Now they were in his room. He removed her coat, and settled her on the double bed, and bent to pull off her shoes. As he did so, she forced her eyes open. ‘The sedation is wearing off, Andrew. But I’m still sort of-slowed down.’ She took in the room, disoriented. ‘This room. Is this your room?’
‘Yes… Now, stretch out. You’ll be yourself in a little while.’
She nodded, pushed herself to the centre of the bed, falling backwards to the pillow. She lifted her slim legs, making one gesture towards her skirt, trying, and failing, to cover her knees, then letting her arm drop limply to the quilt.
Craig turned down two of the three lamps, poked at his valise, removed his jacket and tie, tried to busy himself in every way, hoping that she would sleep. At the telephone, he considered calling the Concert Hall and leaving a message for Jacobsson, explaining that he would be late. But then, as he weighed the necessity of the call, he realized that Emily was still awake, her eyes following his every movement.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Feebly, she touched the bed beside her. ‘Come, sit close to me.’
‘Yes.’ He stood over her. Her silken black hair, and green eyes and serious crimson lips, had never been more beautiful to his sight. He bent over her face, and she closed her eyes, and he kissed her.
At last, with one weak hand against his shoulder, she asked for release, and he granted it.
‘Andrew-’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Very simple. We’ll wait for the drug to wear off, and then we’ll change and go.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘I meant-’ But then it was difficult to know what she meant under the sedation, and her brain was slow. ‘How did you find me?’
He told her how hopeful he had been after receiving her message, and how he had waited for the telephone call and for her understanding. Then he related how he had gone to her suite, and received the tape recorder, and made up his mind not to burden her uncle with the terrible dilemma, but to see what he could do by himself. He told her about Gottling, and how they had gone to Daranyi, and what had happened there, and then he told her, in lesser detail, of his showdown with Krantz that had led him to the meeting with Walther in the stateroom.
She had listened without comment, but now she said, ‘You are good.’
‘I’m in love,’ he said simply.
She avoided the declaration. Instead, she said, ‘I keep thinking-what if it had been Uncle Max they had reached before you? He would have gone over to their side without hesitation-remembering my father only as he had last seen him in another age-forgetting, as we all do, people are different people at different times.’
‘That is true.’
‘Uncle Max would have been lost to me-and I’d be alone. How did you ever think you could-?’
‘I didn’t think, Emily,’ he said. ‘I felt. I felt, and I acted on feeling-something I have not done in years. That’s all I did. I felt Max must not be given away. I felt your father must be reasoned with. Most of all, I felt alive-but for a while, as dead as before I met you-and I knew I could be alive again, and stay alive, only by being with you… Emily, stop ignoring it, denying it. I love you, and accept this from me.’
‘I can’t. Won’t you understand? I’m unable to-I can’t.’
‘But why not?’ His mind went to a word, and he wondered if it might hold her secret. ‘Emily, I don’t know what is wrong-I can only guess it must be something in your past. I’ve heard one word over and over again. From you. From your Uncle Max. From Daranyi. Even from your-from Walther.’ She was watching him with frightened eyes, but he went on. ‘The word is Ravensbruck,’ he said. ‘It’s the only other thing I don’t understand, besides your rejection of me. I know-you told me once-Ravensbruck was a women’s concentration camp in Germany during the war. But I still don’t understand its-’
‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘I was going to tell you about that at noon-it was the important thing I had to tell you.’
‘Do you still want to tell me?’
‘I don’t know, except it is now all that matters again. It has never stopped mattering. I suppose if you know the truth about that, you will know me and have some understanding-of why I treated you the way I did that first night we met in the palace, of-of the way I’ve been withdrawn and strange, I’m sure you’ve seen that-of the real reason I sent you away.’ She paused. ‘It wasn’t Lilly, you see. It was me.’ Her green eyes studied his features for long silent seconds. ‘And finally-finally-it’s why I cannot marry you or see you again.’
‘Emily-’
‘I want to talk,’ she persisted tiredly, and her speech had thickened. ‘I have to, sooner or later, so that you’ll know why this is our last time together. You deserve to know, because of what you’ve expected of me. And besides-I guess-my poor brain-I’m so lightheaded now-besides, I think, for once I’m drugged enough to be uninhibited.’
‘Emily, I’d rather you rest, and then-’
‘Now, Andrew, it’s got to be now. It is more important to me than anything in the world.’
‘All right, Emily,’ he said, and he pondered what might come, and for some unknown reason he felt fear.
‘You won’t mind if I don’t look at you while I talk?’ For a moment, she was quiet again, as if rummaging through her opiate-scattered brain. ‘Ravensbruck,’ she said, ‘that is where it began and ended. They called it, in German, the woman’s hell, but it was not nearly so pleasant as that.’
Her thoughts had wandered again, but her determination was strong, and she went on. ‘My mother and I were sent there, you know, fifty miles north of Berlin, and were to be kept alive as long as my father and Uncle Max worked for the government in Berlin.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen in Ravensbruck. When I was first put there, I was a scrawny girl just out of puberty, but the next year I began to mature, and before my fifteenth birthday, I was a woman-much more attractive than I am today-a woman with a serious child’s head. We lived like animals, deprived, ragged, filthy, and always in our fear of being Jews. But no one whipped or beat us or made us stand in the naked inspections, my mother and myself, because of my father and Uncle Max. And for me, most of the first two years, it was not such hell, because I had only then become a woman, and before I had been a child, and so this was almost the only life I knew well, and I had no real standard I would allow myself to compare it with. It seemed natural to me-as if it had always been-to wear a stinking and vermin-covered dress and underwear and to wear wooden shoes, to wake at five-thirty and have one cup of ersatz coffee for breakfast, and one tin can of cabbage soup for lunch, and one more for dinner, and to steal potato peelings from the garbage, to work eleven hours every day digging a road, to use a four-gallon drum for a toilet, to sleep with lice and my mother and one other on straw with one blanket for all three of us. I repeat, I refused to remember any other life, so I managed. It was my mother who suffered worse, but no matter about that. The real horror of the camp was not so much the indignities and punishments and suffering we saw-but the worse things we did not see. As the veterans in the Atlanta hospital where I work are often saying, there were constant latrine rumours. Some I could even verify, because I knew the French women and the Czech women. Our friends disappeared, and we knew it was true that fifty women a day were shot in the back of the neck and cremated. To speed up the liquidation, many of our friends were pressed to build a gas chamber, so we knew that existed. Then there were the scientific experiments, medical experiments-;’
Craig thought of Dr. Farelli at Dachau, and then he listened again, still puzzled.