"I really don't recall anything about money," he said. "But if I did, forget it."
"No. I'll pay you back," she said. "It's important to me. If we're going to be here for a long, long time-and thank God, it looks like we will be-I don't want you looking across a dinner table at me ten, fifteen years from now and thinking, 'That old woman was once an amateur prostitute I took to the Hotel am Wansee. I say amateur prostitute because she didn't ask for the money first, the way a professional prostitute would. She asked for a 'loan' afterward, com-plete with a complicated explanation of her financial predicament.'"
"Your apartment had been burned out," Peter said, remembering. "You couldn't go to the housing people for another one, because you didn't have per-mission to live in Berlin. You did know a place you could get on the black mar-ket, but you didn't have quite all the money you needed...."
"I needed five thousand Reichsmarks," she said. "And you gave me a check."
You're right, Peter thought, remembering. I did think you were an amateur prostitute. And I felt sorry for you for having been forced into it by the war- and that was when I was having a premonition of death about once a week-so I wrote you a check, thinking I wouldn't need the money anyway.
"I didn't think you were a prostitute, Inge, amateur or otherwise," Peter said. "I thought you were a nice girl, alone, and in trouble. And I had the money, so I gave it to you. Loaned it to you."
"See?" she said. "You said 'gave' and then corrected yourself. You did think I was a prostitute, didn't you?"
"I told you what I thought."
"You never thought you'd see the money again, did you?" Inge said. "Tell the truth, Peter!"
"I didn't care if I did or not," Peter said. "And I don't care now."
"Why, then, did you think I let you pick me up? And take you to the Hotel am Wansee?"
"I thought you were dazzled by the Knight's Cross," Peter said, truthfully.
Later, when you asked for the loan, I thought you were an amateur prosti-tute. That was not good for my ego. Fighter pilots aren't supposed to pay whores. So I forgot it.
"When I thought about you-and I often thought about you-I used to think that it wasn't your medal that dazzled me, or the aristocratic 'von,' or even your looks, but the fact that the bartender served you French cognac from an unmarked decanter kept under the bar and normally reserved for generals. That meant you were somebody special-the bartenders there are notorious snobs- and that was what attracted me to you."
"Really?" Peter asked. The conversation was beginning to make him un-comfortable.
"But today, on the way from the airport, I realized that wasn't it at all."
"Wasn't it?"
What the hell is she talking about?
"It was subconscious," she said. "It was because we were two of a kind."
What the hell does that mean ?
"Two of what kind?"
"Survivors," she said. "I sensed you were a survivor, too. And I was right, wasn't I? We're both here, aren't we? We're among the first survivors."
"The first survivors of what?"
"The Thousand Year Reich, of course," Inge said. "That's why I finally married Werner. There were practical considerations, of course. He told me he was being assigned here, and I think I would have married a gorilla if he promised to take me somewhere away from the bombing, somewhere with fresh eggs and meat with no ration coupon, somewhere warm. But the real rea-son was that I sensed-this subconscious thing-that Werner was also a sur-vivor."
"Werner's a survivor?" Peter asked.
"If he wasn't a survivor, Liebchen, Werner would be in Sachsenhausen wearing a pink triangle, (Homosexuals in concentration camps were required to wear a pink triangle affixed to their clothing in the same manner as Jews were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star) instead of in Montevideo making himself rich getting Jews out of Sachsenhausen."
What did she say, "making himself rich getting Jews out of Sachsen-hausen"?
"Werner's a little light on his feet?" Peter asked, as nonchalantly as he could.
She nodded.
"Do you think Goltz knows?"