The Young Lions

The week passed in a riotous haze for Christian. The city around him, the millions going to and fro, the clang of tramcars and buses, the placards outside the newspaper offices, the Generals and politicians in their gleaming uniforms who sped by him in the long armoured cars, the shifting hordes of soldiers on leave and on duty, the bulletins on the radio of miles gained and men killed in Russia – all seemed to him shadowy and remote. Only the apartment on Tiergartenstrasse, only the wild pale body of Lieutenant Hardenburg's wife seemed substantial and real. He bought her a pair of ear-rings, sent home for more money and bought her a gold chain bracelet, and a sweater from a soldier who had carried it back from Amsterdam.

She had got into the habit of calling him demandingly at any hour of the day or night at the boarding-house where he was living, and he forsook the avenues and the theatres and merely lay on his bed, waiting for the phone to ring downstairs in the grimy hall, waiting to rush through the streets to her.

Her home became for him the one fixed place in a shadowy, reeling world. At times when she left him alone, waiting for her in her apartment, he roamed restlessly through the rooms, opening wardrobes and desk-drawers, peering at letters, looking at photographs hidden between books. He had always been a private man and one who had a deep sense of others' privacy, but it was different with her. He wanted to devour her and all her thoughts, possessions, vices, desires.

The apartment was crammed with loot. A student of economics could have pieced together the story of German conquest in Europe and Africa merely from the things tucked away carelessly in Gretchen's apartment, brought there by the procession of rigid, shining-booted, beribboned officers whom Christian occasionally saw delivering Gretchen in heavy official cars as he peered jealously out of the window to the main door below. Apart from the rich profusion of bottles that he had seen the first day, there were cheeses from Holland, dozens of pairs of French silk stockings, bottles and bottles of perfume, jewelled clasps and ceremonial daggers from all parts of the Balkans, brocaded slippers from Morocco, baskets of grapes and nectarines flown from Algiers, three fur coats from Russia, a small Titian sketch from Rome, two sides of smoked Danish bacon hanging in the pantry behind the kitchen, a whole shelf of Paris hats, although he had never seen Gretchen wear a hat, an exquisite worked-silver coffee urn from Belgrade, a heavy leather-topped desk that an enterprising Lieutenant had somehow shipped from a captured villa in Norway.

The letters, negligently dropped on the floor or slipped under magazines on the tables, were from the farthest reaches of the new German Empire, and although written in the widest variety of literary styles, from delicate and lyric poems from young scholars on duty in Helsinki to stiff, pornographic memorials from ageing professional military men serving under Rommel in the Western Desert, they all bore the same burden of longing and gratitude. Each letter, too, bore promises… a bolt of green silk bought in Orleans, a ring found in a shop in Budapest, a locket with a sapphire stone picked up in Tripoli…

The amazing thing about her was that only three years before she had been a demure young schoolteacher in Baden, instructing ten-year-old children in geography and arithmetic. She had been shy, she told Christian. Hardenburg had been the first man she had ever slept with, and she had refused him until he married her. But when he brought her to Berlin, just before the begi

Hardenburg's letters from Re

"How would you be," she had asked, half-joking, lying back on the sofa, "at ru

"Wonderful," he had said.

"You wouldn't wear yourself out," she had said, smiling, "with your agricultural duties?"

"Agreed." He had sat down beside her and put his hand under her head and caressed the firm, fair skin at the base of her neck.

"We'll see. We'll see…" Gretchen had said. "We might do worse…"

That would be it, Christian thought. A great wild estate, with the money rolling in, and Gretchen mistress of the old house… They wouldn't marry, of course. Marrying Gretchen was an act of supererogation. A kind of private Prince Consort, with hand-made riding boots and twenty horses in the stables and the great and wealthy of the new Empire coming down from the capitals for the shooting…

The luckiest moment of my life, Christian thought, was when Hardenburg unlocked that desk and took the package of black lace out of it in the police barracks in Re

Christian went over and kicked the door shut and took her into his arms.

Then, three days before his leave was due to expire, although he wasn't worried, Gretchen had said it was all being fixed, the phone rang in the boarding-house and he rushed down the stairs to answer it. It was her voice. He smiled as he said, "Hello, darling."

"Stop that." Her voice was harsh, although she seemed to be talking in a whisper. "And don't say my name over the phone."

"What?" he asked, dazedly.

"I'm speaking from a phone in a cafe," she said. "Don't try to call me at home. And don't come there."

"But you said eight o'clock tonight."

"I know what I said. Not eight o'clock tonight. Or any night. That's all. Stay away. Goodbye."

He heard the click as she hung up. He stared at the instrument on the wall, then put up the receiver slowly. He went to his room and lay down on the bed. Then he got up and put on his tunic and went out. Any place, he thought, but this room.

He walked hazily through the streets, hopelessly going over in his mind Gretchen's whispered, final conversation, and all the acts and words that might have led up to it. The night before had been, for them, an ordinary night. She had appeared at the apartment at one o'clock, quite drunk, in her controlled, nervous way, and they had drunk some more until about two, and then they had gone to bed. It had been as good as it had ever been, and she had dropped off to sleep, lying beside him, and had kissed him brightly and affectionately at eleven in the morning, when she left for work, and said, "Tonight let's start earlier. Eight o'clock. Be here."