We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [298]
He lost her in the crowd heading for the exit. Or perhaps he'd let her go deliberately. And perhaps she'd let him go too? Fires burned outside. He scanned the faces in the flickering light. Her? Or her? The young girl with the scarf around her head and her eyes fixed on the ground? Or the middle-aged woman with the hard face, trying to fix her smeared lipstick in the glow of burning houses? He didn't want to know. Both he and the unknown woman had found what they were looking for. Faces and names were irrelevant.
He stayed in London for three days.
He did it in back yards, in pub toilets, in hotel beds; he did it to the thunder of bombs and he did it without any accompaniment other than his own panting and that of his arbitrary partner; he did it until he reached a place where silence and darkness met and took him. He drank with men and he had sex with women who felt just the same way he did. When the bombs dropped, nobody knew who would shortly be joining the rapidly growing numbers of the dead, or whose workplace had been reduced to rubble or whose family was buried under a collapsed house. They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them. Every single second was a rebirth, every kiss a stay of execution, every shuddering breath in the arms of a stranger a declaration of love to life. Every drunken stupor—the permanent stupor he'd sought and found—was a gift, because just like a bullet to the brain, it eradicated all he was—his face, his name, his past—and unleashed all the hunger in his body. For three days he was his own ruthless appetite for life and nothing more.
On their last night they gathered up the remaining contents of their suitcases: underwear, nylon stockings, coffee, cigarettes, and dollars. Dollars especially. They behaved like Yanks and paid for a night in a hotel suite that took up an entire floor. They brought in the girls themselves and tipped the waiters generously. The porter kept an eye on their bar account to warn them when their money was running out. They ate, drank, danced, and whored through yet another night of bombing. Wally was in charge of the gramophone. They danced to Lena Horne and knocked back beer, whiskey, gin, and cognac.
The air-raid alarm went off at eleven o'clock. The waiters hammered on the door and called out to them to go to the basement.
"I suggest we stay here," Knud Erik said. He'd dropped the commando tone. He wasn't the captain now, but a mate among mates.
"Aye, aye, Captain." Wally saluted him and poured himself another cognac.
They switched off the light and opened the curtains. Outside, searchlights were strafing the night sky. The first bombs fell, far away to begin with, then closer. It sounded like a drummer testing his kit before his great solo. The building shook, and they dived under the beds. They knew that a mattress was no protection. But the intimacy of another body was. Their instincts took over: sex made them invincible.
The bombs came closer and closer. Outside a purple light flickered sporadically and a fiery glow dappled the ceiling. Every time common sense wormed its way into their muddled brains with the message that they should leave this minute and head for the safety of the basement, they grabbed their women tighter and thrust deeper, lust and fear driving them to ecstatic heights. Then they collapsed together, limp and exhausted, flung out their arms, and dozed briefly but blissfully, as if they'd already made it safely through the night.
But they hadn't. The bombs wouldn't let go of them. The fear returned, with its constant companion, ally, and friend: desire. From the darkness beneath a bed, someone would suggest, "Change? Who wants to swap?" And then a scramble would start, and they'd shuffle across the floor on their stomachs to a fresh, uncharted love nest, where new arms, a new greedy mouth, and new moist openings awaited, while the German bombers beat their kettledrums on the roofs