knee and given her a thorough spanking. The thought which had frightened him a moment earlier was very innocent compared to what Mock now imagined might follow such a spanking. He plastered his cheek to the cold window and gaped dully at South Park as they approached. His eyes were closing of their own accord. Beneath his eyelids floated the lights of the Three Crowns beer cellar, then silent cemeteries. Trees rustled somewhere in the distance, a carpenter’s plane swished, and a small child cried, pressing a face wet with tears against the tired man’s face. She put her little arms around his neck and tried to say something, tugging at his arm, contorting her lips fretfully and then calling in a raised voice:
“Wake up, Mr Mock! The driver’s asking where we want to go!”
Mock rubbed his eyes, extracted his watch from his pocket and glanced at Christel Ruhtgard’s angry face.
“I wanted to see you home,” he muttered, “so that you’re not accosted by any more drunks.”
“Like you?”
Mock got out of the Horch and looked around. They were at the bottom of Hohenzollernstrasse. Wind blew through the treetops in South Park to his right. To his left, the satiated incumbents of the modern detached houses and stately villas slept the sleep of the righteous. None of them were getting ghastly notes from demented murderers; none of them had a child who had just been deserted — or maybe even orphaned — put her arms around their neck. They were not told to pay a gruesome penance for fabricated mistakes. Mock walked round the car, opened the door and offered his arm to the girl. She spurned his polite gesture and nimbly jumped onto the pavement of her own accord.
“Like me,” he replied. “Those are especially dangerous.”
“Don’t make yourself out to be a demon,” Miss Ruhtgard said and she set off towards the park. “I haven’t got far to go from here. I don’t want you to walk me home.”
“Today, not far from here,” he called after her, “my men found a man hanging from a tree by his legs!”
Christel Ruhtgard stopped and looked at Mock with distaste, as if he had been responsible for decorating trees with dead people. They stood for a while in silence.
“This park is not as safe as the promenade by the moat on Sunday mornings,” Mock said, “where people go for an ice cream after church. It’s haunted here at night, and corpses can be found hanging on trees or floating in the pond.”
“You really won’t say anything to my father about me and Fred?” Christel asked quietly.
“On the condition that I walk you home.”
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1919
TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
They walked in silence through the dark park, lit up here and there by islands of light from the few street lamps. Mock lit a cigarette.
“You don’t know how to begin the conversation,” laughed Miss Ruhtgard quietly. She walked proud and upright. Irritation had given way to faint amusement.
“I know how to begin it, but I don’t know whether you’re going to want to talk about what interests me.”
“I’m not going to talk to you about Alfred Sorg. Is there anything else you’re interested in?”
“You’re an intelligent young lady. I could talk to you about anything.” Mock realized he had paid her a compliment and felt as embarrassed as a schoolboy. “But to touch on certain subjects we’ll have to get to know each other better …”
“You want to get to know me better? Isn’t what my father tells you enough?”
“I remember what your father said about you in the trenches at Dunaburg. You were his only chance of survival. You saved him, dear Christel.” Mock stopped and rubbed the sole of his shoe hard against the pathway, swearing under his breath when he realized he had stepped into one of the mementoes Bert and other dogs leave in parks. He wiped it on the grass and returned to his broken train of thought. “And not only him, by the way. You saved quite a few Russian soldiers. If it hadn’t been for you, your father would have thrown himself at the Russian trenches with his rifle and killed a lot of Russians, then he’d have died himself …”
“What makes you think he had suicidal thoughts?” In the dim light, Christel observed Mock as he pulled out a checked handkerchief and wiped the dust from the tip of his shoe.
“A lot of us had suicidal thoughts,” he muttered. “A good many of us tried hard to imagine the end of the war, but couldn’t. Your father did. You were the end of the war for him.”
“He talked to you about me?”
“Constantly.”
“And you listened? You sympathized with him? As far as I know, you don’t have any children of your own … How long can one listen to somebody talking about their children, about boys exploding with energy and moody girls?”
“You weren’t a moody girl in his eyes.” This time Mock pulled out a starched white handkerchief and wiped his brow. The September night was almost sweltering. “You were the very idea of a beloved child. An idea in the Platonic sense. A paragon, an archetype … After those conversations I’d envy him… I wanted to have a child like that myself …”
“And after this evening?” Christel looked at Mock in despair. “Would you still like to have a daughter like that?”
“One evening doesn’t cancel out a whole lifetime.” Even though Mock said these words quickly, he hoped the girl had heard the negative in his reply. “I don’t know what things are like between you on a day-to-day basis …”
Mock offered her his arm. After a moment’s hesitation, Christel took him gently by the elbow. They circled the pond.
“You beat up my friend,” she said quietly. “I ought to hate you for that. And yet I’m going to tell you how things are with my father on a day-to-day basis … He’s possessive. Every boy I get friendly with, everyone who visits me, he considers a rival … Once he told me that after my mother’s death — I was two at the time — I jumped for joy … I was happy my mother had died, my alleged rival … Note that … He always has books by Freud on his desk. In one of them he’s boldly underlined the father of psychology’s definition of the Electra complex. Entire pages scribbled on with horrible, smudged ink …”
“Try to understand your father.” Mock felt uncomfortable to be so near the girl. “Young ladies ought to meet young men in the company of chaperones. They shouldn’t be taking part in gatherings of drunken, fired-up commoners.”
Christel let go of Mock’s arm and looked around absent-mindedly.
“Please give me a cigarette,” she said.
Mock offered her his cigarette-case and struck a match.
“Men always strike matches towards themselves, did you know that? You did too. You’re one hundred percent male.”
“Anyone would feel one hundred percent male, walking through a park on a fine night in the company of a young and beautiful lady.” Mock suddenly realized he was courting his best friend’s daughter again. “I apologize, Miss Ruhtgard, I didn’t want to say that. I’m supposed to be acting as your Cerberus now, not your Romeo.”
“But the latter is decidedly nicer for any woman,” laughed Miss Ruhtgard.
“Is that right?” Mock asked, blessing the dark shadows for concealing his blushes. Feverishly he searched for an apt pun, a humorous retort, but his memory let him down. Minutes passed. Miss Ruhtgard smoked her cigarette awkwardly and smiled at him, waiting for him to say something. He was seized by anger — anger at himself and at this chit of a girl who was wrapping him around her little finger. What was most infuriating was the fact that the role suited him.
“Stop it, my dear,” he raised his voice a little, forsaking the formal “Miss Ruhtgard”. “You’re not a woman. You’re still a child.”
“Is that so?” she asked playfully. “I stopped being a child in Hamburg. Perhaps you’d like to know the circumstances?”
“There’s something else I’d like to know,” Mock said, in spite of himself. “Are you aware of any of Alfred
