The Young Lions

"Brandt was drunk."

"Was he? Possibly. Are you sure you don't want to go to sleep?"

"I'm sure."

"You do look very tired, you know."

"I do not wish to go to sleep."

Francoise nodded gently. "The ever-waking Sergeant. Does not wish to go to sleep. Prefers to remain awake, at great personal sacrifice, and entertain a lonely French lady who is at a loose end until the Americans enter Paris…" She put her hand, palm upward, over her eyes, the loose sleeve falling back from the slender wrist and the long, sharp-nailed fingers. "Tomorrow," she said, "we will enter your name for the Legion of Honour, second class, service to the French nation."

"Enough," Christian said, without moving from his chair.

"Stop making fun of me."

"Nothing," said Francoise flatly, "could be further from my mind. Tell me, Sergeant, as a military man, how long do you think it will be before the Americans get here?"

"Two weeks," said Christian. "A month."

"Oh," Francoise said, "we are in for an interesting time, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"Shall I tell you something, Sergeant?"

"What?"

"I have remembered our little di

"'40? '41?"

"'40."

"I wore a white dress. You looked very handsome. Tall, straight, intelligent, conquering, shining in your uniform, the young god of mechanized warfare." She chuckled.

"You are making fun of me again," Christian said. "It is not pleasant."

"I was very much impressed with you." She waved her hand, as though to stop a contradiction that Christian had no idea of voicing. "Honestly, I was. I was very cold to you, wasn't I?" Again the small remembering laugh. "You have no idea how difficult it was for me to manage it. I am far from impervious, Sergeant, to the attractions of young men. And you were so splendid-looking, Sergeant…" The sleepy, hypnotic voice whispering musically in the soft-lighted, civilized room, seemed remote, unreal. "So ripe with conquest, so arrogant, so beautiful. It took all my enormous powers of self-control. You are less arrogant, now, aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Yes," said Christian, feeling himself between sleeping and waking, rhythmically adrift on a soft, perfumed, subtly dangerous tide. "Not arrogant at all any more."

"You're very tired now," the woman murmured. "A little grey. And I noticed that you limp a bit, too. In '40 it did not seem you could ever grow tired. You might die, then, I thought, in one glorious burst of fire, but never weary, never… You are very different now, Sergeant, very different. By ordinary standards, one would never say you were beautiful now, with your limp and your greying hair and your thin face… But I'm going to tell you something, Sergeant. I am a woman of peculiar tastes. Your uniform is no longer shining. Your face is grey. No one would ever believe that there is a resemblance in you to the young god of mechanized warfare…" A final hint of soft laughter echoed in her voice. "But I find you much more attractive tonight, Sergeant, infinitely more…"

She stopped speaking, her opium-like voice dying among the shadows of the cushioned couch.

Christian stood up. He went over and stared at her for a moment. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, smiling with candour.

He knelt swiftly and kissed her.

He lay beside her in the dark bed. The window-curtains were blowing gently in the summer night wind. A pale silvery wash of moonlight draped and made soft the outlines of the dressingtable, the chairs with his clothes thrown over them.

The German-hater… He smiled and turned his head. Her hair tumbled in a dark, fragrant mass on the pillow, Francoise was lying beside him, touching his skin lightly with the tips of her fingers, her eyes once more mysterious in the wavering pale light.

She smiled slowly. "See," she said, "you weren't so terribly tired, after all, were you?"

They laughed together. He moved his head and kissed the smooth, silvery skin where her throat joined her shoulder, drowsily submerged in the mingled textures of skin and hair, swimming hazily in the living double fragrance of hair and skin.

"There is something to be said," Francoise whispered, "for all retreats."

Through the open window came the sound of soldiers marching, hobnails making a remote military rhythmic clatter, pleasant and meaningless heard in this way in a hidden room through the tangled perfumed strands of his mistress's hair.

"I knew it, as soon as I saw you," Francoise said. "The first time, long ago, that it could be like this. Formidable. I could tell."

"Why did you wait so long?" Christian pulled back gently, turning, looking up at the pattern the moonlight, reflected from a mirror, made on the ceiling. "God, the time we've wasted. Why didn't you do this then?"

"I was not making love to Germans, then," Francoise said coolly. "I did not think it was admirable to surrender everything in the country to the conqueror. You may not believe this, and I don't care whether you do or not, but you are the first German I have let touch me."

"I believe you," Christian said. And he did, because whatever else her faults might be, dishonesty was certainly not one of them.

"Don't think it was easy," Francoise said. "I am not a nun."

"Oh, no," said Christian gravely. "I will swear to that."

Francoise did not laugh. "You were not the only one," she said. "So many magnificent young men, such a pleasant variety of young men… But, not one of them, not one… The conquerors did not get anything… Not until tonight…"

Christian hesitated, vaguely troubled. "Why," he asked, "why have you changed now?"

"Oh, it's all right now." Francoise laughed, a sly, sleepy, satisfied, womanly laugh. "It's perfectly all right now. You're not a conqueror any more, darling, you're a refugee…" She twisted over to him and kissed him. "Now," she said, "it is time to sleep…"

She moved over to her side of the bed. Lying flat on her back, with her arms chastely at her side, her long body sweepingly outlined under the white blur of the sheet, she soon dropped off to sleep. Her breath came in an even, healthy rhythm in the quiet room.

Christian did not sleep. He lay uncomfortably, with growing rigidity, listening to the breathing of the woman beside him, staring at the moon and mirror-flecked ceiling. Outside, there was the noise of the hobnailed patrol again, increasing and receding on the silent pavement. It did not sound remote any more, or pleasant, or meaningless.

Refugee, Christian remembered, and remembered the low, mocking laugh that accompanied it. He turned his head a little and looked at Francoise. Even as she slept, he imagined seeing a superior, victorious smile at the corner of the long, passionate mouth. Christian Diestl, the non-conquering refugee, finally given admission to the Parisie

Suddenly it was intolerable to think of Brandt snoring softly in the next room, intolerable for himself to remain in bed next to the handsome woman who had used him so comfortably and mercilessly. He slid noiselessly on to the floor and walked barefooted and naked over to the window. He stared out over the roofs of the sleeping city, the chimneys shining under the moon, the pale streets winding away narrowly with their memories of other centuries, the river shining under its bridges in the distance. He could hear the patrol from the window, faint and brave across the still dark air, and he got a glimpse of it as it crossed an intersection. Five men walking deliberately and cautiously down the night-time streets of the enemy, vulnerable, stolid, pathetic, friends…

Swiftly and soundlessly, Christian dressed himself. Francoise stirred once, threw her arm out languidly towards the other side of the bed, but she did not awake. Her arm looked white and snake-like stretched into the warm emptiness beside her.