“I ... have always worn it like this.”
No, that was not true. There was a time, she recalled, with Horst, when it had flowed about her shoulders, thick and brown, in the summer of 1970. There was a time when it had blown in the wind on the lake at the Schlosspark in Laxenburg.
Karim rose without a word and walked behind her. She felt a rising panic. This was preposterous. Skillful fingers eased the big tortoiseshell comb out of her bun. This must stop. She felt the bobby pins withdrawn, her hair coming undone, falling down her back. She sat rigid at her place. The same fingers lifted her hair and drew it forward to fall on either side of her face.
Karim stood beside her, and she looked up. He held out two hands and smiled.
“That’s better. You look ten years younger and prettier. Let’s sit on the sofa. You pick your favorite piece for the record player and I’ll make coffee. Deal?”
Without permission, he took her small hands and lifted her up from her seat. Letting one hand drop, he led her out of the alcove into the sitting room. Then he turned into the kitchen, releasing her other hand as he did so.
Thank God he had done that. She was shaking from head to toe. Theirs was supposed to be a platonic friendship. But then, he had not touched her, not really touched her. She would, of course, never permit
She caught sight of herself in a mirror on the wall, pink and flushed, hair about her shoulders, covering her ears, framing her face. She thought she caught half a glimpse of a girl she had known twenty years ago.
She took a grip on herself and chose a record. Her beloved Strauss, the waltzes every note of which she knew, “Roses from the South,”
“Vienna Woods,” “Skaters,” “Danube” ... Thank goodness he was in the kitchen and did not see her nearly drop it as she placed it on the turntable. He seemed to have great ease in finding the coffee, the water, the filters, the sugar.
She sat at one far end of the sofa when he joined her, knees together, coffee on her lap. She wanted to talk about the concert scheduled for the Musikverein next week, but the words did not come. She sipped her coffee instead.
“Edith, please don’t be frightened of me,” he murmured. “I am your friend, no?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not frightened.”
“Good. Because I will never hurt you, you know.”
Friend. Yes, they were friends, a friendship born of a mutual love of music, art, opera, culture. Nothing more, surely. Such a small gap, friend to boyfriend. She knew that the other secretaries at the bank had husbands and boyfriends, watched them excited before going out on a date, giggling in the hall the morning after, pitying her for being so alone.
“That’s ‘Roses from the South,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I think it’s my favorite of all the waltzes.”
“Mine too.” That was better—back to music.
He took her coffee cup from her lap and put it beside his own on a side table. Then he rose, took her hands, and pulled her to her feet.
“What ...?”
She found her right hand taken in his left, a strong and persuasive arm around her waist, and she was turning gently on the strip-pine flooring of the small space between the furniture, dancing a waltz.
Gidi Barzilai would have said, go for it, boychick, don’t waste any more time. What did he know? Nothing. First the trust, then the fall.
Karim kept his right hand well up Edith’s back.
As they turned, several inches of space between them, Karim brought their locked hands closer to his shoulder, and with his right arm he eased Edith nearer to his body. It was imperceptible.
Edith found her face against his chest and had to turn her face sideways. Her small bosom was against his body, and she could sense that man-smell again.
She pulled away. He let her, released her right hand, and used his left to tilt her chin upward. Then he kissed her, as they danced.
It was not a salacious kiss. He kept his lips together, made no effort to force hers apart. Her mind was a rush of thoughts and sensations, an airplane out of control, spinning, falling, protests rising to fight and failing. The bank, Gemutlich, her reputation, his youth, his foreignness, their ages, the warmth, the wine, the odor, the strength, the lips. The music stopped. If he had done anything else, she would have thrown him out. He took his lips from hers and eased her head forward until it rested against his chest. They stayed motionless like that in the silent apartment for several seconds.
It was she who pulled away. She turned to the sofa and sat down, staring ahead of her. She found him on his knees in front of her. He took both her hands in his.
“Are you angry with me, Edith?”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to. I swear it. I couldn’t help it.”
“I think you should go.”
“Edith, if you are angry and you want to punish me, there is only one way you can. By not letting me see you again.”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
“Please say you’ll let me see you again.”
“I suppose so.”
“If you say no, I’ll abandon the study course and go home. I couldn’t live in Vienna if you won’t see me.”
“Don’t be silly. You must study.”
“Then you will see me again?”
“All right.”
He was gone five minutes later. She put out the lights, changed into her prim cotton nightdress, scrubbed her face and brushed her teeth, and went to bed.
In the darkness she lay with her knees drawn close to her chest. After two hours she did something she had not done for years: She smiled in the darkness. There was a mad thought going through her mind over and over again, and she did not mind. I have a boyfriend. He is ten years younger, a student, a foreigner, an Arab, and a Moslem. And I don’t mind.
Colonel Dick Beatty of the USAF was on the graveyard shift that night, deep below Old Airport Road in Riyadh.
The Black Hole never stopped, it never slackened, and in the first days of the air war, it was working harder and faster than ever.
General Chuck Horner’s master plan for the air war was experiencing the dislocation caused by the diversion of hundreds of his warplanes to hunt Scud launchers instead of taking out the targets preassigned to them.
Any combat general will confirm that a plan can be worked out to the last nut and bolt, but when the balloon goes up, it is never quite like that. The crisis caused by the rockets dropping onto Israel was proving a serious problem. Tel Aviv was screaming at Washington, and Washington was screaming at Riyadh. The diversion of all those warplanes to hunt the elusive mobile launchers was the price Washington had to pay to keep Israel out of retaliatory action, and Washington’s orders did not brook argument. Everyone could see that Israel losing patience and its entering the war would prove disastrous for the frail Coalition now ranged against Iraq, but the problem was still major.
Targets originally slated for day three were being deferred for lack of aircraft, and the effect was like dominoes. A further problem was that there could still be no Bomb Damage Assessment, or BDA. It was essential, and it had to be done. The alternative could be appalling.
