The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [23]
Evenings he and Hella kept to their room, lying together on the couch reading, the radio tuned to a German station that played soft music. When the last of the warm summer twilight died away they would look at each other and smile and go to bed. They would let the radio play until very late.
The floor on which they lived was quiet, but on the floors below parties went on night after night. In the summer evenings the sound of radios filled the Metzer Strasse, and jeeps loaded with Americans in their olive-green civilian uniforms, pretty, barelegged German girls on their laps, stopped in front of the building with a screaming of brakes and shrilling cries of the young women. The laughter and clinking of glasses carried out to passers-by who turned their heads curiously and cautiously as they went on down the street. Later they might hear Eddie Cassin cursing drunkenly as he fought with one of his girl friends outside the building. Sometimes the parties would break up early, and a late summer night breeze, its freshness tainted with the smell of rubble, would rustle leaves and branches of the trees that lined the street below.
On Sundays Hella and Frau Meyer prepared dinner in Meyer's attic apartment, usually a rabbit or duck that Eddie and Mosca drove out to a near-by farm to trade for, and with it garden vegetables from the same farm. Then gray German bread topped off with PX coffee and ice cream. When they had finished eating, Hella and Mosca would leave Eddie and Frau Meyer to their drinking and go for a long walk through the city, and beyond it to the flat, green countryside.
Mosca smoking his cigar, Hella wearing one of his starched, white shirts, sleeves rolled neatly up above the elbow, they would go up past the police building, its massive, green-colored concrete showing pray scars chipped out by the explosion and past the Glocke Building, a little farther on, which now housed the American Red Cross Club. In the square before it, children waited and begged for cigarettes and chocolate. Stubble-cheeked men in Wehrmacht caps and torn, dyed Army jackets picked up the butts as soon as one of the olive-drab GIs leaning against the building flicked it away. The GIs lounged easily, eyeing the women, picking out the Frauleins who passed by slowly as if walking on a treadmill, and who a short time later, circling the building, passed by again, and then again and again until it was like watching someone known riding a merry-go-round, the familiar face appearing inevitably before the watchful, expectant, and amused onlookers. In the warm summer afternoon the square was like a gay, thriving market place, making the day seem not like Sunday, taking away the Sunday atmosphere of quiet and suspended motion.
Great olive-drab Army busses and mud-covered trucks poured into the square every few minutes, bringing occupation troops from the hamlets surrounding Bremen and some from as far away as Bremerhaven. The GIs were natty in pressed olive drabs, the trouser legs tucked neatly into polished, mahogany-colored combat boots. There were English troops sweltering in their heavy woolens and beretiike headgear. American merchant mariners, wild looking in raggedy trousers and dirty sweaters and occasionally with bushy, full-grown beards, waited sullenly for MPs to check their papers before they could enter the building.
Sporadically the German police in their dyed, soldierlike uniforms cleared the square, shooing the child beggars down the many side streets, pushing the haggard-looking butt snipers to the far corner of the square, and then letting them rest on the steps of