Conrad was right, not in insisting that I should come back but in painting my situation as the result of some nervous disorder. But that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve always had nightmares; I was the only one to blame—and possibly that idiot Charly for drowning. Conrad, however, saw instability in the fact that for the first time I was losing at Third Reich. I’m losing, true, but I haven’t resorted to playing dirty. To illustrate this, I laughed out loud a few times. (Germany, according to Conrad, lost because it played fair; the proof is that it didn’t use poison gas, not even against the Russians, ha-ha-ha.)
Before I left, the rescue worker asked me where Charly was buried. I told him I had no idea. We could go visit his grave some afternoon, he suggested. I can find out at Navy Headquarters. The idea that Charly might be buried in town lodged in my head like a time bomb. Don’t do it, I said. The rescue worker, I realized then, was drunk and overexcited. We must—he stressed the word—pay our friend our last respects. He wasn’t your friend, I muttered. It doesn’t matter, he could have been, we artists are brothers no matter where we are, dead or alive, beyond the limits of age or time. The likeliest thing is that they shipped him to Germany, I said. The rescue worker’s face flushed and then he snorted so violently with laughter that he almost fell over backward. That’s a rotten lie! You ship potatoes, not dead bodies, and definitely not during the summer. Our friend is here, he said, pointing at the floor in a way that admitted no response. I had to take him by the shoulders and order him to bed. He insisted on walking me out, with the excuse that the main door might be locked. And tomorrow I’ll find out where they’ve buried our brother. He wasn’t our brother, I repeated wearily, though I realized that at that precise instant, due to who knows what outrageous distortion, his world was made up almost exclusively of us three, the only individuals on a vast and uncharted sea. In this new light the rescue worker took on the guise of a hero or a madman. Standing in the doorway with him, I looked him in the face, and his glassy stare expressed gratitude for my look without entirely understanding it. We were like two trees, until the rescue worker began to take swipes at me. Like Charly. Then I decided to push him, to see what would happen, and as might have been expected, he fell and didn’t get up again, his legs drawn up and his face half covered by an arm, a white arm, untouched by the sun, like mine. Then I went coolly down the stairs and returned to the hotel with time enough to shower and have dinner.
Spring 1943. El Quemado makes his entrance a little later than usual. In fact, as the days go by, his arrival time keeps getting pushed back. If we go on like this, the final turn will start at six in the morning. Is there any significance to this? In the West I lose my last hex in England. El Quemado continues to have luck with the dice. In the East the front runs through Tallin–Vitebsk–Smolensk– Bryansk–Kharkov–Rostov–Maikop. In the Mediterranean I plot an American attack on Oran but I can’t take the offensive; in Egypt no change: the front holds in LL26 and MM26, the hexes along the Qattara Depression.
SEPTEMBER 18
Like a ray of lightning, Frau Else appears at the end of the hallway. I’ve just gotten up and I’m on my way to breakfast, but I’m frozen in place by the surprise.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says, coming toward me.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I was in Barcelona, with my family. My husband is sick, as you know, but you aren’t well either and you’re going to listen to what I have to say.”
I let her into my room. It smells bad, like tobacco and stale air. When I open the curtains the sun makes me blink in pain. Frau Else stares at El Quemado’s photocopies pinned to the wall; I imagine she’ll scold me for breaking the hotel rules.
“This is obscene,” she says, and I don’t know whether she’s talking about the content of the pages or my decision to display them.
“They’re El Quemado’s edicts.”
Frau Else turns. She’s even more beautiful than she was a week ago, if possible.
“Was he the one who put them up here?”
“No, it was me. El Quemado gave them to me and… I decided it was better not to hide them. For him the copies are like a backdrop to our game.”
“What kind of horrible game are you talking about? The game of atonement? It’s all so tasteless.”
Frau Else’s cheekbones may have gotten slightly sharper during her absence.
“You’re right, it’s tasteless, though the truth is it’s my fault, I was the first to bring out photocopies; of course, mine were articles on the game. Anyway, coming from El Quemado it’s to be expected, we all have to do things our own way.”
“Statement of the Meeting of the Council of Ministers, November 12, 1938,” she read in her sweet and melodious voice. “Doesn’t it make your stomach turn, Udo?”
“Sometimes,” I said equivocally. Frau Else seemed increasingly upset. “History in general is a bloody thing, you have to admit.”
“I wasn’t talking about history but about your comings and goings. I don’t care about history. What I do care about is the hotel, and you are a disruptive element here.” With great care she began to take down the photocopies.
I suspected that it wasn’t just the watchman who had come to her telling tales. Clarita too?
“I’m taking them,” she said with her back to me, gathering up the copies. “I don’t want you to suffer.”
I asked whether that was all she had to say to me. Frau Else was slow to answer. She shook her head, came over to me, and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You remind me of my mother,” I said.
With her eyes open, Frau Else kissed me hard on the mouth. How about now? Without knowing very well what I was doing I took her in my arms and deposited her on the bed. Frau Else started to laugh. You’ve had nightmares, she said, thinking probably of the terrible mess the room was in. Her laughter, though it may have verged on the hysterical, was like a girl’s. With one hand she stroked my hair, murmuring unintelligible words, and when I lay down beside her I felt on my cheek the contrast between the cold linen of her blouse and her warm skin, soft to the touch. For an instant I thought she was going to surrender at last, but when I slid my hand under her skirt and tried to pull down her underpants, it was all over.
“It’s early,” she said, sitting up on the bed as if propelled by a spring of unpredictable force.