Bomber

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‘How old are you?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Twenty-two,’ said Anna-Luisa.

‘Well, there you are,’ said August. ‘It’s stupid, absolutely stupid,’ but he did not undress her more slowly. The nearby church clock struck nine and a horse and cart clattered past the house. It made their intimacy more conspiratorial to hear the town going about its business just a few yards away.

‘I love you, Herr Bach,’ said Anna-Luisa.

‘August,’ insisted August.

‘You’ll write?’

‘Every day,’ swore August.

‘And to my father?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘I love you, Herr August,’ said Anna-Luisa. ‘I love both of you. We shall make a perfect family. You just see. I will buy new fabric for the front-room curtains, and Hansl needs new shoes.’

He pulled the pins from her hair and it tumbled down over her face. He had never seen her with her hair loose. It had always been rolled tight at the nape of her neck in a style suitable for her uniformed appearance. She laughed and kissed him again. By now they were in the bedroom and the big brass bed creaked loudly as she climbed onto it. August leaned across the bed to her, but she moved aside and giggled at outwitting him. For a moment, a terrible moment, August thought that she was just teasing him. It was the sort of thing that a young girl might do to an ardent lover of forty-six. But no sooner had the thought entered his mind than she undressed herself. Still standing on the bed, she threw her starched white uniform blouse across the room and stepped out of her brown skirt. Her underwear vanished as if by magic and there she was, naked, spinning round before his startled gaze. She pulled back the bedclothes and slid under them. Only her tousled flaxen hair and bright blue eyes were visible as she pulled the eiderdown up to her nose. It was the yellow silk eiderdown, that his wife had been so proud of, Bach remembered. They had saved so long to buy it.

He unbuttoned his uniform jacket and put it across the back of a chair.

‘Don’t come to bed with your medal on, Herr August. It hurts,’ she called.

He pulled the black-and-white ribbon of the Pour le Mérite over his head.

‘Show me.’ He threw the beribboned medal to her. He continued to undress while she looked at it.

She put the ribbon over her head and admired herself in the mirror, stiffening her naked body like a soldier on parade. The blue and gold of the medal matched her eyes and hair.

‘It’s the Pour le Mérite, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘That’s very clever of you.’

‘I asked someone about the cross you wore at your throat. What did you do?’

‘I shot down eleven English aeroplanes in the first war.’

‘You must have been only a boy.’

‘I was seventeen when I shot down the first one.’

She opened her arms to him and he climbed on to the bed with her.

‘You know,’ she told him in a whisper. ‘I have seen this room a thousand times from every place. I have even crawled under the bed to sweep and clean but I never thought I would see the room from this viewpoint.’ Her skin was soft and warm and contrasted with the cold stiffly starched sheets under his touch.

‘In future you will see it from this viewpoint as often as you wish,’ he said with a smile.

‘I shall always wish it so,’ said Anna-Luisa seriously. She touched his face with her fingertips and he caught the harsh smell of kitchen soap as it mingled with her cologne.

‘It’s a gloomy room,’ said August. The wallpaper was dark and the oak wardrobe huge and ancient. They were both reflected in its mirror. Their eyes met. A streak of lightning came through the lowered blind and lit them momentarily like a flashbulb. There was a growl of thunder. Anna-Luisa blushed and looked away. Hung here and there were old family photographs; unwanted in the sitting-room, but difficult to throw away. On the washstand a basin and jug glinted in the rosy light coming through the pink blind. A potted plant silhouetted against it shivered in the draught from the window. Anna-Luisa touched the Pour le Mérite medal. She grinned. ‘It looks better on me,’ she said.

‘It does,’ he agreed, and reached out for her.

‘And the red ribbon?’

‘For the East Front,’ he said. ‘The Eisbeinorden.’ The cold-feet medal.

‘That must have been terrible.’

‘It was.’ His voice was muffled as he kissed her ear.

‘Herr August,’ she whispered as they began to make love. ‘Shall I always sleep in this bed now?’

‘Yes,’ said August. Close to, he noticed that her hair was almost white and under its fringe her eyes were reddened by sobbing, and the tip of her nose was too. She smiled at him again. The light faded and there was the chilly gust of air that precedes a storm. Without hurry August made love to her as the thunderclouds darkened the gloomy room.

Afterwards she clutched him very tightly and made his arm wet with her silent tears. He reached for his cheroots and lit one. He wanted to tell her everything he had ever done and show her everything he had ever seen. There was so little time before he must go.

‘Will you be kind to me, Herr August?’

He kissed the side of her nose. ‘Kindness in a man is a quality few women admire,’ he said. ‘Especially very young, very beautiful women.’

‘I shall always admire you, Herr August. Tell me about the medal.’

We were all victims of these symbols and trinkets, totems and taboos, thought August Bach. Why should the girl be attracted by the blue enamelled cross? What could it mean to her?

‘The aeroplanes were different then. Biplanes: fragile little affairs of sticks and fabric.’ Why was he using those old clichés? They were tough little planes and agile too. Not like today’s sophisticated metal machines so full of fuelpipes, radio gear and delicate equipment that even a heavy bump on take-off made something malfunction.

‘They were painted with strange patterns of mauve and pink and grey. I can remember them.’ It wasn’t true. He could no longer remember the difference between a Halberstadt and an Albatros. It was the smell that he remembered, the fuel and the dope, shrill smells that caught the back of the throat. He remembered too the sound of the Mercedes motor firing and the roar of it echoing against the side of the hangar.

‘I remember the day I shot down my first Englishman. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.’ Or was he telling it correctly? Surely that was the day he got the telegram about his mother dying. It was pouring with rain the day he shot down his first Englishman.

‘Were you afraid?’ asked Anna-Luisa.

‘I was afraid that someone would think I might be afraid,’ he said. It was a conventional answer. The true answer was that at eighteen he didn’t have enough intelligence to be afraid with.

‘Did you see the Englishman?’

He tried to remember. ‘It was a two-seater. I saw the pilot’s white silk scarf floating out of the cockpit. I came out of the sun.’

‘Were you proud?’

‘I’d killed two men, Anna-Luisa. It’s a terrible thing.’ He wondered what sort of men they were or might have become. The British should never have sent men out in those BE-2s, not over the lines anyway. After he landed and claimed his first victory his Staffel commander said, ‘A BE-2, I suppose.’ This one had already been shot up but he fought like the devil. On the third pass the gunner ran out of ammunition. He waved and pointed to his gun. A white-faced fellow with a moustache, no youngster. The pilot seemed unable to open the throttle. He looked over his shoulder to see how close the attack was coming. They stood no chance. He went out to the crash, to salvage the roundel markings as a trophy, but there was blood all over the canvas upon which they were painted. Both British flyers were dead. The sentry told him that one of the medical orderlies had kept an Englishman’s scarf. He’ll sell it for five marks, said the sentry. Bach had declined.

‘I want to walk with you, Herr August. Can we go shopping together?’

‘And we will lunch together at the Stube,’ he answered.

‘It will be wonderful, August.’ She stroked his head.

‘We will walk everywhere, Anna-Luisa. Everyone shall see us arm in arm.’

‘I love you, August. I shall always love you.’

The room lit up bright pink.

‘One thousand,’ said Anna-Luisa. ‘Two thousand …’ When he puffed at his cheroot he found it had gone out. He reached for his matches and relit it carefully, then he held up the match and Anna-Luisa blew it out but still counted on. When the thunder came she pronounced the storm to be four kilometres away. There was still no sound of rain.

‘Did you know how to tell how far away a storm is?’ she asked.

‘You can never be sure,’ said August.