The Young Lions

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"THEY assure me," the voice behind the bandages was saying, "that in two years they can give me a face. I am not under any illusions. I will not look like a motion-picture actor, but I am confident it will be a serviceable face."

Christian had seen some of the serviceable faces that the surgeons patched on to the wrecked skulls delivered to their tables, and he was not as confident as Hardenburg, but he merely said, "Of course, Lieutenant."

"It is already almost definite," the voice went on, "that I will see out of my right eye within a month. By itself that is a victory, even if it was as far as they could go."

"Certainly, Lieutenant," Christian said in the darkened room of the villa on the pretty island of Capri, standing in the winter sunlight of the bay of Naples. He was sitting between the beds, with his right leg, bandaged and stiff in front of him, just touching the marble floor and his crutches leaning against the wall.

The case in the other bed was a Burn, an armoured-division Burn, very bad, and the Burn merely lay still under his ten metres of bandage, filling the high-ceilinged cool room with the usual smell, which was worse than the aroma of the dead, but which Hardenburg could not smell, because he had nothing left to smell with. An economically minded nurse had realized this fortunate fact and had placed them side by side, since the hospital, once the vacation spot of a prosperous Lyons silk manufacturer, was being crowded more and more every day with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa.

Christian was in a larger hospital down the hill, devoted to the common soldiers, but they had given him his crutches a week ago, and he now felt like a free man.

"It is very good of you, Diestl," said Hardenburg, "to come and visit me. As soon as you get hurt people have a tendency to treat you as though you were eight years old, and your brain goes to rot along with everything else."

"I was very anxious to see you," Christian said, "and tell you in person how grateful I am for what you did for me. So when I heard you were on the Island, too, I…"

"Nonsense!" It was amazing how much the same, clipped, precise, snarling, Hardenburg's voice was, although the whole facade that had shielded the voice was now gone. "Gratitude is out of order. I did not save you out of affection, I assure you."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"There were two places on that motor-cycle. Two lives could be saved that might be useful somewhere later on. If there was someone else there who I thought would be more valuable later, I would have left you behind."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, staring at the smooth, white, unfeatured bandages wrapped so neatly about the head that he had last seen red and dripping on the hill outside Solium, with the noise of the British planes dying away in the distance.

The nurse came in. She was a motherly-looking woman of about forty, with a kindly, fat face. "Enough," she said. Her voice was not motherly, but bored and business-like. "The visit is over for the day."

She stood at the door, waiting to make sure that Christian left. Christian stood slowly, taking hold of his crutches. They made a sodden, wooden noise on the marble floor.

"At least," said Hardenburg, "I will be able to walk on my own two feet."

"Yes, Sir," Christian said. "I'll visit you again, if you are agreeable, Lieutenant."

"If you wish," said the voice behind the bandages.

"This way, Sergeant," said the nurse.

Christian tapped his way out clumsily, because he had only recently learned how to handle the crutches. It was very good to be out in the corridor, where you could not smell the Burn.

"She will not be too disturbed," Hardenburg was saying through the white muffling wall of bandage, "by the change in my appearance." He was talking about his wife. "I have written to her and told her I was hit in the face and she said she was proud of me and that it would alter nothing."

No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.

Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir," and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after a while, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian's benefit, as though now, in this enforced holiday, he was taking an inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiral, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sick-room became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, muffled trumpets in a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the sunny, blue harbour was real, important.

"Gretchen will be very valuable to me," Hardenburg was saying, "after the war. Gretchen, that's the name of my wife."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, "I know."

"How do you know? Oh, yes, I sent you to deliver a package."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"She is quite handsome, Gretchen, isn't she?"

"Yes, Sir. Quite handsome."

"Very important," said Hardenburg. "You would be amazed at the number of careers that have been ruined in the Army by dowdy wives. She is also very capable. She has the knack of handling people…"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"Did you have an opportunity to talk to her?"

"For about ten minutes. She questioned me about you."

"She is very devoted," said Hardenburg.

"Yes, Sir."

"I plan to see her in eighteen months. My face will be well enough by then. I do not wish to shock her unnecessarily. Very valuable. She has a knack of being at home wherever she finds herself, of being at ease, saying the correct thing…"

"Yes, Sir."

"To tell you the truth, I was not in love with her when I married her. I was very much attached to an older woman. Divorced. With two children. Very attached. I nearly married her. It would have ruined me. Her father was a workman in a metal factory and she herself had a tendency to fat. In ten years she will be monstrous. I had to keep reminding myself that in ten years I expected to have Ministers and Generals as guests in my home and that my wife would have to serve as hostess. She had a vulgar streak, too, and the children were impossible. Still, even now, thinking of her, I feel a sinking, weak sensation. Have you ever been like that about a woman?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"It would have been ruinous," said the voice behind the bandages. "A woman is the most common trap. A man must be sensible in that department as in anything else. I despise a man who will sacrifice himself for a woman. It is the most sickly form of self-indulgence. If it were up to me, I would have all the novels burned, too, all of them, along with Das Kapital and the poems of Heine."

The doctor was a grey-haired man. He looked seventy years old. He had pouches under his eyes of wrinkled purple skin, like the flesh of swamp flowers, and his hands shook as he poked at Christian's knee. He was a Colonel and he looked too old even for a Colonel. There was brandy on his breath and the small, watery spurts of his eyes suspiciously searched Christian's scarred leg and Christian's face for the malingering and deception the doctor had found so often in thirty years of examining ailing soldiers of the Army of the Kaiser, the Army of the Social Democrats, and the Army of the Third Reich. Only the doctor's breath, Christian thought, has remained the same over the thirty years. The generals have changed, the sergeants have died, the philosophers have veered from north to south, but the Colonel's breath bears the same rich freight by a dark bottle out of Bordeaux that it did when Emperor Franz Josef stood beside his brother monarch in Vienna to review the first Saxony Guards on their way into Serbia.

"You'll do," said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian's card. "Excellent. It doesn't look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometres a day and never feel it. Eh?"

"I did not say anything, Colonel," said Christian.

"Full field duty," the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. "Eh?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. "Roll down your trousers, Sergeant," he said. He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. "What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?"

"I was a skiing instructor, Sir."

"Eh?" The Colonel glared at Christian as though he had just insulted him. "What was that?"

"Skiing, Sir."

"Eh," said the Colonel flatly. "You will not ski with that knee any more. It is for children anyway." He turned away from Christian and washed his hands, with meticulous thoroughness, as though Christian's bare pale flesh had been unutterably filthy.

"Also, from time to time, you will find yourself limping. Eh, why not? Why shouldn't a man limp?" He laughed, showing yellow false teeth. "How will people know you have been in the war otherwise?"

He scrubbed busily at his hands in the large enamel sink that smelled so strongly of disinfectant as Christian went out of the room.

"You will kindly get me a bayonet," Hardenburg said. Christian was sitting at his side, looking at his leg, stretched, still stiff and dubious, out in front of him. In the next bed the Burn lay, lost as always in his silent Antarctic of bandage and his tropical and horrible smell. Christian had just told Hardenburg that he was leaving the next day for the front. Hardenburg had said nothing, but had merely lain still and rigid, his smooth, swathed head like a frightening and morbid egg on the pillow. Christian had waited for a moment and then had decided that Hardenburg had not heard him.

"I said, Lieutenant," he repeated, "that I was leaving tomorrow."

"I heard you," Hardenburg said. "You will kindly get me a bayonet."

"What was that, Sir?" Christian asked, thinking: It only sounds like bayonet because of the bandages.

"I said I want a bayonet, Bring it to me tomorrow."

"I am leaving at two o'clock in the afternoon," Christian said.

"Bring it in the morning."

Christian looked at the overlapping, thin lines where the bandage crossed over itself on the round, smooth surface, but there was no expression there, of course, to give him a clue to what Hardenburg was thinking, and as usual, nothing was to be learned from the everlasting, even tone of the hidden voice. "I don't have a bayonet, Sir," he said.

"Steal one tonight. There is no complication there. You can steal one, can't you?"

"Yes, Sir."

"I don't want the scabbard. Just bring me the knife."

"Lieutenant," said Christian, "I am very grateful to you and I would like to be of service to you in every way I can, but if you are going to…" He hesitated. "If you are going to kill yourself, I cannot bring myself to…"

"I am not going to kill myself," the even, muffled voice said.

"What a fool you are. You've listened to me for nearly two months now. Do I sound like a man who is going to kill himself?"

"No, Sir, but…"

"It's for him," Hardenburg said.

Christian straightened in the small, armless wooden chair.

"What's that, Sir?"

"For him, for him," Hardenburg said impatiently. "The man in the other bed."

Christian turned slowly and looked at the Burn. The Burn lay quiet, motionless, communicating nothing, as he had lain for two months. Christian turned back to the equal clot of bandage behind which lay the Lieutenant. "I don't understand, Sir," he said.

"He asked me to kill him," Hardenburg said. "It's very simple. He hasn't any hands left. Or anything left. And he wishes to die. He asked the doctor three weeks ago and the idiot told him to stop talking like that."

"I didn't know he could speak," Christian said dazedly. He looked at the Burn again, as though this newly discovered accomplishment must now somehow be apparent in the frightful bed.

"He can speak," Hardenburg said. "We have long conversations at night. He talks at night."

What discussions, Christian thought, must have chilled the Italian night air in this room, between the man who had no hands and no anything else left and the man without a face. He shivered. The Burn lay still, the covers shrouded over the frail frame. He hears now, Christian thought, staring at him, he understands every word we are saying.

"He was a watchmaker, in Nuremberg," Hardenburg said.

"He specialized in sporting watches. He has three children and he has decided he wants to die. Will you kindly bring the bayonet?"

"Even if I bring it," Christian said, fighting to preserve himself from the bitter complicity of this eyeless, voiceless, fingerless, faceless suicide, "what good will it do? He couldn't use it anyway."

"I will use it," said Hardenburg. "Is that simple enough for you?"

"How will you use it?"

"I will get out of bed and go over to him and use it. Now will you bring it?"

"I didn't know you could walk…" Christian said dazedly. In three months, the nurse had told him, Hardenburg might expect to take his first steps.

With a slow, deliberate motion, Hardenburg threw back the bed-clothes from his chest. As Christian watched him rigidly, as he might watch a corpse that had just risen in its grave and stepped out, Hardenburg pushed his legs in a wooden, mechanical gesture, over the side of the bed. Then he stood. He was dressed in baggy, stained flannel pyjamas. His bare feet were pallid and splotched on the marble floor of the Lyons silk manufacturer.

"Where is the other bed?" Hardenburg asked. "Show me the other bed."

Christian took his arm delicately and led him across the narrow space until Hardenburg's knees touched the other mattress. "There," Hardenburg said flatly.

"Why?" Christian asked, feeling as though he were putting questions to ghosts fleeing past a window in a dream. "Why didn't you tell anybody you could walk?"

Standing there, wavering a little in the yellowing flannel, Hardenburg chuckled behind his casque of bandage. "It is always necessary," he said, "to keep a certain amount of crucial information about yourself from the authorities who control you." He leaned over and felt lightly around on the blanket covering the chest of the Burn. Then his hand stopped. "There," a voice said from behind the ice drift of bandage above the counterpane. The voice was hoarse and lacking in human timbre. It was as though a dying bird, a panther drowning slowly in its own blood, an ape crucified on a sharp branch in a storm in the jungle, had at last accomplished speech with one final word.

"There."

Hardenburg's hand stopped, pale yellow and bony, like a weathered and ancient X-ray of a hand on the white counterpane.

"Where is it?" he asked harshly. "Where is my hand, Diestl?"

"On his chest," Christian whispered, staring fixedly at the ivory, spread fingers.

"On his heart," Hardenburg said. "Just above his heart. We have practised this every night for two weeks." He turned, with blind certainty, and crossed to his bed and climbed into it. He pulled the sheet up to where the helmet of bandage, like archaic armour, rose from his shoulders. "Now bring the bayonet. Don't worry about yourself. I will hide it for two days after you have gone, so that nobody can accuse you of the killing. And I will do it at night, when no one comes into the room for eight hours. And he will keep quiet." Hardenburg chuckled. "The watchmaker is very good at keeping quiet."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian quietly, getting up to leave, "I will bring the bayonet."

He brought the crude knife the next morning. He stole it at a canteen in the evening while its owner was singing "Lili Marlene" loudly over beer with two soldiers from the Quartermaster Corps. He carried it under his tunic to the marble villa of the silk manufacturer, and slid it under the mattress as Hardenburg directed. He only looked back once from the door, after he had said goodbye to the Lieutenant, looked back once at the two white blind figures lying still in the parallel beds in the tall-ceilinged, rather gay room with the Bay shining and sunny outside through the high, elegant windows.

As he limped down the corridor, away from the room, his boots making a heavy, plebeian sound on the marble, he felt like a scholar who has graduated from a university whose every book he has memorized and sucked dry.