The Dark Arena (7 page)

“Screw ‘em,” Mosca said. “Where's the washroom?”

Eddie Cassin led him down the hall. The bathroom was an enormous one, with three sinks, the biggest bathtub Mosca had ever seen, and a toilet bowl Reside which stood a small table littered with magazines and Stateside newspapers.

“Real class,” Mosca said. He began to wash and Eddie sat on the toilet bowl to keep him company.

“You going to move your girl friend in here?” Eddie asked.

“If I find her and she wants to come back,” Mosca said.

“You going out to see her tonight?”

Mosca wiped himself dry and fixed a blade in the razor. “Yeah,” he said and glanced at the partly open window. The last light of evening was melting away. “I'll try it tonight.”

Eddie got up and went to the door. “If it doesn't click, come up to Frau Meyer's rooms when you get back and have a drink.” He gave Mosca a pat. “If everything works out, then I'll see you tomorrow morning at the air base.” He went out and down the hall.

Alone, Mosca felt an overpowering urge not to finish shaving, to go back to his room and go to bed, or go up to Frau Meyer's and spend the evening drinking with Eddie.

He felt a strange reluctance to leave this building to go and find Hella, thinking of her name again now, consciously, but he made himself finish shaving and then he combed his hair. He walked over to the bathroom window and opened it wide; the side street was nearly empty. But down along the ruins he saw a woman in black, a dark mass in the failing light, pulling out the grass that grew here and there in the rubble. She had a great armful of it. And nearer to him, almost underneath his window, he saw a family of four, a man, his wife, and two small boys, building a wall that was as yet no more than a foot high. The boys carried from a small handcart the broken bricks they had salvaged from the rubbled city, and the man and woman hacked and scraped until the bricks fitted into the wall. The skeleton of the house framed them and etched them into Mosca's mind. The last light of the day vanished, and the whole street and the people were now just dark masses moving through a deeper and more massive darkness. Mosca went back to his room.

He took a bottle out of his suitcase and had a long drink. He was careful about dressing, thinking,
It's the first time she'll see me without my uniform.
He put on a light gray suit and a white open shirt. He left everything as it was in the room—the suitcases open but unpacked, the soiled clothing on the floor, the shaving kit thrown carelessly on the bed. He had one last long drink, then ran downstairs and went out into the warm and heavy summer night.

He caught a streetcar, and the ticket taker asked for a cigarette, spotting him for an American immediately. Mosca gave it to him and then kept a watchful eye on each streetcar going by in the opposite direction, thinking that perhaps she had already left her room to go someplace for the evening. Every so often he became tense and nervous, thinking he had seen her, that the back or profile of some girl looked like hers, but he could never be sure.

When he left the trolley and walked down the remembered street, he wasn't sure of the house and had to check the list of names that was posted on the door of each building. He made only one mistake, for the second list he
read did have her name. He knocked, waited a few minutes, and knocked again.

The door opened, and in the dim light of the hallway he recognized the old woman who owned the house. Her gray hair neatly pinned around her head, the old black dress, the threadbare shawl, all gave her the universal look of sorrow of aged women everywhere.

“Yes,” she asked, “what is it?”

“Is Fraulein Hella at home?” Mosca was surprised at the ease and fluency of his German.

The old woman did not recognize him or realize that he was not a German. “Please come in,” she said, and he followed her down the dimly lit hall to the room. The old woman knocked and said, “Fraulein Hella, you have a visitor, a man.”

Finally he heard her real voice, quietly, but on a note of surprise. “A man?” and then, “Wait one moment, please.” Mosca opened the door and went into the room.

She was sitting with her back to him, hastily pushing clips into her just washed hair. On the table beside her stood a gray loaf of bread. Against the wall was a narrow bed, a night table beside it.

As he watched, Hella finished pinning the hair around her head and snatched up the loaf and slice of bread to take them to the wardrobe. Then she turned; her eyes met Mosca standing by the door.

Mosca saw the white, bone-ridged, almost skeletal face, the body even more fragile than he had remembered it. Her hands emptied as the gray bread fell to the wooden, buckled floor. Her face showed no surprise, and for a moment he thought the look was one of annoyance and slight displeasure. Then the face dissolved into a mask of sorrow and grief. He walked over to her, and her face seemed to crumple and fold, the tears following the many creases down to where his hand held the pointed chin. She let her head fall and pressed it against his shoulder.

“Let me see you,” Mosca said, “let me look at you.” He tried to lift her face, but she kept it against him. “It's all right,” he said, “I wanted to surprise you.” She kept sobbing,
and all he could do was'wait, looking around the room, the narrow bed, the old-fashioned wardrobe, and on the dresser, enlarged, framed, the photos he had given her. The light from the single table lamp was dim, a depressing, weak yellow, the walls and ceiling sagged inward from the weight of the ruins above them.

Hella lifted her face—she was half-laughing, half-crying. “Ah, you, you,” she said. “Why didn't you write? Why didn't you let me know?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” he said again. He kissed her gently, and lying against him, she said in a weak, incoherent voice, “When I saw you I thought you were dead or I was dreaming or crazy, I don't know, and I look so terrible, I just washed my hair.” She looked down at the shapeless, faded house dress and then lifted her face to him again.

He saw now the dark circles under her eyes, as if the pigment from the rest of her face had been drained and held there to stain the skin almost black. The hair under his hand was lifeless, still wet, her body against him hard and angular.

She smiled and he saw the gap along the side of her mouth. He caressed her cheek and asked, “And this?”

Hella looked embarrassed. “The baby,” she said. “I lost two teeth.” She smiled at him, asked like a child, “Do I look very ugly?”

Mosca shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, “no.” And then remembering. “What about the baby, did you get rid of it?”

“No,” Hella said, “it was born too soon; it only lived a few hours. I just left the hospital a month ago.”

And then, because she knew his disbelief, his lack of faith, she went to the dresser and pulled out a bundle of papers tied together with old string. She leafed through it and gave him four official documents.

“Read them,” she said, not hurt or angry, knowing that in the world and time in which they lived, she had to give proof, that there was no absolute trust.

The official stamps and seals of the different bureaus
dispelled his doubt. Almost regretfully he accepted the fact that she had not lied.

Hella went to the wardrobe and took out a pile of clothing. She held each one up, the little undershirts, blouses, the small trousers. Some of the materials and colors were familiar to Mosca. And then he understood that because there was nothing else to be had, she had cut up her dresses, even her underclothing, and sewed them together to fit a smaller body.

“I knew it would be a boy,” she said. And then suddenly Mosca was very angry. He was angry that she had given the color from her face, the flesh along her hips and shoulders, the teeth, the clothing so cleverly cut and fitted together and that she had received nothing in return. And he knew that what had brought him back was his own need and not hers.

“That was silly,” he said, “that was goddamn silly.”

Mosca sat on the bed and Hella sat beside him. For a moment they were both embarrassed and stared at the bare table, the only chair, the indented walls, knd sagging ceiling, and then moving slowly, as if taking part in an ancient tribal ritual, like heathens cementing their relationship with a vague and fearful god, not knowing if the ceremony would bring disaster or good fortune, they stretched out on the narrow bed and came together, he finally with a passion inspired by drink, guilt, remorse, and she with love, tenderness, and an absolute faith that this consummation was good, that it would bring happiness to them both. And she accepted the pain given to her not-yet-healed body, the cruelty of his passion, his lack of faith in her and in himself and in all things, knowing the final truth that, of all the human beings that he had known, he had need of her, her faith, her body, her belief and love for him.

That second summer of peace went by quickly for
Mosca. The work at the air base was so light, it seemed as if he were there only to keep Eddie Cassin company, listen to his stories, and cover up for him when he was too drunk to come in and work. Eddie Cassin didn't have much to do. Lieutenant Forte came in for a few minutes each morning to sign papers and thai went up to the Operations Office to sweat out a flight and pass the day talking to his fellow pilots. After work Mosca had supper with Wolf and Eddie and sometimes Gordon at the Rathskellar, the official mess for American officers and civilians in Bremen.

Evenings he and Hella kept to their room, lying together on the couch reading, the radio tuned to a German station that played soft music. When the last of the warm summer twilight died away they would look at each other and smile and go to bed. They would let the radio play until very late.

The floor on which they lived was quiet, but on the floors below parties went on night after night. In the
summer evenings the sound of radios filled the Metzer Strasse, and jeeps loaded with Americans in their olive-green civilian uniforms, pretty, barelegged German girls on their laps, stopped in front of the building with a screaming of brakes and shrilling cries of the young women. The laughter and clinking of glasses carried out to passers-by who turned their heads curiously and cautiously as they went on down the street. Later they might hear Eddie Cassin cursing drunkenly as he fought with one of his girl friends outside the building. Sometimes the parties would break up early, and a late summer night breeze, its freshness tainted with the smell of rubble, would rustle leaves and branches of the trees that lined the street below.

On Sundays Hella and Frau Meyer prepared dinner in Meyer's attic apartment, usually a rabbit or duck that Eddie and Mosca drove out to a near-by farm to trade for, and with it garden vegetables from the same farm. Then gray German bread topped off with PX coffee and ice cream. When they had finished eating, Hella and Mosca would leave Eddie and Frau Meyer to their drinking and go for a long walk through the city, and beyond it to the flat, green countryside.

Mosca smoking his cigar, Hella wearing one of his starched, white shirts, sleeves rolled neatly up above the elbow, they would go up past the police building, its massive, green-colored concrete showing pray scars chipped out by the explosion and past the Glocke Building, a little farther on, which now housed the American Red Cross Club. In the square before it, children waited and begged for cigarettes and chocolate. Stubble-cheeked men in
Wehrmacht
caps and torn, dyed Army jackets picked up the butts as soon as one of the olive-drab GIs leaning against the building flicked it away. The GIs lounged easily, eyeing the women, picking out the
Frauleins
who passed by slowly as if walking on a treadmill, and who a short time later, circling the building, passed by again, and then again and again until it was like watching someone known riding a merry-go-round, the familiar face appearing inevitably before the watchful, expectant, and amused
onlookers. In the warm summer afternoon the square was like a gay, thriving market place, making the day seem not like Sunday, taking away the Sunday atmosphere of quiet and suspended motion.

Great olive-drab Army busses and mud-covered trucks poured into the square every few minutes, bringing occupation troops from the hamlets surrounding Bremen and some from as far away as Bremerhaven. The GIs were natty in pressed olive drabs, the trouser legs tucked neatly into polished, mahogany-colored combat boots. There were English troops sweltering in their heavy woolens and beretiike headgear. American merchant mariners, wild looking in raggedy trousers and dirty sweaters and occasionally with bushy, full-grown beards, waited sullenly for MPs to check their papers before they could enter the building.

Sporadically the German police in their dyed, soldierlike uniforms cleared the square, shooing the child beggars down the many side streets, pushing the haggard-looking butt snipers to the far corner of the square, and then letting them rest on the steps of the German Communications Building. The
Frauleins
on their merry-go-round speeded up the tempo slightly but were never molested.

Mosca would pick up sandwiches in the Red Cross, and they would go on, mingling with the stream of people on their way to Burger Park.

The enemy on Sunday still took their traditional afternoon strolls. The German men walked with the dignity of family chiefs, some with unfilled pipes in their mouths. Their wives pushed baby carriages and children gamboled sedately and somewhat tiredly before them. The summer sun caught the loose dirt raised by the light afternoon breeze that swept through the ruins, imprisoned it, flooded it, so that over the whole city hung an almost imperceptible veil of golden dust.

And then, finally, after they had crossed a great, reddish prairie of ruins, an earth of leveled homes, a soil of crushed brick and dust and iron, they would come out into the countryside, and walking until they were tired, would come to rest in a green and heavily grown field. They
would rest and sleep and eat the sandwiches they had brought, and if the spot were secluded enough, make love peacefully in the empty world which seemed to surround them.