Mother Night

16: A Well-preserved Woman ...

We cried, like babies, wrestled each other up the stairs to my attic.

As we passed Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, I saw that Keeley was crying. Krapptauer stood at attention, honoring the idea of an Anglo-Saxon family. Jones, further up the stairs, was radiant with pleasure in the miracle he had worked. He rubbed and rubbed his jewelled hands.

'My — my wife,' I said to my old friend Kraft, as Helga and I entered my attic.

And Kraft, trying to keep from crying, chewed the bit of his cold corncob pipe in two. He never did quite cry, but he was close to doing it — genuinely close to doing it, I think.

Jones, Krapptauer and Keeley followed us in. 'How is it,' I said to Jones, 'that it's you who gives me back my wife?'

'A fantastic coincidence — ' said Jones. 'One day I learned that you were still alive. A month later I learned that your wife was still alive. What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'My paper has a small circulation in West Germany,' said Jones. 'One of my subscribers read about you, and he sent me a cable. He asked me if I knew your wife had just turned up as a refugee in West Berlin.'

'Why didn't he cable me?' I said. I turned to Helga.

'Sweetheart — ' I said in German, 'why didn't you cable me?'

'We'd been apart so long, I'd been dead so long,' she said in English, 'I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me, I'd hoped that.'

'My life is nothing but room for you,' I said. 'It could never be filled by anyone but you.'

'So much to say, so much to tell — ' she said, melting against me. I looked down on her wonderingly. Her skin was soft and clear. She was amazingly well-preserved for a woman of forty-five.

What made her state of preservation even more remarkable was the story she now told of how she had spent the past fifteen years.

She was captured and raped in the Crimea, she said. She was shipped to the Ukraine by boxcar, was put to work in a labor gang,

'We were stumbling sluts,' she said, 'married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through rained villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it'

She separated herself from me in order to tell her yarn with larger gestures. I wandered over to my front window to listen — listen while looking through dusty panes into the twigs of a birdless, leafless tree.

Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, represent a Nazi, a Communist, and an American.

'Hooray, hooray, hooray.' I'd said,

On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history. She escaped from the labor gang after five years, she said, was caught a day later by Asiatic half-wits with submachine guns and police dogs.

She spent three years in the prison, she said, and then she was sent to Siberia as an interpreter and file clerk in a huge prisoner-of-war camp. Eight thousand S.S. men were still held captive there, though the war had been over for years.

'I was there for eight years,' she said, 'mercifully hypnotized by simple routines. We kept beautiful records of all those prisoners, of all those meaningless lives behind barbed-wire. Those S.S. men, once so young and lean and vicious, were growing gray and soft and self-pitying — ' she said, 'husbands without wives, fathers without children, shopkeepers without shops, tradesmen without trades.'

Thinking about the subdued S.S. men, Helga asked herself the riddle of the Sphinx. 'What creature walks in the morning on four feet, at noon on two, at evening on three?'

'Man,' said Helga, huskily.

She told of being repatriated — repatriated after a fashion. She was returned not to Berlin but to Dresden, in East Germany. She was put to work in a cigarette factory, which she described in oppressive detail.

One day she ran away to East Berlin, then crossed to West Berlin. Days after that she was winging to me.

'Who paid your way?' I said.

'Admirers of yours,' said Jones warmly. 'Don't feel you have to thank them. They feel they owe you a debt of gratitude they'll never be able to repay.'

'For what?' I said.

'For having the courage to tell the truth during the war,' said Jones, 'when everybody else was telling lies.'