Christopher's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page A

them.”
    “They’re ruthless, but there are rules just the same,” O. G. said. “I have a plan.”
    “What plan?”
    “It’s better that you don’t know the details.”
    “He’s our son!”
    “Yes, he is,” O. G. said. “And what if the next time you are invited to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse they decide to get rough? If they beat Paul—I’m talking about grown men, trained thugs, taking turns with fists and feet and clubs—which secrets will you decide not to tell them?”
     6 
    By now Paul was in love. This had not happened to him before, but he was a reader and an observer; he knew the signs. Nevertheless the power of the thing astonished him—the feeling that he never had enough breath in his lungs, the long hours and days of anxiety, the longing, the suspicion, the raw craven fear of loss, punctuated by fleeting moments of happiness when the girl appeared. She was more apparition than human. Except for the moments she had knelt beside him, bathing his cuts and bruises, he had always seen her at a distance. He still did not know her name.
    Having one’s wounds treated by a beautiful female is a powerful aphrodisiac. Paul was beginning to feel symptoms that had little to do with the pure love between man and woman about which he had read so much. Until he had felt her fingers on his battered face, smelled her skin and hair, seen the light in her eyes, she had been like Rima the Bird Girl in his favorite novel, W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions —free, innocent, unattainable, a child of nature. But when he thought of her now, he visualized the thing that he remembered best about Rima—that she was naked in her rain forest (at least in Paul’s imagination) when the hero first caught sight of her. Recalling those passages had a physical effect on him. This troubled him. He wondered if he had a dirty mind; he apologized to both of the lovely wraiths who had somehow become one in his imagination.
    Haunted by the girl and tormented by his injuries, Paul slept fitfully on the night after he was beaten up by the Hitler Youth. He heard his parents come in late after their party. They were awake for a long while, speaking in whispers in the sitting room, his father pacing. Finally they went to bed and Paul drifted into sleep—dreamless sleep, to his surprise. When he woke soon after dawn, he could tell by the feel of the house that his mother had gone out and that his father was writing. This was their routine. Hubbard rose at five every morning, and after drinking a bowl of coffee and milk and eating toasted bread and cheese, began to write the latest passage of The Experiment . This morning he had a great deal to write about. He finished, usually, in time for lunch at one-thirty. During the hours he spent at his writing table, Waterman fountain pen in hand, he was in another dimension. Time dissolved, he had no thought or perception of the real world. Paul knew this because he had seen his father in this state nearly every morning of his life, and also because his parents joked about it all the time. When he was writing, Lori said, Hubbard was andeswoher —elsewhere, unreachable. That was why she did her shopping and other womanly chores in the morning. Her husband did not even know that she was gone. And when he came back up the rabbit hole she was always present, saying something new to his ears, the table set, food ready to be served, that day’s bottle of wine, his reward foroutstanding industry, open and breathing or chilling in an ice bucket.
    When Lori was happy or upset, she went riding. Paul had never seen her so upset as she had been since he came home after his beating. Last night’s whispers told him that she hadn’t recovered. Their elderly horses —Lori’s Lipizzaner mare and his father’s elderly hunter—were stabled near the park. Hubbard had bought them and their elegant tack during the great inflation of the nineteen-twenties. He had arrived in Berlin at a moment when one American