Ask No Question Page 5

  ‘I hope you haven’t acquired a taste for depravity?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  Burke looked at him; in spite of his enjoyment he was still a little incredulous.

  ‘There’s nothing else? No other angle?’

  Mitchell remained silent. Burke turned away and reached for his jacket. He eased it on slowly and stood looking at himself in the mirror, his thin face flushed, the eyes bright with triumph.

  ‘I think dinner now, don’t you?’

  Mitchell answered, ‘Not for me.’

  When Burke had gone he sat down on the bed. His body was drenched with sweat and he felt sick and shaken, but not violently antagonistic towards Burke. He was a patient man, slow to anger. On the whole he blamed himself for what had happened. It had been unintelligent to attack Burke without realizing that his own role in the affair might be questioned. Well, nothing could be done about that now. It had been an unpleasant incident, but it was over; no doubt Miriam Kratz would be on her way back to Berlin tomorrow. The really disturbing thing was that he had discovered that Burke hated him. It was not his habit to analyze people, so he did not ask why this should be so; he simply noted Burke’s hatred and accepted it as a factor to be taken into account from now on. He waited until he was sweating less freely, then he went along to his own room, washed and changed his shirt. He still felt rather sick and the thought of food was unpleasant. Nevertheless, it would be better not to leave Burke alone for too long. Even if it was not possible to cement the breach, some kind of short-term repair must be effected without delay.

  Perhaps the same thought had been passing through Burke’s mind for he greeted Mitchell warmly when he came into the dining room.

  ‘You’re just in time to choose the wine. What shall it be? Valpolicella?’

  Chapter Seven

  Some time during the night the storm wore itself out. The temperature dropped and the air became fresh. Miriam Kratz shifted in her bed and the coverlet slipped slowly to the floor. Immediately she was awake, sitting up, her hands clutching frantically. Then, as she leant forward, she saw the pattern of moonlight on the ground and raising her head she saw through the open window a few rags of cloud strewn across a dark, star-pierced sky. The open window was a reassuring sight, but her nightmare was not so easily dispelled. She compressed her lips tightly and crouched forward, every muscle braced to control her body. But it was no use; the shaking began, as always, in her thighs and quickly spread like a living thing crawling across her body, agitating muscles in her stomach, her breasts, her forearms. She lay back, pulling the blanket over her, trying to get warmth to fight this terrible agitation. Every muscle in her body jerked now and her teeth chattered; the twitching of her thighs was particularly unpleasant. She turned over and lay face down, pressing against the mattress. For a moment, the shaking seemed to ease, then the violent twitching in her thighs started again.

  She tried to think of her mother. Mikail had told her that her mother was the first human being she had known and that her mother had loved her. ‘Before everything else, there was love,’ he had said. Her mind accepted that this was possible, but her emotions told her that the first human being she had known was the woman in the top bunk at Auschwitz. She knew very little about her except that the woman wanted her blanket. At night, she would see an arm, thin as a withered branch, hanging above her face, the fingers clawing. When Miriam was ill, the woman took the blanket. She said, ‘The child is dead now.’ The others made her give it back. ‘They were good to you,’ Mikail told her. ‘They looked after you.’ But it was only the woman she remembered. Once, when Mikail had come to bed late she had gone for him like a madwoman when he pulled back the sheets, tearing his face with her nails. He had taken her in his arms then, eased the shaking of her limbs with the warmth of his body, comforted her with his love. But he was not here now.

  Surprisingly, this thought calmed her because it reminded her that if she became ill there would be no one to work for Mikail. She had learnt to put him before everything, even before the child who at this moment would be asleep in Mikail’s parents’ house in East Berlin. Now, as she fought back the panic which made her body more agitated than ever, she repeated his name over and over again. Gradually warmth returned to her limbs and the shaking stopped. She could not sleep any more, but she lay for a while looking at the open window. Open windows seemed a luxury to her.

  In the morning and in the evening, she always set aside a few minutes when she thought about Mikail. She told herself that, wherever he was, he would do the same thing. Although she knew that a stage could be reached when morning and evening were indistinguishable, she refused to consider the possibility that this had happened to Mikail. Now, as she watched the sky grow pale beyond the window, she told herself that he would be thinking of her. She closed her eyes. It had been very difficult at first to imagine that, although separated, they could still be together; she had missed the comfort of his body so terribly that no other kind of communication seemed possible. But as time went by, she sometimes felt his presence in the first morning freshness. After these quiet moments she usually felt better, as if she had drawn strength from him. Lately, however, it had begun to occur to her that it was she who should give to him. The idea of giving was new, she was not at all sure how to set about it. On this particular morning, she solved the problem by lying spreadeagled on the bed, a position in which she felt cold and unpleasantly vulnerable. In spite of her discomfort, she held the position for a quarter of an hour. Nothing spectacular happened. She heard the first footsteps in the street, the clatter of a dustbin lid, someone shouting at an alley cat. Alley cats had a bad time everywhere, it seemed. The sounds receded, the outline of the window blurred, her body seemed to be drifting somewhere beyond her reach. This feeling that her body had become separated from her was very real; she could see it lying on the crumpled sheet, a frame of bone through which only the morning breeze stirred to give an illusion of life. It seemed that she must make a tremendous mental effort to regain possession of her body. Her mind struggled across the ceiling, along the wall, down the iron post of the bed, and then at last the tension was broken by a long sigh. The rib cage expanded and contracted, the hands twitched, and somewhere in the distance, a church clock chimed six. Miriam sat up.

  ‘I shan’t do that again!’ she grumbled.

  Her limbs were stiff and her body heavy, in spite of the breeze the room seemed airless and she could only draw breath with difficulty. She sat on the edge of the bed, hoping she was not going to be ill. There was no water in the bedroom. Normally this would not have disturbed her, but at this moment it seemed to matter a lot. She dragged herself to her feet and went to the door. In the corridor she saw that a jug of water and a bowl had been set down two doors away. She picked them up and returned to her room; the water was lukewarm and there was a dead fly in it, but nevertheless she felt refreshed when she had washed and stepped into her dress.

  Her feet ached. She had walked a lot the day before, searching for the hotel where Mitchell and Burke were staying. She put the bowl on the floor and then sat on the bed, her feet in the water. She picked up her handbag and counted her money. As she had suspected, there was not enough to pay for her lodgings. She sat absently studying her feet, wondering what to do about money. It had been necessary to steal in order to get here, but now that there was no particular urgency she did not want to risk stealing again. It would not help Mikail if she was sent to prison in Switzerland. There was always Stephen Mitchell. If she asked him for the money he would probably give it to her, he was the charitable kind. But she was reluctant to ask him; she still had the feeling that he might be useful to her in more important ways. She thought about the proprietress. The woman was Italian and Miriam had a vague idea that this might be used to advantage, Italians having a reputation for being warmhearted.

  She waited until seven o’clock, then she took the bowl and tipped the dirty water down the lavatory, replacing the empty jug and bow
l in their original position. She padded swiftly down the stairs, wondering how she could ingratiate herself with the proprietress. But the big woman who met her in the hall and demanded immediate payment had the look of a business woman in her black, beady eyes. It would be no good appealing to her mercy.

  ‘I have breakfast before I pay,’ Miriam said firmly. One should eat before battle.

  ‘Breakfast is seven francs,’ the woman told her.

  ‘That is all right.’

  Seven francs, seventeen francs, it made no difference when you weren’t going to pay anyway. Miriam walked into the dingy courtyard where meals were served and settled herself at a table. As it might be a long time before she had another meal, she told the waiter that a friend would be joining her and ordered breakfast for two.

  Burke was tired of the continental breakfast. Apparently this was something that had been coming over him for years but he had not told anyone about it until now. He waxed eloquent on the subject. Mitchell listened with more attention than would have been necessary in the days when their relationship was casual and easy. They were condemned from now on to a meticulous consideration of each other’s feelings. It was a relief when Alperin came in.

  After Alperin had ordered breakfast and his coffee had been brought to him, Burke left the dining room and made some loud and rather ill-tempered enquiries at the reception desk nearby. Eventually he was given a boat timetable to study. There was a longish pause before he returned.

  ‘Find anything?’ Mitchell asked him later when they were waiting for the nine o’clock boat.

  ‘Only a letter waiting to be posted.’

  At this moment Alperin reached the ticket office and they broke off their conversation to listen. Alperin bought a return ticket, stating that he was going as far as Stresa. Burke sighed: Stresa was a long way down the lake, a day’s trip there and back. Mitchell diverted his attention by asking him about the letter.

  ‘It was to Professor Schaffer at Bonn. I didn’t read it all—there wasn’t much time, the chambermaids were doing the rooms—but there was a reference to the need for a change of air. I told you he went in for clichés.’

  ‘I don’t know how you work so quickly,’ Mitchell said. ‘There’s no one to touch you in Europe.’

  Burke was pleased. For a time after they had settled themselves on the top deck of the boat, he was quiet. He had intended to needle Mitchell with occasional oblique references to his affair with Miriam Kratz, but the sun was gentle and the air still fresh after the storm, so he decided to make it a peaceful day. Peace could be pleasant in small doses: Miriam Kratz was not pleasant. In spite of his decision to say nothing about her, he found it difficult to get her out of his mind. During the war he had been involved in an unspectacular way with an escape organization that had not done as much as it might have done for the Jews. He told himself that there were good reasons for this, the European Jew was an undeserving specimen; nevertheless, he always felt on the defensive where the Jews were concerned. He shifted his position on the hard, slatted seat and his thin fingers tightened on the rail of the boat. Miriam Kratz was scum. It was presumptuous to the point of arrogance that she should be so persistent about her husband’s fate. Mikail Kratz was neither politically significant nor scientifically useful; he was just an unknown doctor who practiced in a poor district and who had been foolish enough to attend to a wanted man. Who did she think was going to take up his cause? True, he had been in Dachau and there were still a few who remembered him and said that he was a good man. But the concentration camps had exhausted their emotional appeal and goodness was not a commodity of any interest to governments. Why didn’t the woman accept defeat and return to her child instead of staying in the West, making a nuisance of herself? Sweat broke out in his armpits, at the backs of his knees. The morning freshness was giving way to the usual breathless heat; the mist was forming again and the water was very calm. Mitchell was taking snaps of a child who was waving from the quayside at Porto Ronco; he was snapping away with the wasteful enthusiasm of the tourist. Burke, reminded that he, too, had a part to play, unbuttoned his shirt and displayed white, reluctant flesh to the devouring sun. He hoped his next assignment would take him to the Arctic Circle.

  The lake widened beyond Luino and the pattern of water, coast and island became more intricate. There were many inlets and the coast receded into haze and materialized again where one least expected it; solitary mountains reared up, seeming to have no base but the water; islands appeared and drifted by.

  ‘This is nearly as bad as the Hebrides,’ Burke complained. ‘You can’t tell where the coast stops and the islands begin.’

  Alperin seemed to know. As the boat approached Isola Madre they saw him on the deck below, at the front of the group waiting to disembark. Burke studied the guidebook. ‘Another botanical garden!’

  ‘He can’t get into much trouble there,’ Mitchell said. ‘Suppose we go on to Pallanza.’

  They landed fifteen minutes later and ate their packed lunches at a café overlooking the lake. Light glared from the stone promenade and the metal table was almost too hot to touch. Mitchell sat back in the canvas chair watching a Frenchwoman at a nearby table. She was very poised, sitting with her head tilted slightly, pensively watching the smoke rising from her cigarette. He appreciated the accomplished way in which, without once looking in his direction, she managed to convey the fact that she was aware of him. Burke, too, watched the woman. She was the kind of woman he had dreamt of as a young man before he had learnt that he could not hope for much except the occasional kindness of a good-hearted whore such as Lottë. He picked up his glass of beer and drank; the beer was warm and flat. He was nauseated by everything; by the sweat of his own body, by the greasy paper bag containing the moistly buttered bread, by the strong-smelling cheese and, most of all, by Mitchell and the woman. He took the last roll and examined its contents without much hope.

  ‘My stomach is beginning to rebel against salami.’

  Mitchell said idly, ‘Anyone can tell you’ve never lived rough.’

  Burke crumpled the offending paper bag and stuffed it and the roll back in the carrier.

  ‘Are you about to recount your wartime adventures?’

  Mitchell winced at the acidity of the tone. ‘For pity’s sake, Dan! What’s got into you now?’

  ‘Don’t be so damnably superior!’

  Mitchell shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can’t keep up with you; I’m much too slow-witted.’

  ‘But then you have your beautiful, strong body.’

  Mitchell turned his head away and looked across the lake.

  ‘You do that kind of thing superbly.’ Burke’s voice was amused, but his eyes were dark and his lips chiselled the words to a fine edge. ‘But as a gesture it’s dated. In fact, you’re a trifle dated yourself. Did you know that?’ Mitchell continued to look at the lake; the sun was at its zenith now and the light glittered painfully. ‘You think I’m odd?’ Burke began to peel a banana. ‘But it’s you who are the odd one, my gallant Stephen. This is the age of the twisted, the deformed, the age of the pervert . . . you should know, you’ve lived in Berlin. But you don’t look about you. If you did you would realize that you are out of place. For one thing, your comfortable upper-middle-class background is hopelessly wrong; people aren’t interested in you nowadays unless you’ve elbowed your way out of a council estate with enough resentment in your belly to keep it rumbling for the rest of your life. The world has changed a lot since you and Claus were the kind that mattered.’ Needles of light stabbed into Mitchell’s eyes, a red mist blurred his vision; but he went on staring at the lake, forcing himself to concentrate on the pain in his eyes. Burke, exhausted and feeling suddenly rather foolish, finished his beer and beckoned to the waitress. When he had paid, he said:

  ‘I think that’s the boat coming from Isola Madre now.’

  They walked away without looking at the woman.

  As they stood waiting for the boat, Mitchell wondered how muc
h more of this he could stand. Burke’s venomous bouts were not entirely new; in the past Mitchell had been one of the few men who could cope with him at such times. But now the poison had begun to sting. The boat came alongside. It was one of the small motor boats which ferried between the islands and there were not many people on it. Mitchell, however, was still thinking about Burke as he boarded the boat and it was not until a few minutes later that he noticed Alperin sitting in the prow talking to another man. Beside Mitchell, Burke swore softly, ‘Jesus wept!’

  At that moment Alperin looked up and saw them; his companion saw them, too. Neither registered much pleasure. Mitchell, on the other hand, appeared to be as delighted as if this was the moment for which he had waited all day. He waved and pushed past the rows of seats to where Alperin was sitting.

  ‘We seem to be following each other around.’ He put one foot on the bench beside Alperin, crouched forward and pointed his camera at the receding shore. ‘People tell me I ought to get a range finder, but I don’t think there’s anything like your own judgment, provided you have a good eye.’ He took a few shots and sat down, folding his camera into the case. ‘I’ve been trying Agfacolor for a change. Friend got some good results with it recently and I thought the colours were very soft . . . just right here.’ He gazed over the water at the hills, pale indefinite outlines which would elude all but the finest camera lens. ‘Not like Southern Italy, colours are so much stronger there. Wonderful country, Italy, don’t you think? Everything so warm and rich, and yet such tremendous contrasts. I mean, compare this with Amalfi.’ He turned to Alperin who drew back hastily. ‘You know Amalfi?’