In the King's Arms (16 page)

Lili was assigned to the bunk below Gretta’s. During the first night, she had spread her lips wide and sung full-throatedly in the dark barracks. Her voice was low and it was strong, too; the wooden bunks vibrated mesmerically. Those who slept through Lili’s songs were deep sleepers; perhaps something in the notes made them sleep the more deeply. The song was not familiar to Gretta, but she found it easy to understand, the way one understands a formless cloud, or the moon that does not always look, or have to look, like a smiling face. It was like birdsong; it advanced to no climax, and did not therefore fall away.

Not long after Lili was brought to the camp, she found favor in the eyes of a Nazi. In the daytime, she had dug trenches, her large legs planted apart like a trestle, flinging dirt over her shoulder so
cockily that all the Nazis had taken notice of her. All the Nazi-men: they gawked at Lili, at her magnificent hips, working for them, at her beautiful head, ripe as a gourd, at her parted mouth, streaming with notes. She grinned insolently at them, never breaking rhythm with the hard dirt at her feet. One Nazi, among all, had returned a grin. Lili did not especially notice him; she did not focus. But eventually he made her focus.

Eventually, she lay on her back beneath him, silently. Still later, because he became a human being to her, and she, perhaps, to him, she found herself singing in his ear as her arms and legs danced upwards in the air above his head. Her hair grew back quickly, becoming downy to his soft caressing strokes. Her muscles softened; she never put a thread on them; she was ever on the bed, his ready infant. The man used to suck at her nipples, as though he had forgotten who was weak and who strong, who the parent and who the child.

She sang him to sleep, rocking her wide hips below. In time he threw Lili out. But not before every Nazi who cared to had degraded her as the stinking Jew-whore she was. Her man was in the next room, listening to the sounds of his fellows laughing in her face and raping her. He felt murderous; he had had enough of her; she was beginning to make a fool of him. Those Jew-witches get into your heart, he thought. He was getting soft as a woman; she’d bedeviled him.

Let her try her tricks on them, he thought, and let her wiggle those hips in the gas chamber. Choking Jews dance wild in there. Her songs and her smirks and her crocodile tears. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, he thought, pacing the floor, listening to her cries.

A gang of men in uniform approached Lili to do the quick business.
They stood on the edge of the rumpled bed and lugged her roughly to them, one by one, by her ankles. Few undressed. They unzipped, retaining their status, then zipped again, restored.

All of them having had her, one or two invented a new amusement. They decided to crush her face. One smashed her nose, the other sent her teeth flying. Her mouth collapsed. Her blood soaked the floor.

“Call in another whore to mop up here!” yelled one chunky Nazi, gaily hoisting his trousers (this one had stripped to avoid staining the fresh uniform). The bed itself was drenched.

Lili did not die just then. She returned to work. This was about the time that Gretta began working in the kitchen. Lili was unrecognizable, and could not chew the extra scraps that Gretta managed to sneak to her. She listlessly pushed peelings back to her molars, and then would forget to chew. Gretta learned to treat her like a baby: she chewed the food herself, then placed it into Lili’s mouth, coaxing her with a soft voice, “Try, Lili, please.” One of Lili’s eyes could not open anymore, and the other oozed involuntary tears, and looked out with a horrifying docility.

“Lili! Please, for me!” begged Gretta. Where Lili had once stood planted by day, she now trembled pathetically in the wind, confused, looking down with wonder into the deep hole the others were busily digging. It was a mass grave.

Goodbye, Lili, goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye.

Lily was named after this woman, and not, as was the convention, after her grandparents, who also toppled somewhere in Europe, into anonymous earth. It was not that Gretta had forgotten her own mother and father. But when she first heard her daughter’s strong, stubborn cries, she thought of the singing voice of Lili in the dark barracks.

Lily, winding home, sang out again:

 

 

She did not summon up martyrdom to Holy Wars, or martyrdom to love. She heard the sound, pure: a magical, lilting, umbilical tune, anchored securely inside her.

It sang her homeward.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF HER JOURNEY, Lily stopped with a jolt: a sudden instinct warned her away from danger. She knew, all at once, what her parents would tell her to do: abort.

The Lili after whom she was named had once been pregnant, too. That was a secret she had learned not from her mother, but from another survivor, Eva. Eva had winked and said, “Why do you think the Nazi threw her out? It was because she was carrying a child from him. Imagine: half Jew and half Nazi. Imagine. On the night he threw her to the dogs, she must have lost it. Or if not then, then later, when they put her to work, broken, in the fields again. No one wants a baby like that on this earth. Not Jew, not Christian.” When Lily had told her parents what she knew about her namesake, her mother had responded: “It was not God’s will to bind two enemies.” Even her gentle father had added, “You see, Lily, such a baby goes against nature.”

With all her heart, she longed to be back with Mrs. Dancer and little Rebekah. Mrs. Dancer would protect her from danger, surely. But Lily could not stay longer with the poor woman; the house was tiny, and crowded. Mrs. Dancer had her own daughter, who by now would be back from London.

There was no place for Lily to go.

J
ULIAN SAT UP IN BED, sad and tense. The bedding was twisted around his body like a chrysalis.

“She was here? In this room? Last night? Why on earth didn’t you tell me, Peter?”

Peter knelt over the electric kettle, and Julian couldn’t see his face. He was making coffee.

When he had finished stirring in the cream and sugar, he rose, strode over to Julian, and handed him a steaming mug.

Then he said: “Because you were a ruddy, two-ton, drooling cadaver last night, that’s why. How much did you pour down?”

“No, Peter. Why?”

Julian had no one else to plead to. There was no Lily in the room. The fact that he’d missed her by inches and hours filled him with an ungovernable sadness.

“Look, Julian, it isn’t all up to me, is it? It’s really your doing. You were at the theatre last night. You saw her. You ran out. And you got dead drunk. You.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” said Julian.

He gave a little wincing toss of the head.

“Well, then. Whose fault is it? Lily’s? Mine? And you ran out before my best scene. You missed my best scene. It amazes me that
my own brother could walk out on the last performance of my first big part. My best scene. Ask anyone. I turned puce in that scene last night; I was brilliant! You disloyal pig.” He was only half-teasing.

“And now it’s all over, Julian. My play. You will never see it again. So don’t you yell at me for not doing something for you.”

He sighed out lengthily.

“All right. All right. You look shattered. You smell awful. You must feel awful. You’re not even drinking your coffee, and here I’ve used fresh cream and demerara sugar.”

“Peter, don’t, please. Don’t be funny now.”

Julian rolled over on his stomach and dug his face into the pillow.

“Lily was here last night,” he said, “and I slept right through it.”

“I suppose, then, that you don’t recall Lily’s kissing you?”

“Just stop, Peter! Won’t you?”

“I’m not being funny. It’s true, little brother.”

“Kissed me? What do you mean?” He turned around slowly.

“On your forehead. And you slept right through. Were you pretending?”

“No!”

“Frankly, she seemed to think so. I could tell. I pick these things up. I’m an experienced actor sensitive to the nuances, you know. She seemed a bit surprised that you didn’t open your eyes. Hurt, I’d say. But she covered it up. She was very coy. As though she’d be perfectly happy never to see you again. But we know Lily better than she thinks we do, don’t we?”

“I hope so.”

“So. If a kiss couldn’t wake you, or the manufactured shrug of your darling’s coy shoulders, what could I have hoped to do? Turned you upside-down and let the drink slide out?”

Lily had kissed him. Julian wondered what she’d been thinking. Kisses could be dismissive, loving, condescending, sad. He wondered what she was thinking now, as he thought of her. He had lost the instinct of who she was, and of who she thought he was. The accident had done this to them. That was the embarrassment. Not to have spoken since she’d left his home in a disgraced panic: how had he let this come about? How had she? Her disgrace was his; her fears, his. Didn’t she know that?

Something had cracked that night; some horror had come and it had leveled them. But this wasn’t true distance; it was an invitation to closeness. A terrifying closeness that each was afraid of. They had to keep looking at each other, thought Julian, however awful the sounds of cracking, however scary the crashing of waters. Looking at each other.

That night they had come to each other, naked and vulnerable. That night they’d drowned together, drowned in pleasure and crazy pain. Blood and seed and sweat and everyone’s tears. Everybody he loved was crying that night.

Lily, he thought, are you crying now? I am crying, thinking of you. We washed up on different shores, but we’ll find each other. We’re more alike than we’ve ever been, however far apart: drenched and laid low. We’re slow, and we’re frightened, and we’re very tired, but we are going to find each other.

Peter said, “Julian, you mustn’t cry like that.”

He sat down on the bed, and took his brother’s hand.

“If you do, I’ll cry, too. And I haven’t cried for years.”

He wasn’t really sure why he suddenly felt so sad.

“She’s leaving Oxford, Julian. I guess I should tell you that.”

“But she’s coming back to finish her course, isn’t she?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“But Peter, why now? What’s happened now?”

A part of Peter wanted Julian quit of her. To recoil from an involvement so exacting, so overwhelming. To laugh at it. Then they could be men of the world together, blades in tailored suits, laughing. Then he’d never lose his brother, or have to pray to be lost, himself, to an equal passion. Which he knew might never pass his way.

But a part of Peter, the better part, wanted love to rise above revulsion, fear and mockery. No one had ever made Julian feel the way Lily made him feel. This gave Peter a strange sweet feeling, as though certain once-loved notions of his, since degraded, defrauded, were not worthless after all. If Julian could not be laughed at now, raw as he was, he could never be laughed at. There was a sweetness in this hope. It was much sweeter than derision.

Peter wanted to poke at Julian now, to provoke him, to enable his heart to flex its unknown strengths. He wanted to see those unknown strengths, to learn from them. He felt like saying many things to Julian, true or untrue, just so long as they were provocative of feeling; he wanted to witness the force of lover’s love. He felt like saying: she’s dying; she’s pregnant; she hates you; she forgot you. She’s killed herself because you never wrote; she loves another man. She’ll meet you on the sand, at dawn; she’ll marry you tonight. She’s right outside that door. Just open up that door.

“Tell me, Peter,” said Julian. “I can see it’s something big and horrible. I see it on your face. Please tell me.”

“She’s going back home. America.”

He stopped again. She had said she wanted to tell Julian herself.

At the word “America,” Julian lost heart for a moment, seeing Lily vanish into the vast continent, disappearing amongst skyscrapers and prairies, limitless heights and breadths. Now he’d never find her. Julian had never been outside of Europe.

“To her parents?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have the address?”

“Haven’t a clue. But she’s going home to her parents because she’s, she’s . . .”

He was going to tell; to hell with her. This was his brother. And Lily knew he could never keep a secret. Perhaps she knew he would tell. Perhaps she wanted him to tell.

“Well,” he continued, fighting the urge to turn away, “it’s the oldest reason in the world. After seven or eight weeks, there was no mistaking, I suppose, that she was, you know, pregnant and now she’s off to have the baby. Couldn’t very well have it here.”

He looked at his brother. A smile was playing on Julian’s face, which he covered self-consciously with a hand. Peter went on again.

“So I suppose you’re better off without the public humiliation, eh? Wouldn’t want her sobbing on your doorstep, would you?”

“I don’t believe it,” said Julian, softly.

His tone revealed that he did believe it, and was shaken. But there was no trace of horror in his voice. His hand fell from his mouth and he smiled a dazzling smile up at the ceiling. He remembered how he’d come that night. He remembered their words: what if? What if? It is a funny thing when the possible comes vividly and inescapably true.

“The most amazing thing,” he said, his voice almost inaudible.

Julian began to feel happy, and even lucky. This meant something. Even if he slept, or felt a doubt, or if she did, the baby inside her was growing. There was no answer to that growing life. They couldn’t tell it a thing; but it could teach them things there were no words for.

“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” he said to Peter.

“
I’m
frightened!? Aren’t
you
frightened?”