On my final night in Paris — I’d just been assigned to the eastern front — I breathed for the last time the perfume of a pair of French girls and tried to engrave in my memory every detail of their bodies: the color of their nipples, the shapes of their belly buttons, the fluttering of their eyelids, the way their toes curled as they came. I wanted to savor Paris as much as I possibly could. In the Ukraine, so the rumor ran, a soldier who had potato peels to eat could count himself lucky.
That the hands of both girls were cold should have been a warning to me. Their smooth black and brunette hair hid their faces as I lay undressed on the bed and they explored my body with their tongues and lips. I closed my eyes. The weight on the mattress shifted, one of the two rising while the other settled herself on top of me. She bit my neck; first it stung, then grew warm. I brought my hand to my throat, opened my eyes, and saw blood. In her right hand, she held a jackknife. She lunged at me, shouting something in French. I tried to grab her arm, but she was too fast. At the last moment I twisted onto my side, and she struck me in the back. The pain knocked the breath out of me. I managed to grab the hand with the knife, and held it tight with both of my own. She raised herself behind the blade. The bathroom door swung open — the other French girl, the brunette. On the bathroom floor behind her lay my clothing and bag, which she’d been rummaging through. Luckily, I didn’t have the gold with me; I kept it at the hospital, never carrying it with me in the city. Instead of helping her accomplice, the brunette scooped up her things and ran from the room. That threw the black-haired girl long enough for me to buck her away, and the knife tumbled from her hand. Immediately she grinned, giggled, wrapped her legs around me, and reached for my cock. As if it had all been merely foreplay. Blood dripped from my throat onto her cheeks. I shook her off, and went to pick up the knife. My legs gave way, and I fell to the ground. The knife lay just in front of me, I reached for it, wrapped my hand around it. The French girl leapt from the bed, pulled on her clothes; all I could see were her slender feet. Within seconds she’d left the room. I concentrated on breathing calmly, pulled the bedsheets to me and pressed them against my throat, crawled to the chair where my own clothes lay, and knocked it over. As I attempted to pull on my pants, I could feel the weakness growing. I was getting cold. I dropped the pants and crawled naked to the open door, the red sheets wrapped around my neck. Blood was flowing from the wound in my back, I was leaving a trail behind me as I went. I felt more and more exhausted. In order to gather strength, I shut my eyes.
I woke, and my hands were numb and stiff. I couldn’t say how long I’d been asleep. My legs wouldn’t move. The stairs down to the first floor were steep. I let my head sink to the cool floor and thought of Anni.
At least she’d assume I’d fallen in battle.
Two Possibilities
I’d never believed in God. I’d always been convinced that I didn’t need him, that I could live my life without having to arrange it around someone for whose existence there was no credible evidence. But after my brush with death in a Paris bedroom, I began to pray. Not out of thankfulness. I didn’t fold my hands, take myself to church, or consult a pastor; I simply sent my thoughts Godward — arbitrary thoughts, and not always friendly.
The doctors had told me that, due to the spinal injury, I’d never be able to walk again. What kind of a god was it who, just as I was about to slip into a peaceful sleep, had sent a woman, right on time, into the stairwell, whose hysterical screams had brought the soldiers stationed nearby at a run, only to leave me with half a working body? God could have left me lying there. Instead, he’d sent me (as I learned later from my medical file) on a journey through sick bays and hospitals, of which I have no memory apart from the acid reek of disinfectants and the stink of rotting flesh. At that time many people lost their faith because of the horrible things that had befallen them. For the same reasons, I found my faith. I realized that God must exist. He didn’t love and wasn’t righteous — rather, he was a sort of malicious scientist. And mankind was his experiment. By means of a sexual act, he’d robbed me of the ability to walk, left me for weeks at a stretch wishing I was dead. Yet he’d also manifested a definite irony, in that he’d unmistakably reanimated — as I found when a ward nurse with azure eyes helped me into a wheelchair for the first time — certain parts of my lower body.
I could have rejoiced, I could have been relieved, but instead I apologized to the ward nurse. To which she replied that I didn’t need to be ashamed, that it was a good sign.
She couldn’t know that my eternal desire for the proximity of women was what had led me to this wretched pass. I was twenty-seven years old, I was seated in a rolling steel contraption, and I had lost everyone whom I’d ever loved.
Two possibilities remained: I could end my life, or fundamentally alter it, and I chose the second because, as I now believe, I was too craven for the first. I resolved to forswear any romantic attachment to women. As difficult as it would be in the beginning to resist, over time my memories would fade, and with them my longings; I would forget what a kiss felt like, or the touch of a beloved person, or waking up to a warm body snuggling closer to me. And maybe I’d learn to be happy alone, and finally find peace.
In my letters to Anni I didn’t mention my misfortune, my now useless legs, so that she wouldn’t worry, or attempt to find me. As the German Reich expanded, the possibility that we’d ever see each other again dwindled. I struggled to suppress just how much I missed her, and held fast to the thought that the growing distance between us would at least make my dream of a fulfilling life without women easier to achieve.
My disability abetted it as well. No question about it, women felt less attracted to a man they had to squat in front of in order to look in the eye. Meanwhile I’d reached the final station of my odyssey through the various hospitals of the Reich, the Saint Helena Veterans’ Home in Upper Bavaria, which was run by the nuns from an adjacent convent. Their relief that at least one of the soldiers in their charge could contain his libido was palpable. Ludwig Wickenhäuser was one of the most beloved patients at Saint Helena. He believed in God, he shared with them his knowledge regarding burials — knowledge particularly useful at this moment in history — he understood their Bavarian, and understood, too, that they wanted to be perceived as female beings, though not in the single sense in which most female beings were perceived by men.
Presumably this quality was the reason that, once my wounds had healed and I had long since resigned myself to my new existence as a perpetual sitter, barely even needing their help any longer, they didn’t demand that I vacate my bed, but rather asked me if I’d stay on with them. I accepted their invitation, and moved into a ground-floor room furnished with a low bed, extra support handles in the bathroom, and a wheelchair ramp in front of a window overlooking the orchard, which I opened first thing every morning. I’d haul myself up onto the sill and lean out and breathe the perfume of the apple trees and think: here I might be able to learn to look for happiness right where I am, rather than in all those places I can’t be.
Surrender