The Innocent (21 page)

She spent some time stubbing out her cigarette and at first did not look up from what she was doing when she spoke. “I’ll tell you why he’s in there. I’ll tell you what Otto wants. I wish I didn’t know, I hate knowing why. But, so …” When she began again, her tone was brighter. She had a theory. “When first you know Otto, he is kind. This was before the drinking began, seven years ago. At first he is kind. He does everything he can think of to please. This was when I married him. Then slowly you see that this kindness is possession. He’s possessive, he thinks all the time you are looking at other men, or they are looking at you. He is jealous, he starts hitting me, and making up stories, stupid stories about me and men, people he knows,
or people in the street, it doesn’t matter. He always thinks there’s something. He thinks one half of Berlin has been to bed with me, and the other half is waiting. About this time the drinking gets worse. And finally, after all this time, I see it.”

She was reaching for another cigarette, but she shuddered and changed her mind. “This thing, me and another man, he
wants
this. It makes him angry, but he wants it. He wants to watch me with another man, or he wants to talk about it, or he wants me to talk about it. It excites him.”

Leonard said, “He’s … he’s a sort of pervert.” He had never actually said the word before. It was satisfying.

“Exactly so. He discovers about you, that’s when he hits me. Then he goes away and thinks about it, and can’t stop thinking about it. This is all his dreams come true, and this time it’s real. He thinks and he drinks, and all the time he has a key from somewhere. Then tonight he drinks even more than usual, comes up here and waits …”

Maria was beginning to cry. Leonard crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder.

“He waits, but we are late and he falls asleep. Perhaps he was going to jump out while, when … it was happening and accuse me of something. He still thinks he owns me, he thinks I am going to feel guilty …”

She was crying too much to speak. She was fumbling in her skirt for a handkerchief. Leonard gave her his big white one from his trouser pocket. When she had blown her nose, she breathed deeply.

Leonard started to speak, but she spoke over him. “I hate him, and I hate knowing about him.”

Then he said what he had been going to say. “I’ll take a look.” He went into the bedroom and turned on the light. To open the wardrobe he had to close the bedroom door behind him. He stared at the voyeur. Otto’s position was unchanged. Maria called from next door. He opened the bedroom door an inch or so. “It’s all right,” he told her. “I’m just looking at him.”

He continued to stare. Maria had actually chosen this man as her husband. That was what it came down to. She might say
she hated him, but she had chosen him. And she had also chosen Leonard. The same taste exercised. He and Otto had both appealed to her, they had that in common—aspects of personality, appearance, fate, something. Now he did feel angry with her. She had bound him by her choices to this man whom she was pretending to disown. She was making out it was all an accident, as if it really had nothing to do with her. But this voyeur was in their bedroom, in the wardrobe, asleep, drunk, about to piss on all the clothes because of the choices she had made. Yes, now he really was angry. Otto was her responsibility, her fault, he was hers. And she had the nerve to be angry with him, Leonard.

He turned out the bedroom light and went back into the living room. He felt like leaving. Maria was smoking. She smiled nervously.

“I’m sorry I shouted.”

He reached for the cigarettes. There were only three left. When he chucked the pack down, it slid to the floor, by the shoes.

She said, “Don’t be angry with me.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

She looked up, surprised. “You are angry. Come and sit down. Tell me why.”

“I don’t want to sit down.” He was enjoying his scene now. “Your marriage to Otto is still going on. In the bedroom. That’s why I’m angry. Either we talk about how we get rid of him, or I’m going back to my place and you two can carry on.”

“Carry on?” Her accent gave the familiar phrase a strange lilt. The menace she intended was not there. “What are you trying to say?”

It irritated him that she was coming back at him with anger, instead of allowing him his scene. He had let her have hers. “I’m saying that if you don’t want to help me get rid of him, then you can spend the evening with him. Talk over old times, finish the wine, whatever. But count me out.”

She put her hand to her beautiful high forehead and spoke across the room to her imagined witness. “I don’t believe this.
He’s jealous.” Then to Leonard. “You too? Just like Otto? You want to go home now and leave me with this man? You want to be at home and think about Otto and me, and perhaps you’ll lie on the bed and think about us …”

He was genuinely horrified. He did not know she could talk like this, or that any woman could. “Don’t talk such bloody nonsense. Just now I was for dragging him out into the street and leaving him there. But you just want to sit here and give me a loving description of his character, and cry into my hankie.”

She balled the handkerchief up and threw it at his feet. “Take it. It stinks!”

He did not pick it up. They both went to speak, but she got there first. “You want to throw him in the street, why don’t you just do that? Do it! Why can’t you just act? Why do you have to stand around and wait for me to tell you what to do? You want to throw him out, you’re a man, throw him out!”

His manliness again. He strode across the room and grabbed her by the front of her blouse. A button came off. He put his face up close to hers and shouted, “Because he’s yours! You chose him, he was your husband, he got your key, he’s your responsibility.” His free hand was in a fist. She was frightened. She had dropped her cigarette into her lap. It was burning, but he didn’t care, he didn’t give a damn. He shouted again. “You want to sit by while I sort out the mess you’ve made of your past—”

She shouted back, right into his face. “That’s right! I’ve had men screaming at me, hitting me, trying to rape me. Now I want a man to look after me. I thought it was you. I thought you could do it. But no, you want to be jealous and scream and hit and rape like him and all the rest—”

Just then Maria burst into flames.

From where the cigarette had smoldered leaped a single finger of flame, which instantly crossed and wreathed itself around others springing from the folds of white fabric. These flames were multiplying outward and upward even before she had drawn her first breath to scream. They were blue and
yellow, and quick. She scrambled to her feet, beating with her hands. Leonard reached for the wine bottle and the half-full glass that stood beside it. He emptied the glass over her lap and it made no difference. As she stood and began a second long scream he was trying to pour the wine from the bottle over her. But it would not come quick enough. There was a moment when her skirt was like a flamenco dancer’s, all oranges and reds, with in-woven blue, and to a crackling sound she was turning, thrashing, pirouetting as though she might rise up and out of it. This was a moment, a fraction of an instant before Leonard hooked both hands into the waistband and tore the skirt away. It all came in one piece, and blazed afresh on the floor. He stamped on it, glad of his shoes, and as the flames gave way to thick smoke he was able to turn and see her face.

It was relief he saw there, stunned relief, not physical pain. There was a lining, a stitched-in petticoat of satin or some natural material that had been slow to catch. It had protected her. It was under his feet now, browned but intact.

He could not stop what he was doing. He had to go on stamping as long as there were flames. The smoke was bluish-black and thick. He needed to open a window, and he wanted to put his arms around Maria, who was standing motionless, perhaps in shock, naked but for her blouse. He needed to fetch her dressing gown from the bathroom. He would do that first, when he was certain that the carpet would not catch fire. But when at last he was satisfied and had stepped away, it was natural that he should turn and embrace her first. She was shivering, but he knew she was going to be all right. She was saying his name over and over. And he kept saying, “Oh God, Maria, oh my God.”

At last they pulled away a little, only a few inches, and looked at each other. She had stopped trembling. They kissed, then again, and then her eyes shifted from his and widened. He turned. Otto was leaning by the bedroom door. The remains of the smoldering skirt lay between them. Maria stepped behind Leonard. She said something quick in German which Leonard did not catch. Otto shook his head, more to
clear his thoughts, it looked, than to deny what she had said. Then he asked for a cigarette, a familiar phrase that Leonard only just managed to understand. Whatever the improvements in Leonard’s German lately, it was going to be hard following the conversation of this once-married couple.

“Raus,”
Maria said. Get out.

And Leonard said in English, “Clear off, before we call the police.”

Otto stepped over the skirt and came to the table. He was wearing an old British Army jacket. There was a V shape of darker material where a corporal’s stripe had been. He was sifting through the ashtray. He found the largest stub and lit it with Leonard’s lighter. Because he was still covering Maria, Leonard was unable to move. Otto took a drag as she stepped around them and made for the front door. It hardly seemed possible that he was about to step out of their evening. And it was not. He reached the bathroom and went inside. As soon as the door closed, Maria ran to the bedroom. Leonard filled a saucepan with water and poured it over the skirt. When it was drenched through, he lifted it into the wastepaper basket. From the bathroom came the sound of a terrible hawking and spitting, a thick and copious expectoration through the medium of an obscene shouting noise. Maria came back, fully dressed. She was about to speak when they heard a loud crash.

She said, “He’s knocked down your shelf. He must have fallen onto it.”

“He did it deliberately,” Leonard said. “He knows I put it up.”

Maria shook her head. He did not see why she should be defending him.

She said, “He’s drunk.”

The door opened and Otto was before them again. Maria retreated to her chair by the pile of shoes, but she did not sit. Otto had doused his face and had only partially dried himself. Lank, dripping hair hung over his forehead, and a droplet had formed at the end of his nose. He wiped it with the back of his
hand. Perhaps it was mucus. He was looking toward the ashtray, but Leonard blocked his way.

Leonard had folded his arms and set his feet well apart. The destruction of his shelf had got to him, it had set him calculating. Otto was six inches or so shorter and perhaps forty pounds lighter. He was either drunk or hung over, and he was in bad physical shape. He was narrow and small. Against that, Leonard would have to keep his glasses on and was not used to fighting. But he was angry, incensed. That was something he had over Otto.

“Get out now,” Leonard said, “or I’ll throw you out.”

From behind him Maria said, “He doesn’t speak English.” Then she translated what Leonard had said. The threat did not register on Otto’s pasty face. The gash in his lip was oozing blood. He probed it with his tongue and at the same time reached into first one and then another of his jacket pockets. He brought out a folded brown envelope, which he held up.

He spoke around Leonard to Maria. His voice was deep for such a small frame. “I’ve got it. I’ve got the something from the office of something-something” was all Leonard could make out.

Maria said nothing. There was a quality, a thickness to her silence that made Leonard want to turn around. But he did not want to let the German through. Otto had already taken a step forward. He was grinning, and some muscular asymmetry was pulling his thin nose to one side.

At last Maria said,
“Es ist mir egal, was es ist.”
I don’t care what you’ve got.

Otto’s grin widened. He opened the envelope and unfolded a single sheet that had seen much handling. “They have our letter of 1951. They found it. And our something, signed by both of us. You and me.”

“That’s all in the past,” Maria said. “You can forget about that.” But her voice wavered.

Otto laughed. His tongue was orange from the blood he had licked.

Without turning around, Leonard said, “Maria, what’s going on?”

“He thinks he has a right to this apartment. We applied for it when we were still married. He’s been trying this one for two years now.”

Suddenly, to Leonard, it seemed a solution. Otto could take this place, and they would live together in Platanenallee, where he could never find them. They would be married soon, they did not need two places. They would never see Otto again. Perfect.

But Maria, as if reading his thoughts, or warning him off them, was spitting out her words. “He has his own place, he has a room. He only does this to make trouble. He still thinks he owns me, that’s what it is.”

Otto was listening patiently. His eyes were on the ashtray, he was waiting for his chance.

“This is my place,” Maria was saying to Otto. “It’s mine! That’s the end of it. Now get out!”

They could be packed up in three hours, Leonard thought. Maria’s stuff would fit into two taxis. They could be safe in his apartment before dawn. However tired, they might still resume their celebration, in triumph.

Otto flicked the letter with his fingernail. “Read it. See for yourself.” He took another half-step forward. Leonard squared up to him. But perhaps Maria should read it.

Maria said, “You haven’t told them we’re divorced. That’s why they think you have a right.”

Otto was gleeful. “But they do know. They do. We have to appear together before a something-something, to see who has the greater need.” Now he glanced at Leonard, then round him to Maria again. “The Englishman has a place, and you have a ring. The something-something will want to know about that.”

“He’s moving in here,” Maria said. “So that’s the end of the matter.”