holding her and listening to the rain.
“It used to frighten me,” she said. “How it made me feel. I thought it was wrong to feel that way. I wanted to have a normal life. Be a good woman. I was raised for that.”
“No,” he said, stroking her, “for this.”
“And now it’s all gone anyway, that life. It doesn’t matter anymore.” She put her head back, lying quietly, looking across his chest at the room. “What’s going to happen?” she said.
“We’ll go to America.”
“Germans are so popular there?” I he war s over.
“I don’t think for us. Even here, thec Americans look at you- What do they think we did?”
“Never mind them. Somewhere else, then, where nobody knows who we are. Africa,” he said, playing.
“Africa. What would you do there?”
“This. All day long. If it’s hot, we’ll close the shutters.”
“We can do this anywhere.”
“That’s the idea,” he said, pulling her up and kissing her.
She hung over him, her hair falling around his face. “Somewhere new,” she said.
“That’s right.” He ran his hand over her buttocks. “No more terrible things.”
Her face clouded and she turned away, facing the wall. “There’s no place like that.”
“Yes, there is.” He kissed her shoulder. “You’ll forget.”
“I can’t,” she said, then turned back to face him. “I killed him. Do you know what that means? I can’t forget the blood. It was everywhere, in my hair—”
“Ssh,” he said, then put his hand up to stroke her head. “It’s not there anymore. It’s gone.”
“But to kill somebody—”
“You had to.”
“No. It was finished. I couldn’t stop him from that. Then I killed him anyway. With his gun, while he was still on me. Killed him. And I didn’t have to. You think I’m the same person.” She lowered her head. “I wanted to be. Pretending to look like before. But it’s not before.”
“No, it’s now. Lena, listen to me. He raped you. He might have killed you. We all had to do terrible things in the war.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“What things?”
He took her face between his hands and looked straight at her. “I forget.”
“How can you forget?”
“Because I found you again. I forget the rest.”
She looked away. “You mean you want me to.”
“You will. We’re going to be happy. Isn’t that what you want?”
She smiled a little.
“We’ll start here.” He turned her face and began kissing it, the cheek, then the lips, drawing a map of their place. “We’ve already started. You forget everything when you make love. That’s why they invented it.”
Finally they drifted off, not quite asleep but hazy, like the vapor that hung outside after the rain. They were still lying there, holding each other, when he heard a door close, footsteps next door, the world coming back.
“We should get dressed,” she said.
“No, wait a little,” he said, his arm around her.
“I have to wash,” she said, but she didn’t move either, content to lie there, still drifting, until they heard the quick knock on the door. “Oh,” she said, flipping the end of the spread up to cover them, only halfway there when Liz opened the door and stopped in surprise, eyes wide with embarrassment.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, a gulp, ducking away and closing the door behind her.
“My god,” Lena said, swinging out of bed, grabbing clothes and holding them up in a bunch. “You don’t lock the door?”
He looked at her from the bed, grinning.
“How can you laugh?”
“Look at you, covering yourself. Come here.”
“Like a farce,” she said, ignoring him. “What will she think?”
“What do you care?”
“It’s not nice,” she said, then, hearing herself, began to smile too. “I’m a respectable woman.” You were.
She put her hand to her mouth to cover her smile, a girlish gesture, then tossed his pants over to the bed and started wriggling into her dress.
“What will you say to her?”
“Tell her to knock longer next time,” he said, up now and putting on his pants.
“It happens so often, is that it?”
“No,” he said, coming over and kissing her. “Just this once.”
“Get dressed,” she said, but smiling. She turned to the mirror. “Oh, look at me. My hair’s a mess. Is there a comb?”
“In the drawer.” He nodded at the frilly vanity. He buttoned his shirt and started tying his shoes, watching her at the mirror, the same absorbed concentration. She opened a drawer, searching. “On the right,” he said.
“You shouldn’t leave your money around,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
“What money?”
She held up Tully’s hundred-mark note. “And no lock either. Anyone could—”
He went over to the dressing table. “Oh, that. It’s not money. It’s evidence,” he said easily, the word as far from his thoughts as Tully or anything else.
“What do you mean, evidence?”
But he wasn’t listening now, looking at the bill. What had Danny said? A dash before the number. He turned the bill over. A dash, Russian money. He stood for a second, trying to think what it could mean, then gave it up, indifferent, his mind still hazy, not wanting anything to interrupt the day. He put the note back in the drawer and leaned down to kiss her head. The lavender was still there, mixed now with the smell of them.
“I’ll be down in two minutes,” she said, eager to leave, as if the billet were a hotel room they’d rented for the afternoon.
“All right. We’ll go home,” he said, pleased at the sound of it. He picked up Liz’s shoes on the way out.
In the hall he waited until she answered his knock.
“Hey, Jackson,” she said, still looking embarrassed. “Sorry about that. Next time put a tie on the door.”
“Your shoes,” he said, handing them to her. “I borrowed them.”
“I’ll bet you looked swell.”
“Hers were wet.”
She looked up at him. “It’s against the house rules, you know.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“No? You could have fooled me.”
“What did you want, anyway?” he said, feeling too good to want to explain.
“Mostly to see if you were alive. You still live here, don’t you?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Uh-huh. And here I was, worried. Men. People have been asking for you, by the way.”
“Later,” he said, unconcerned. “Thanks again for the shoes.”
She tipped one to her head in a salute. “Anytime. Hey, Jackson,” she said, stopping him as he turned to go. “Don’t let it throw you. It s only—”
“It’s not what you think,” he said again.
She smiled. “Then stop grinning.”
“Ami?”
“Ear to ear.”
Was he? He went down the stairs, wondering if his face were really a flushed sign, giving them away. Slap-
