'It's not that we don't get enough to eat,' Gretchen said officially, 'but it's just that the variety…'
Oh, God, Christian mourned within him, here two minutes and we are discussing diet!
'Tell me,' he said abruptly, 'have you heard from your husband?'
'My husband,' Gretchen said, checking herself, as though she regretted giving up the subject of food. 'Oh. He killed himself.'
'What?'
'He killed himself,' Gretchen said brightly. 'With a pocket knife.'
'It's not possible,' Christian said, because it did not seem real that all that fierce, ordered energy, that intricate, cold, reasonable strength could have been self-destroyed. 'He had so many plans…'
'I know about his plans,' Gretchen said aggrievedly. 'He wanted to come back here. He sent me his picture. How he ever got anyone to take a picture of that face I honestly don't know. He regained the sight of one eye and suddenly decided he wanted to come back and live with me. You have no idea what he looked like.' She shuddered visibly. 'A man must be insane to send his wife a picture like that. I would understand, he wrote, I would be strong enough. He was queer enough to begin with, but without a face… There are some limits, after all, even in a war. Horror has a proper place in life, he wrote, and we must all be able to bear it…'
'Yes,' said Christian. 'I remember.'
'Oh,' said Gretchen, 'I suppose he told you some of it, too.'
'Yes,' said Christian.
'Well,' Gretchen said, petulantly, 'I wrote him a most tactful letter. I worked at it for a whole evening. I told him he would find it uncomfortable here, he would be better looked after in an Army hospital, at least until they did something more with his face… although, to tell you the truth, there was nothing to be done, it was no face at all, things like that really shouldn't be permitted, but the letter was extremely tactful…'
'Have you the picture?' Christian asked suddenly.
Gretchen looked at him strangely. She pulled the wrap closer around her. 'Yes,' she said, 'I have it.'
'I can't understand,' Gretchen said, standing up and going over to the desk against the far wall, 'why anyone would want to look at it.' She rummaged nervously through two of the desk drawers, then brought out a small photograph. She glanced at it briefly, then handed it to Christian. 'There it is,' she said. 'As though there aren't enough things to frighten a person these days…'
Christian looked at the photograph. One bright, crooked eye stared coldly and imperiously out of the nameless wounded flesh, over the tight collar of the uniform.
'May I have this?' Christian asked.
'You people are getting queerer and queerer these days,' Gretchen said shrilly. 'Sometimes I have the feeling you all ought to be locked up, really I do.'
'May I have it?' Christian repeated, staring down at it.
'I suppose so.' Gretchen shrugged. 'It doesn't do me any good.'
'I was very attached to him,' Christian said. 'I owe a great deal to him. He taught me more than anyone else I ever knew. He was a giant, a true giant.'
'Don't think, Sergeant,' Gretchen said quickly, 'that I wasn't fond of him. Because I was. Deeply fond of him. But I prefer remembering him like this…' She picked up from the table the silver-framed photograph of Hardenburg, handsome and stern in his cap, and touched it sentimentally. 'This was taken the first month we were married and I think he'd want me to remember him like that.'
There was the turning of a key in the door, and Gretchen twitched nervously and tied the cord around her robe more tightly. 'I'm afraid, Sergeant,' she said hurriedly, 'that you'll have to go now. I'm busy at the moment and…'
A large, heavy-framed woman in a black coat came into the room. She had iron-grey hair, brushed severely back from her forehead, and small, cold eyes behind steel glasses. She glanced once at Christian.
'Good evening, Gretchen,' she said. 'Aren't you dressed yet? You know, we're going out for dinner.'
'I've had company,' Gretchen said. 'A Sergeant from my husband's old Company.'
'Yes?' The woman's voice had a rising note of cold inquiry. She faced Christian heavily.
'Sergeant… Sergeant…' Gretchen's voice hesitated. 'I'm terribly sorry, but I don't remember your name.'
I would like to kill her, thought Christian, standing facing the middle-aged woman, the photograph of Hardenburg still in his hand. 'Diestl,' he said flatly. 'Christian Diestl.'
'Sergeant Diestl, Mademoiselle Giguet.'
Christian nodded at the woman. She acknowledged the greeting with a brief downward flicker of her eyes.
'Mademoiselle Giguet is from Paris,' Gretchen said nervously. 'She is working for us in the Ministry. She is living with me until she can find an apartment. She's very important, aren't you, darling?' Gretchen giggled at the end of her sentence.
The woman ignored her. She began stripping her gloves off her square, powerful hands. 'Forgive me,' she said. 'I must have a bath. Is there hot water?'
'Lukewarm,' said Gretchen.
'Good enough.' The square, heavy figure disappeared into the bedroom.
'She's very intellectual.' Gretchen did not look at Christian.
'You'd be amazed how they come to her for advice at the Ministry.'
Christian picked up his cap. 'I must go now,' he said.
'Thank you for the photograph. Goodbye.'
'Goodbye,' Gretchen said, pulling nervously at the collar of her wrap. 'Just slam the, door. The lock is automatic.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
'I SEE visions,' Behr was saying, as they walked slowly along the beach, towards their boots, their bare feet sinking into the cool sand. The sound of the waves, rolling mildly in from America three thousand miles away, made a springtime murmur in the still air. 'I see visions of Germany one year from now.' Behr stopped and lit a cigarette, his steady, workman's hands looking enormous around the frail tube of tobacco. 'Ruins. Ruins everywhere. Twelve-year-old children using hand-grenades to steal a kilo of flour. No young men on the streets, except the ones on crutches, because all the rest are in prison camps in Russia and France and England. Old women walking down the streets in potato sacking and suddenly dropping dead of hunger. No factories working, because they have all been bombed to the ground. No government, just military law, laid down by the Russians and the Americans. No schools, no homes, no future…'
Behr paused and stared out to sea. It was late afternoon, amazingly warm and tender for so early in the season on the Normandy coast. The sun was an orange ball sinking peacefully into the water. The coarse grass on the dunes barely moved in the quiet; the road, running in a black winding streamer along the beach, was empty and the pale stone farmhouses in the distance seemed to have been deserted a long time ago.
'No future,' Behr repeated reflectively, staring out across the stretched barbed wire to the sea. 'No future.'
Behr was a Sergeant in Christian's new Company. He was a quiet, powerfully built man of about thirty, whose wife and two children had been killed in Berlin in January by the RAF. He had been wounded on the Russian Front in the autumn, although he refused to talk about it, and had only come to France a few weeks before Christian had arrived there after his leave in Berlin.
In the month that Christian had known him he had grown very fond of Behr. He had seemed to like Christian, too, and they had begun to spend all their spare time together, on long walks through the budding countryside, and drinking the local Calvados and hard cider in the cafes of the village in which their battalion was based. They carried pistols in holsters at their belts when they went out because they were constantly being warned by superior officers about the activities of Maquis bands of Frenchmen. But there had been no incidents at all in that neighbourhood, and Christian and Behr had agreed that the repeated warnings were merely symptoms of the
