A Dark Song of Blood Read online

  “Have you lost weight, Martin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re pale, I can see the veins in your temples. Is that a scar on your neck?”

  “It’s nothing. From the windshield when it burst.”

  She looked away. As the street curved, sunlight suddenly became caught in the crisp fleece of her neck: the sight of it, the pouting curve of her lips etched against the cold brightness of day, filled his mouth with moisture. Lavish and fair, lavish and fair. He had a shameless want to lick her face slowly, to seek her mouth and unseal it again, crazed into strange images of intimacy that drained his face of blood. Dikta knew, of course, but did nothing about it until they were in the hotel, past the lobby where other officers turned to glance at her. In the elevator she unexpectedly reached for his inner thigh and kissed him, behind the back of the round-shouldered lift boy.

  After the bedroom door closed they embraced greedily, speaking over each other’s mouth now, but already lips, hands, motions lost kindness, hard body parts chafed raw in the frantic silent grind of clothes until Benedikta let skirt and underskirt drop around her ankles, and her fully dressed torso over near-naked hips was outrageous and irresistible. Bora felt the skin of her thighs and lost his head. He freed himself only of that part of his uniform that was necessary, forgetful of the crude tearing of silk over the moist, deep stricture of her body.

  She was amused at his embarrassment afterwards. Carelessly she gathered the rent handful of her underwear at her feet and stepped toward the bathroom. “Don’t apologize, Martin. It has been a whole year, after all. I ought to keep this as a souvenir, you’re always so level-headed otherwise.”

  Bora stood ashamed in the wetness of his clothes, watching her get ready for a shower. He regretted this mode of encounter, not just the quickness of it, as demeaning. Because he loved her, his heart ached for slower and more accomplished love, but Dikta was fast in and out of her urge. He felt exhilarated and aroused again at the sight of her water-sleek body when she lathered herself and with self-indulgence ran her hands on breasts, thighs and knees. He longingly wondered how her tight belly would grow to hold a child of his blood. By next Christmas, why not? It made him dizzy to consider it may have happened even now, by what translucent moisture had raced from him into her. So quickly, so quickly. The latency of life in his precarious self made all dangers to it bearable, even irrelevant: and she was precious many times over.

  He watched her. The silence outside of the room was only broken by the rhythmic step and singing of the SS column daily marching for its training up from Via Rasella.

  Emerging as from a warm rain, Benedikta gathered her hair to squeeze out its excess moisture. “Get ready, Martin, won’t you?”

  As they drove out to the restaurant – she did not want Italian food, so they drove to the Corso for Hungarian fare – he could think of nothing else. When a young pregnant woman walked in the restaurant he blushed hard, though his wife did not notice.

  By mid-afternoon they were back at the hotel. Benedikta joked that he should look at her less and eat more. From the suitcase open on the bed she began to take out her clothes, with little buffs of the hands smoothing them and placing them aside. Her perfume rose at each unfolding, as if her motions were scent itself. “Thanks for the beautiful roses,” she said. “And for coming to the station.”

  “How could you think I wouldn’t be there?”

  She smiled after a moment of silent arraying of clothes. “Well, considering... But I’m glad you didn’t mention it at all while we were out, Martin.”

  “Didn’t mention what?” he asked, conscious that she might speak of children, or lovemaking. He lit a cigarette for her, stretching it to her across the bed. “I believe we’re both thinking of it.”

  “But you’re so stoic. It’s wonderful how you take adversity.”

  “Oh, that. I have little choice in the matter, Dikta.”

  She took a drag, and then balanced the cigarette on the ashtray’s rim. When she leaned over the suitcase, her torso bloomed in a desirable curve under the blouse. “What I mean is that you’re not angry with me.”

  “Why should I be?”

  This time she looked up from the clothes. Her eyelids fluttered, although she still smiled. “Well, considering what I wrote to you, of course.”

  Bora felt a thin line of discomfort stretch within him, unwarranted yet but noxious. Arousal decreased sharply with it; a state of warning took its place. He said, “I was reassigned suddenly; my last mail hasn’t been forwarded. I don’t necessarily know what you mean.”

  The brightness of the dress she was holding crumpled like a bird in her hand. “Oh, Martin.” She slowly sat on the bed. “Don’t tell me you haven’t read it!”

  “What is it, what did you write to me?”

  “You don’t even know why I’m here, then.”

  A nervous smothering of her cigarette in the ashtray was all that passed before she spoke to Bora again, eyes averted. The room shrank before him as if she were the only thing of notice in it, the most disquieting and terrible one. She dealt him the blow quickly. “I petitioned the Vatican for an annulment. It’s almost certain that it will go through, and I understand how you must feel, but there is no point arguing over it.”

  Bora had no need to convince himself that he had heard right: he knew he had.

  “Oh Christ.”

  She glanced his way, less apologetic. “Of course I know Catholics don’t divorce, so I thought that since you’re Catholic, this really leaves you free to marry again. I did it for you, Martin. I could have done otherwise, but I was thoughtful, and it’s for the best. And anyway, it’s your nature to get over things. You’ll get over this. You simply will.” Because he did not approach the bed, she cowardly confronted him. “The reason is not that you’re maimed.” She saw the blood rush to his face at her words and justified herself. “Well, you have lost a hand.” Her voice rose in defense, trembling a little. “I had made up my mind even before that. And it really doesn’t matter now, does it? You’re the one who is stoic, I’m not. I don’t take adversities well, you know I don’t. I don’t even like them, and walk away from them. You never asked me if I’d grown tired of waiting, and I’m sick of it.”

  “Do you think I have control over this war?”

  “Then you shouldn’t have married me. You know I lose interest quickly. Had you any sense, you would have understood.” She grabbed clothes out of the suitcase, crushing them in hand. Breathlessly, she gave him no room to speak. “I always had fun in my life, and I always got what I wanted. You knew all that before you married me. You knew it. The war has ruined everything, and you’ve been in it from the start. I’m sure you like it. More power to you, go ahead and like your war, but don’t ask me to be a part of it. Why should I be sacrificed, when I don’t even believe in sacrifices? Why should I? I have too much to live for, Martin. I do. I can’t be caught in a marriage until this is over.”

  That she could keep from crying was incredible to him, because Bora felt torn apart.

  “You wanted to marry!”

  “It was something to do. Everybody got married in those days. But the war was supposed to end in months, not five years!”

  Bora sensed the intolerable uselessness of words even as he spoke them. “How have I failed you, other than I had to be away – and you knew I would, you knew when you married me that I was a career man and would be gone. I spent every moment of leave with you, I wrote to you every day I physically could, even from Russia. I’ve been faithful to you these five years, for God’s sake. I lived to see you again, no matter what happened!”

  He could see now what the hardness in her eyes had meant, what their brightness meant to him. “Well, pity it was all one-sided and I never agreed to it. Or if I said I did, I didn’t mean it, which is the same, and you’re an intelligent man, you should have seen through it.” She stood, staring him down. “And don’t say you didn’t have lovers; men always do when they go to war
. If you didn’t, it’s still not enough. In five years we spent two or three months together, and not all at once. What kind of marriage is that? I never cared for long-distance affairs. I can’t accept them. I realize you love me and it makes it difficult, but it’s done and you will just have to face reality as you always do.”

  Bora could not remember a time he’d raised his voice with her. “How can you tell me I have to face this well?” he shouted. “You goddamn well know I’m not going to take this well! We haven’t even talked it over; what about what I have to say? You can’t just decide for both of us on your own!”

  “I have.” She was unfolding a document, and laid it on the quilts for him to pick up. “Mother called from her winter house in Lisbon. That’s where I’m going next. I’m only here for the paperwork.”

  Bora would not touch the paper, nor look at it. “Would you stay had I not been wounded?”

  “It’s a hypothetical question – there’s no such alternative.”

  “But I must know, by God! Would you stay?”

  “Maybe. But that can’t be helped, you see?” She again sat on the bed, her altered profile barely visible to him. “It’d have been better had you died. For both of us. Had you died I wouldn’t have to go through all this. I’m trying to be nice about it, but you make it so difficult by not accepting it as you should if you were sensible.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t die.”

  And it was no use saying more, because logic had nothing to do with this except for what she wanted. What she wanted was not him, and it was all there was. Loyalty and commitment meant nothing if she had never partaken of those. Bora ached terribly at the sight of the framework of her mind, exposed as miserly and uncomplicated, bare, a cheap machine. What Dikta wanted was shamelessly simple, but not his to give.

  They spent the next hour in complete silence, she seated on the bed, Bora standing against the sill with his back to the muting glare of the window, until daylight grew faint and relinquished the room. His wholeness was scattered all over, as far as his mind could go – strands of him, loose ends, strange pieces, and he would need to pick them up and braid them back together to reshape his balance.

  How the person here seemed different from the person who uttered the words, he thought: they were somehow removed from her, like a cause remote already and no longer assailable. Could a separate peace be made with the woman here? Instead of coming together, certainties fell away from him, a sore shedding as a scab lifted from the wound exposes fresh and raw layers. Guilt entered resentment, and this slid and drowned into an anguished sense of being adrift. He felt lost but for the anchorage of the windowsill. Lost, lost. Immense distance lay between him and the bed, unbridgeable, though he may travel to it. The sill was really a part of the outside, not of the room. She was the room, a continent in the darkness – edged with high cliffs and perilous shores, largely unknown. How had his heart not told him?

  Only from the rustle of clothes he perceived Dikta was undressing and getting into bed, with the familiar sounds of their nights together. Against himself and the aghast disbelief and bitterness of his mind, he felt a wave in the flesh again creep up his thighs at the memory, decidedly painful this time.

  Still he stood until she called out to him. Then blood began to sing its dark song which was like a hum, a wordless sustained note that pushed ahead in the veins, until all veins also sang, and the voices multiplied in him. Known voices of killing, children-making and proving oneself. She cared for none of these. But in his belly the song was black and it fed and fueled and filled him up, and yet it remained hungry. Her summons angered him only because he feared she wouldn’t invite him again if he refused. He imagined her nakedness in the sheets, hating himself for being like all men, whose resolve counts for nothing when their body is strongest and crazed.

  “Come to bed, Martin.”

  The song inside strained high. It hammered, but he was heeding an unstrung desperate desire to change her mind instead. Deadly sadness and that unstrung desperate want made him strip and climb alongside her in the great bed, where he suffered her to slide her hands and mouth down the lean fore of his belly.

  In the morning, Benedikta lay with the sheet between her legs, and these crossed at the ankles. Propped against the pillows, her torso was pink and opalescent in the early light, the nipples diverged on her young breast, brightly pert and narrow of areolas as in women who have never given birth. A fine blond down lined the seam of her belly under the navel, and to it like a tired narrow wave came the twisted sheet, covering her sex.

  “Give me a cigarette,” she said.

  Bora sat at the foot of the bed, facing her, and still was startled by her voice. Dressed already, he struck a strange image of order on the upheaval of the bed. It was the last time, he was thinking, that it would disconcert him how without foreplay Benedikta sought intercourse, in her callous need for lovemaking – how their lying together was then agile but hard, not a lying together at all, wordless, a back-breaking struggle that left them sore in the wet space of the bed.

  Some moisture still lined the inner part of her thighs, milky and delicate. Bora felt a void melancholy for it, much like regret. He lit a cigarette for his wife and offered it to her.

  “I’m sorry for the way you had to hear it, Martin.”

  “Up front, you mean?” Pitilessly reflected in the mirror, his face came into a shaft of window light as he sat back, and the expression on it was a stern army mask. “I’d rather.” A small contraction of the jaw when he spoke was all she likely could perceive of him. “May I at least know why, really?”

  “I told you why. We have nothing in common, really.”

  “And we’ve been married five years, with nothing in common?”

  “What we had together were those few weeks of leave, that’s all.” She prevented whatever else he was about to say. “I’m not interested in sharing your mind and heart, Martin – I don’t care to talk to you by phone, or read your letters from the front. I want someone with me now. Surely, you lived for those furloughs – when all was said and done they always came down to what’s between your legs and mine, and though you dress it up you need it greatly. It’s true.” She shrugged, and then relaxed her shoulders. “Even though you’re a good lover – I’m going to miss that. You’re the best lover I’ve had.”

  Her compliment hurt him, whether it was from a mercenary ground that it came, or because he was sensitive and the animal quality of her assessment of him left him bruised and vulnerable. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Well, I’ll miss it.”

  “How can this be all? I loved you aside from sex.”

  “I understand all that. It still doesn’t change a thing. There’s no room for appeal, since I spelled out to the Church my reasons – my faults, if you wish – and the marriage will be more than dissolved. It will never have existed.” Her cheeks narrowed as she inhaled deeply. “As for what you wanted this time... People told me you would, since you’ve been wounded. All you men do these days, whether or not you come out and say so. Mortality makes you frantic to reproduce. I can see you feel the urge for it, poor Martin, but I don’t want your children.”

  “I never even made you pregnant.” Bora nervously searched his pockets for the lighter.

  She stared at him. Without answering she rearranged the pillows behind her back. “Why do you tell me that?”

  “Because perhaps you won’t get pregnant, even if we stay together.”

  She smoked quietly for a while, her face turned away. Smoke twirled up from her mouth and hovered above her head; like a halo it created an illusion of bluish light around her. She nearly exhausted the cigarette before saying, “But I did.” Calmly, so deceivingly confident that her husband had time to absorb the blow and recoil and pretend to compose himself. “When you came a year ago at Christmas it was the third time. I almost told you then, but I thought better of it. It made me ill and I didn’t want it. I didn’t. I saw your brother’s wife go through w
ith it, the sickness, all the changes in her body, and then the pain of giving birth for someone who was rotting in Russia already.” She removed the sheet from her body and he didn’t react to her nudity, but was breathing hard and fast. “I got rid of them, Martin. It’s better if you know without wondering. They were just clots of blood, not your children, really. They were just little clumps of meat on the midwife’s table.”

  Bora had a sudden urge to throw up. He rose and made it to the bathroom and to the cold edge of the sink, where he doubled up to retch. There was nothing in his stomach and he merely went through painful dry heaves that hardly gathered spittle, and twisted his stomach like a rag that is wrung without expelling any liquid. Afterwards a paroxysm of anger took him, and likely grief in excess of anger. An extremity of physical agony just like when his hand had been torn off by the grenade, and blood had exploded from it onto him, bits of flesh, bone, parts of him, pieces of him, clots of blood. With his back to the tiled wall he let breathing break fitfully out of his lungs through an open mouth – in and out as he had done before to endure the atrocity of mutilation without screaming, until he regained control by rape-like violence on himself. Spiders of pain drew webs in him, stretched tight and lopsided, then ate the spun drivel and crawled off his limbs one by one, leaving him numb.

  From the open window, with no effort on his part, the kind morning air came to dry the cold sweat on his face and neck.

  Like veins of muddy water, stockings rained from Benedikta’s hands as she began dressing on the bed. Were she dead on it, were he dead at the foot of it, nothing less could pass between them. She put her bra on without looking at him, like a stranger you chance upon in a fitting room. Her fingers clasped the lacy band over her stomach, turned it around and lifted it to her chest. She placed her breasts in the cups, passed the satin straps over her shoulders.