done for. Take him away…” And he turned aside wearily. On the neighboring table a colossus with an uncovered belly, starred with wounds, had fallen into an incoherently euphoric delirium: “Ha ha, ha ha, La Chênaie… four thousand… three thousand six hundred marks… Snapdragons! Mama…” A long bout of groaning, then he launched into a verse from the Ninth Symphony: “We enter, drunk with joy, Thy bright sanctuary… Drunk with joy.” Gently Erna fitted the anesthetic mask onto a feverish head like a ball of roots pulled out of the soil.
The day staff usually partied through the night, for life is short, death easy (in a certain sense), and joy fleeting, so
The demolished city was preparing for sleep. Patrols were following perilous itineraries which intersected with those of lucky pass holders who were out looking for a good time. Muted singing could be heard deep in the charred ruins, in alcoves like the dens of shipwreckers, around daintily embroidered tablecloths, with plentiful quaffing of that delectable scotch someone swiped after an American retreat, or the last of the champagne from the plunder of France, or the sweet Rhineland wine they call liebsfraumilch, Milk of the Beloved Woman, or the chiefs’ coffee filched from the storeroom; and every bottle, if its story could be known, would relate a gory melodrama full of episodes of the last days of a civilization. “The trophies most prized by victorious armies,” Conrad once remarked, “are the ones they treasure up to the very last minute of their own defeats, are the bottles…” The heroic survivors of slaughtered units organized group-sex parties, for lack of privacy and anyway the proud but not-too-proud depravity of warriors is more fun. Couples entwined wherever they could, mingling lips, breasts, hips, and groins, bursts of laughter and tears, rage and joy. All together now, softly, allegretto:
Or suddenly switching to a mode of lyrical lamentation so touching that the eyes of the Adelinas became moist and it took five men to prevent a pilot from emptying his revolver on everyone:
“I find myself wondering,” confessed a grenadier of the Battalion of Death, “whether I shall ever again be able to sleep with a woman in private and without beating her; I actually tried it the other day, with a classy, good-looking one — between clean sheets if you can imagine that — and I couldn’t get it up! Me!” Someone shot back gaily, “You won’t have that problem much longer!” Indeed (in aparte):
Sung to the tune of a lively march, the words were Conrad’s, disseminated thanks to the Secret Service, which was hell-bent on arresting the author. Under cover of such fraternal orgies of boozing and brawling (after which the corpse, thrown into the street, would be attributed to Polish outlaws), Erna met with Conrad, a volunteer on the night security shift with perforated lungs; skinny, properly helmeted and shined, the young man looked shy — and resolute. People imagined that they enjoyed having their pleasure in the open air, pressed up against derelict walls like homeless animals, and this was the subject of a good deal of joking speculation.
“Well?” Erna questioned anxiously, when Conrad had come for her and they were standing outside under the portico of a bank that still lorded over the surrounding devastation.