Mother Night

10: Romance ...

My wife never knew I was a spy.

I would have lost nothing by telling her. My telling her wouldn't have made her love me less. My telling her wouldn't have put me in any danger. It would simply have made my heavenly Helga's world, which was already something to make The Book of Revelation seem pedestrian.

The war was enough without that.

My Helga believed that I meant the nutty things I said on the radio, said at parties. We were always going to parties.

We were a very popular couple, gay and patriotic. People used to tell us that we cheered them up, made them want to go on. And Helga didn't go through the war simply looking decorative, either. She entertained the troops, often within the sound of enemy guns.

Enemy guns? Somebody's guns, anyway.

That was how I toast her. She was entertaining troops in the Crimea, and the Russians took the Crimea back. My Helga was presumed dead.

After the war, I paid a good deal of my money to a private detective agency in West Berlin to trace the wispiest word of her. Results: zero. My standing offer to the agency, unclaimed, was a prize of ten thousand dollars for clear proof that my Helga was either alive or dead.

Hi ho.

My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history, and I was grateful No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed — and my Helga was the angel who gave it to me.

Copiously.

No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord — as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.

Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn't go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.

Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains.

And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a sub microscopic Wanderv?gel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga's belly button. If this image is in bad taste, God help me. Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health. I have simply described the game, an adult interpretation of 'This-Little-Piggy' that was ours.

Oh, how we clung, my Helga and I — how mindlessly we clung!

We didn't listen to each other's words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats.

If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been, Away from the sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us.

But it did not count.

Only one thing counted —

The nation of two.

And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.

I can't say I wasn't warned. The man who recruited me that spring day in the Tiergarden so long ago now — that man told my fortune pretty well.

'To do your job right,' my Blue Fairy Godmother told me, 'you'll have to commit high treason, have to serve the enemy well. You won't ever be forgiven for that, because there isn't any legal device by which you can be forgiven.

The most that will be done for you,' he said, 'is that your neck will be saved. But there will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of biding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free.'