The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [70]
Eddie showered and shaved and found himself hurrying, but he paused long enough to put a great deal of sweet-smelling talcum powder over his body and face. He combed his hair carefully, regretting its grayness on the sides, and in his room put on his olive-green officer's uniform with the civilian patch, knowing that he would not appear as old in her eyes in these as he would in civilian clothing.
There was a knock on the door and Fran Meyer came in. She was in a bathrobe. It was an old trick of hers. When she knew Eddie was bathing she would bathe also, and smelling sweetly of perfume come to the room as he was dressing. Usually it would work.
“Have you a cigarette for me, Eddie?” she asked and sat on the bed and crossed her legs. Eddie, tying his shoelaces, motioned toward the table. She took a cigarette, lit it, and sat again on the bed.
“You look very handsome; are you seeing someone?”
Eddie stopped for a moment, surveyed the almost-perfect body, the pleasant, buck-toothed face. It was known. He lifted her off the bed, carried her out of the room, and set her down in the hall. “Not today, baby,” he said and ran down the stairs and out of the building. There was a tremendous excitement and exultation in him, a quivering of the heart. He trotted up the Metzer Strasse, slowing to a quick walk as he came to the corner and, puffing a little, turned into the Kurfursten Allee.
As far as he could see, the trees along the Allee stood all alone, no children underneath them. The strip of grass was a continuous green line with no foreign body to mar its harmony with the trees above it. His eye singled out the exact spot in the row opposite him and it was as if it were a picture hanging on his wall, familiar, known every day, out of which the human figures he had always seen had magically faded. Eddie Cassin crossed the Allee and went to the nearest house. He knocked on the door and inquired in bad German about the girl taking care of four children, but no one knew anything about her, in that house or the others. The last house was an apartment billet for American civilians and the man who answered the door Eddie recognized as someone he had seen often at the Rathskellar. “No,” the man said, “she doesn't come from this street. The guys in here are laying all the dames in the block, and I know them all. I felt like going out myself. You're out of luck, fella.” And he grinned sympathetically at Eddie Cassin.
He stood in the center of the Allee, not knowing which way to go. The spring evening fell upon him, fresh breezes blowing away the afternoon heat On the other side of the Allee and beyond it, he could see the gardens with their newly sprouting green, the even patches and the mottled brown wooden and paper huts in which the gardeners kept their tools and in which some of them lived. He could see some men working in that small, farmlike area, and he could smell the river behind the hill which rose above the gardens. Patched through the rubble and from the sides of ruined houses he could see wild little streaks of dark green. He knew he would never see the girl again and would not recognize her if he did, but suddenly the exhilaration returned and he started the long walk down the whole length of the Kurfiirsten Allee until it ended where the city ended and he could see the country unmarked, the slightly rolling, restful hills, the moist green of spring over them like fresh-grown skin; and where no blemish of gray and blackened ruins could mar the beauty of the day.
That evening Hella tacked the woodcut illustrations of fairy tales on the walls. She had bought them for the coming child, she said, but Mosca felt that it was some sort of superstition, a magic that would make everything go well. When she finished she said, “I think we should go in to see Frau Saunders.
“Christ, I'm too tired tonight,” Mosca said. “We did a hell of a lot of work.”
Hella sat still on the