A Necessary Action (25 page)

‘There’s a mine up there. Did you look at that too?’

‘We weren’t there, but I remember seeing it, in the distance.’

‘Was Santiago Alemany also with you?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t remember the date, but you think it was November and anyhow before the third of December?’

‘Yes.’

‘We shall look at those days for a few minutes, the second and the third of December. What did you do then?’

‘No idea.’

‘I’ll help you. On the second of December in the evening you were in the puerto. A police patrol saw you out by the pier at half-past one in the morning with your Norwegian friends and the Alemany brothers. What were you doing out there?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What were you doing out by the pier?’

‘Bathing.’

‘At half-past one in the morning? And by the pier? Why not at one of the ordinary bathing-places near the village?’

‘We didn’t have our bathing-costumes.’

‘Not the woman either?’

‘No.’

‘It’s not permitted to behave like that. There’s even a special law which forbids it. Do you know that?’

‘It’s a silly law.’

‘That’s possible. Did you have sexual relationships with the woman too?’

‘No.’

‘But you practically lived with her for four months. She’s said to have been physically attractive and not especally … particular. She could hardly have failed to make an impression on you. Were you in love with her?’

Willi Mohr did not answer. He felt less tired now, but very uneasy and he wanted at any price to get the other man away from this subject.

‘What do you really want to know?’ he said.

‘For instance, what happened on the following day, the third of December?’

‘I think we went to the puerto then too. Let me see, one moment, it was very hot then too. We didn’t bathe but went to a bar and stayed there until late into the night. It was a kind of party. We sang and drank quite a bit … and … well, there was nothing else.’

‘Were the Alemany brothers there too?’

‘Yes. Santiago Alemany was with us all the time. His brother came later, after being out in the fishing-boat. Yes, I remember
now. We were down on the quay when the boat came in. The Alemany brothers’ father spoke sharply to Santiago because he had not been to town with the fish the day before. Then we all went back to the bar again.’

‘What did Santiago Alemany answer to that?’

‘I don’t remember. Not definitely. Yes, that the van was out of action, I think. Then we started drinking again and then we went home. I drove the camioneta, I remember.’

‘Did you drive although you were drunk?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not really allowed.’

Sergeant Tornilla smiled. His expression was again friendly and good-humoured.

‘Tonight you’ve admitted three offences already. Wherever will this end?’

He put his hand down behind his chair and lifted up the water-jug. Then he got up and walked round the desk, just as elegant an unmoved as before. Willi Mohr drank and was given a cigarette and a light. The other man returned to his place.

‘The electricity really is poor,’ he said, looking at the bulb, which had again begun to flicker.

Then he sat in silence for a while, looking at the man on the bench.

‘You should have a family,’ he said, pointing with his middle finger at the three photographs in the leather frame. ‘It’s very important for a man to have a family. It gives him a wholly different anchorage in life. I well remember after all those years as a soldier, what a change it meant. Perhaps you don’t really appreciate it to the full until you have children of your own. You ought to get married. Then you have two essential things to live for, your work and your family. The family makes your work more worth while, even if as in my case, you sometimes don’t see all that much of them. You get a more definite understanding of what you’re working for, evidence that your aims really correspond to the work you do to achieve them.’

Willi Mohr was not listening. His cigarette had gone out and he was holding it between his fingers, staring at the portrait. It seemed to him that the Caudillo’s lips were moving, like the last time, and he did not like it.

‘Have you a fiancée in Germany perhaps?’ said Sergeant Tornilla.

‘No.’

‘Not even before either?’

‘Yes, perhaps, in a way. Once.’

‘A long time ago?’

‘During the war.’

‘You were in Poland in the war, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, in Gotenhafen.’

‘Was it a nice town?’

‘No, not especially. Rather small, wide streets and small, square houses. A very large harbour. Full of army people.’

‘I was in Poland once or twice too. My impression of the Poles was not particularly favourable. They seemed very hostile, almost irreconcilably. Like the Russians.’

‘They had good reason to be. It was an unjust war.’

‘That’s right. But why? Well, because it was lost. Even here that’s thought to be a historical truth now, although it’s admitted that the opposite result would have been better. The war became unjust the moment it was lost. And the result might well have been different.’

‘Don’t talk about the war,’ said Willi Mohr, crushing his cigarette-end out in the ash-tray.

Sergeant Tornilla pushed the packet of cigarettes across the desk and followed up with his lighter. Then he sat in silence and waited.

‘Gotenhafen was a dreadful town,’ said Willi Mohr. ‘I was there for a year, from February forty-four to January forty-five. Second Submarine Cadet Division. More than two thousand men, jammed into an ex-luxury liner which had been painted grey. Everything was grey, except the snow, and that turned grey too, as soon as it reached the ground. It was always windy and the whole of your damned war went through the town like an endless grey snake. Stores and tractors and hospital ships and grey boats which came and went and grey voices bawling out lies from a grey loudspeaker. And every night one lay in terror that they’d bomb the place and the ship would heel over and drown you. It did in the end, and drowned five thousand people, mostly women and children. And almost half of the Second Submarine Cadet Division.’

He fell silent.

‘What happened?’

‘The Russians torpedoed it, a Russian submarine.’

‘I’ve read about that. During the evacuation, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ruthless.’

‘Not at all. That’s your war, just as it should be. Anyhow, what d’you think one can see in a bloody great storm in the middle of the night? Woman and children? Huh.’

‘And what happened to you yourself?’

‘Nothing. Nothing happened to me. I never saw the enemy, not until the war was over, and then there weren’t any enemies any longer, were there? That’s the rules. I just saw thousands of grey people with grey faces. They came from somewhere or other and stood on the quays and waited in their tens of thousands. In snowstorms. Some died, I suppose. There were air-raids sometimes, so they say. But no bombs ever fell where I was, and I saw nothing. And the boat I was on got through. That was a liner painted grey too, but an older one. And it didn’t drown me.’

Unfortunately, thought Willi Mohr. And the next second he thought about himself talking like this with great surprise. He must pull himself together.

‘But you had a fiancée there?’

‘Yes, if you can call her that.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Barbara.’

‘German?’

‘Yes.’

‘Born in Gotenhafen?’

‘Posted there. Women’s Naval Corps.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Did she disappear after the torpedoing?’

‘I don’t know which boat she was on. Most got through. We were soldiers. Never knew anything about anything.’

‘You never met her again?’

‘No.’

‘Did you look for her?’

‘Everybody was looking for someone. But there was no one looking for everyone.’

‘And you loved each other?’

‘We made love.’

‘Do you mind talking about it?’

‘Not at all. But it’s not worth it.’

‘No, perhaps not,’ said Sergeant Tornilla.

He picked up a photograph and handed it over.

‘Do you recognize this man?’

A thin, ordinary Spanish face. Like a road-labourer’s, perhaps a little more lively.

‘No,’ said Willi Mohr.

‘Well then, so you sailed with Ramon Alemany for almost three weeks, nineteen days to be exact?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘No.’

Answer in monosyllables, thought Willi Mohr. Don’t let him get you talking again.

‘Let’s talk a little about the trip to Corsica. Was the weather good?’

‘I’m tired,’ said Willi Mohr. ‘I need some sleep.’

‘Naturally. I should have thought of that before. You can sleep here. Or would you rather go home?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want to go home?’

‘Yes.’

Sergeant Tornilla got up, smiled and held out his hand.

Willi Mohr swayed as he got up. He was drenched with sweat and everything blurred in front of his eyes. The other man looked exactly as he had done when he had got up from the armchair the first time, an eternity ago.

‘I’m sorry I’ve had to wear you out,’ he said. ‘And now, until the next time.’

He threw his hands out apologetically. Smiling.

Then he walked to the door and opened it politely.

Reprieve, thought Willi Mohr as he stood out in the porch. The dawn light hurt his eyes.

The sun had just risen behind the ridges on the sea side and
the mountainside was bathed in its clear white light. A little of the cool of the night remained and although it was already hot, the heat had not yet become oppressive. The long, low, yellow stone building of the guard-post appeared empty and dead, and the silence lay like a hood over the countryside. Willi Mohr stood quite still in the great dusty stillness and looked at the buildings which rose in a jumble beyond the olive-trees. This was the town up in the mountains. Here lived a number of priests and a doctor and some officers and policemen and naturally someone who owned the sheep and most of the land, and three thousand people too, simple and poor and happy over the miracle that they were allowed to create new families for this community. Most of them had fought for three years in the war to avoid experiencing this miracle.

He had lived here for more than a year, sufficiently long to get to know the milieu without breaking through or carrying out systematic studies. Now he was standing there, waiting for the town to wake, rise and cry out, not in revolt, but in an agony of death and despair.

He was beyond fatigue now, and could not control his thoughts, which had broken through the barriers and become impulsive and irrational.

Willi Mohr shrugged and began to walk along the road between the olive-groves. It was still straight and smooth but the rains of the last few months had crumbled the edges and washed away most of the gravel.

He looked straight ahead and walked through the town with long strides, calmly and mechanically. The only people he saw were two civil guards standing in the middle of a cross-roads staring out to the east. They were smoking and had leant their carbines against the low wall along the edge of the road.

He went into the house in Barrio Son Jofre and shut the door behind him without locking it. Dimly, he was aware that such details would no longer change or even influence his situation. He poured water into the bowl for the dog and gulped down what was left in the jar. Before he left the kitchen, he glanced at his watch. Nearly six o’clock. The interrogation had not been especially long, at the most three or four hours.

He did not bother to wash, but went back into the room and
lay down on his back on the mattress, his straw hat over his face, without undressing or taking off his sandals.

Thirty seconds later it struck him that they were going to kill him, presumably without telling him why and without giving him another opportunity to kill Santiago Alemany. But that did not matter any longer. He just wanted to sleep.

Just as he was about to fall asleep he thought once again about Barbara Heinemann.

In December 1944, Barbara Heinemann was just twenty-one and two years older than Willi Mohr. She was five-foot-eight, weighed ten stone and had fairish hair drawn into a small knot at the back of her neck. Dressed, she seemed plump, but that was largely due to her thick stockings and ill-fitting uniform. She did not have any special physical advantages, apart from her youth, but together with Willi Mohr she was undeniably beautiful. Once, when he had pointed this out to her, she looked in the spotted mirror on the wardrobe door and said: ‘Why, you’re quite right. I can even see it myself.’

The room was small and shabby and they had scrounged together three rolls of adhesive tape and an unwarrantable number of emergency rations to be able to rent it.

He slept with her sixteen times and before that he had had only a few misleading experiences from field-brothels, where the exhausted whores were shaved for hygienic reasons and usually refused to take off much more than their woollen bloomers.

Barbara was the first woman he had seen naked, and with astonishingly photographic clarity he could remember what she looked like, especially from behind.

It was snowing outside and the room was full of a greyish soft light. She was standing on the bare floorboards some way away from the bed, calm and relaxed, her head bowed and her arms hanging loosely at her sides. Her feet were slightly apart and she had lifted her right heel a few inches off the floor so that her knee was slightly bent and her weight was resting on her toes
and the front part of her foot. Her legs were not slim and nor were they exactly shapely, but they were quite long, with well-rounded calves and the muscles ran in soft ridges at the back of her knees. Although the distance between her heels was no more than an inch or so, her legs touched each other in one place only, a few inches below her crotch where two slight bulges caused the insides of her thighs to meet. Above this point he could see the daylight between her thighs and a few curly hairs outlined against the light background. Although her hips looked firm and reassuring, her backside was small and her buttocks firm and well-shaped, a horizontal crease below the left one making them look uneven in size and shape. The narrow cleft between them opened out into a diffuse cavity, soft and kindly, and farther up, on each side of the small of her back, were two dimples, irrationally placed with the left one higher and a little farther away from her spine. Her hips had no even curve, but ran in an irregular line which was both beautiful and inviolable and beyond all geometrical definition. Her shoulders were a little broader than her hips and the contour from armpit to waist was soft and pure and simple. Her shoulder-blades were like resting wings under the soft skin, and a little farther down, shadows gathered in a shallow hollow down her spine. Her arms looked loose and relaxed, and he could not see her hands as they were resting against the front of her thighs, just below her loins. Neither could he see her breasts, but he knew they were small with pale brown, quite circular nipples. She was standing quite still with her head bent forward and her eyes directed at some point on the floor, just in front of her and a little to the left.