I Followed My Wife to That Ruined Apartment
Vienna, 1948. They said that if you died German in those years, you would spend eternity in purgatory paying for the sins of a country that had never regretted a thing. I didn’t need to die to know it: I was already living there.
Whenever someone planned to cross into the Russian sector, I always gave them the same advice. Don’t wear a watch, because the Ivans will steal it. Don’t carry anything valuable, only the oldest jacket you own. And if they speak to you, curse the Americans and pray you don’t smell of Yankee tobacco.
All good advice. I would have done well to follow it myself that night on the train.
The soldier guarding my carriage suddenly stood up and loomed over me with the swagger of a man who knew no one would hold him accountable. He was an enormous, stupid mountain man, with black eyes and a jaw as broad as the steppe. He snatched the newspaper from my hands and held out his callused palm.
“Padarok,” he said, and then, slowly, in bad German: “I want gift.”
I smiled and nodded like an idiot, then rolled up my sleeve to show him my bare wrist. I had no watch to give him, I explained. I had nothing. The smile vanished from his face. He shoved me, spat on the compartment floor, and called me a liar. Then he approvingly felt the fabric of my jacket, and I understood that there were only two possible endings that night: either I killed him, or he killed me.
When he bent down for his carbine, I kicked him between the legs. The stock struck the floor, he doubled over, and I smashed my fist straight into his face. We struggled against the window until the glass gave way and carried half his body outside, into the darkness of the train hurtling at full speed. I hit him again, once, twice, until something in the darkness beside the tracks finished the job for me and the Ivan’s fingers suddenly went slack.
It took me several minutes to gather the strength to shove what was left of him outside. Then I searched the greatcoat he had abandoned on the seat: a handful of stolen watches, a Czech pistol, and half a bottle of vodka. I kept everything, took a long drink to the nighttime firmament, and threw the coat through the broken window.
***
It was past midnight when I opened the front door with a shoulder blow. The lock had been broken for months; getting in was as easy as getting out. I expected to find my wife asleep, but the bedroom was empty. I emptied my pockets onto the bedside table and got ready for bed.
Scattered beside the lamp, the soldier’s watches all showed the same time, one minute apart from one another. That precision only served to emphasize how late Renata was coming home. I would have worried about her if I hadn’t already suspected where she was and with whom.
I fell asleep exhausted. Much later, the wind howling at the window woke me, and instinctively I moved closer to the warm body that had appeared beside me. Then my brain began reading the clues in the darkness: new perfume on her neck, the smell of blond tobacco in her dyed hair. I hadn’t heard her get into bed. I closed my eyes and turned away.
In the morning, there were things on the kitchen table that hadn’t been there the night before: real coffee, butter, a tin of condensed milk, two bars of chocolate. Everything from the American military commissary, the only shops in the whole city with goods to sell. On our ration cards, we barely reached a thousand calories a day; I had lost thirty-three pounds since the end of the war. I had doubts about how Renata obtained that extra food, but I pushed them aside and set water to heat.
Drawn by the smell, she appeared in the doorway, still wearing the white dress and the ruffled apron that were her waitress uniform.
“Is there enough for two?” she asked, clearing her throat.
“Of course,” I said, setting a plate in front of her. “You shouldn’t smoke so much.”
That was when she saw the bruise on my face.
“Good Lord, Klaus! What happened to you?”
“A run-in with an Ivan. He wanted to rob me. We got into a fight and he took off.” I let her touch my face and show her concern. “You came home late last night.”
Renata smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand before answering.
“You were sleeping like a baby when I got in. A colonel took over the place for his birthday. It was a crazy night.”
“I see.”
She was a schoolteacher, but she served drinks at the Liberty, a bar in Hietzing open only to American officers. I weighed the tin of condensed milk in my hand.
“Did you steal this?”
She nodded without looking at me, twisting a blond lock around her fingers.
“You have no idea how much food there is in that place,” she said. “A Yankee stuffs down your month’s ration in one night and still has room for ice cream.”
She took a pack of American cigarettes from her coat pocket and offered me one. Stolen too, I’m sure, I thought, but I accepted it and leaned toward the match she struck.
“The detective again,” she muttered, irritated with me and with my profession. “A boy gave them to me. He’s kind, that’s all. They like chatting with a woman.”
“At least your English will improve.” I smiled, to soften the edge in my voice.
I didn’t mention the bottle of French perfume I had found hidden in one of her drawers the week before. Instead, a little later she came out of the bathroom naked and stood before the full-length mirror in the corner, examining herself with the merciless attention of someone who knows time is running out. She was a mature and beautiful woman, in her early forties, determined to make the most of whatever years she had left of being so.
“You’re keeping yourself very well,” I said.
“A little thin for a love poem,” she grumbled.
She came closer, still naked, and watched me as I studied the half-empty pantry: real soap, saccharin, a packet of condoms from the commissary. Was there one American, or several?
“Good heavens, you’ve been busy, darling,” I said, picking up the packet. “How many calories do these have?”
She laughed, coughed, and then grew serious.
“The manager keeps them under the counter. I thought it would be fun.” She shifted one leg to the side. “It’s been a long time since we fucked. We have a little while, if you want.”
She said it with the casualness of someone asking for a cigarette, and that casualness burned me worse than the suspicion. Even so, I set my cup on the table and grabbed her by the waist. Her skin smelled of American soap and something underneath, sour and warm, that I recognized without wanting to recognize it: the trace of another man’s semen that the bath had not managed to wash away completely. I kissed her anyway, biting her lip, and she opened her mouth with a tired sigh. I squeezed one breast and felt the nipple harden against my palm, that small reflex no body knows how to fake.
“Here,” she said, pushing me toward the kitchen chair. “The coffee’s getting cold.”
She knelt between my legs with the efficiency of a waitress opening a bottle. She undid my trousers, pulled out my cock, and weighed it for a second, as though measuring what she was dealing with, before putting it in her mouth. She went down slowly, and I watched her swallow until the tip touched her throat and drew that morning cough from her—the one that no longer fooled me. She worked with her flat tongue against the vein underneath, moving up and down, her hand closed around the base of my shaft to keep me from going too deep. The neatly combed blonde look from that morning began coming undone, and I buried my fingers in her dyed hair and pushed a little farther, forcing her to do with me what I suspected she did with others. She coughed, pulled back, and looked at me with eyes bright with saliva and something else, then went down again without complaint.
“That’s enough,” I said hoarsely. “Come here.”
I lifted her, turned her around, and bent her over the kitchen table beside the tin of condensed milk and the captain’s bars of chocolate. I pushed her ruffled apron up to her waist. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her pussy was swollen and pink, still glistening, and I told myself it was the soap. I spread her buttocks with my thumbs and looked at her. Her other hole was reddened, slightly open, and I could no longer deceive myself.
“You’re very wet, darling,” I said against the nape of her neck.
“It’s been a long time,” she murmured, resting her face against the wood.
I tore open the American condom wrapper with my teeth, rolled it on, and penetrated her in a single thrust. Renata let out a long gasp, more surprise than pleasure, and I dug my fingers into her hips so she wouldn’t move. I began slowly, going all the way in and pulling almost completely out, hearing the wet slapping sound her pussy made each time I returned. I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about who had left her like that, who had opened that wet path before me that very night, and failed. I sped up. The table creaked beneath her belly, the tin of condensed milk trembled and rolled, and she began returning my thrusts with her hips, pushing backward as I had asked.
“That’s it,” I panted. “You push.”
I reached underneath her, found her clitoris, and rubbed it with the pad of my thumb while I kept fucking her. Renata moaned for the first time in earnest, a low, dirty moan, and her legs began to tremble. I grabbed one breast with my other hand and twisted it. I knew she liked it, though she had never told me. I heard her bite her knuckle to keep from screaming.
“Come,” I ordered her. “Come for your husband, just once.”
The word made her pussy squeeze around my cock like a fist, and I understood that I had forced her to remember who she was and where she was. She came with a short, muffled tremor, almost angrily, and in that instant I thrust deep and emptied myself inside the condom too, biting her shoulder through her dress.
I pulled out of her and spent a second watching her pussy slowly close, still throbbing. She straightened on weak legs, pulled down her apron, and picked up the used condom as if she had found a dead mouse beneath the bed, carrying it to the bathroom. Half an hour later, dressed for work, she paused to watch me stoke the stove fire.
“You do that very well,” she said brightly, and left with a hurried kiss that meant nothing.
***
That afternoon I gave it no further thought. That night I took the train to Hietzing and stationed myself on the sidewalk opposite the Liberty, among the parked jeeps and the windows clouded with steam and noise. Beside the door, hunched over, was one of the city’s thousands of cigarette-butt collectors, men who made a living gathering the remains of cigarettes left by the soldiers.
“Hey, you,” I said. “Want to earn four cigarettes?”
His rheumy eyes jumped from my hand to my face.
“What do I have to do?”
“Two now and two when you alert me after seeing this woman.”
I handed him the photograph of Renata I carried in my wallet and pointed with my thumb toward the café upstairs, where I planned to wait. The man gave an almost military salute, pocketed the photograph and cigarettes, and went back to scanning the ground. I grabbed him by his filthy jacket.
“You won’t forget, eh? I know where to find you.”
“Maybe she’s forgotten you, sir,” he said with a horrible smile, “but I won’t.”
I waited almost two hours with a glass of cheap cognac as my only company, listening to voices I could not understand. When the cigarette collector finally came to fetch me, he wore a triumphant smile.
“She went toward the station, sir. With a Yankee. A captain, I think. Big and handsome. Be careful.”
I didn’t stay to hear the rest. I walked as quickly as my leg—still weakened by the Ivan’s blow—allowed, and soon I saw them: Renata and an American officer with his arm around her shoulders. The full moon let me follow them without losing sight of them, down the street, to a block every bit as ruined and riddled with shrapnel as the one where we lived.
When they disappeared inside, I wondered whether I really needed to see it. Bile rose bitterly in my throat, loosening the greasy knot in my stomach. I went in anyway.
***
I heard them before I saw them, the way you hear mosquitoes before you feel them.
“It’s too big, Dean,” my wife was laughing. “Other girls might manage, but I can’t. I’m a decent girl, I told you.”
She said it while her hand moved up and down a cock the size of the captain’s. I slipped into the gap of a door with no panel, into the shadows, and from there, when a cloud cleared the moon, I saw them with cruel clarity through the kitchen’s bare window.
For a moment they were the very picture of innocence, kissing slowly like two teenagers. Then he pushed her tight black dress up to her waist, whispered some compliment I couldn’t make out, and bent to explore her breasts with a delicacy that did not fit such a large man. He yanked her tits out of her bra and licked them calmly, sucking each nipple until they were rigid and shining with saliva, then nibbling them with calculated care that drew little broken cries from Renata. She panted, but turned around and rubbed herself against him while searching for his cock over his uniform once more.
The American took off his shirt. He had a broad swimmer’s chest, well-fed and healthy, so different from my starving one that even from the shadows the comparison was obvious. He squatted behind her, pulled her panties down to her knees, and bit one buttock before turning her around and pushing her against the table. He spread her thighs with his hands and buried his face between them. I knew her. I could tell by the way she leaned against the table that he was spreading her pussy with his thumbs and running his whole tongue from bottom to top, stopping at her clitoris to suck it until she moaned. Renata threw her head back, grabbed the captain’s hair, and pushed his face against her sex with a boldness she had never granted me. I heard her call him by name, panting, “Dean, Dean,” and then say something in clumsy English that sounded like, “don’t stop, don’t stop.” When she finally came against his mouth, she had to push him away and make him stand, because her legs could no longer support her.
Then it was my wife who knelt, and he who guided her with his hands on the back of her neck. I was surprised she allowed it: she had always told me it distressed her, that she didn’t like it. He undid his uniform, lowered his trousers, and pulled out a long, thick, already erect cock that jerked in front of her face. Renata looked at it for a second, as if measuring a glass filled too high, and stuck out her tongue to lick the tip. She worked it from bottom to top, following the vein with her tongue, then put the whole head in her mouth and went down as far as she could. She coughed and cleared her throat, and at last I understood where her morning coughs came from. The captain did not take pity on her: he gripped the back of her head with both hands and began fucking her mouth at an unhurried pace, pulling out every so often to let her breathe before plunging it back in. She spat saliva onto his cock, stroked his balls with one hand, and touched her dripping pussy with the other. When he released her for a moment, Renata asked him for more in a hoarse voice:
“Again,” she said. “Again, all the way down.”
And again he put it in her, and again, and again. Her jaw slackened, her mascara ran, and still she looked up at him with a devotion that chilled me.
She stood, turned around, and offered him her ass on tiptoe. If I had left at that moment, perhaps our marriage might still have been saved. But the thought of giving up that spectacle never crossed my mind.
“Yes!” was all that came from her throat when he penetrated her.
A succession of yeses ran through her as the captain thrust against her hips in a rhythmic cadence, and she stared at the ceiling of the little room as if a god were fucking her, not a stranger in a bombed-out apartment. I saw the Yankee’s cock enter and leave my wife’s wet pussy, gleaming in the moonlight, and saw his fingers digging into the white flesh of her hips, leaving marks she would have to hide from me the next day. Her legs faltered with every thrust, until he lifted one and held it up, unknowingly giving me a full view of what he was doing to my wife: his cock going all the way in, his balls striking her clitoris, a thread of thick fluid running down her thigh. Renata clung to his shoulders and closed her eyes to endure the pleasure folding her in two.
“Harder,” she begged him. “Fuck me harder, please.”
The captain obeyed. Every thrust tore a grunt from her and made her ass strike his belly with a wet smack that reached my doorway. Then he laid her on her back across the table, spread her legs high, and entered her again. Her high-heeled shoes shook in the air in time with his thrusts, and every time he pushed a little deeper, she laughed in disbelief before screaming. He grabbed her ankles and spread them even wider, folding her nearly in half, and from where I stood I could see everything: her pussy stretched to its limit around that cock, her asshole contracting every time she drew breath. I had never seen Renata like that. I don’t think she had ever seen herself like that either.
After several minutes, the American pulled out, put her on all fours on the table, and crouched behind her. He spat on the little hole and began preparing her with his fingers for something she had never allowed me to do. He inserted one finger first, and she shuddered, then two, opening them slowly inside her. Renata opened her eyes wide and let out a frightened shriek.
“I won’t hurt you, I promise,” I heard him say, with the calm of a man who knew what he was doing.
Against all expectations, she nodded. He took his time, patiently undoing that last knot of resistance with his fingers, moving in and out, spitting on her again, greasing his cock with his hand, while he whispered in her ear, first to calm her and then with increasingly obscene words, drawing confessions from her that even I had never known. I heard her tell him yes, that she wanted it, that she had imagined it for years, that her husband had never touched her there. When he finally straightened, my wife gripped the edges of the table, arched her back, and spread her buttocks with her own hands, offering herself to him. In the poor moonlight, her forty-something body looked strong and beautiful, and even that young man in the prime of his life paused for a moment, looking at her, doing nothing but molding her with his hands.
“Close your eyes,” he told her.
And he possessed her. He pressed the tip of his cock against that little hole and pushed, millimeter by millimeter, until he made room for himself. Renata screamed when she felt him enter and reached one hand backward against his belly to stop him, a useless gesture, because he was already inside and all that remained was for her to grow accustomed to it. He did not use force then, but his hands: he caressed her face, kneaded one breast, sought her sex with his fingers, buried two of them in her pussy while he remained buried in her ass, and kept talking to her until he convinced her that it was extraordinary, until he made her nod and, finally, ask him for more.
“Slowly,” she panted weakly. “Slowly.”
But as her moans grew higher, the officer’s tenderness gave way to something primitive. He began to move, first with a short rocking motion, then with full thrusts, pulling his cock almost all the way out and driving it back in to the hilt. Renata moaned with her mouth against the wood, drool running from the corner of her lips, and with every thrust she repeated “yes, yes, yes,” as though saying it to herself in order to believe it. The captain’s two fingers never stopped moving in and out of her pussy in the same rhythm, and that was how he kept her, filled from both sides, trembling from head to toe. He made her wrap her arms around his neck and, without leaving her, lifted her into the air and sat her on his thighs in a rickety chair that creaked beneath their combined weight. There my wife took control, riding him with hip strokes so fierce she seemed to be opening herself to the very soul, rising and falling on that cock buried in her ass, her tits bouncing and one hand between her own legs, rubbing her clitoris at a desperate pace. I heard her moan isolated words in German, words she had never said to me: “more, deeper, break me.” Until a final orgasm made her convulse and tremble, impaled on him, her belly quivering with spasms and a long moan rising from deep in her chest.
She barely had time to enjoy it. The captain pulled her away, put her on her knees on the floor, and jerked his cock with his hand in front of her face for several seconds, still gleaming with what he had drawn from her ass. He finished with a hoarse grunt, holding her head, and filled her mouth with thick spurts of come, one after another. Renata, who like every woman in that city knew what it meant to go hungry, did not reject the ration. She closed her lips around him and swallowed, then opened her mouth to show him her clean tongue. What hurt me most was not that, but that she continued afterward, licking him with a mixture of gratitude and delight, sucking the soft tip to draw out the last drops when there was no need. She truly liked that boy. He was not merely a benefactor with chocolate in his pockets.
***
I left without making a sound, aware that soon the chocolate would sweeten the taste lingering in my wife’s throat. The war had ended three years earlier; the Americans had been among us long enough to know that as long as they fed us, none of us planned to slit their throats. And that night I lost myself in the worst streets of the city and drank until I could feel nothing.
The next morning I left a note on the kitchen table and took the first train west. I spent nearly the entire journey thinking about Renata and cursing myself for not knowing how to write something deeper, for not telling her that there was nothing I would not have done for her. Though she already knew that. She had it in writing, in the letters from our courtship that she kept in the drawer, right beside the bottle of French perfume from her captain.
