A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 16

Midnight on the Obersalzberg.

There is a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Return of the Hunters, in which three muffled men breast a snowy hill. Before them stretches a great plain rising to grotesque, jagged peaks in the far distance. Below are everyday people engaged in everyday activities on the plain, and snug houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, and yet the effect is-and this was certainly Brueghel's intention-of man dwarfed and trivialized by an awesome and indifferent Nature.

That was very much the feeling on the mountain. No moon, but starlight reflected from the snow made it bright enough to see across the valley to the mountains of Austria: ghostly blue-white snowfields; black, dense clumps of forest; monumental crests and ridges-everything windless, silent, sweeping, immense. For a while it was enough to subdue the crowds that had gathered in shivering little clumps, but after a time the Class VI vodka, gurgling steadily from flasks and bottles, had created a hum of conversation and laughter among the American military spectators.

There were German spectators too, and they and the milling shooters had been at their schnapps, so the mood was pretty lively all around. Most people had brought flashlights, the beams of which bounced playfully from group to group.

By the time the shooting began, things were starting to get rowdy. The way it was supposed to work was that the senior marksman would give the order, and the others would then fire in rapid sequence, sounding like a string of Chinese firecrackers. They would then load up again, ceremoniously knocking their powder into the pistol barrels with little wooden hammers, and await the next signal to fire.

And that, more or less, was the way the first series went, but each succeeding one got a little sloppier, until there were flashes going off out of sequence in all directions, generally followed by giggling screams from the women and laughter from the men. Good thing, I thought grouchily, that the weapons weren't really loaded. Which was more than you could say for the people.

"Kind of boisterous, isn't it?" Anne said. "I've never seen it so wild."

"Dangerous too," I said, shielding my eyes against the jabbing flashlight beams. "Even without bullets, those flashes must be able to burn you. Or can't they?"

"Oh, yes. People get hurt every year. If you're ready to go, I am too, Chris. All this tipsy Gemutlichkeit is getting to me."

"Me too," I said with feeling, despite my head start of three ports. "And welcoming Christmas with a shooting spree still seems like a rotten idea, no matter how old it is."

We had been sitting on a log convenientiy lying at the base of a thick pine that had served as a backrest, and although we were behind a group on blankets and air mattresses, we'd been too comfortable to move. We still were, so getting up took a special effort.

"One… two… three" I said, and shoved myself up, tugging Anne along with me, or trying to. I got her halfway up, lost my footing in the snow, and went over backward just as another ragged volley exploded.

"Ouch!" I said, at a small, sharp stab of pain in my left hip. I wound up flopping flat on my back, legs in the air, like a lassoed calf, while Anne tipped back over the log and landed in much the same position.

"They got 'em," somebody observed. "Good shootin'."

The twinge in my hip had only been momentary-a minor strain, I assumed-and we both roared with laughter, neither of us, it seemed, being so very far above the general level of tipsy Gemutlichkeit after all. I scrambled up, brushing the snow off, and hand in hand we trotted down the incline, working our way through the crowd. A turn in the path after a hundred yards put a great wall of rock between us and the shooting, and we stopped to listen to the sudden silence. The sound of our weight shifting squeakily in the snow was all we could hear.

"Aah," we said together, letting our eyes adjust to the dark again, our ears to the quiet. When I put a hand to her shoulder, she moved willingly into my arms to the noisy rustle of our nylon jackets.

"Tell your jacket to keep out of this," she said. "This is our affair. Oops."

Abruptly tongue-tied, I said nothing. I brushed my lips over her eyebrows, against the grain to feel the roughness, with it to feel the smoothness, and I felt her lids flutter against my chin. Her cheeks were cool, fragrant with winter. We kissed gentiy, quietiy, and she bowed her head to my shoulder. Her hair stirred against my face when I breathed. There again was that cool, clean scent of citrus.

"Anne-"

"Shh." Her hands went to my sides and pulled me closer still. "Ow!" I said.

"Sorry. When I get like this, I don't know my own strength."

I laughed. "I must have landed on a rock when I fell over back there."

She tilted her head back and regarded me. "No, you said 'ouch' before you hit the ground. I remember distincdy."

"I did?" I worked my hand under my jacket and explored the top of my hip. "Ow!" I said again. "Damn."

"Chris? Are you all right?"

"Oh, sure. It just stings a little. And it seems to be a little stiff."

"I think we ought to go inside and sit down," she said, and I complied happily, basking in her concern.

The General Walker bar was open late for the apres-Weihnachtschutzen crowd, and we both ordered hot chocolate, which the creative bartender had to make from Kahlua, and a very warming invention it was. My hip stopped smarting by the third swallow.

I can't remember what we talked about, but we spent half an hour at it, until Anne finished her drink and stretched. "One-thirty. Time to call it a day."

"I guess so." I stared into the bottom of my cup, listening to my heart race. "Like to join me for a nightcap? I've got some cognac in my room."

"Could you really stand a nightcap?"

"No." I smiled and looked up. "All right, then; care to join me just for the company?"

She looked at me for a while, her eyes soft. "No," she said finally. "I don't think so."

No? This courting business was coming very hard to me, as must be obvious, and here was another unnerving development. I'd thought I was reading the signals correcdy.

She covered my hand with hers. "You don't need to look embarrassed. I'd like to, Chris, very much. I just don't think you're ready."

"I'm not ready!" I laughed. "If I got any more ready I'd-well, I'm ready, believe me."

She smiled. "I don't mean that way. Chris, I'm kind of old-fashioned… I don't mean that I need a commitment or anything-"

"Anne, it's OK. You don't have to justify-"

"No, let me finish." She spoke hesitandy, rotating her empty cup slowly between her hands and staring down into it. It was a side to her that I hadn't seen before: uncertain, diffident, tentative. "Chris, when you and I… if we… well, I just want you to be there for me, not off somewhere else." She shrugged, still not looking up at me. "I don't feel that you're ready to do that."

And I guess I wasn't. I didn't protest; I didn't tell her that she was so lovely it made my throat ache to look at her. I just sulked like any wounded male.

"Don't be angry," she said.

"I'm not angry," I snarled, and we both laughed. "

And not embarrassed?"

"That's different; I'm embarrassed as hell. Did you think my forehead always glistened like this? And now can we stop going on about it, please?" I held out my hand to her. "Come on, I'll walk you to your room."

Later, alone in my own room, I had to admit it was a good thing. The pain in my hip had sharpened, and all I wanted to do was keep it still. I stripped gingerly, but all I found was a kind of crease, an angry red furrow, just below the crest of the hip bone, as if an object the size of a pencil had been pressed hard against the flesh for a long time. There had been some bleeding, and there were black specks on my skin that felt greasy when I touched them. I'd never had a bruise anything like it.

When I took a look at my clothes I discovered a tear just above the hip pocket of my pants, and a small hole with signs of a smudgy ring around it through all the layers of my jacket.

No strain had done that. Was this what a powder burn looked like? The pistols had gone off while I was pulling Anne up, I remembered, but I had been a good forty feet from them. Still, these were ancient, primitive weapons, and when they were fired, they produced great flaring volcanoes that very well might extend forty feet, for all I knew.

I know, I know, if it were you, you would have figured out long ago that someone had shot at you. Easy for you to say, just sitting there, but I wasn't thinking along those lines. Admittedly, the possibility of danger had crossed my mind before, but not very seriously and not for very long. It was true that Peter had most certainly been murdered, but it was hard for me to give credence to the idea that anyone was out to kill me.

Wait until you find yourself in a similar situation, and see if you don't feel the same way.

By the next day my hip was better; still tender, but more of a dull, aching bruise than anything else. The same went for my ego.

I met Anne for breakfast, during which we both were restrained and awkward, with little to say. Then she drove me down the mountain in a blue air-force car to the railroad station, where we had another old-comrades embrace (not so satisfying this time). And then I was off to Munich, there to make my way to the Munchen-Riem airport, whence to London via Heathrow and the tube.