A Dark Song of Blood (10 page)

They spent the next hour in complete silence, she seated on the bed, Bora standing against the sill with his back to the muting glare of the window, until daylight grew faint and relinquished the room. His wholeness was scattered all over, as far as his mind could go – strands of him, loose ends, strange pieces, and he would need to pick them up and braid them back together to reshape his balance.

How the person here seemed different from the person who uttered the words, he thought: they were somehow removed from her, like a cause remote already and no longer assailable. Could a separate peace be made with the woman here? Instead of coming together, certainties fell away from him, a sore shedding as a scab lifted from the wound exposes fresh and raw layers. Guilt entered resentment, and this slid and drowned into an anguished sense of being adrift. He felt lost but for the anchorage of the windowsill. Lost, lost. Immense distance lay between him and the bed, unbridgeable, though he may travel to it. The sill was really a part of the outside, not of the room.
She
was the room, a continent in the darkness – edged with high cliffs and perilous shores, largely unknown. How had his heart not told him?

Only from the rustle of clothes he perceived Dikta was undressing and getting into bed, with the familiar sounds of their nights together. Against himself and the aghast disbelief and bitterness of his mind, he felt a wave in the flesh again creep up his thighs at the memory, decidedly painful this time.

Still he stood until she called out to him. Then blood began to sing its dark song which was like a hum, a wordless sustained note that pushed ahead in the veins, until all veins also sang, and the voices multiplied in him. Known voices of killing, children-making and proving oneself. She cared for none of these. But in his belly the song was black and it fed and fueled
and filled him up, and yet it remained hungry. Her summons angered him only because he feared she wouldn’t invite him again if he refused. He imagined her nakedness in the sheets, hating himself for being like all men, whose resolve counts for nothing when their body is strongest and crazed.

“Come to bed, Martin.”

The song inside strained high. It hammered, but he was heeding an unstrung desperate desire to change her mind instead. Deadly sadness and that unstrung desperate want made him strip and climb alongside her in the great bed, where he suffered her to slide her hands and mouth down the lean fore of his belly.

In the morning, Benedikta lay with the sheet between her legs, and these crossed at the ankles. Propped against the pillows, her torso was pink and opalescent in the early light, the nipples diverged on her young breast, brightly pert and narrow of areolas as in women who have never given birth. A fine blond down lined the seam of her belly under the navel, and to it like a tired narrow wave came the twisted sheet, covering her sex.

“Give me a cigarette,” she said.

Bora sat at the foot of the bed, facing her, and still was startled by her voice. Dressed already, he struck a strange image of order on the upheaval of the bed. It was the last time, he was thinking, that it would disconcert him how without foreplay Benedikta sought intercourse, in her callous need for lovemaking – how their lying together was then agile but hard, not a
lying
together at all, wordless, a back-breaking struggle that left them sore in the wet space of the bed.

Some moisture still lined the inner part of her thighs, milky and delicate. Bora felt a void melancholy for it, much like regret. He lit a cigarette for his wife and offered it to her.

“I’m sorry for the way you had to hear it, Martin.”

“Up front, you mean?” Pitilessly reflected in the mirror, his face came into a shaft of window light as he sat back, and the
expression on it was a stern army mask. “I’d rather.” A small contraction of the jaw when he spoke was all she likely could perceive of him. “May I at least know why, really?”

“I told you why. We have nothing in common,
really.
”

“And we’ve been married five years, with nothing in common?”

“What we had together were those few weeks of leave, that’s all.” She prevented whatever else he was about to say. “I’m not interested in sharing your mind and heart, Martin – I don’t care to talk to you by phone, or read your letters from the front. I want someone with me
now.
Surely, you lived for those furloughs – when all was said and done they always came down to what’s between your legs and mine, and though you dress it up you need it greatly. It’s true.” She shrugged, and then relaxed her shoulders. “Even though you’re a good lover – I’m going to miss that. You’re the best lover I’ve had.”

Her compliment hurt him, whether it was from a mercenary ground that it came, or because he was sensitive and the animal quality of her assessment of him left him bruised and vulnerable. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Well, I’ll miss it.”

“How can this be all?
I
loved you aside from sex.”

“I understand all that. It still doesn’t change a thing. There’s no room for appeal, since I spelled out to the Church my reasons – my faults, if you wish – and the marriage will be more than dissolved. It will never have existed.” Her cheeks narrowed as she inhaled deeply. “As for what you wanted this time... People told me you would, since you’ve been wounded. All you men do these days, whether or not you come out and say so. Mortality makes you frantic to reproduce. I can see you feel the urge for it, poor Martin, but I don’t want your children.”

“I never even made you pregnant.” Bora nervously searched his pockets for the lighter.

She stared at him. Without answering she rearranged the pillows behind her back. “Why do you tell me that?”

“Because perhaps you won’t get pregnant, even if we stay together.”

She smoked quietly for a while, her face turned away. Smoke twirled up from her mouth and hovered above her head; like a halo it created an illusion of bluish light around her. She nearly exhausted the cigarette before saying, “But I did.” Calmly, so deceivingly confident that her husband had time to absorb the blow and recoil and pretend to compose himself. “When you came a year ago at Christmas it was the third time. I almost told you then, but I thought better of it. It made me ill and I didn’t want it. I didn’t. I saw your brother’s wife go through with it, the sickness, all the changes in her body, and then the pain of giving birth for someone who was rotting in Russia already.” She removed the sheet from her body and he didn’t react to her nudity, but was breathing hard and fast. “I got rid of them, Martin. It’s better if you know without wondering. They were just clots of blood, not your children, really. They were just little clumps of meat on the midwife’s table.”

Bora had a sudden urge to throw up. He rose and made it to the bathroom and to the cold edge of the sink, where he doubled up to retch. There was nothing in his stomach and he merely went through painful dry heaves that hardly gathered spittle, and twisted his stomach like a rag that is wrung without expelling any liquid. Afterwards a paroxysm of anger took him, and likely grief in excess of anger. An extremity of physical agony just like when his hand had been torn off by the grenade, and blood had exploded from it onto him, bits of flesh, bone, parts of him, pieces of him, clots of blood. With his back to the tiled wall he let breathing break fitfully out of his lungs through an open mouth – in and out as he had done before to endure the atrocity of mutilation without screaming, until he regained control by rape-like violence on himself. Spiders of pain drew webs in him, stretched tight and lopsided, then ate the spun drivel and crawled off his limbs one by one, leaving him numb.

From the open window, with no effort on his part, the kind morning air came to dry the cold sweat on his face and neck.

Like veins of muddy water, stockings rained from Benedikta’s hands as she began dressing on the bed. Were she dead on it, were he dead at the foot of it, nothing less could pass between them. She put her bra on without looking at him, like a stranger you chance upon in a fitting room. Her fingers clasped the lacy band over her stomach, turned it around and lifted it to her chest. She placed her breasts in the cups, passed the satin straps over her shoulders.

Bora could not bring himself to look at her. He went past her to reach for his pistol and holster on the night stand, girt himself with them and walked out of the room.

Outside the air was clean, the sky high and cloudless. Shadows lay blue carpets across the streets, and on them people were blue. He drove the distance to Villa Umberto and entered the park from the riding grounds, where things were green in excess of blue even at this time of year. Under the fretwork of pine trees he sat in the car. To the policeman who came an hour later to inquire discreetly, he said nothing was the matter, though he had the Walther in his lap; when later another policeman accosted him, Bora simply squared the pistol at him.

All around, light washed brightly in the free spaces of sky, but in the shade it drizzled or tossed coins on the frost-yellow grass, or it made the surface of the car into a leopard-like pelt. In time it turned white and the shadows, still spotted, all moved creeping on the earth. Bora looked at the shadows and remembered how summer skies raced overhead when his brother had died. Children were eating sunflower seeds around the crash site. “
Gdye nyemetsky pilot
?” he recalled asking of them, “Where’s the German pilot?”, as he parted with his hands the hairy, barbed forest of tall flowers under a cloud of dust, with a crunch of salty loam under his teeth. How the shadows raced even then. Bora looked away from the outside, seeking some neutral surface within the car.

And there was the gash in the Russian earth, as if a ploughshare had turned it open to prepare it for sowing, its moist sod evaporating in the heat until the line of sunflowers trembled double, a mirage suspended above itself. Flowers on flowers, and the jagged, greenish tail rudder stood like a fin of dead fish past the flowers.

The boys ate sunflower seeds, and his brother was dead.

It was long before bells tolled deep from Trinity Church and St Isidoro’s across the spaces now ruddled and flushed. Longer yet until the air became without shadows, of the dead color of ash. Then a waning moon came up somewhere to grizzle the dark.

Bora did not feel the cold. He was bodily numb and his mind clicked orderly from thought to thought with the rhythm of gears finely serrated. Thoughts of Russia and thoughts of death and thoughts of Benedikta. The dark grew near, until like drapes it clung to the windows, and he didn’t know if his eyes were open or closed.

All day and all night Bora sat in the car, thinking.

Icy moisture dressed the twin needles of the pines while he traveled to Via Veneto the morning after, perfectly clear-headed. It was his well-known enclosed world of tightly woven runners and typing noises behind doors, where adjutants had adolescent faces and low voices never echoed themselves. Bora kept his things handy in the desk, and washed and shaved before going to Westphal’s office.

“What are you doing back so early, Major?” The general took a friendly look at him.

The answer came remarkably unemotional, as if the startling words bore no relation to the meaning of it.

3

5 FEBRUARY 1944

The weather was still cold, but without hard frost.

“You know about leap years,” Signora Carmela told Guidi as he got ready for work. “
A year that leaps / troubles in heaps.
”

“It can’t get much worse than it’s been,” Guidi remarked. “Is there anything I can get you at the store?”

“No, thank you. Remember that today is tobacco day, in case you need a smoke. Not that I approve of smoking, but you seem to be good in every other sense.” Signora Carmela tugged at the small charm on her chest, a slim gold horn that enjoyed much fondling. “Not that I should ask, but how are things coming with Francesca?”

Guidi was caught off guard. “I’m not sure how they ought to be coming.”

“We hoped you might help her open up a bit.” Signora Carmela sighed. “Such a strange girl. Speaks so little, eats so little. Seems to have no desire to be any more a part of us than as a boarder. We’d love to be closer to her, if she let us.”

With some polite, generic formula Guidi took his leave, and because it was his day to report to Caruso, he went straight to the
Questura Generale.
In the waiting room, with guarded hilarity, he was told about the Chief’s mishap, as he’d been mistakenly arrested in a routine round-up of civilians and held for several hours before being able to prove his identity.

“He’s still livid, Inspector. Watch out when you go in. He’s also furious at the Vatican.”

“What for? For resenting his violation of St Paul’s extraterritorial rights?”

“God forbid you should mention the operation to him.”

Caruso’s stubble stood on his head like a ruffled cat’s back. He acknowledged Guidi’s entrance by a slashing gesture of the right arm in the air, his nose deep in paperwork. “Keep it short. What’s new with the Reiner affair?” When Guidi reported, “Boyfriends, girlfriends!” Caruso barked, looking up above his glasses, “What are you talking about? As if you had time to waste! You’ve been spoon-fed a suspect. All you have to do is prove his guilt. What’s this going far afield on your own?”

Guidi kept standing, not having been asked to sit. “Naturally I am looking into Merlo’s involvement. Up to now, I haven’t found a reason why he should kill any woman.”