The Innocent (16 page)

Leonard pressed the light switch just as Mr. Blake rounded the corner of the half-landing. He took the final flight of stairs three at a time. He was in shirtsleeves and without a tie, and he had silver armbands around his biceps. His face was hard, emanating ferocious military competence, and his hands were tensed and open at the ready. He was prepared to do someone a lot of harm. When he arrived at the top of the stairs and took in Leonard, his face did not relax. Maria had let her handbag drop to the floor and had raised her hands to cover her nose and mouth. Blake took up a position between Leonard and Maria. His hands were on his hips. He already knew he was not going to have to hit anyone, and this added to his ferocity.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded of Leonard, and without waiting for a reply he turned away impatiently and confronted Maria. His voice was kindly. “Are you hurt? Has he tried to hurt you?”

“Of course I haven’t,” Leonard said.

Blake called over his shoulder, “Shut up!” and turned back to Maria. His voice was immediately kind again. “Well?”

He was like an actor in a wireless comedy, Leonard thought, doing all the voices. Because he did not like Blake standing between them like a referee, Leonard crossed the landing, pressing the light switch on his way to give them another ninety seconds. Blake was waiting for Maria to speak, but he
seemed to know that Leonard was coming up behind. He put out an arm to stop Leonard walking around him and going to Maria. She had said something Leonard had not caught, and Blake was replying in competent German. Leonard disliked him more. Was it out of loyalty to Leonard that Maria answered in English?

“I’m sorry to make this noise and bring you from your house. It’s something between us, that’s all. We can make it better.” She had taken her hands from her face. She picked up her handbag. Having it in her hands seemed to restore her. She spoke around Blake, though not quite to Leonard. “I’ll go inside now.”

Leonard took out his key and stepped around Maria’s savior to open the door. He leaned in and turned on his hall light.

Blake had not moved. He was not satisfied. “I could phone a taxi for you. You could sit with my wife and me until it comes.”

Maria crossed the threshold and turned to thank him. “You’re very kind. I’m okay now, see. Thank you.” She walked confidently along the hall of the apartment she had never visited, stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.

Blake stood at the head of the stairs with his hands in his pockets. Leonard felt too vulnerable, and too irritated by his neighbor, to offer further explanations. He stood irresolutely by his door, restrained from going indoors until the other man had gone away.

Blake said, “Women generally scream like that when they think they’re about to be raped.”

The ludicrous knowingness of the remark called for an elegant rebuttal. Leonard thought hard for several seconds. What impeded him was that he was being mistaken for a rapist when in fact he had almost been one. In the end he said, “Not in this case.” Blake shrugged to indicate his skepticism and descended the stairs. From then on, whenever the two men met by the lift, they did so in cold silence.

Maria had locked the bathroom door and washed her face. She lowered the lid on the toilet and sat there. She had surprised herself by her scream. She did not really believe that
Leonard had wanted to assault her again. His awkward and sincere apologies had been adequate guarantee. But the sudden darkness and his quiet approach, the possibilities, the associations, had been too much for her. The delicate equilibrium she had developed during three weeks in her parents’ stuffy apartment in Pankow had come apart at the touch of Leonard’s hand. It was like a madness, this fear that someone pretending affection should want to do her harm. Or that a malice she could barely comprehend should take on the outer forms of sexual intimacy. Otto’s occasional assaults, dreadful as they were, did not inspire anything like this sickness of fear. His violence was an aspect of his impersonal hatred and sodden helplessness. He did not wish to do her harm
and
long for her. He wanted to intimidate her and take her money. He did not want to get inside her, he did not ask her to trust him.

The trembling in her arms and legs had ceased. She felt foolish. The neighbor would despise her. In Pankow she had come slowly to the decision that Leonard was not malicious or brutal, and that it was an innocent stupidity that had made him behave the way he had. He lived so intensely within himself that he was barely aware of how his actions appeared to others. This was the benign judgment she had reached by way of much harsher evaluations and emphatic resolutions never to see him again. Now, with her scream in the dark, her instincts seemed to have overriden her forgiveness. If she could no longer trust him, and even if her mistrust was irrational, what was she doing in his bathroom? Why had she not accepted the neighbor’s offer of a taxi? She still wanted Leonard; she had realized that in Pankow. But what kind of man was it who crept up in the dark to apologize for a rape?

By the time she emerged ten minutes later, she had decided to talk to Leonard one more time and see what happened. She was not committed either way. She kept her coat on, buttoned up. He was in the living room. The overhead lights were on, and so were the Army issue standard and table lamps. He had taken up a position in the center of the room and looked, she thought as she came in, like a boy who had just had his backside
thrashed. He gestured toward a chair. Maria shook her head. Someone was going to have to speak first. Maria did not see why it should be her, and Leonard was wary of making another mistake. She came further into the room and he took a couple of steps back, unconsciously granting her more space and light.

Leonard had the outlines of a speech in mind, but he was not certain how it would go down. If Maria were to absolve him of the responsibility for further explanation by turning on her heel and slamming the front door on her way out, he would be relieved, at least initially. When he was alone, there was a sense in which he ceased to exist. Here, now, he had to take control of a situation without destroying it. Maria was watching him expectantly. She was offering another chance. Her eyes were bright. He wondered if she had been crying in the bathroom.

He said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He was tentative; it was almost a question. But she did not have an answer for him, yet. In all this time she had not spoken a word to him. She had spoken only to Mr. Blake. Leonard said, “I wasn’t going to … to do anything. I only wanted …” He was sounding implausible. He fumbled. To get up close in the dark and hold her hand, that was all he had wanted, to illuminate with the old terms of touch. It was his unexamined assumption that he was safer under cover. He could not tell her, he hardly knew it himself, that the chance darkness on the landing was one with the gloom under the covers in the coldest week of winter, back in the old familiarity when everything had been new. The blade of calluses on her toe, the mole with two hairs, the minuscule dents on her lobes. If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn’t with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of him, they came as easily as breath. “I love you,” he said, and then he said it again, and repeated it in German until he had expunged the last traces of self-consciousness, the wincing foolishness of the
formula, until it was clean and resonant, as though no one in life or in films had ever uttered it before.

Then he told her how miserable he had been without her, how he had thought about her, how happy he had been before she went away, how happy he thought they both had been, how precious and beautiful she was, and what an idiot, a selfish, ignorant fool, he had been to frighten her. He had never said so much in one go. In the pauses, when he was searching for the unfamiliar, intimate phrases, he pushed his glasses up his nose, or took them off, examined them closely and replaced them. His height seemed to work against him. He would have sat down if only she had.

It was almost unbearable to watch this clumsy, reticent Englishman who knew so little about his feelings lay himself open. He was like a prisoner in a Russian show trial. Maria would have told him to stop, but she was fascinated, the way she had been once as a girl when her father had removed the back of a wireless set and shown her the bulbs and sliding metal plates responsible for human voices. She had not lost touch with her fear, even though it was diminishing with each halting intimacy. So she listened, betraying nothing by her expression while Leonard told her once more that he did not know what had come over him, that he had not meant her harm, and that it would never, ever, happen again.

Finally he ran out. The only sound was that of a scooter on Platanenallee. They listened to it changing down at the end of the road and pulling away. The silence made Leonard think he was doomed. He could not bring himself to look at her. He took off his glasses and polished them on his hankie. He had said too much. It had sounded dishonest. If she went now, he thought, he would take a bath. He wouldn’t drown himself. He glanced up. Around the elongated blur that represented Maria in his field of vision there was discernible movement. He returned the glasses to his face. She was unbuttoning her coat, and then she was crossing the room toward him.

L
eonard was walking along the corridor from the water fountain to the recording room, a route that took him past Glass’s office. The door was open and Glass was behind his desk. Immediately he was on his feet and waving Leonard in.

“Good news. We ran the checks on that girl. She’s cleared. She’s okay.” He was pointing at a chair, but Leonard remained leaning in the doorway.

“I told you that in the first place.”

“That was subjective. This is official. She’s a nice-looking girl.
The CO and the second-in-command out at this toytown repair outfit have both got the hots for her in their own British way. But she plays it very straight.”

“You met her then.” Leonard already knew from Maria about the three interviews with Glass. He did not like it. He hated it. He had to hear about it.

“You bet. She told me that you two were having some trouble and that she was staying out of your way. I told her, ‘What the fuck, we’re spending valuable man-hours checking you out because you’re stepping out with one of our guys, the closest we’ve ever seen to a genius, godammit, who’s doing very important work for his country and mine.’ This was after I knew she was okay. I said, ‘You just propel your ass around to his apartment and make it up. Herr Marnham isn’t the kind of guy you mess around with. He’s the best we got, so you better count yourself a privileged lady, Frau Eckdorf!’ Did she come back?”

“The day before yesterday.”

Glass whooped and started to laugh in a theatrical way. “There, see? I did you a big favor, I built you up, you got her back. Now we’re even.”

All very childish, Leonard thought, this locker-room treatment of his private life. He said, “What happened at these interviews?”

The speed of Glass’s transition from hilarity to seriousness was in itself a kind of mockery. “She told me you started acting rough. She had to run for her life. Listen, I keep underestimating you, Leonard. That’s quite an act you keep hidden there. At work you’re Mr. Meek and Mild, then you go home and wham! It’s King Kong.”

Glass was laughing again, genuinely this time. Leonard was irritated.

Last night Maria had told him all about the security check, which had rather impressed her. Now Glass was back behind his desk, and still Leonard could not dispel his doubts. Could he really trust this man? It was undeniable: one way or another, Glass had climbed into bed with them.

When the laughter had stopped Leonard said, “It’s not something I’m proud of.” Then he added, with what seemed the correct degree of menace, “Actually, I’m pretty serious about this girl.”

Glass stood up and reached for his jacket. “I would be too. She’s a honey, a real honey.” Leonard stood aside while he locked his office. “What is it I heard one of your people saying once—a proper little darling?”

Glass put his hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and walked with him along the corridor. The Cockney imitation was half-hearted, deliberately appalling, Leonard thought. “C’mon, cheer up. Let’s go an’ ’ave a nice cuppa tea.”

L
eonard and Maria began again on different terms. As the summer of 1955 got under way, they were dividing their time more equally between his apartment and hers. They synchronized their arrivals home from work. Maria cooked, Leonard washed the dishes. On the weekday evenings they walked to the Olympic Stadium and swam in the pool, or, in Kreuzberg, walked along the canal, or sat outside a bar near Mariannenplatz, drinking beer. Maria borrowed bicycles from a cycling club friend. On weekends they rode out to the villages of Frohnau and Heiligensee in the
north, or west to Gatow to explore the city boundaries along paths through empty meadows. Out here the smell of water was in the air. They picnicked by Gross-Glienicke See under the flightpath of RAF planes, and swam out to the red-and-white buoys marking the division of the British and Russian sectors. They went on to Kladow by the enormous Wannsee and took the ferry across to Zehlendorf and cycled back through ruins and building sites, back into the heart of the city.

Friday and Saturday evenings they went to the pictures on the Ku’damm. Afterward they jostled with the crowds for a table outside Kempinski’s, or they went to their favorite, the smart bar at the Hotel am Zoo. Often they ended up late at night eating a second dinner at Aschinger’s, where Leonard liked to gorge himself on yellow pea soup. On Maria’s thirty-first birthday they went to the Maison de France for dinner and dancing. Leonard did the ordering in German. Later the same night they went on to Eldorado to see a transvestite cabaret in which completely convincing women sang the usual evergreens to a piano and bass accompaniment. When they got home, Maria, still tipsy, wanted Leonard to squeeze into one of her dresses. He was having none of that.