After a while they gave up, got dressed and Jack took Mitti home in a cab.
He kissed her goodnight and headed back to base feeling lonely and sad.
At about lunchtime the next day Mitti rang Helga to find out how her night had gone.
Helga said it had been fine, but she had sounded strange. After that Mitti did not see Helga for a week, by which time Helga had been to the police to report having been raped.
There were two stories of what happened to Helga after Jack and Mitti had left the bar that night.
Nobody disputed that Dipstick, Rod, Brad, Karl and Helga had all left the bierkeller in Bad Nauheim together, leaving Captain Schultz to his sauerkraut. Likewise, there was general agreement that the party had removed itself to the Hotel American where Dipstick had taken the best rooms available, a suite that boasted its own bar and a whirlpool bath. After this the stories begin to diverge. Helga admitted that they had all stripped off and squeezed into the hot bath together. Also she admitted, under police questioning, that she had then voluntarily had sex in the spa with Dipstick while the other men looked on. She also conceded that she had briefly masturbated certainly one other man, Rod, she thought, and possibly one of the others, too. After this Helga claimed that Rod had suggested that she now have sex with him and then also with the two younger officers. Helga said that at this point she had become nervous, as the men were beginning to get noisy and raucous. She declined Rod’s request for sex, saying that she had now had enough, and attempted to leave the spa bath. After this she claimed that Rod and Brad had raped her in turn while Karl and Dipstick sat by and continued to drink.
The men, on the other hand, all swore under oath that Helga had consented to all the sexual acts that had happened that night. They swore that there had been no difference at all between Helga’s attitude to having sex with Dipstick and then having sex with the other two men. They pointed out that Helga had not cried out and that afterwards she had not left the hotel until the following morning, even accepting a cup of coffee from Karl. Everyone admitted to having been very drunk.
Helga could not explain why she had not cried out, except to say that she thought she might have been too scared. She was also not entirely sure why she had remained in the hotel for some hours after the incident, apart from the fact that she had felt weak and sick and upset. When asked why it had taken her five days to report the alleged attack, she said that she had prevaricated because she knew very well how the whole incident would look. The only thing of which Helga was absolutely certain was that the last two men who had had sex with her had known that she was no longer a willing participant.
The courts decided in favour of the men. The fact that Helga had had a previous sexual relationship with both Dipstick and Rod and the fact that she had gone voluntarily for sex at the hotel told heavily against her. Besides which, in the long run it came down to the word of four people against one.
Helga moved away from Bad Nauheim almost immediately following the court case. She wrote home once or twice and Mitti heard that she was living in Hamburg, but after that she seemed to disappear.
The careers of the four soldiers never recovered. Whatever the courts may have decided, such a sordid incident was too much for the army to ignore and they were marked men. One by one they returned to civilian life in the States, angry and bitter and having learnt nothing from their experience. Quite the opposite, in fact. All four men came to believe absolutely that their treatment had been grossly unfair and that the woman Helga had set out viciously to destroy them for no better reason than feminine pique.
The case shocked and disturbed both the army and the local community. Jack, who was called as a witness to recall the course of events during the early part of the evening, found his emotions and his principles confused and divided. He engaged in a heated correspondence with his brother Harry on the issues raised by the awful affair. Harry felt that it was obvious that the four soldiers were in the wrong and that they had got off far too lightly. Jack could not see things so clearly. He remembered the sight of the young man Brad crying in the witness box, pleading that he had really thought that the sort of girl that Helga was did not care much about one man more or less.
“And what about you, Jack?” Harry wrote back furiously. “Is that what you think? Does being a soldier make a guy so dumb that he can rape a woman by mistake?”
No, Jack knew that he could never do that, but he wondered. He wondered what he would have been like as a man if he had never met Polly. Would he have been like Brad? Would he too have been capable of getting drunk and seeing a woman not as a whole and complex person, confused and in pain, but just as some kind of two-dimensional sexual animal? It was possible, of course it was possible. All men had a darker side; that was what made them capable of killing. Jack was a soldier and he knew that very well. To Jack what the Bad Nauheim case had shown was what that dark, uncivilized side of man was capable of when it gained the upper hand. It was a lesson he was not to forget.
Jack may have betrayed Polly’s love but Polly’s love had not betrayed him.
22
Polly finally left the peace camp with the gap that Jack had left in her heart and soul still not filled. She was unsettled and restless. She could not return to her old life, the one she had known years before; it had moved on without her. All her friends from that time were already in their second year at university. She saw them occasionally but she no longer had anything in common with them. She knew that deep down they felt sorry for her.
“But what are you going to do after all this?” they asked. “You can’t just be a protester all your life.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I can,” Polly replied, but she knew that it sounded stupid.
Still looking for something and nothing she became a traveller, a member of one of the New Age convoys that roamed the country at the time. Polly liked living on the move. It gave her the impression that she was going somewhere. She started seeing a casual dope dealer called Ziggy who owned a Volkswagen Camper. Polly was fond of Ziggy. He was thirty-six and painfully handsome with deep, piercing blue eyes. He had a Ph.D. in Ergonomics and was an extremely bright and interesting conversationalist, when he was not stoned. Unfortunately this was only for about fifteen minutes each morning. For the rest of the day Ziggy tended to merely giggle a lot.
It was fun for a while, rejecting hierarchy and property, but it couldn’t last. Slowly but surely Polly began to long for a more structured life, a life where she could watch television without having to stare through the window at Dixons and go to the toilet without taking a spade. She was twenty-one, Mrs Thatcher had just won yet another election, and Polly had not been entirely clean since Duran Duran had been at the top of the charts.
She left Ziggy, which hurt him badly.
“But why, Poll?” he asked. “I thought we had a scene going.”
“It’s the giggling, Ziggy. I just can’t handle the giggling.”
“I’ll giggle less,” he pleaded. “I’ll start smoking hash instead of grass. It’s a much mellower high.”
But it was no use. Polly left the convoy and moved to London, where she virtually became a street person, spending two months standing on the never-ending picket outside the South African Embassy. It was while on the anti-apartheid picket that Polly met an alternative comedian called Dave, whose opening line was “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would you like to see my bollocks?” Dave was nice, but he was, in his own words, “Not into monogamy, right?” In truth, he saw his gigs as no more than a good way of pulling girls. There might have been a time when Polly would have turned a blind eye to such behaviour, but these were the great days of AIDS paranoia so Polly took one last look at Dave’s bollocks and moved on again.