A Time to Love and a Time to Die

  "Frau Witte is staying too," Graeber sajd.

  "Come."

  As he walked toward the bed he saw his face in the gray and silver mirror. He did not recognize it. It was the face of someone else. "Come," Elisabeth said once more.

  He leaned over her. She put her arms around him. "It doesn't matter what happens," she said.

  "Nothing can happen," he replied. "Not tonight." He did not know why he believed that. It had something to do with the garden and the light and the mirror and with Elisabeth's shoulders and a vast, expansive quietude that suddenly filled him to the uttermost. "Nothing can happen," he repeated.

  With one hand she took hold of the covers and threw them to the floor. She lay there naked and strong; from her hips sprang long, powerful legs; it was a body that narrowed from shoulders and breasts to a flat depression at the belly; the upper thighs were not thin but seemed to swell and plunge into the dark triangle. It was the body of a young woman and no longer that of a girl.

  He felt her in his arms. She slid against him and it seemed to him as though a thousand hands intertwined and held him and bore him up. Nowhere was there any longer any space between, everything was close and tight, it was no longer the tumult of the first days, it was a slow, steady rising that rushed over everything and swept away words, boundaries, the horizon and then the self—

  He lifted his head. He was coming back from a great distance. He listened. He did not know how long he had been away. Outside all was silent. He thought he must be mistaken and lay listening. He heard nothing—no explosions and no more antiaircraft firing. He shut his eyes and sank back. Then he awoke again. "They didn't come, Elisabeth," he said.

  "They did," she murmured.

  They lay side by side. Graeber saw the covers on the floor and the mirror and the open window. He had thought the night would never end but he felt time creeping slowly back again into the stillness. The vines outside the window swung once more in the breeze, their shadowy images moved in the mirror, and distant sounds began again. He looked over at Elisabeth. She had her eyes closed. Her mouth was open and she was breathing deeply and calmly. She was not yet back. He was back. He had already begun to think again. She was always away longer. I wish I could lose myself too, he thought, completely and for a long time. It was something for which he envied her, for which he loved her and which frightened him a little. She was some place where he could not follow her or not for long enough; it was that perhaps which frightened him. He felt himself suddenly alone and in a strange fashion inferior.

  Elisabeth opened her eyes. "What became of the airplanes?"

  "I don't know."

  She pushed back her hair. "I'm hungry."

  "So am I. We have lots of things to eat."

  Greaber got up and fetched the canned goods he had brought with him from Binding's cellar. "Here's chicken and veal and there's even a potted hare with compote to go with it."

  "Let's have the hare and the compote."

  Graeber opened the jars. He loved Elisabeth for not helping him but lying there and waiting instead. He could not stand women who, still surrounded by mystery and darkness hurriedly transformed themselves again into busy housewives.

  "Every time I look at these things I feel ashamed," he said. "I acted pretty badly toward Alfons."

  "He may have acted badly toward someone else too. That evens out. Were you at his funeral?"

  "No. There were too many Party members in uniform there. I didn't go along. I just listened to Group Leader Hildebrandt's oration. He said we should all imitate Alfons and fulfill his last wish. He meant remorseless strife against the foe. But Binding's last wish was something different. Alfons was in pajamas in the cellar with a blonde in a negligee."

  Graeber emptied the meat and the compote into two dishes which Frau Witte had given them. Then he cut the bread and opened a bottle of wine. Elisabeth got up. She stood naked in front of the walnut bed. "You really don't look like someone who has been sitting bent over for months sewing army overcoats," Graeber said. "You look like someone who does gymnastics every day."

  She laughed. "Gymanastics? You only do gymnastics when you are in despair."

  "Really? That would never have occurred to me."

  "Only then," Elisabeth said. "Exercise until you can't move any more, run around until you are dead tired, clean up the room ten times, brush your hair till your head hurts and so on."

  "Does that help?"

  "Only with the penultimate despair. When you don't want to think any more. In the final despair nothing helps except to let yourself drop."

  "And then?"

  "Wait until the tide of life somehow flows back again. I mean the life that keeps you breathing. Not the one you live."

  Graeber raised his glass. "I believe we know too much about despair for our age. Let's forget it."

  "We know too much about forgetting, too," Elisabeth said. "We'll forget that as well."

  "All right. Long live Frau Kleinen who put up this hare!"

  "And long live Frau Witte who gave us the garden out there and this room!"

  They emptied their glasses. The wine was cold and aromatic and young. Graeber refilled the glasses. The moon stood golden in them. "My beloved," Elisabeth said, "it's good to be up at night. It's so niuch easier to talk then."

  "That's true. At night you are a healthy, young child of God and not a seamstress of military overcoats. And I am not a soldier."

  "At night one is what he was intended to be; not what he has become."

  "Perhaps." Graeber looked at the hare, the compote, and the bread. "That makes us pretty superficial people. We don't do much at night except sleep and eat."

  "And make love. That's not superficial."

  "And drink."

  "And drink," Elisabeth said, holding out her glass.

  Graeber laughed. "Theoretically, we should really be sentimental and sad and should be carrying on deep conversations. Instead of that we've eaten half a hare and we find life wonderful and give thanks to God."

  "That's better. Don't you think?"

  "It's the only thing. If you make no demands, everything is a gift."

  "Did you learn that in the field?"

  "No, here."

  "That's good. It's really all you have to learn, isn't it?"

  "Yes. After that all you need is a bit of luck."

  "Have we had that, too?"

  "Yes. We have had everything there is."

  "You're not sad because it's over?"

  "It's not over. It's just changing."

  She looked at him. "No," he said. "I am sad. I am so sad I think I shall die tomorrow when I leave you. But when I try to think how it would have to be for me not to be sad, then there's just one answer—never to have met you. In that case I wouldn't be sad but would be going away empty and indifferent. And when I think that, then the sadness is not sadness any more. It's black happiness. The reverse side of happiness."

  Elisabeth stood up. "Perhaps I haven't put that right," Graeber said. "Do you understand what I mean?"

  "I do understand. And you have put it very well. One couldn't put it better. I knew you would say it." She got up and came over" to him. He felt her. Suddenly she no longer had a name and had all the names in the world. For an instant something like an unbearable white light flamed through him, he realized that all was one, departure and return, possession and loss, life and death, past and future, and that always and everywhere the unchangeable countenance of eternity was there and nothing could be obliterated—

  It was the last afternoon. They were sitting in the garden. The cat stole by. She was pregnant and completely occupied with herself, paying no attention to anyone. "I hope I'm going to have a child," Elisabeth said suddenly.

  Graeber stared at her. "A child? Why?"

  "Why not?"

  "A child! In these times! Do you think you're going to have one?"

  "I hope so."

  He looked at her. "I believe I'm supposed to say or do something now and ki
ss you and be surprised and tender, Elisabeth. I can't do it. I hadn't thought about a child until now."

  "You have no need to either. It doesn't really concern you at all. Besides, I'm not sure yet."

  "A child! It would grow up just in time for a new war as we did for this one. Think of all the misery it would be born to!"

  The cat came by again. She was creeping along the path to the kitchen. "Children are born every day," Elisabeth said.

  Graeber thought of the Hitler Youth and of the children who had denounced their parents. "Why do we talk about it?" he said. "It's only a wish after all. Or isn't it?"

  "Don't you ever want to have a child?"

  "I don't know. In peacetime perhaps. I haven't thought about it before. There's so much that has been poisoned all around us that the ground will still be contaminated for years. How can one want a child in such circumstances?"

  "For that very reason," Elisabeth said.

  "Why?"

  "To educate it against that. What's to happen if the people who are against everything that is happening now don't want to have children? Are only the barbarians to have them? Then who's to put the world to rights again?"

  "Is that why you want to have one?"

  "No. I only thought about the just now."

  Graeber was silent. There was nothing to be said against her argument. She was right. "You're too quick for me," he said. "I have not got used to being married and now all of a sudden I'm to decide whether or not I want a child."

  Elisabeth laughed and stood up. "You haven't noticed the simplest part of it—that it isn't just a child I want but your child. And now I'm going to discuss dinner with Frau Witte. It's to be a canned masterpiece."

  Graeber was sitting alone in his chair in the garden. The sky was full of clouds tinged with red. The day was over. It had been a stolen day. He had overstayed his furlough by twenty-four hours. Although he had reported for departure, he had stayed. Now it was evening and in an hour he had to be off.

  He had gone to the post office once more; but no further word had come from his parents. He had arranged everything that could be arranged. Frau Witte had already agreed to let Elisabeth go on living in her house. He had examined its cellar; it was not deep enough to be safe but it was well built. He had gone to look at the public cellar in the Leibnitzstrasse as well; it was as good as most of the others in the city. Calmly he leaned back in his chair. He could hear the clattering of pots in the kitchen. It had been a long furlough. Three years, not three weeks. Sometimes they still seemed to him not altogether secure and they had been built hastily on uncertain ground; nevertheless he wanted to believe they were secure enough.

  He heard Elisabeth's voice. He thought over what she had said about a child. It was as though suddenly a wall had been broken through. An opening had appeared and behind it, wavering and indistinct, a garden, a bit of the future. Graeber had never thought beyond that wall. When he had arrived he had hoped to find something and seize it and possess it in order to be able to leave it behind when he went away again, something that bore his name and with it bore himself—but the thought of a child had never occurred to him. He looked into the twilight that hung between the lilac bushes. How unending it would be if one continued to pursue it and how strange it was to feel that the life which had always hitherto ceased for him at the wall might go on, and that what he had up to then regarded almost as booty, hastily seized, might sometime become an assured possession to be handed on to an alien, unborn existence in a future that had no end and was full of a tenderness he had never known. What expanses there were and what presentiments and how greatly something in him wanted it and did not want it and yet wanted it, this poor and comforting illusion of immortality!

  "The train leaves at six o'clock," he said. "I have taken care of all my things. Now I must leave. Don't come with me to the station. I want to leave from here, taking you with me in my mind the way you exist here. Not in the crowds and the embarrassment of the station. My mother went with me last time. I couldn't do anything to stop her. It was dreadful for her and for me. It took me quite a while to get over it, and later it was always what I remembered—the weeping, tired, perspiring woman on the station platform—not my mother as she really was. Do you understand that?"

  "Yes."

  "All right. Then let's do it this way. It will be one burden the less. Besides, you oughtn't to see me when I have' been reduced again to a mere number, just another uniform loaded down like a donkey. I want to part from you the way we are here. And now take this money: I have it left over. Out there I won't need it."

  "I don't need any money, Ernst. I earn enough for myself."

  "I can't spend it out there. Take it and buy yourself a dress. A senseless, impractical, beautiful dress to go with your little gold cap."

  "I'll use it to send packages to you."

  "Don't send me any. We have more to eat out there than you have here. But buy yourself a dress. I learned something when you bought that hat. Promise me that you will buy a dress. Or isn't there enough for that?"

  "There's enough. It will even do for a pair of shoes as well."

  "That's perfect. Buy yourself a pair of golden shoes."

  "All right," Elisabeth said. "Golden shoes with high heels and light as a feather. I'll run to meet you in them when you come back."

  Graeber took out of his knapsack the dark painted icon he had brought with him to give to his mother. "Here's something I found in Russia. Keep it."

  She did not take it. Her face was suddenly distracted. "No, Ernst. Give it to someone else. Or take it back with you. It's too much goodby. Too final. Take it back."

  He looked at the picture. "I found it in a ruined house," he said. "Perhaps there's no luck in it. I hadn't thought of that." He put it back again. It was a Saint Nicholas on a golden ground with many angels.

  "If you like I'll take it to the church," Elisabeth said. "The one where we slept. The Katharinenkirche."

  The one where we slept, he thought. Yesterday that was still close; now it's already infinitely far away. "They won't take it," he said. "It's a different kind of religion. The trustees of the God of love are not especially tolerant of one another."

  He reflected that he might have put the picture with Kruse's ashes in the grave of Bluemer, the cathedral capitulary. But very likely that, too, would have been just one more sacrilege.

  He did not look back. He walked neither too slow nor too fast. The knapsack was heavy and the street was very long. When he turned the corner he turned many corners. For a moment the perfume of Elisabeth's hair was still about him; then it was drowned out by the smell of old fires, by the sultriness of the late afternoon and by the rotten-sweet smell of decay that rose out of the ruins in the warm air.

  He crossed the embankment. One side of the Lindenallee was burned black; the other was in green leaf. The river was choked and crept sluggishly over concrete, straw, sacking, the broken remnants of docks and beds. Suppose an air raid should come now, he thought. I would have to take cover and would have an excuse for missing the train. What would Elisabeth say if I suddenly stood before her? He thought about it. He did not know. But everything that had been good this time would probably turn into pain. It was the same as at a station when a train was late in leaving and you still had half an hour's time to labor through in embarrassed conversation. Besides it would do him no good; during a raid the train would not leave and he would get there in time just the same.

  He came to Bramschestrasse. It was from here that he had first made his way into the city. The bus that had brought him was standing there waiting. He climbed in. After ten minutes they started. The station, meanwhile, had been moved again. Now it was a roof of corrugated tin camouflaged against airplanes. At one side sheets of gray cloth had been stretched. Next to them, as concealment, artificial trees had been set up and there was a stall out of which a wooden cow peered. Two aged horses were grazing in a field.

  The train was ready and waiting. A number of car
s bore the sign: For Military Personnel Only. A guard was inspecting papers. Nothing was said about the fact that Graeber was a day late. He got in and found a seat beside the window. After a while three more men entered: a non-com, a lance corporal with a scar, and an artillery man who immediately began to eat. A field kitchen was rolled along the platform. Two young student nurses appeared, accompanied by an older nurse with an iron swastika worn as a brooch.