Rosa (47 page)

Lina and Hoffner were both stone-cold sober when they stepped out into the night. They walked in silence as Hoffner wondered how much of this had been new to her. He, of course, had heard his fair share of Jew-bating over the years, especially in the south, but this was something different even for him, something more fully conceived, and without so much as a trace of restraint. A good anti-Semite usually had the sense to show a little subtlety in his jabs. Eckart’s demonization was completely unabashed.

Lina was the first to speak: “So, any more charming drinking partners tonight, or are we through playing?”

Hoffner was glad for her cynicism. She was still so young, and men like Eckart relied on that vulnerability. At least here, Lina was showing none. “Not what I was expecting,” he said, matching her tone. “Two cafés tomorrow, then, to make up for it.”

The streets were deserted as they walked, Munich after midnight no better than a provincial town, taller buildings, wider streets, but everyone safely tucked away in their fine Bavarian beds. No wonder Eckart felt so at home here. At the hotel, Hoffner had to ring twice before the concierge came to open the door. The man looked slightly put out. His guests were usually in their rooms by eleven.

Upstairs, she was undressed and in bed before Hoffner had managed his way out of his pants. Not that she was in any great hurry for him; a bed this size was simply new to her: Lina wanted to take as much time in it as she could. She made an effort to reach over and help, but Hoffner seemed to work through his pain better alone.

When they were finally lying naked side by side, she propped herself up on an elbow and said, “You know, you’re really quite good at what you do.”

He was on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and smiled at her apparent surprise. “Thank you.” He had a sudden taste for a cigarette, but the pack was in his jacket across the room: too much of an effort to get up for it now.

“You know what I mean,” she said. She took hold of his hand and began to thumb across his open palm. “It was good fun to watch.” He stared down at her as she used her nail to pick at a bit of dead skin that was on one of his fingers. “I don’t imagine Hans is nearly that clever.”

Hoffner had not been expecting Fichte to make an appearance tonight, but here he was, casually tossed onto the bed with them. She seemed easy enough with it; Hoffner was happy to follow suit. “He might surprise you,” he said. He could only guess at what the boys on the fourth floor had in mind for young Fichte.

She was busy with his finger as she shook her head. “Not Hans.” She brushed away a few flakes of skin and looked up at him. “You think it’s strange that I’m talking about him.” It was a statement, not a question.

Hoffner did his best with a shrug. “Something we have in common.”

Lina drove a nail into the thick part of his hand and said with a rough smile, “Ass. Yes, lying naked in a bed, and that’s what we have in common.”

Hoffner tried to pull his hand away, but she was too quick. She brought it up to her mouth and kissed the bruised skin and he felt her tongue dabbing at his palm. “You were the one to bring him into the room with us,” he said.

“He’ll be all right in a few days. Boys like Hans always are.” For some reason she had needed to tell him this. “So . . . what’s this pact I’ve heard so much about?”

The question caught Hoffner completely off guard. “The what?” he said.

“The pact,” she repeated. “Hans told me. He said he heard about it when he was in Belgium.” She stopped, her expression momentarily less animated. She had reminded herself of Fichte’s recent cruelties. Evidently her own recovery would take a bit longer than the one she had imagined for him.

“Oh, the pact,” Hoffner cut in quickly. Not that he was all that keen to bring it up, but better that than to allow Fichte’s stupidity any greater sway over her. With a careless shrug he said, “Not really that interesting.”

He watched as she gazed up at him; without warning, she was on her knees, leaning over his face, her thumbnail hovering menacingly above his cheek. “Really?” she said with an impish grin. “Not that interesting?”

Hoffner lay there calmly. “Not really.”

Lina’s eyes flashed and, in one fluid movement, she was on him, pressing her hands down onto his shoulders and tightening her thighs around his chest.

All of this would have been quite wonderful, and the prelude to some really exquisite bed time, had Hoffner’s ribs not forced him to shout out in intense pain. Lina at once realized what she had done and frantically pulled herself off him. Her knee grazed his abdomen and Hoffner let go with a second, stifled groan.

She was lying perfectly still at his side when he finally managed to say, “We’ll try it this way. You promise not to move and I’ll tell you about the pact. Fair enough?”

Lina began to nod; she stopped herself and, barely opening her mouth, said, “Fine.”

Hoffner kept his eyes on the ceiling as the throbbing in his chest receded to a dull ache.

It had been a long time since he had sought out these memories,         three blind-drunk Germans sprawled out under a half-moon on the most perfect Tyrolean hillside he had ever known. He let himself recall the grass under his neck, the taste of the olive trees on his tongue, the sound of Knig’s laughter as it had echoed into the vast nothingness of the valley below. Mueller had been whole then, dancing in the darkness on two good legs, a bottle in each flawless hand, spilling more booze than he could drink. It was life as Hoffner had never known it—before or since—full and vibrant and unbearably real.

“We were in the Tyrol,” he said as he continued to gaze up. “A palazzo in the hills. Knig, Mueller, me. I forget the name. August of ’15. I don’t remember how we worked it. They flew in, picked me up. Something like that. Anyway, they were on leave, and we found ourselves on this hillside, two, three in the morning.         .         .         .” He turned to her. “You’re sure you’re interested in this?”

“Yes,” she pressed. “I’m sure.”

“Fine,” he conceded. He adjusted his pillow. “So there we are, two, three in the morning, soused to the gills, and Victor—Knig—starts in on how much he loves life, how much he understands it now that he’s flying over battlefields and seeing bodies and waste and on and on. Until he says that he won’t be coming back. That he
knows
he won’t be coming back, because he’s been given this extraordinary gift to appreciate it all. And Mueller and I just sit there, and listen, and wait until he’s finished, and tell him he’s an idiot.” Hoffner lost himself for a moment. “Of course, he wasn’t,” he said quietly. Refocusing, he turned to her. “So I say I’m not going to ruin the few days we have together talking about that sort of nonsense. And he says, ‘If you’re so sure it’s nonsense, then make it worth my while.’” Even now Hoffner could hear the arrogance in Knig’s voice. “So I did. If he came home, he came home, nothing else. If he didn’t, then I promised to be faithful to my wife. That was it. The agreement. The pact.” Hoffner remembered the letter he had received, the typewritten
t
’s that had jumped too high on the line, the word “death” with a little hitch just before the end. He was gazing up at the ceiling again and said, “He was shot down two months later. Mueller and I got very drunk.”

Lina lay quiet. She waited until he turned to her before saying, “I thought it was something else. I wouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

He tried a smile. “No reason to be.”

“Do you regret not keeping it?”

“Not keeping what?”

“Your promise.”

“Ah.” Hoffner nodded slowly to himself. “My promise.” He lay with the word a moment longer. “But I did,” he said. It was now Lina’s turn to look confused. “At least up until a few weeks ago.”

Lina brought herself up on an elbow and gazed down at him. He had never seen this look before. There was a caring and a concern that was almost too much to take in. At once, he regretted having told her. She said, “You never told me that.”

He kept it light. “Not exactly something you bring up, is it?”

“That’s over three years.”

“Yes.”

“And that was it? You’d spent long enough keeping your word?”

He knew what she wanted him to say—that it had been because of her that he had betrayed Knig—but that would have been no more true than the other. He said vaguely, “I don’t think it works that way.”

“Works what way?”

“The way that makes it more than it is.” He meant it not to be unkind but to protect, even though he knew it was too late. He could see now how this would all fall apart; it would only be a matter of time. They had been safe as long as questions of intent had remained hidden; his story made that impossible: too much meaning, and they would crumble under the weight; too little, and she would feel a different kind of betrayal. For her, the breaking of the pact had hinged on a choice—imagined or not—which even now Hoffner had to admit might not have been so disengaged, or so consciously made, after all.

For several moments she hovered above him, searching for something more. When it was clear that there was nothing more, she lay back. “You were close with him,” she said. “With Knig.”

“Yes.”

“And he knew your wife.” Again, she was stating, not asking.

Hoffner felt the pull of his cigarettes from across the room. “I suppose. Does it matter?”

“He wanted to help her.”

Whether days or weeks from now, he thought, he would always look to this moment as their last. “Do you know where I put my cigarettes?” he said.

“Why did he want to help her?”

Lina was digging with no care for the consequences, and that left him no room to hide. “He didn’t,” he said. He struggled to get himself upright, then brought his legs over the side and sat with his back to her. “He thought he was helping me, which showed how little he understood.” Hoffner got up and moved across to the pile of clothes. “Did I put them in my jacket?”

He was fumbling through his pants when she said, “And what didn’t he understand?”

The sting, of course, was in her feigned indifference, but it was hardly fair feeling the least irritation when it had been his own stupidity that had put them here. The past was kept in strongboxes for a reason; he had removed the lid and had been forced to peer in for himself. How could he blame her for making him rummage through to the bottom?

He located the pack and lit one up. “Victor saw things differently at the end,” he said. “That’s all. I never floated over battlefields and so never gained the same appreciation.”

Lina spoke with an honesty that went beyond her years: “That seems unkind.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” He suddenly recalled the name. “Terranova. Palazzo Terranova. Victor found it all very meaningful.” She looked confused. “New ground,” he explained. “‘Terranova’ means ‘new ground.’”

“You resent him for it.”

She had never challenged him like this: endings, he imagined—even at their inception—granted a kind of invincibility. “For what?” he said.

“For seeing things in a way you couldn’t.”

Hoffner shook his head. “He was creating his own version of nobility, the great sacrifice, and he wanted me to do the same thing.”

“So being faithful to your wife was a sacrifice?”

It sounded so hollow, coming from her. At least Victor had done what he had in the name of something vital, a life rediscovered, a gift repaid. But it was a vicious circle: that kind of redemption was only for those who could embrace vitality. Hoffner had survived on an imitation kind, his own fueled by infidelity, which only made his choice to make good on the promise an even greater hypocrisy. He had let himself be fooled—just once—into seeing it for more than it was: some meaningless argument with Martha when he had revealed his self-denial and had staked his claim to nobility, but she had been no more unforgiving than Lina. “What sacrifice?” Martha had said with justified bitterness: his sudden rage, her body sent crashing to the floor. Hoffner now realized that it was the shame of that moment that he had grown tired of; and it was that fatigue, and nothing more, that had led him to Lina.

He took a pull on his cigarette and said, “It’s difficult to sacrifice something you never had.”

She had watched the sadness in his face, but she showed him no pity. “And you think getting into bed with me makes any difference?”

He looked over at her and he knew: I won’t even be a memory to her one day. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

There was something comforting in the truth, even for her. He lay back down and she placed her arm across his chest. Later they made love and they fell asleep and Hoffner dreamed of Rosa.

SHATTERED GLASS