After dinner, I run the tip of a single finger along the resistant seam of khaki from knee to crotch. I feel the Captain stiffen. Did he tell me his name? I have forgotten it. He has a small head for such a large body. His eyes are closed but the lids flicker as if he is dreaming. He has pale eyelids and a grandfather’s moustache. I imagine him in the mornings taking a tiny pair of scissors for a private harvesting of hair. I imagine him at home as he snips the hedges and cuts the trees, lopping off their branches as they reach for the sky. He would have a neat house with shutters and a gravel path. His wife would drive her own modest car. She is kind and why would she not be? She has framed pictures of her children and grandchildren on a little table in the sitting room. He told me the name of his town in France. I cannot remember it now. I can remember nothing. I only have what I hold in my head at each precise moment. It is rare that I can think up the past and I make sure I don’t peer at the future. I look instead at the Captain’s skin coloured with wine and wind. He has a map of lines across his forehead, valleys around his nose, needle-thin pores. His mouth is full and soft like a child. There is a tinge of blue running along the rim of his lips. I do not want to kiss him.
I have the aftertaste of meat and gravy in my mouth. It was intoxicating to eat. There had been mushrooms, sweet onions, carrots and barley; good bread that smelt of rosemary and oil, not water-bleached with a tang of old tin. I had eaten until I felt sleepy. They had watched me, the two French soldiers, in silence. I hadn’t seen a carrot for weeks. I hadn’t eaten meat for longer. It had been bitter greens, and pastry bruised with imagined jam. Of course, in the hotels, they have everything. You can get anything with dollars or deutschmarks in the city shaken out of its siege.
I told them my name is Celeste. It is not Celeste. I cannot remember my own name. It is an echo in my head. My mother with a flotilla of curls at the top of the stairs, calling me to her, handing me a piece of flat, white bread, sending me cold to bed. I had a name but I never heard it, she used to call me child, ‘where is the child?’ ‘Child, it is time you disappeared.’
The Captain kisses my hand, my arm, he pushes the woven sleeve of my dress with his nose. I am so tired I let him. My full belly is weighing me into sleep. He creaks above me. The bedspread is candlewick, a battlefield of ridges and smooth plains. It is the dusky pink of cottage garden roses.
Then he lurches from me. I can hear him in the hotel bathroom, breathing heavily as he tries to piss.
The other soldier opens the door with a hotel key. I cannot move. My bones are wedded to this bed. He looks at me but doesn’t smile. He is smaller than the Captain and smells of tobacco, a strong, twisted, country odour. He grimaces as he works at the laces of his boots. This one has thin lips. He is younger, stronger. His hair is vigorous and intensely black. Did he tell me his name? He has a scar that runs below his cheek to his chin. If I had the curiosity I would ask him how he got it.
He takes out a bottle of vodka just as the Captain comes back into the room.
‘Jean-Paul,’ he says, ‘here,’ and he passes the vodka. The Captain shakes his head and nods at me.
‘Not for me but our guest.’
The second soldier offers me the bottle. In my head, I do not want to drink but I reach for it. I am too tired to refuse. I am too tired to get up and walk from the room and anyway I have nowhere else to sleep. I have been lucky to run into these two. I could have been curled up in a flowerbed with spiders weaving their webs above me.
The raw vodka scorches my throat and I cough. The soldier, his name is Yves, laughs and takes the bottle from me. He drinks again. He runs his hand through his hair.
‘How shall we do this?’ he asks the Captain.
I lie down on the bed again, on my side, draw my legs up into the ball-child I once was.
The Captain sits heavily. He strokes my hair and then strokes out my limbs.
I close my eyes. I feel resigned. Hope it will all be over quickly and I can sleep.
She’s tired, I can hear the Captain’s voice. Let her sleep for a while.
Yves snorts. He switches on the television. An Italian singer, plaintive, romantic. ‘She needs a bath. Make her take a bath,’ he mutters.
I do not need a bath. I need a new skin.
The Captain snuffles into my neck. His large, baker’s hands hover over my breasts, my hips. He puckers his heavy mouth against my lips. I cannot breathe and push his face away.
Yves laughs.
The Captain is like a cliff. I crawl onto my ice floe, it floats on the Arctic waters. The snow moon shines down on me.
‘Let me sleep,’ I say.
The Captain sits on the end of the bed. He turns the volume down on the television.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asks Yves.
The Captain shrugs.
‘Let her sleep.’
I can see the Snow Moon casting shadows into the room.
‘No way, we bought her dinner,’ Yves drinks again.
I close my eyes and roll onto my side. I have a large bruise on my hip but I have forgotten how it came there. Sometimes that happens, I discover a cut, a bruise and have no idea how they came to me, as if I have been caught in a whirlwind and slammed from side to side. The music on the television changes. It is Jacques Brel, Jacques Brel makes me wistful.
‘It’s Brel,’ said the Captain. ‘You can’t do that while Brel is singing, it wouldn’t be right.’
Yves laughs. He claps the Captain on his back. ‘Very well, we won’t offend, Brel.’ And both men turn to the screen.
I think about slipping off the bed and sliding under the door. I close my eyes and roll onto the floor.
‘Allez, Oop,’ says the Captain and even though I keep my eyes closed, I sense him standing above me. Yves snorts. ‘She’s drunk.’
I am not drunk. I am invisible. A memory coils in the back of my head, it is furtive and dark, an old man in a city of basements is crying. I am holding up my top and he is looking at my breasts. He takes a nipple into his mouth. ‘That’s enough, come child.’ I pull away from him. He takes my hand. ‘Thank you,’ he says to me. ‘Thank you.’ I turn to my mother, ‘he always cries,’ she says, and sniffs. ‘You made him happy. Time to go.’
Brel stops singing. There is a rapture of applause. The Captain lifts me back onto the bed.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Do you have a wife?’
The Captain looks at Yves. ‘I…’ he begins to speak but drops his shoulders.’
‘She’s used to it,’ Yves is curt, ‘it’s what she is.’
The Captain shakes his head.
‘You’ve never done this before.’ I can hear my voice, it sounds distant like a small, fluting bird.
‘See,’ she’s a pro,’ Yves pushes me back onto the bed. ‘Do you want it quick or slow,’ he asks me.
I hate him. He is a wolf, not a wolf, he is a savage bear-dog.
‘Quick,’ I hiss.
I can smell his tobacco skin. In a moment, I will feel that death in me.
‘No,’ says the Captain. ‘This isn’t right.’
Yves turns. ‘Go and have a drink at the bar if you can’t take it. Come on, Jean-Paul, it’s what we do.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not what he does.’
‘No one’s talking to you.’
I sit up. Yves pushes me back.
‘All these years, you have been policing this war, have you once betrayed your wife?’ I ask the Captain, who pushes his hands deep into his pockets, lowers his head. ‘No,’ he says.
Yves pulls up my dress.
‘Then you go,’ I say to the Captain and close my eyes, ‘imagine how you will feel if you go back and touch your wife when you have been with me. We don’t have to do this. Imagine what it will feel like to return home, clean.’
The Captain smiles at me, sadly. I can see him receding as my ice floe rises and falls over the arctic sea. ‘How old are you?’ he calls from the far shore. ‘I don’t remember,’ I wave. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I whisper, for Yves has caught me on his hook and is plunging me deep beneath the waters. ‘Go home.’ I tell him, ‘to your wife.’ He is bathed in the light from the television and Hugo Fey sings of love. I imagine the door opening on his life. His wife turns to face him; her hands are flowers.
‘I cannot stop this,’ says the Captain. ‘I am sorry.’
I cannot speak. I think I am forgetting the usefulness of words. My memory will slacken all my thoughts and I will forget.
I watch him walk to the door. He jingles a coin in his pocket as he jerks his hand out to reach for the door handle. Yves grimaces above me. His face is a black constellation.
The Captain turns back. ‘Leave her,’ he commands and his voice is that of a superior officer.
I rise up from the frozen sea and Yves flaps like a dead fish on my shore. I dance in the light of the Snow Moon. I lift my arms up to the light. ‘See’ I say. ‘Clean.’
Belona Greenwood