and Tina told them to shut their eyes, and pushed the presents she had bought for them into my hands, and I gave Karl a wooden car and Lisc a doll that opens and shuts her eyes and says ‘Mutti,’ and then Tina whispered, Let’s go home, she said ‘home’ and glanced at me sideways, blushing, she always blushes, and we went home, very excited.” There’s no need for a full description of the meeting here. Most of it will be familiar enough: supper was simple but festive. Neigel had brought real blood sausage his driver found for him on the black market in Warsaw, and Tina got a little tipsy on a quarter of a glass of the wine they had opened on their wedding day in ‘28 which they drank only on very special occasions. Then they sent the children to bed. Tina went to do the dishes, and Neigel to wash up. When he finished, he took off his clothes, got into bed, and waited for her. (Wasserman: “To tell the truth, he embarrassed me! Into his bed he takes me! Here I was, like MALKIEL ZEIDMAN [q.v.], sticking my nose into the marriage bed!”) Neigel looked at Wasserman, and said with a hesitant, apologetic smile, “And don’t think I was always a big Don Juan, Wasserman, because I wasn’t. The truth is, Christina was my first. There, now you know something even she doesn’t know. I liked to let her think I had a lot of women before her, you see …” Wasserman mustered his strength to answer him with a feeble smile. (Wasserman: “Nu, well, et! My Sarah, too, my treasure … nu yes, she, too, did not know, and I dropped boastful hints from time to time, sparks of bravado … I was vague and omitted the details … Ai, how full the world is of wretches like me.”) Later Tina came and sat on the edge of the bed, and rubbed a sweet-smelling cream on her hands, and Neigcl swallowed her simple movements with his eyes, and Tina said,If you don’t mind, let’s talk a little first, because I think we have a lot to say to each other, and Neigel, though he was “burning down there, really burning with … nu, you know, Wasserman,” said, “Anything, anything you want.” Because, he said, he understood that women are sometimes inhibited after an outburst of, well, passion. “And my Tina, though she was born in Bavaria, in matters like that has a ‘Rhinish’ personality, gentle and refined and very slow.” Neigel listened to her tell all she had endured these past months, never speaking. She ran her finger over the sheet, very close to his body, and she unburdened herself. She told him about the shock she suffered that day in December when she visited his camp, and how she began to be afraid of him. “She was really afraid, Wasserman, and she hated me. And even our Karl, who looks so much like me, she sometimes, at certain moments, found it hard to love him as before, and she said she was sure I was doing it only because I believed it was my duty, and that I probably hated it, because at heart you’re different, that’s what she said, and of course I wanted to tell her about Otto’s band then, and I also wanted to change the subject, because it wasn’t easy to listen to her saying those things, but Tina held her finger to my mouth and said, Let me talk, I’ve been waiting a long time for this.” And she told him that months before she had decided to divorce him, and after some debating, had gone to her parents in Augsburg and informed them of her decision, and “they disowned her, Wasserman, can you believe it? They told her to leave the house. Her father runs a laundry there and works for the army, and her mother belongs to the Augsburg Women’s League, and when she told them, she saw how frightened they were. Yes, it was plain fear, as though she had a contagious disease. They simply threw her out of the house so she wouldn’t infect them, and told her she was hurting a war hero and sabotaging the war effort … These were the best excuses they could come up with on the spur of the moment, and her mother ran after her in the street in her robe and whispered that she was no daughter of theirs, that they didn’t want to see her or the children anymore, imagine, a woman with two small children, all alone, with no one to help. I always did everything at home, yes, I’m not ashamed of it. I liked to work around the house. And now everything fell on her shoulders. And you have to understand, she isn’t a lousy Communist or anything and she knows nothing about politics,” explains Neigel in alarm, his fingers twisting, “and she had nothing to hold on to, noreligion or party, no slogans, not even a good friend to talk to; that’s how she was, all alone, very quiet, she wouldn’t have any part of the general excitement, this woman is stronger than any of us, I tell you.”
And then Christina began to speak of his letters, his recent letters from the camp. She told him how she lay in bed at night after putting the children to sleep and read them, laughing under the sheets. “Do you understand what this means for me, Wasserman? I never made her laugh before, the best I could do was to take her to a Charlie Chaplin picture, and now she says, I read and I was moved, and I laughed and I cried, and I knew you weren’t a murderer.” She caressed his face (Wasserman: “Dear God, her delicate, fragile hand on that face”) and said words of MERCY [q.v.] and LOVE [q.v.]; My love, she said, I know you’re fighting a war
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