“No. Only in puzzles.”
She stopped, still staring at him. When she spoke again her words seemed almost unconscious, drawn out of her in a trance. “What are you working out now?”
“Now? I don’t know. Why I’m here in a room full of pinheads eating cake instead of getting shot on Okinawa. Why anybody’s on Okinawa in the first place. What the Jap pilots think about when they crash into the ships. Why somebody got killed in a park. What are we going to do after the war.” He stopped, looking at her. “Why I’m pretending I’m thinking about any of this. All I’m really trying to figure out is how I can go to bed with you.”
She looked at him as if nothing had been said, but the longer she was silent, the more real the words became, hanging between them like visible shapes. For an instant he thought he had frightened her, but he held her eyes without apology, determined to play the hand through. Then, still saying nothing, she took a drink and walked away from him into the room.
He stared after her, unable to read any expression in her movement, not sure what he had done. Then people closed around her in the crowded room and she was gone. Someone at the table jostled his arm, and finally distracted, he looked at the rest of the room. People were still eating and talking. In the music corner, one of the players began tuning his viola.
“Now where is Hans,” Johanna Weber said to nobody in particular, busy now with a new hostess assignment. Connolly decided to look for the bathroom before the music began. The room had become even warmer, and despite the chill someone had opened the door to let in the fresh night air. He brushed past some smokers lining the narrow hallway and went through a half-open door to the bedroom. The bed was heaped with jackets and coats, and in the corner, under a desk lamp, Professor Weber and another man were leafing through pages. The room itself seemed oddly solemn, a refuge from the conversation just steps away, and Connolly realized that the effect came from the men themselves, wordlessly and gravely turning the pages of a magazine. He had clearly interrupted them, but Weber, glancing over his shoulder, nodded with an automatic courtesy.
“The bathroom?” Connolly said.
“Through there,” Weber said, pointing to a door. And then, still courteous, “This is Friedrich Eisler. Friedrich, Mr. Connolly.”
Connolly nodded, but both men returned to the magazine as if he had gone. “Oh, Friedrich,” Weber said, a plaintive sound of such quiet distress that Connolly stopped, alarmed. The room suddenly was no longer solemn but filled with the disturbance of something gone wrong. Connolly looked toward the open magazine- Life, or something like it-and stopped, shaken.
He had seen combat pictures before, and pictures of rubble and bodies crushed in suffering, but this was something new. Skeletons covered with a thin layer of skin looked out at the camera through a wire fence, their eyes utterly without expression. Some wore the black-and-white stripes of dirty prison camp uniforms. Behind them bodies lay on the ground, one so thin that a thighbone seemed to puncture the skin. In another, bodies were heaped in piles, limbs at unnatural angles, mouths wide open to the air. Connolly looked at them, paralyzed. Children. The men at the fence seemed to hang there, as if they needed to hold the wire to remain upright. In another picture, a vast open pit was filled to overflowing with shaved heads and naked bodies. Everyone was dead, even the ones pretending to be alive at the fence. Their eyes burned straight through the camera. Connolly wondered who had taken the pictures, who had recorded not just lifeless bodies but death itself. Only a mechanical box should see this. He imagined his finger trembling on the shutter, refusing to look. His eyes swam. He darted from picture to picture, trying to make any sense of it, but the world had tilted slightly on its axis, rearranging everything, and it was impossible to understand anything so new. Another picture: a ragged group of Nazi guards, their eyes dead too. A camp entrance. More piles of bodies. People lying in bunks, a bony arm jutting out for help. But all too late. Even those with open eyes were already dead. He could hear, outside, the rasp of the viola tuning and people talking, and he realized that in the bedroom they had almost stopped breathing.
There was a shame in seeing this-the act of witnessing made one a part of it. And there was the shame of failed hopes. The past few weeks had been filled with exultant news from Germany. The Rhine crossed. A city taken. Berlin within reach. Refugees marching to a somber future, richly deserved. Since the offensive of the winter, the war had taken on the pace and excitement of a long sporting match finally about to be won. The world was beginning to make sense again. Now he saw it was too late for that too.
“So many,” Eisler said, a low intoning.
“We knew, but we didn’t know.” They were still oblivious to Connolly, but looking at the photographs had drawn him into their circle. “Friedrich,” Weber said, “they killed everybody.”
Eisler put his hand on Weber’s shoulder, glancing up at Connolly. Connolly took him in for the first time-a tall, scrawny man with the pallor of laboratory duty about his face. His neck stretched unnaturally high, with a prominent, bobbing Adam’s apple and the slight discoloration of a birth defect to the right of his chin. Connolly noticed his long fingers, delicate and tapering, as if they had been formed, or trained, for precision work. His hair was uncombed, landing wherever it fell over his gentle face.
“They’ve won,” Weber said, almost to himself.
“No. What are you saying?”
“They killed everybody. It’s too late, don’t you see? All this work. We’re too late now.” He shrugged in resignation just as his wife came to the door to summon him.
“Liebchen, come start, please. It’s getting late,” she said, barely sticking her head in, unaware that she had trivialized the moment.
Dutifully, Weber got up and shuffled out of the room, leaving Connolly and Eisler in uncomfortable silence. Still holding the magazine, Eisler sat heavily on the bed, cushioned by the heap of coats. Connolly stared down again at the pictures. Personalize the crime, an old journalist’s trick. Focus on one person-that man looking through the fence-to construct the story. But as he stared at the picture, everyone became disembodied. There were no people left, just those rows of blank eyes. Then Eisler let the magazine slide shut and he was staring at the bright color of a Chesterfield ad on the back.
“What did he mean, we’re too late?” Connolly said quietly.
For a moment he thought Eisler hadn’t heard, but when he finally spoke, his soft voice was precise, as if he had been carefully considering his answer. “We came here to defeat the Nazis. Soldiers, you see?” He smiled weakly. “This was our way of fighting. With our slide rules. Our tests.” His voice had only a trace of accent. “We were the little boys wearing glasses, not the big ones with the boots and the armbands. But we had the intelligence. We could fight with this.” He tapped the side of his head. “We would build a bomb to kill all the Nazis. A terrible thing, yes. But with the Nazis, anything was permissible. Even the bomb. They wanted to kill everybody. And now, you see, they have. What are we going to do now?”
“The war isn’t over yet.”
Eisler looked up at him, surprised at the sound of his voice, and Connolly realized he’d been thinking aloud, not talking to him at all.
“It is for them,” Eisler said, rising slowly and handing Connolly the magazine. “It will be over for the rest of us very soon. You think perhaps they have a secret weapon? A new rocket for London? Well, it’s an idea. Convenient, certainly.”
“Convenient?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly with a handkerchief. “If there are Nazis, we don’t have these inconvenient moral questions. But what shall we do with this bomb if there are no Nazis?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said, at a loss.
“No,” he said, smiling. “None of us do. Sometimes I wonder what we have been thinking. Maybe the Nazis did that to us too. But you must excuse me. You came to hear the music, not to discuss-well, what do we call it?”
Outside, the music had begun, the precise lilting phrase of a Bach partita.
“German music,” Eisler said ironically. “Such beautiful music. You must admit, we are an extraordinary people. Or were.”
Connolly felt again that he was eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Eisler might have been talking to Weber, not a stranger holding a magazine. His shy face seemed to be looking elsewhere, at some invisible sadness.
“Something always survives,” Connolly said, not even sure what he meant.
“Yes, we survive,” Eisler said gently, opening his hand to indicate the house. “Americans now. Oh, I can see you think I’m being sentimental. You’re right, of course. That’s very German too. But our culture is over. Perhaps it
